The Slightest Provocation Read online

  He’d been an idiot. He deserved whatever radical claptrap…

  No, he didn’t.

  He didn’t deserve to hear his government slandered.

  Nor to hear whatever bloody Richard had to say.

  It felt better to pace around a bit. Better being a relative term. It felt like hell.

  She’d wrapped her shawl about herself and had begun her own pacing, in the half of the room nearest the fire.

  Of course. She would take that half of the room, just as he’d become conscious that he was freezing, his hands in particular. Probably because there wasn’t much blood in them-nor in any of his limbs, his vital fluids having reasonably assumed they’d be needed elsewhere just about now. He thrust his fists into his waistcoat pockets so precipitously that a button popped off and rolled under the bed.

  How many more damn buttons am I going to lose tonight?

  He’d pick it up later; right now he didn’t relish the thought of scrabbling around on his knees while she vented her spleen at him.

  For suddenly, they weren’t talking about politics at all. If you could even call what they were doing talking.

  Lecturing. Hectoring. Reviving vicious old arguments and raking over horrid old events.

  “Yes, it does still hurt,” she was saying. “Even after all this time. Of course it does. One doesn’t forget a husband’s cheating and lying, staying out nights whoring, and sometimes not coming home till noon. Not to speak of pretending to love me and then not touching me for weeks-as though I were… hideous, repulsive. After that first year when we’d been so happy-or so I’d believed.”

  He’d thought that having popped into bed first-refreshing their memories, in a manner of speaking, with a taste of what they’d once had together-it would give them a kind of incentive to work out their differences. Ignore the difficult parts, at least for a while.

  Lead with your strength. Any boxer in Britain could tell you that. Do what you’re best at.

  No question what they’d always been best at.

  Too bad it hadn’t worked out that way. For he loathed apologies and had hoped to avoid that part of it.

  “I couldn’t touch you that time,” he said. “Well, you know why. I’d got a disease… Couldn’t touch anybody. I expect I should have explained it to you more carefully, the details, you know. But it made me shy, talking about that sort of thing to a lady…”

  She’d sat down at the dressing table, her neck rising from the folds of the shawl. The back of a woman’s neck, he thought, a few bright chestnut curls nestled in the declivity at its center, was every bit as provocative as the parts people made more of a fuss about.

  For a mad moment he imagined himself dragging her from the chair, tossing her onto the bed-solving their problems the easy way, by exercise of force. The thought rather repulsed him. Not that they hadn’t played at such things-and of course he knew plenty of men who felt it their right to impose themselves on a woman, as though to protect the public order. But no matter how infuriating she could be, he wasn’t one of those men. Nor would he be playing, if he tried to take her right now.

  He peered over her shoulder, at her white face glaring up at him from the mirror.

  “Yes, and when you did heal-isn’t it odd, Kit, how you were too shy to tell this lady that crucial detail, that you were quite well and… functioning again. He’s at White’s, I’d tell myself-or at the fives court watching the pugilists. He’s doing one of his gentlemen’s things that he suddenly needs to keep secret from me, these nights he stays out so late.”

  When she spoke again her words fell heavy and dull as lead. “And so I had to find out for myself about that… actress, as I believe she called herself… hearing the news at Gunter’s, of all places, over my favorite… pistachio ice, from some ladies who didn’t think I was listening.”

  The timbre of her voice grew stronger, burnished by irony now. “Let me amend that-from some ladies who must have known full well that I was listening.”

  For she’d already borne some animosity from that particular set, whinnying like overbred mares in a paddock at whatever stupid joke had been making the rounds at White’s Club.

  Better concentrate her fury on his slut of an actress. About whom, it seemed, he had the grace to evince a hint of discomfiture.

  Or was that a trick of the light from the fire? He stood in front of it now, his hands (gracefully, elegantly-amazing that she could find them so at this moment) spread out to warm himself.

