To Haveand To Hold

“Don’t lie. I’ve never heard of anyone called Mrs. Oldham; I doubt if I’d recognize her if I rode my horse over her. It’s not the way a good country squire ought to conduct himself. It’s appalling, in fact.” She kept her head down, frowning at the knot she was trying to tie over his stomach. He ducked his head—making a joke of trying to see her face. “Come, agree with me. I’m sure it’s what you think. Don’t von? Lord D’Aubrey’s an arrogant, conscienceless libertine with too much money and time on his hands. You won’t admit it? Well, I can’t blame you. Who knows what the consequences might be?” He sighed—then flinched at the pain sighing had caused him.

  “I’m finished,” she said. “I think you should lie down.”

  “Only if you’ll lie with me.”

  Maybe he was drunk. A slight smile played about his lips, but she couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. As if he hadn’t spoken, she stood up and began to rinse out the bloody linens in the lavatory.

  “Leave that,” he said. “Come, Rachel, help me to bed.” He held out his left arm, and she had no choice but to come to him and let him drape it over her shoulders. He had a half-healed wound in his side, and when he’d fallen on the stairs he hadn’t hurt himself. There was no reason why he couldn’t walk the twenty-some feet from his bathroom to his bedchamber unassisted. But she didn’t point that out. Taking up the lamp, she moved with him in a slow, intimate procession, letting him lean on her, and when they reached the bed she turned back the covers for him and tried to pretend that the cool silkiness of the cream-colored sheet brought back no memories.

  She wasn’t surprised when he held onto her hand as she started to leave. “Don’t go.” Remarkably, it sounded like a request, not command. “Stay and talk to me for a little while.”

  “You should sleep now.”

  “I should, but I don’t want you to go. I don’t want to be alone.” He looked down at their hands, hers in both of his. “It’s not fair to say that to you. But I’m asking this favor of you anyway.”

  “All right,” she said faintly. “I’ll stay for a little while.”

  “Thank you.” He brought her hand to his mouth and held it there for a long moment. Again his gentleness confounded her. “Will you lie down with me, Rachel?”

  “What?”

  “Just that. I won’t touch you. I have something to tell you.” She began to shake her head. “Please. I have to lie down, and I don’t want to be in this bed and you in that chair.” He smiled. “I’m very weak, you know. Voice can’t carry. Might faint if I have to shout at you.”

  She looked away. “When will it end? When will it—be enough?”

  “What do you mean?” He touched her cheek, making her look at him. “Don’t be sad. It’s changing, I swear it. Nothing will be the same. You can’t believe that and you can’t trust me, so I have to take advantage of your helplessness one more time. To show you.”

  She whispered, “I don’t understand you.”

  “I know. Lie down with me.”

  So she did. Self-deception wasn’t one of her failings, so she didn’t tell herself that she was obeying him again because she had no choice, that her compliance was one more “condition of employment.” In truth, he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t bear solitude right now. She needed the comfort of another human being, and although it was the height of irony, the only person to whom she could turn was the very one who had put her in need of comfort.

  Ah, well. It wasn’t an uncommon phenomenon; she’d seen it in Dartmoor often enough—the prisoner so desperate for sympathy and companionship that she grew dependent on, even attached to, her gaoler. Was it twisted? A corruption of reality? In the end it didn’t matter, because the deadliest enemy was still loneliness. It put all the others to shame.

  She took off her shoes, helped him take off his. They half lay, half sat in the bed, their backs against the pillows. At the instant she began to think that it seemed strange to lie together but not to touch, he picked up her hand and laid it palm-down on his upraised thigh. Stranger still—because they were enemies, weren’t they?—such an intimacy from him no longer alarmed her. Maidenly shyness was a condition she hadn’t been able to claim since her school days. But was Sebastian her enemy? Why did he sometimes seem like her only ally?

  “Sully’s not a friend of mine,” he said carefully. “I have my share of shallow, profligate friends, but Sully’s not among them. Our paths cross often enough in London and elsewhere, because we’re both idle and aimless. But we are not friends.”

