Pam Rosenthal - The Slightest Provocation

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.

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.”

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. ”