She’d heard the change in pronouns. “Did he do that to you—make you confess?”
“Sure. I was a terrible sinner. I was up there almost every Sunday, baring my wicked soul.”
She shuddered; she could think of few crimes uglier than humiliating a child.
“Being a child of sin, I was doomed from the start—my vicious ways were only what you’d expect from a boy conceived in lust and born of a harlot. That’s what he called his own daughter, Sara, every day until she died.”
“Why did she stay there?”
“She had nowhere else to go. She didn’t know she was pregnant until after my father burned to death in a fire in his boardinghouse. His people were all dead. She had no money, no skills, not much education. All she had was me. So she went back home and let my grandfather abuse her for the last seven years of her life, for my sake.”
Her arms tightened around him. He put his fingers in her hair, gently massaging her scalp. “My mother’s death left a big hole in Matthew’s life. My grandmother didn’t have any fight in her by then, so she was no good to him. That left me. Satan’s spawn.”
He stopped. In dread, Sara finally asked, “What did he do?”
“He believed in two roots of all evil, not one— money and sex. That made poverty and absolute chastity the highest moral goals. And I’ll say this for him, he wasn’t a hypocrite—he practiced what he preached. In our house, that meant there wasn’t enough to eat, among other things.”
“What other things?”
“Stupid, grinding poverty that served no purpose but to degrade us. I wasn’t allowed to have shoes. The house could never be heated. My grandmother was fifty years old, and he wouldn’t let her have a coat. God put us in California; the sun and the earth’s bounty were His blessing. If you wanted more, you were selfish and ungrateful and you’d burn in hell for it.”
She knew there was more; she could even guess what it was. His hand, tangled in her hair, had turned into a fist; if she moved her head, he would hurt her. Slowly, gently, she disengaged his fingers, then kissed them one by one. “Did he hurt you?”
After a long time, he said, “Yeah.”
“Tell me.”
“Why?”
She waited, as tense now as he.
With a defeated sigh, he told her. “I got a beating almost every day from the time I was seven years old. Usually he used his hands. He was a big, strong son of a bitch. I was faster, though, so I could outrun him. I’d sleep in the fields or hide in the barn for a night or two, but in the end I’d always have to go back. And he was always waiting. He never forgot anything.”
“Alex,” she whispered, horrified.
“If I’d been really wicked, he used a strap. My grandmother never tried to stop him. I think my mother would have. When I was sixteen, I fell in love with a girl named Shelly. She lived in Salinas; her father ran the livery. We used to sneak off to this place called Deep Creek as often as we could. It started out innocently, nothing but holding hands and a few kisses. But before long we were making love. I guess we seduced each other. It was—magic, something I’d never felt. Not just the sex, either. The cherishing. The caring. It was as if she was healing me.”
“And then?”
“Salinas is a small town. No secrets. My grandfather found out.” Suddenly he had no stomach for going on with this story. “I ran away that night,” he finished, skipping the worst, his voice clipped. “If I hadn’t, he’d have killed me, beaten me to death. Or I’d have killed him. I never went back. Once I wrote to my grandmother, but there was no answer. I found out that she died about a year later.”
Aching, Sara lay still, wondering what words she could possibly say that would comfort him. “Perhaps he was unbalanced, Alex, his mind—”
“I don’t care about that,” he said harshly, sitting up and turning away from her. “Do you think that changes anything, whether or not he was deranged? I don’t give a damn. It makes no difference to me, understand?”
“I understand that you’re not ready to forgive him.”
“No, and I’ll never be. I haven’t told you half— a quarter of what he did. He’s rotting in hell now, there’s not a doubt in my mind, and he deserves it.” He stood up, cursing violently. “Son of a bitch, he can still do this to me. Christ, I wish I could let it go.” He turned back. “Sara, I’m sorry. How the hell did I get started on this?”
“Let’s go for a walk.”
“What?”
“Do you want to?”
“Now?”
She threw the sheet off and got up. “Why not?”
