Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Present Day
Southampton, England
Julian set his fork and knife into the rare slice of roast, aware of the woman one white-clothed-covered table to his right.
She had met his eyes twice and the quirk of her lips extended another invitation to room fifteen.
If she looked again through his meal, he could not know.
Julian had been determined not to damn his soul further by engaging in a careless fuck for the sake of his needs.
Smart, brown shoes appeared at his left under a grey skirt and a long apron with a prayer book dangling from her waist. Julian nodded for the maidservant, Althea, to speak.
“I offered Madame dinner, sir. She thanked me but would not take the tray.”
“Did she appear unwell?”
Althea’s wide grey eyes clouded behind thick spectacles. “I did not see her, sir. She would not open her door.”
Julian cursed Kitty for her sulk, and then his conscience reared. After their painful discussion at the yard, the sulk was appropriate. He asked Althea if she had a key, and when she bobbed a nod, he pressed a tuppence into her thin hand and directed her to check on Kitty in the morning.
His gaze traveled to the window but not before the woman from room fifteen caught his eye again. He frowned back in bald irritation. Did the chit not see that now was not the time? The sun had lowered to the horizon and his wife had been holed up in her room for more than eight hours.
Much had happened in one day. And if it hadn’t gone as smoothly as he had hoped, he had seen it through. With Kitty, he had rarely resorted to subterfuge. Because Kitty had been a rare girl. Kind and whip-smart. An open book of joys and worries. He had loved that girl.
He had learned to live without her.
Time had passed in an agonizing existence. First in Southampton as he had struggled to prove he could build ships without her. Furious to extract her from his dreams. After two years, he had understood that Kitty was the dream, more than the ships.
He had walked away.
His paternal great-aunt, with a soft spot for stubborn boys and a hatred for the earl, had settled a fortune on her favorite nephew, allowing Julian’s time to be measured in women and drink, in minutes and hours, then days and months, until another year had passed and he had awakened alone, not lonely.
He no longer loved Kitty. He was certain.
Quitting the dining room, he dressed for exercise, decided to drink instead, and fell asleep on the settee facing the gallery windows. He awoke before dawn with a raging erection. He slapped cold water on his face and walked out through the service entrance, running north.
The day dawned flat and grey but warmer than the day before.
Birds called, desperate to make use of the summer before fall set in.
He lengthened his strides, his pace unforgiving abreast the River Test’s eastern shore.
He weaved in and out of the thick vegetation and swooped under willows and birches.
He avoided a nesting site, and his face struck a gnarled limb, throwing him back a step.
The resounding whack vibrated through his brain. He swiped the blood from his cheek with his sleeve. Hands on his hips, he stared at the grey sky between the verdant leaves with as many greens as Kitty’s eyes.
Was she right? Did his actions reek of revenge?
He started running again.
Had he wished to hurt Kitty? Did he hate her?
He searched within, and while he couldn’t name it hate, it was far from indifference.
Kitty had abandoned him to traipse about the Continent.
Black rage rose up in his chest. She loved him?
Did she really? No, she could not. Nor could he love her.
And he would never trust her with so much as pouring him a cup of tea.
An hour later, Julian trotted down High Street where vendors set up their carts and shopkeepers swept their front walks in the morning light. Sailors trudged blurry-eyed toward the quay from their night of drink and women and fighting.
The grueling run, his first since leaving Venice, made him feel old. It had done nothing to clear his head. He called for a bath, and the soothing water could not wash away the nagging sense that he had gone about this all wrong.
He dried himself and paced the main room naked. He dropped down and completed a hundred press-ups and sit-ups each, and when he was through, he eased back to the carpet, folded his arms behind his head, and stared into his bloody feelings.
The comfort of indifference he sought was born of anger. He had, yes, been angry for five years. He wanted Kitty gone because he wanted to be angry still. And the selfish man he was, he preferred the company of his own interests. And his interest was… revenge.
Muttering an oath, he sat up and, elbows to his bare knees, sheathed his fingers in his wet hair. He remained in this position until a knock came at his door.
Stepping back as he opened the door, Althea’s spectacles slipped down her as nose as she ogled his bare chest down to the towel wrapped around his hips. “I checked on Madame, sir. I had to make use of my key, but she is sleeping. Quite soundly.”