  You don’t need the fire. Touch me instead. Here, where I’m so very warm. Her thighs trembled; she’d parted her legs without realizing it. She clamped them shut. Damn those absurd stray thoughts (if thoughts they could be called), tripping her up amid the worst of their arguments, disarming her before his next round of attack.

  “That actress meant nothing, dammit, and you know it. And you were out too, quite often, in the afternoons, when I’d be, um, waking up. Gadding about with that swine Morrice…”

  “He wanted to meet Sir Francis Burdett, who’d been Papa’s friend, and I was happy to do him the favor of presenting him to a circle of intelligent people. He’d had enough-as I expect I had too-of the imbecility that passes for talk in Mayfair and St. James. He was interested in learning…”

  “About what mush-minded Jacobins thought? About what you thought?”

  Politics again. Was there any more deadly combination, he wondered, than eros and politics?

  “Please, Mary, the only thing Richard Morrice was interested in learning was what was under your skirts.”

  She blinked at a sudden loud crash. Thunder and lightning: an unanticipated storm must have blown in from the Atlantic.

  Nice to imagine so. Nice to delay acknowledging, for even an instant, that she’d hurled the bottle of Calvados at him.

  Invigorating in its way.

  She supposed it was relief she was feeling for not having hurt him. He’d leaped out of the way; the bottle had shattered against the mantel. Brandy was dripping down to the hearth, raising blue flames as though from a plum pudding and causing a ridiculously festive round of popping.

  Well, he shouldn’t have said that about Richard. Though of course she and Richard shouldn’t have given him cause to say it. Not that they ever would have, if…

  They were shouting at each other now.

  It appeared that a part of her had wandered off into a corner of the room to witness their verbal sparring. Quite as though she were a spectator at a match between a pair of boxers.

  A good, experienced couple of pugilists, each of them leading with a classic gambit.

  “But he was my closest friend, Mary!”

  “Rubbish! You’d begun ignoring him, quite as you were ignoring me! ”

  Feinting, parrying, now; dancing on their feet, catching their breath while exchanging stupid, babyish insults. She’d never minded that he wasn’t much above medium height, but he minded terribly-he left her the opening; she took it. It was as easy a jab as ever. And he could always get to her about certain inadequacies in her toilette-damn him anyway, for making fun of the state of her undergarments.

  Ah yes, and now the new moves they’d picked up during their years apart. The political vocabulary: Tory and radical. Habeas corpus. Treason.

  “Danger in the countryside,” he said. “Sedition, even if your friends are too blind and naïve to see it.”

  “Nonsense,” she snapped. “Just because your family has always and entirely opposed any extension of rights to the general populace doesn’t mean…”

  They circled the ring, taking the time to repeat some of their earlier gambits. The actress… but I wouldn’t have looked at her, he was shouting, if you’d ever listened when… no, of course I didn’t try to explain it to her, why should I, she wasn’t my bloody damn wi-

  “Nor would I be at this moment, if we lived in a civilized nation. If the law didn’t insist on considering the two of us one person-and you know very well which bloody one of us they mean. But I shall ma
nage. I’ve managed thus far to live a quite reasonable and satisfying life; I shall continue to do so, and you can like it or… or lump it. England isn’t so small a country that we can’t both reside in it.”

  But she must be running out of energy. She imagined a boxer staggering against the ropes. One final offensive, she thought-against him and against her own ambivalence.

  “While as for being your wife-perhaps I shall give you cause to put an end to that.”

  Had she scored a knockout blow?

  The pity was that it never felt quite as good as you thought it would.

  “Suit yourself, Mary,” he was saying. “I wish you well with your reasonable life. Of course, you never really did have the dash, the ton…”

  Bits of glass crackled below the soles of his boots as he made his way to the door.

  Had she meant to speak of the possibility of divorce?

  Until this moment, it had remained only that-a distant and rather abstract possibility.

  Not so distant now. She’d opened a Pandora’s box; the room seemed to swarm with nasty little winged things, with names like alienation of affections, bring suit, criminal conversation, Parliamentary divorce.

  A legal nightmare and a public ordeal.