Sixteen
A LOVER’S MOON COASTED HIGH in the blue night sky, racing the clouds, raining ghostly showers on the sea and the sandy beach. Low tide sucked monotonously at the rubble of the surf, then hurled it back shoreward with a violent slap again and again, incessantly. Sara leaned back against Alex’s chest and pulled his arms tighter around her. The salt breeze was steady but warm, a late-summer gift. “I wish we lived here. You and Michael and I. I wish.”
He wished it, too. He rested his chin on top of her head, blind to the moon on the water and the crashing waves. Leave him, Sara. He almost said it out loud. But that would lead to an argument he didn’t want to have, not yet. “I was thinking of you and Michael, how different you are from my mother and me. I was all she had—like you and Michael—but you’re stronger than she was. And Michael’s a bright, happy boy. Open and full of life.”
“I hope he’s happy.” But he was too sensitive, too much like her. She was afraid her melancholy would infect him.
“My mother was miserable. And I was angry all the time, especially after she died. Sullen and rebellious, closed up. Ben never hits Michael, does he, Sara?”
“No, he never hits Michael. But Michael never gives him any reason. Michael loves him, and that baffles Ben, I think. He’s impatient with his frailty and his ill health because they frighten him, and when he’s frightened he can become aggressive. Michael’s a sort of pale mystery to him, I think. He looks more English than American, and that irritates—” She broke off when he turned her around forcefully and gripped her shoulders hard. “Alex, what—?”
He’d heard nothing after, “No, he never hits Michael,” because the odd inflection froze his blood. “Does he hit you, Sara? Does he?” He gave her an urgent shake when she didn’t answer. “Tell me.”
She pulled his hands away and stepped back. “Alex,” she said as calmly as she could, “we’re lovers for now, for this night. But you can’t have my past or my future. I’d give anything to change that, but I can’t. So don’t ask me such questions—that part of my life isn’t for you, isn’t for us. Please.” She turned from him and started to walk.
He grabbed her back after two steps. “My God. He does, doesn’t he?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“No.” She wrenched away again. He was so upset, so close to violence himself, that a shrill blare of alarm sounded in her brain. “I’m not lying. You misunderstood what I said—I’m sorry! Some things are worse than hitting—coldness, absolute withdrawal. Other things. Insensitivity beyond a certain point is a kind of sadism. I have a bad marriage, Ben and I don’t suit”—the understatement made her laugh—” but he doesn’t hurt me physically, I swear.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“Yes. Alex, I would tell you if he did.”
“Would you?”
“Yes.” She waited, feeling the battle he was waging between what he feared and what he wanted to believe. “It’s true, I swear,” she said again. She put her arms around his waist and drew him close. “What kind of woman do you think I am? I would never allow Ben to hurt me. Believe it, Alex.” She felt the tension draining out of him as his hands came up to hold her. Forgive me, she begged in silence. But she didn’t regret the lie.
He sighed with relief, and an odd kind of weariness. “Why did you marry him, Sara?”
She hid a sad smile agai
nst his shoulder. “I was wondering when you would finally ask me.” She took his hand and they started to walk again, bare feet sinking deep in the soft sand.
“Don’t you want to tell me?”
“It’s nothing I’m proud of.” She put her head back to stare up at the black sky. “But I suppose I’ve paid for it enough by now that there’s no point in still feeling ashamed.”
He waited.
“I was eighteen when we met. I’d been out of school for a year, living with my mother in our decaying mansion in the Blackdown Hills. She was a hopeless drunk by then, and it was my job to take care of her. I can’t describe to you what it was like. There was literally nothing to hope for; I lived closer to despair in that year than at any other time in my life, before or since.” That was the truth, because as wretched as the years with Ben had been, at least she’d always had Michael.
“So Ben came along and saved you,” Alex guessed.
“There were moments when I thought of it like that. Not for long, but in the beginning.”
“How did you meet?”