Sleeping still at half past ten when she had been in her room for more than twenty hours? “Check on her again at noon.”
She shoved up her spectacles, her eyes reminiscent of an owl. “Yes, sir.”
He collected a coin from his desk, and after pocketing it in her apron, Althea said, “Begging your pardon, but she is sleeping soundly, sir.”
“As you said. Likely she remained awake through the night.”
“Yes sir, but ’tis quite really soundly-like.”
How many ways could one use the word soundly in a sentence? Althea didn’t look like she was leaving. “Wait here.”
In breeches and shirtsleeves, he followed Althea to Kitty’s room.
In the cool hue of morning, he saw Kitty’s sketchbook and a vibrant blue banyan draped long-wise on the bed.
There was a woman in the banyan. It was Kitty with chalk between her slack fingers and her nose pressed against the sketchbook’s spine.
He shook her, and her flaccid form moved without protest.
Noting the glass on the table, he picked it up and sniffed. Laudanum. He looked back at his wife. Pale. Breathing between long stretches of stillness.
“It is soundly-like,” he said to Althea, unable to look away from his wife. When a deep breath shuddered from her, he finally took his own breath.
“Yes, sir. Like the dead.”
“Well, that might have gotten me here sooner.” He gathered Kitty in his arms and carried her to his rooms. She was absolutely oblivious to the world, her body limp as he directed Althea to draw back the linens and settled her in his bed.
Althea gaped at the woman, scandalous visions dancing in her grey eyes.
“She is my wife,” he said.
“I—I thought she was a widow.”
“In some respects, she is. Please have her belongings brought to my apartments. And if you wish, I’ll hire you as her maid. She wishes for a companion. You appear”—he motioned to her prayer book hanging at her hip—“not the usual sort of serving girl.”
“No, sir,” she huffed, “I am not the usual.”
“I’m certain your purse reflects thus.” How did she survive on a wench’s wage without offering her favors? By the leanness of her form, barely.
“Miss Althea Dixley,” she said.
“Pardon me?”
“My name.”
“Ah, yes. Thank you. Miss Dixley, I shall speak to Mr. Welles, and you may lodge in Madame’s old room. Also, have fresh water and food brought up in two hours.” There was no need for it now. Kitty was an exhausted lump of laudanum.
After Miss Althea Dixley unpacked Kitty’s trunks, she handed Julian a Bible for his comfort and promised to return within the hour. Lobbing the Bible aside, he tucked the covers to Kitty’s chin and retrieved her sketchbooks.
Reclining beside her, he set the larger book on his lap and flipped to the last pages.
The sketch of him could only have been from the day before.
And there was the sign, and the unfinished Valiant, and Sam Worthing.
And an infant. He leafed forward and back to root the drawing in time but none of the sketches were linear.
The infant had no place, no name. Maybe, a dream.
Another was of Kitty, a flower in her hand. A man sat beside her at a wrought-iron table. A dark-haired man with the sly look of a rogue, one he recognized. She had named it: Anthony at Tuileries Garden.
“Hardly a friend,” he said, glaring down at Kitty’s sleeping countenance.
A pastel of Anthony and the lovely widow he’d made a conquest of (and ultimately deserted) at the Mont Cenis Bridge. Another of Julian in the shadow of the Rome coliseum.
He paused at a page with three studies of the boat he had built for her, the Fairy. On another was Daisy, her guinea pig. Pages of birds, horses, a chicken she had named Louis, though it was a hen, not a rooster.
He continued his study, through the smaller book, hundreds of sketches, each growing in artistic fluency: Georgiana, Uncle William, Father Dunlevy, Mrs. Higglewaite, Clara the governess, Julian from ten to nineteen, actual and imaginary.
Smiling, kissing her, lying with her on the riverbank, in meadows.
Shirtless. Julian as a boy standing at Notfelle steps with flowers.
His father?
When had Kitty met his father? Never. But he was here, executed in detailed strokes standing by a riverbank and condensed to his callous essence with that stare Julian had been subjected to his entire life.
His gut tightened in knots just to see it on paper.
He had the urge to rip the page from the book and burn it.
No. She had never known the earl. It was Uncle William.
He found the lock of his hair tied in a blue ribbon that she had snipped from his head the first day they had met. What a day. A wonderful day of promising beginnings. But that was childhood. And every day brought fewer beginnings.