FORTY

It was a month since his release and I had not heard from him. But the silence had not stopped me from thinking about him, had not halted expectation.

My dress was purple with cranberry and emerald flowers, and a swirly vinelike design throughout in a deeper shade of purple so dark as to nearly be blue. The garnet of my earbobs brought out the cranberry in the dress.

I had lost weight, so much so that my dress now hung on me, but I had not previously noticed how great was the loss. I had somehow reconvinced myself I was still eating the same as always, despite John’s comments, despite John’s insistence Cook only prepare the things I liked best.

I saw John depart in the carriage, taking little note of how damp I was getting as I watched him pull away in the rain.

Did I sense, even then, I would somehow be safer on this night if he remained?

John was on his way to a meeting with his editor. While his editor resided on an estate only miles distant, they had built up a custom, when a manuscript needed more than usual attention, of working through the night. The final points of the prison manuscript were now ready to be gone over and John had said I should not look for him until, at the very earliest, late in the afternoon of the following day.

“I am not sure what more Connor can add to the subject at this point,” he said, referring to his editor by given name.

In point of fact, John always did say his editor was as much an architect of his creations as he was the shepherd that guided them.

“And do try to eat something, dearest” were John’s last words to me. “You’ve grown frightfully thin.”

I did not know whether to be touched or irritated at his repeated concern.

As I reentered the house, Timmins glanced meaningfully at the outline my damp dress made of my figure.

“Madam,” he spoke, “you will catch your death of cold.” He paused, pursing his lips, before adding, “If you do not put on more clothes.”

Could he know something?

“Of course, you are right as always, Timmins.” I laughed. “Although there are times when, it seems to me, you are worse than Nanny.”

As I closed the bedroom door behind me, a man emerged from the shadows. Surprisingly, I did not start at this. Although I had never seen him before, immediately I knew it was him.

How long I had waited for this!

And yet, how strange he looked in my bedroom. It was almost as though one had come upon a painting one had looked at day after day, year after year, to discover that another artist had stolen in like a thief in the night, only this time, the thief had added something rather than taking something away, added to a previously pastoral scene an indelible figure that no amount of turpentine could ever remove.

Where there used to just be my large bedroom, with its fireplace, heavy draperies, and French windows, there he was; where there used to be my vanity, chair, and full-length mirror, there he was; where there used to be my armoire, writing desk, and four-poster bed, there he was—and would now forever remain, I well knew, no matter what I might do to try to eradicate his memory from my surroundings.

How different this room would now be for me forever. It was as though he took up all the space of any room he was in, erasing everything else.

It was particularly strange to see him standing there not far from my writing desk, the place from where I had written him so many times, only able to guess at what my correspondent might look like.

Still, somehow, despite the strangeness of it, the intrusion of it, it was just as I had imagined it, so many times.

“How did you get in here?” I asked, but then I saw the open French door.

“My husband—” I began again, but he cut me off.

“—is not coming back for hours. I heard you see him off in his carriage.”

Somehow, I had expected a darker man, but the size of him was as I had imagined. Somehow, perversely, I had expected him to be a male version of myself, only substantially larger, with dark hair and eyes, pale skin.

Well, I had gotten the substantially larger part right, at any rate.

Was he taller than John? I could not tell. Perhaps not. Certainly, he was broader, the hint of a muscular form beneath his clothes that John’s own patrician form would never be a match for.

Without realizing I had done so, I had moved across the room, coming to stand beside him near the open window.

I could see his features clearly now: an abundance of brown hair thicker than the fashionable norm, hazel eyes beneath brows that had a slight sardonic arch, proud cheekbones, determined jaw, generous lips surrounding teeth whose only flaw was a slight gap between the front two. Involuntarily, I reached a single finger toward those lips.

He slammed me against the wall so hard it raised a lump, but, even startled as I was at the abruptness of his action, I didn’t notice it at the time, nor would I have done the next day had not John, pausing to caress my head on his way out, remarked upon it.

I wore neither corset nor extra skirts beneath my thin dress. What would have been the point any longer? I was ready. Nowadays I was always ready.

He pushed up my dress.

“You surprise me,” he said, commenting on my lack of skirts. Brusquely, he pushed my lone undergarment aside. “Perhaps next time, you will not even wear this?”

I felt his hands beneath my thighs. For the briefest second, I thought he might use his fingers to see if I was ready, but he did not. And why would he? He must have known, as he lifted me upward and onto him, that I wanted this as much as he did; that in my anxiousness to live this moment, I was living it too quickly, moving through it too fast, nearly beyond it before it had even properly begun.

As I felt him straining, pounding inside me, I moved the velvet curtain back, tilting my eyes up and to the side.