  He laughed humorlessly. “I’m telling you this to justify myself, but of course, it’s too late for that. When I received his letter saying he and his friends were coming, my first reaction was relief. I wanted him here. I wanted his cynicism and vulgarity, his contempt for anything simple or decent. I wanted him to remind me of my roots, you might say. Because for some time I had felt myself moving in a slightly different direction and it . . . and it . . .” He stared at her fingers, absently pressing them apart one by one. “It frightened me.”

  She listened to the echo of that extraordinary admission, and could think of nothing to say.

  “As soon as I saw them, I knew I’d made a mistake. But I didn’t understand the enormity of it until you came. Then it was . . .” He put his head back and closed his eyes. “Biblical analogies,” he said with another mirthless laugh; “lamb to the slaughter, all that. Painful. Excruciating to watch, almost unbearable. But I managed. Perhaps you thought I was enjoying myself. You might take a little comfort from knowing that I suffered. Not as you did—I couldn’t claim that. But I suffered.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know.” He kept his eyes shut, so she watched him closely. “I honestly don’t know.”

  She didn’t believe him. She even thought she knew the answer, but she didn’t offer it. Not because he would deny it, but because saying it out loud would upset this odd, new, peculiarly enjoyable peace they were sharing.

  “I thought you would ask me why I hated it,” he said after a moment, looking at her. “Why I finally stopped it. I’ll tell you, even though you won’t ask. It’s because I saw myself when I looked at Sully and the others. Heard my voice in their voices. What they did was despicable, indefensible, and they were the mirror of me. I could see it clearly, and it revolted me. I was glad when Sully drew the knife, because that gave me permission to kill him. I wanted to kill him, wring his neck, stop his heart. You won’t believe it, but I know that it was the vileness in myself I really wanted to kill.”

  Face to face at last, she thought. They looked at each other through nothing but the air, no veils of deception between them, no pride, no determined cruelty, no trumped-up impassivity. Even so, she drew back; as much as she welcomed this openness, she also feared it with her woman’s discretion, her natural armor.

  He sensed it—changed tacks. “Why aren’t you angry?” he asked in the gentle voice, the devastating one. “Why are you here? How could you tie a bandage around me and then lie down with me in my bed?” To make it worse, he caressed her forearm, beneath the tight sleeve of her dress—he’d unbuttoned it a minute ago and she, silly woman, had barely noticed. “Are you mad?” he murmured. “Or that compassionate? That foolhardy?”

  The last guess was the best one. “I found out about anger in prison,” she said slowly. “In the first year, it ruled me. I couldn’t control myself. I’d never been treated rudely in my life, and I didn’t know how to cope with such callousness. The refractory cell I described that night—do you remember?” He didn’t answer; his expression said she had just asked a very stupid question. She blushed, but for a second she felt airy inside, almost breathless. “I spent . . . quite a lot of time there in the early days. Because of my anger. They call it ‘breaking out’—smashing everything in your cell, screaming, shredding your clothes. It keeps you from going mad for a little while, but the consequences are . . . dire.”
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  “What was it like?”

  “I can’t describe it. They never beat me. Once they hobbled me—tied my hands and feet together behind my back. Left me in the dark cell.”

  “How long?”

  “Days. Two or three, I don’t know. That was the worst time. After that, I changed. I became a model prisoner.”

  He was watching her carefully, really seeing her; she had his complete attention, and it made her nervous. But under the nervousness lay a quiet, secret excitement. It’s only the novelty, she assured herself. The newness of being listened to by someone, by anyone. But the effect, she couldn’t deny, was elating.

  She continued in a low, tentative voice—so he could stop her whenever he chose, whenever he tired of this. “But it wasn’t really the solitary cell or the shackles or the denial of food or privileges that made me change. After that first year, I came to understand that the anger and fury, the terrible sense of injustice I felt—they were eating me alive, and keeping me in a prison every bit as vicious and confining as Exeter. But I could free myself at least from that prison if I could let all the rage and hurt go, just—let it go. And so I did.”