“It seemed like chance to me; later I learned it had all been rather carefully arranged. My best chum from school had taken pity and invited me up to London for her coming-out. It was my first debutante ball—but not Ben’s, I found out. In fact, he’d already had marriage proposals turned down by two young titled ladies. The season was ending; desperation was setting in. He saw me as his last chance.”
“He told you all this?”
“Later, yes. Of course, now it seems all of a piece, but at the time the coldbloodedness of it stunned me. He’d been planning it for ages, he and his protégée.”
“Protégée?”
“Yes—a fancy word for mistress. She was a widow named Mrs. Russell—Minnie. He actually introduced us once.”
Alex swore.
“Ben was incredibly wealthy by the time he was twenty-five. He started out in the Chicago stockyards, prodding cattle along a chute to their deaths. Sometime you must ask him to tell you about the skull-smashing device he invented to speed things along. Anyway, he had everything he’d ever dreamed of except for one thing—social respectability. He wanted to be allowed into the elite. Minnie told him how to do it—take an aristocratic wife. Her name and his money, she assured him, would open all the doors of the Fifth Avenue mansions that had been closed to him before. She’d been around the block, as Ben would say, but she must have been nearly as naive as he was to think it would be that easy. But he swallowed it whole, and went off to England to buy himself a bride. He’d decided to limit the search to Great Britain,” she added as an aside, “because he couldn’t stand foreigners, and if he had to marry one he at least wanted one who spoke English.”
“And he’s telling you all of this.”
“Yes, I’ve told you. So he found me. You can believe that I was perfect. A duchess’s daughter, shy and biddable, reasonably well-educated. And refined—that was the great thing—as only sheltered English girls can be.” She laughed softly. “I must have seemed like a creature from another planet to him. At first he couldn’t even understand me when I spoke. I put him on his best behavior with my intimidating foreignness and my strange formality. Can you believe he thought I was sophisticated? We spoke at cross purposes, neither of us understanding the other. Attributing qualities to each other we wanted to find but which, as we would learn later, didn’t exist at all. We were abysmally, categorically mismatched.”
“What did you like about him?”
“Oh, Alex.” She leaned against his shoulder. “I was so young. And so ignorant. I saw his stubbornness as drive. I saw his bullying and intolerance as energy. He was an American, and that made him foreign and exciting, a little wild. A man on the frontier. Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe it was our complete oppositeness that appealed to me, if only for a little while—weeks, really.”
They had reached the rocky end of the beach, where a tumble of sea boulders blocked the way between the woods and the water. They found a flat, dry rock away from the outrushing tide and sat down.
“He came to Somerset almost immediately after we met. I don’t think I invited him; maybe my mother did. I can’t remember that part. Anyway, he made a bargain with her with amazing speed. He offered her fifty thousand pounds right away, a sort of down payment on me, and then ten thousand a year for the rest of her life.”
Alex had heard the “down payment” was twenty thousand; a part of him was glad she hadn’t come so cheap. He took her hand and held it in both of his, hearing the pain underneath the cynicism in her voice.
“It was a fortune to her, a pittance to him. She told me to marry him. So I did. And part of the reason was to get away from her.”
She paused, then sank against him, resting. He pulled her closer, not speaking.
“We were married in New York,” she resumed finally. “The honeymoon was short; in fact, it really ended at the wedding ceremony, when most of the socialites he and Minnie had invited declined to attend. That was the first inkling he had that his strategy for self-advancement might have a flaw. Naturally he blamed me. We went to Italy after the wedding, Florence and Rome. That’s where a lot of my girlish questions finally got answered. No, my husband didn’t love me. No, I didn’t love him. Our marriage was a business deal, and we’d both only begun to suspect how disastrous the deal was going to turn out to be.”
“Did you become pregnant with Michael immediately?”
“Very nearly. Thank God—I truly think Michael saved me from going mad. But first there were those awful months in New York, just after we returned from our wedding trip. A few invitations turned up, but they were from parvenues Ben had never thought of cultivating anyway, social climbers no higher on the ladder than he was. So he told me to be more aggressive. He ordered me—his eighteen-year-old bride, friendless in a strange country—to knock on the doors of the Drexels and the Whitneys and leave cards, issue invitations to the Bradley Martins for dinner and tea, ask Mrs. Henry Phipps to play bridge or to ride with me in Central Park.”