It was odd really; as much as I had wanted this, as much as I wanted this now, it was as though I had to remove at least part of myself from it; it was as though I felt that if I gave myself over to it too completely, I would lose it that much quicker. And so, a distant part of my mind registered that the rain had stopped and with it the humidity that had been with us for so long had finally fallen, the fog had lifted, revealing a scattering of diamonds of varying brilliance embedded against an inky velvet sky.

He moved faster and faster, catching me back, capturing all of me, and I raced to remain where he was.

When it was over, it was as though we were frozen there like some bizarre tableau, our upper bodies still clothed, he with even his traveling cloak still on, my naked legs yet wrapped around his hips, his damp forehead—damp with remnants of the rain? with sweat?—pressed downward to mine, eyes shutting out the world.

“Madam?” I heard Timmins knock on the door. “Are you all right?”

I struggled to rein in my breathing, heart still pumping so wildly I was sure he could hear it through my chest, through the door.

“Fine, Timmins.”

“Are you sure, madam? I thought I heard a loud bang. Are you sure you did not fall?”

“Of course I am sure, Timmins. I merely dropped my hairbrush.”

“Very good, madam.”

But I did not hear him move down the hall right away. Like a spider, it seemed, he waited for the opposing chess player to make a move.

“Good night, Timmins,” I said, command in my voice, hoping not to betray the trembling, the tiny aftershocks I kept experiencing as I locked eyes with Chance Wood, unable to tear my gaze away.

Finally, at last, I heard Timmins retreat.

“You are even more beautiful than I imagined you would be based on your writings, Emma.”

Even though he had spoken earlier, it was as though I were hearing his voice for the very first time. I would have expected, based on his previous life and crimes, to hear a lowborn voice, with something of the street in it, something rough even, despite the somewhat cultured tone of his letters.

But I was wrong.

Rather, he spoke well, his voice possessed of a rich timbre, a seeming confidence, as though he knew me completely even though, for all intents and purposes, he had only just met me. Competing with the confidence was a surprising vulnerability. The mix was exhilarating. It was also terrifying.

I wanted to ask him why he had been silent for the month since his release, what his plans were, what our plans were.

But he did not give me the chance.

Gently, he eased me down off him. Gently, he led me over to the dark bed, the bed I had only ever before shared with my husband.

“Lie with me awhile?” he asked, gently pulling me down.

And here was another strange thing: Even though we had just made love in a way in which I never had before, with an almost violent intimacy previously foreign to me—in that it was not just the other wanting to create that driving thrust but me chasing after it as well—now that it came to a point of some more, well, normal activity, I felt a shyness overtake me.

And yet, I could not refuse him.

Slowly, he undressed me, pulling the pins from my hair, holding it out of the way with one hand as he undid the back of my still-damp dress with the other. When I was naked, I did not flinch from his gaze. Nor would I permit him to assist me while I undressed him, a thing I had never done before; previously, I had helped a man put on clothes—a tie added here, a jacket there—but I had never sought to take them away.

Now, as we lay together beneath the canopy, we had the luxury of time untempered by urgency, time in which to explore every inch of each other as we had not before.

As he rose up above me, I took in his naked chest, as broad as I had imagined it beneath his clothes and as hairless as my own, his tapered waist with a smattering of hair extending from his navel down to the thatch surrounding his manhood; took in the deep and jagged scar on the back of the right hand as it reached to caress my breast; took in the indelible pale imprint on the wedding finger of a ring no longer there.

“Have you missed me, Emma?” he asked, wavering above me.

“Oh, yes.”

“But you knew that I would come?”

I answered directly as he entered me: “Yes.”

Before, the first time, I could have told myself of it, when reflecting later, I had been taken by surprise; that even though I had expected him, had in fact been expecting him daily for the past month, my reactions had been involuntary, no different really from the conditioned responses a man called Pavlov had been able to elicit from dogs in some preliminary experiments John had been telling me about. I could have pled temporary insanity, and I might have even believed it myself.

But not now.

Now what we did had such deliberation to it, passion having been relegated to a handmaid’s role where it waited upon conquest, that the truth and the intent of what we were doing could no longer be denied.

What had started out on paper, quite possibly no more than the jottings of a middle-aged woman and an imprisoned man looking for a little diversion, had crossed the line over into the real world. I was no longer writing a parallel life for myself, a fantasy.

Fantasy now existed as reality.

And now that they were one and the same, I tried to rein rational thought to the romance at hand. What about this man was so compelling? It was not that he was so extraordinarily good-looking, although he was certainly handsome enough, despite that one flaw in his teeth. No, it was nothing so common as appearances. It was the energy he gave off. It was the way he filled the whole room, nay, the whole universe. It was that I could feel him wanting to possess me body and soul, not for his own mere happiness, but because he wanted to live inside me. He was an irresistible sun.

My mind halted at the impossible task of putting into mental words what it was about him that owned me so and I let my body and spirit take over where my mind had left off.