  “How?”

  “I stopped caring.”

  He nodded, but she saw his skepticism.

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” she conceded. “I think, to understand it, you would have to have experienced life in a convict prison. To survive, one becomes like an animal. No memories, no hopes. Dulled senses. I can’t explain it, it’s—not like anything. There are no words. You cannot imagine it.” She sighed, hopeless again. Words, or the futility of them, depressed her.

  A silence. Sebastian shifted uncomfortably, holding his side. “Have to lie down,” he mumbled, moving down in the bed until he was flat on his back, only his head on the pillow.

  “You’re tired,” she said, embarrassed, starting to get up. “I’ll—”

  “No, don’t go. I’m not tired anymore. Stay, Rachel—come down here beside me.”

  She didn’t even argue with him this time. This was where she wanted to be. She might be losing her sense of proportion, of propriety, of self-preservation, she might even be losing her mind—but it was lovely to lie here in the semidark and murmur a few of her deepest secrets to this man who held her fate in his hands. A few nights ago he’d seduced her body, taken everything a man can take from a woman. What would he think if he knew that a truer, more devastating seduction was the one going on here, this minute?

  “I’m sorry about Sully,” he said quietly, his eyes on the ceiling. “I couldn’t say the words before. I wanted to imply it—much easier than saying it. Now I’m saying it. I apologize to you.”

  She kept the ridiculous tears in by squeezing her eyes closed. “It’s all right.”

  “No, don’t say that. Keep your anger—it’s completely justified. I didn’t apologize to you so that you would forgive me.” She doubted that, and a second later he smiled and added sheepishly, “Although I was very much hoping you would.”

  She smiled, too. “I’ll tell you something curious.” He turned onto his good side, facing her. “I hated the things they said to me, the way they treated me, all of that. They made me feel like an object, not a person, something pitiful and despicable. They made me feel dirty. But—here is my confession—when they started playing the ‘truth’ game and I had to answer their questions, I felt—of course I hated it, but—deep down, something in me was glad to answer. Glad because I was being made to speak, finally, even in that awful way, of the things that happened to me in gaol. Can you understand this? It’s . . . hard for me to talk—of course, you know that; it’s obvious. But they made me talk, and I was . . . relieved. That sounds pitiful.”

  “No.”

  “Crazy.”

  “No. I felt something like it, too. What happened was absolutely hellish, a nightmare, but at the same time I was glad to find out some of your secrets at last. It wasn’t lewd curiosity, I promise you.” He pushed his hand through his hair. “Why should you believe me?” he asked softly, rhetorically. “But if I were to ask you now to tell me what it was like in prison, would you believe that something more than prurience motivated the question?”

  She thought, but not for long. Probably not long enough. “Yes. Now. I would now.”

  They were both quiet for a time, holding hands under the covers. She couldn’t measure the risk she had just taken because it was too big, incalculable. But she felt alive for the first time in a long time, and the extraordinariness of that couldn’t be measured either.

  And then it started. With the gentle encouragement of his thoughtful, judicious questions, she began to speak of the last ten years of her life. It wasn’t an orderly recital; she let her thoughts wander in time, forward or back, over events and milestones and states of mind. She told him of the bitter indignities she’d suffered at the hands of ignorant, underpaid, casually vicious warders, the constant bullying and hectoring, the battering of the mind and soul that never stopped, never, not for four thousand days. The deadly monotony, the barren, brutal months, the unspeakable loneliness. The flies and spiders she’d befriended; the mouse she’d kept for a pet for one whole winter. The SILENCE signs on the walls of every cell, every corridor. The time they’d given her two days’ bread and water for smiling at a fellow inmate on Christmas Eve. Loneliness could become so real, it took on a life of its own, became a kind of company. She told him her number—forty-four—and that she hadn’t heard the sound of her own name in more than nine years.