  But at the end of it, she’d be free to marry a man she wouldn’t want to pitch things at.

  She found that she was pacing again, between the fire and the window. I freeze, I fry, the old poets liked to say… Simple, not inaccurate, and not entirely unpleasant.

  Her hands were icy, her breasts were warm… Dear Lord, her nipples were hard and erect as cherry stones, through the fabric, between her fingers.

  She’d have to watch where she stepped, with all that glass on the floor. Too bad; she’d wanted to taste the brandy straight. They’d have drunk it by now. She’d have had his boots off by now. His boots, and probably more than that.

  She ached from her thighs to her belly. And didn’t exactly mind it.

  There hadn’t been a great many lovers in his absence. But those there had been, she’d chosen with great care, both for their attractions and their inability to upset her life’s precarious balance. Capable, intelligent, and always profoundly self-involved men: a painter, a married physician from Edinburgh, a Milanese patriot smarting under restored Hapsburg rule-each of them secure in his busy, substantial life, with his own passions, commitments, and obligations. The affairs had been discreet, satisfying, meticulously planned and administered. No point deceiving oneself that a liaison could be kept entirely secret; the important thing was to maintain a certain public esteem for social convention. In each case it had been she who’d ended the connection, and there’d never been bitterness or recrimination.

  An impressive thing to have kept up over the years, and an exhausting one. Which was why, when Matthew Bakewell had announced that he wanted more from her, she’d been disposed to take him and his importunities seriously. And why it wasn’t a comfortable thing to find that her troublesome and entirely unmanageable husband could still make her feel so riotous and disorderly, so dazed, addled, lost, and distressingly exhilarated.

  Too disordered to think any further about divorce; she’d wait until morning for that. Meanwhile, there was laudanum, put aside for strong megrims, and who could cause her a worse headache than Kit? No wonder Peggy had left the corked brown bottle so visible, with a glass of water right beside it.

  Four careful drops, so distinct she could almost hear the tiny splashes they made: she watched the little dark clots of liquid spread, swirl, and attenuate, like feathery tiny clouds, before disappearing into the clear water.

  She swallowed it down, threw off the rest of her clothes, slipped naked below the quilt, and-quickly and coldly, skillfully and purposefully-touched herself until she cried out. Until the aching became a burning, a hard white light easing to a warm orange glow, until the trembling stopped and the candle guttered and died and the visions faded, of blazing eyes and strong tapering hands, of pain and anger, disillusionment and rivalry-oh, and other visions, memories from youth, of things they’d done and things they hadn’t dared to try. The smell of lemon oil, warm, smooth cherrywood surface of a desktop, her face and breasts crushed against it. All subsiding now to a dull dark red, as though dimly painted upon the velvet insides of her eyelids. Ebbing, waning, flickering. Until she slept.

  Chapter Five

  It isn’t easy, even with the sunlight pouring through the window, for a maid to rouse her mistress from a heavy drugged sleep. Especially a maid who’s moving a bit slowly herself, and who can’t help rubbing her own red and swollen eyes as she assesses the disorder about her.

  I should want to give me a good shaking, Mary chided herself, if I were in her place.

  The night before was still a bit of a blur. The visions-best, she suspected, that they remain a thrilling, rather wicked blur. But the memory of what they’d said last night would come back, probably sooner than she wanted. Her limbs were heavy; she forced herself to be passive, to move where Peggy prodded her, to keep gentle and limp beneath the towel washing the smell of brandy off her, the strong little hands buttoning her into her clothes.

  “You should eat something, my lady.” The girl mumbled the words-or something like them-through pins stuck in her mouth.

  She spoke more clearly now that she’d gotten Mary’s fichu tucked and tacked inside the neckline of her dress. “The eggs is very fresh here. Me and Tom, we were, uh, hungry… Well, you should try some eggs. And one o’ them crescent roll things too.”