Each time I tilted my hips upward to meet him, as though I were trying to push myself into him in the same way he was pushing into me, I felt as though I were making a choice, over and over again.

It was a second-by-second revelation: After months of imagining his hands through my hands, these were now his hands, his real hands, upon me. It was his body inside me. It was his heart I felt beating next to mine. And when the world shattered apart, into a million tiny pieces of unimaginable sensation before reintegrating, it was with an awe-inspiring power, a revelation like nothing I had ever achieved on my own. It was like its own religion.

Sometime later, I lay on the bed and watched him go, no talk of when he might return, of when I might see him again. After all, now that he had gained his freedom, who knew but that he might not want to leave the area altogether…start fresh…start fresh without me.

It was not something I wanted to think about: the future. I had, for today, gotten what I had most wanted.

Well, I tried to tell myself that, at any rate.

In fact, as I lay there in one spot, my cheek resting on the comfort of my lightly clenched hand, my mind ranged over the possibilities of the whole wide world. I could almost feel that world spinning around me, spinning faster and faster even as my mind spun from place to place, like a bird looking for and not finding just the right branch to light down upon.

I would not have believed it if someone told me I would be able to sleep that night, but sleep I did.

Hours later—it was still night, but I could not say what time—I woke with a start. The rain had started up again and the wind was hammering at the open window, making a rattling sound as drops splattered against the floor. Hurrying to shut it, I saw there was now a small puddle where Chance and I had stood mere hours before.

Chance! What had I done?

Bending my head to the sheets, I inhaled the scent of us, of what we had done, coming off the linen in an unmistakable aroma of human earth and sexual life. I wanted to bury my nose further, summon up the night, ignore time.

But the side of me—a side that was growing smaller all the time—that was still practical, shrieked, No!

If I could inhale us so easily, anyone else—Lucy coming to change the bedding, my husband coming home too early—would surely be able to do so as well; smell us and know the masculine part of the smell was not that of my husband.

Locking the door on the desires of my heart, I whipped the sheets off the bed, the purple dress I had worn before still tangled among them. Realizing I was still naked, I dropped my bundle long enough to put on a dressing gown, then reclaimed it, setting off through the house.

I don’t know what I could have been thinking, save to get the evidence off the bed and out of my bedroom as quickly as possible, but I found myself tiptoeing through the pantry and the kitchen with its big vatlike sinks, big enough for when John entertained dozens of his literary and political acquaintances. What was I thinking, that I would go downstairs to the laundry or use the vatlike sinks right there, that I would somehow wash out the sheets myself and not be noticed?

“Can I help you with something, madam?”

I nearly leapt out of my skin.

“Timmins,” I spoke, hand to chest, awkwardly clutching the soiled items in the other, “you startled me.”

“I am sorry, madam.” He did not sound sorry in the slightest.

Had he been upstairs in his room above the kitchen, prowling around when he heard me down here? The fact that he was in his own bedtime clothes should have comforted me somehow, made me feel as though we were at least on equal footing. But it did not. In fact, I felt myself, as he peered at me closely, to be at a distinct disadvantage.

“Is something wrong, Timmins?” I finally asked.

“It’s just that…Perhaps it’s not my place to say, but…” He looked at me closer still. “Before, earlier this evening, you dropped your hairbrush…”

One hand flew to my hair, and yet in an instant I regretted the impulse. Did he see my horror? It was all I could do to keep myself from coming up with a sniveling alibi with which to appease the butler as to why I was disheveled.

“Shall I send Lucy to attend to it, madam? I thought you must be dressing it when you dropped your brush, but perhaps seeing the master off in his carriage disturbed it more than you thought.”

“That’s quite all right, Timmins. I can manage myself this evening. No need to bother Lucy. Already it grows late.”

“As you wish, madam.”

Still he stood there. Why would he not leave?

“Was there something else you required this evening, madam?”

“Hmm?”

He looked pointedly at the soiled sheets and dress I yet held so desperately. “Did you need those attended to?”

He held his arms out to receive them. Why should this feel like such a trap?

“Oh,” I laughed, the laugh sounding a tinny note even in my own ears, “that. While I was getting ready to retire, I happened to spill a bottle of lotion on the sheets. It got on my dress as well and made a great mess.”

His eyebrows asked why I had not summoned a servant to remove the bedding; why I had not, at the very least, if I had not wanted to disturb anyone else, just left it in the corner for one of the maids to attend to in the morning? But he would never ask such a question outright. And I would never—could never—answer it.

He pried the items from my grasp.

Helplessly I watched them go. What else could I do?

“I’ll see that these are attended to first thing in the morning, madam, your dress returned to you just as soon as it is clean again. Surely, you need fresh sheets?”

I had no choice. Meekly, I went with him to the linen closet, where he started to make noises about waking Lucy again.

“That is all right, Timmins.” I took the sheets from him. “I can surely manage on my own for one evening.”