  He asked about her family, and she told him about the one and only time they’d come to see her. She’d been locked up in a large wooden box with wire netting for a window; four feet away her father, mother, and brother were locked inside an identical box. Two warders stood between the boxes, listening to the conversation, such as it was. Her mother had never stopped crying, and after the first shocked greeting, her father couldn’t speak. It lasted ten minutes, and when it was over she asked them not to come back. She never saw any of them again.

  She told him about the library, the only light in the long darkness of her prison term. It had four hundred books, and she’d eventually read all of them, some many times.

  At first, she’d feared dying in prison. That had seemed the ultimate horror, being nailed up in a prison coffin and thrown into an unmourned grave. But after her family was gone, she stopped caring, and soon she began to pray for death. She hated, hated, hated everything, especially a world where such an unspeakable travesty of justice had been allowed to occur. But even the hatred had waned as year followed empty year. “You erased yourself,” Sebastian said, and she said, “Yes. That’s it, exactly. I killed myself without dying.”

  She rested, exhausted from the telling. The lamp by the bedside had long since sputtered out; they Jay in the dark, she listening to his breathing. She’d told him terrible things, painful, degrading truths she’d thought she would take to her grave. By rights, she ought to be frightened, but all she could feel was tired and relieved. Unburdened.

  Extraordinary.

  He still had her hand, but she thought he’d fallen asleep. She was surprised when he said, “Rachel.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Who do you think killed Wade?”

  She blinked, trying to see his face. “What?”

  “Who killed him? You must have thought about it in prison. Who do you think it was?”

  She tried to speak, but only a wheezing sound came out before her throat closed up. She realized she was squeezing his hand too tight, using all her strength. She let go and sat up in bed, hugging her knees.

  He sat up, too, and put his hand in the middle of her back. “What’s wrong? Are you crying?”

  She shook her head. A pitiful lie—-her eyes were swimming, face dripping; only by swallowing repeatedly did she keep back embarrassing sobs. Emotions she couldn’t blame on weariness or tension ham
mered for release, threatening to burst out of their careful bounds. Sebastian had his arm around her shoulders, his hand on her wet cheek, trying to make her look at him. She knew him by now: he would keep at her, he wouldn’t stand for evasions.

  “I’m just—grateful,” she got out, voice strangled. “Because no one believed me. You can’t know—” She gave up, couldn’t talk.

  “What do you mean? That you were innocent? What rot. Don’t cry, I can’t stand it,” he whispered, holding her against him, both arms around her now, and she was soaking his skin with tears.

  She put her hand on her aching throat and told him the worst. “No one believed me. No one.”

  “You mean . . .”

  “My family.”

  There, it was out, the worst thing, the most grievous hurt. As soon as she said it, she calmed. The emotional storm passed, and she was left trembling in reaction.

  “Impossible,” he said lightly, stroking her hair like a father, rocking her a little. “I always knew it. I doubt if you could kill an insect. You’re the gentlest person I know. And the saddest.”

  “Stop.” Or she wouldn’t be able to stop crying.

  He knew the surest way to banish tears. He kissed her. Not like a father. He kissed her like a lover, slow and hot, their mouths wet, clinging, salty from her crying. As soon as she stiffened, he stopped. In unison, they lay back down on their separate pillows. “You’re tired,” he whispered. “Go to sleep, Rachel.”

  She was tired. She covered a yawn with her hand. “I could never sleep in prison.” A minute later, she was dreaming.

  ***

  She dreamt she was in her prison cell, lying on her hard cot in the dark. Even though her eyes were closed, she could see everything. Someone was watching her through the spy hole beside the door. She feigned sleep, not moving, trying not to breathe. A key scraped in the lock. The door opened an inch, two inches, and cold, paralyzing dread congealed in her stomach. The eye in the spy hole was still watching her, and she knew who it was. Then her blanket was gone and her legs were bare. She wanted to push her dress down, cover herself, but if she moved he would know she was awake. The door widened.