Alex rested his temple against hers. “Poor Sara.”
“Yes. It was dreadful. And needless to say, it was all for nothing. When I’d confess, in tears, the snubs I’d endured, it made him furious. He honestly couldn’t understand where he’d gone wrong. He’d bought and paid for an aristocratic Englishwoman, by God, so it must be my fault, something I was doing on purpose to sabotage him. He…”
“Punished you,” Alex guessed, grim-faced.
“We punished each other. We both felt angry and cheated, and so we waged war in our separate ways. Sometimes I’d start a fight with him on purpose, because it was the only thing that made me feel alive, if only with bitterness. I was a bad wife—am a bad wife.”
“Oh, please.”
“It’s true, I’m most of the things he calls me— cold and unfeminine, selfish, supercilious—”
“You’re none of those things, don’t be an idiot.”
“You love me—you don’t know.”
“I know because I love you.”
She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. She didn’t want to talk about Ben anymore. Alex didn’t either. He slipped his hands inside her robe—his robe, which she wore with her drawers over his shirt: a fascinating ensemble. The robe came untied and she wrapped it around his shoulders, enveloping him and her in its big gray wings. “If you knew what this is like for me, Alex, my love, my love.”
“I do know.”
“No, you couldn’t. To tell you all of that—to be with you here, to have the freedom to touch you like this—” Stupidly, she started to cry.
Nuzzling her wind-tangled hair aside, he put his lips on her tight, aching throat, soothing her, murmuring to her. She felt the blossoming of a bittersweet happiness inside. His hands slid to the sides of her breasts; his mouth burned where he kissed her. Everything changed, so quickly she could hardly follow her body’s swift, unexpected combustion. “You make me lose my mind,” she ob
served wonderingly. “I mean—literally—” It tapered away to nothing, just as she’d predicted, and she lost the power to speak words more rational than, “Alex, please, yes, oh God—” Her trembling arms circled his neck, still sheltering them with his robe; under it, he opened the buttons on her shirt and uncovered her breasts. She arched up, gasping, and pressed closer. Lifting her knee, she draped it over one of his in blatant, wanton invitation, hazily amazed at herself.
Cold and unfeminine, her husband called her. Alex dragged his mouth down her soft throat, feeling the surge of her pulse. He found her breast and suckled her slowly and steadily while she moaned and her nails dug into his back—a delicious pain she stopped inflicting, abashed, when he lifted his head and said appreciatively, “Ow.” The skin on the inside of her thighs was softer than an infant’s. “Sara,” he whispered, “beautiful Sara. Have you ever made love outside, darling?”
She couldn’t stop shaking. That was odd, because everywhere he touched she was burning. “I’ve never made love anywhere until tonight.”
He kissed her eyes closed, her mouth open. Pulling her other leg across his lap, he bent over her until she felt the cold solidity of the rock on her shoulder blades. “I know just the place.”
His hand stroking between her legs caused her to squeeze her eyes shut and sigh, “Do you ever.”
He gave a throaty laugh. “No, on the sand— over there.” He moved his head vaguely. “It’ll be softer than this rock on your lovely backside.”
“Are we on a rock? I thought it was a cloud.”
He gathered her in his arms and stood up, suddenly out of patience and finished with finesse. She clung to him, in instant sympathy with his need for haste. She didn’t care where he took her; it made her dizzy, but it was lovely to close her eyes, press her face to his neck, and let him carry her wherever he liked.
He didn’t go far. The sand leveled off a few feet above the tide line; he sank to his knees and laid her in a soft-looking place, lit silver by moonlight. A feverish urgency seized him when the loose folds of robe and shirt slipped open, uncovering her intoxicating nakedness. But his hands on her face were gentle, his voice steady when he told her, “I’m in love with you, Sara. This won’t end tonight, it can’t. You must know that. Say it.”