  So it was Tom, now-me and Tom. Lucky pair, Mary thought, to have spent… well, it probably wasn’t accurate to say they’d spent an uneventful night, but she expected it had been less wearing on the emotions than her own. The girl’s face was flushed and rather puffy, her mouth soft and babyish as she turned from her neatly dressed mistress to the bedchamber that smelled (and rather looked) like a public house after a rough brawl.

  “Yes, thank you. Perhaps I shall try to eat, Peggy”-turning, waving a vaguely apologetic hand at the detritus and setting off down to the dining room.

  The impertinent serving girl from last night’s supper was nowhere to be seen. Which would be no surprise, Mary thought, if Kit’s old patterns had run true. Her drugged sleep shed a protective haze about her; on the other side of it doubtless lay some low, unworthy sentiments. Too bad she wanted the coffee; emotional clarity wouldn’t be pleasant. She accepted a cup from the plainer girl who offered it, and opened the book she’d brought down with her.

  “Plus de café, madame?”

  “Non, merci.” It must be time to depart. How long, she wondered, had she been scowling from behind her spectacles at the novel in her hand?

  But the more important question was how long he’d been staring down at her from just a few feet away. Face livid and unshaven above barely respectable linen, hair wet and combed back from his forehead-he’d been washed down like a racehorse. His valet hovered somewhere behind his elbow, lest he pitch over, as he looked alarmingly likely to do.

  What a nice little barrier a pair of spectacles made between oneself and the world. Sliding them just an inch farther down her nose, she gazed at him from above the thin gold wire at the lenses’ upper rims.

  “You look ghastly,” she said. “Why aren’t you asleep or… or still with that girl? I’m disappointed; it’s not like you, Kit. I should surely have thought that she…”

  “Disappeared quite early,” he told her, “after I’d drunk myself into a state making indecent toasts to you, just before collapsing…”

  She could feel the ends of her mouth quivering. He winked; she suppressed a fledgling smile. Don’t press your luck, darling.

  “Wait, no-I didn’t collapse on the floor. Almost did, yes, right. But she’s stronger than she looks, a real peasant-propped me up on her shoulder and walked me to the bed, where I rather drifted off, just this side of stupefied and almost enjoying the sensation of being parted from all the coins in my pocket.”

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sp; He patted himself around the waistcoat (which looked even more disreputable with its bottom button missing) and croaked out a short attempt at laughter. “Pocket watch too. A gift from you quite possibly. Engraved, as I remember-most charmin’ obscure poetic stuff.”

  Had he still been carrying it last night?

  “She must have found it rather a humiliation,” he added, “that a nation of such buffoons could have defeated l’empéreur Napoléon.” He shook his head. “Clever fingers on her. Too bad…”

  “And so you made your shambling way down here to tell me about it?” Pretending it was a matter of indifference that all he’d given the girl was the contents of his pockets.

  “I shambled down here to inform you that I’m coming back to London today. I shall be staying at my mother’s house in Park Lane.”

  He swayed rather alarmingly on his feet as he spoke, and winced as the valet put out an arm to steady him. “Well, later today,” he said, “an early afternoon boat, perhaps. I should have liked to accompany you, but Belcher here”-he nodded in the direction of the valet-“is of the opinion I’m not quite up to a choppy voyage across the Channel this morning. Unless you’d like to wait, to accompany me.”

  “Back to England today!” She pushed the spectacles back over the bridge of her nose. “But you said…”

  “I lied. Well, no, I didn’t, not exactly. I exaggerated-rearranged a few points. There were a great many details to attend to, official ones, rather… Letters of introduction-oh, but I told you that part, didn’t I? Anyway, I got them done quickly. The position I’m after…”

  She wouldn’t allow him to draw her into another argument. “Yes. Well. I’m sure we’ll manage to pursue our separate courses in town. Your confreres at White’s, the girls at Mrs. Goadley’s, will all be delighted, I’m sure, to welcome you…”

  “The position at the Home Office…” His voice was firm, though his gaze flickered for a moment-defiant, even if half-abashed at his evident need to emphasize it.