Chapter Fifteen #2
“It was our wedding night, of course,” she said, and he nodded, thinking with a grin, despite all his confusion, that she was one of the few women he’d ever wanted to bed who would have said “of course” about that.
“We went to a hotel, here in New York: The Amsterdam. Not the best hotel,” she said in more normal tones, “but a nice one, and one we could afford. John had arranged for a bottle of champagne to be brought to our room, and we raised a toast to the future. And then, after he’d another glass, he said, ‘Guess we’d better turn in, if we want to get an early start tomorrow.
’ He’d saved up and we were going to Niagara Falls,” she said, pleased to find a thing she could talk about that didn’t shock her, and thinking his sigh was one of relief because she’d begun speaking of it.
“So I went into the bath to dress for bed, and then John did. And then,” she said, remembering, “he had another glass of champagne and came to bed. But after a few minutes, he got up again and had another. And then, after a time,” she said, her voice growing lower, “he said it wasn’t any use.
I was probably too tired, and good night.
“In the next two weeks, he tried and tried. It wasn’t until a week later that he said he thought there might be something wrong with me.
He stayed a few weeks more, but then he left.
I would have left him,” she said, “because he’d begun to drink too much, and he—he struck me that last time he tried. ”
Gray tensed before he realized how futile it was to want to kill a dead man. He thought about what she’d said, and everything she hadn’t, and then he sighed again.
“That doesn’t tell me much. Hannah, honey, I know you’re a lady.
But can’t you try to forget that for a second?
Just for a second? It’s important, if you want me to understand.
I… I don’t mean you have to tell me everything…
damn it! Yes I do. Sorry. Sorry for cursing,” he murmured.
“But what happened whenever he ‘tried’? Can you bring yourself to tell me?”
It was harder than trying to lay back on the doctor’s icy examining table, although she lay so comfortably in Gray’s arms, but at last she managed to whisper, “He’d push and prod, and then he’d get up and walk around the room or have another drink.
Sometimes it hurt and sometimes it didn’t, but after a while it was so painful, I wanted to weep, even if it didn’t hurt. Do you understand?”
He murmured something insubstantial, and then asked, “Listen. I don’t know how to say it politely, but ah—you mean to say…”
“I mean to say he never came into me,” she said.
“And he could?”
Her head came up. “Why shouldn’t he?” she asked.
“I mean,” he said with as much impatience as concern for his language, even as he damned the fact that ladies and men couldn’t speak the same language about the act of love. “I mean, he was ready?”
She gazed at him in puzzlement.
“You didn’t look?” he asked.
“It was always dark,” she said, the way she’d said “of course” before, “and, and he was always in his nightshirt,” she added defensively, color returning swiftly to her cheeks, as she lowered her eyes from his expression of shock.
But he seldom made love to women with his clothes on, unless they insisted, or there wasn’t time—and had forgotten, if he’d ever known it, that most respectable people did all the time.
And some very unrespectable ones, too, he thought, remembering the cribs and houses that catered to the poorest drifters back home, where they said a man could leave his hat on, along with everything else, so long as he at least took off his spurs before he hit the bed.
It was a tale he wished he could share with Hannah, because he could imagine her laughter at hearing it.
That was the problem, and the joy of her.
She was proper, but not prim; he’d swear that once he knew her intimately, there’d be little he couldn’t get her to say or do.
Because although he knew her notions of propriety, he thought he knew her very well, too.
It was so damned important to her to be respectable, to be like the world she’d envied for so long.
But once she was sure of herself and her man, he knew she’d want to please him and herself and think the world well lost for love—especially as it was a world she hadn’t been brought up to.
But there were things they couldn’t discuss simply because they hadn’t done them yet.
Now he wondered if they ever would. His arms tightened around her.
He held her, but couldn’t have her; he knew he’d never been closer to losing her no matter how close they were now.
And he couldn’t bear the thought of giving her up.
“Then he just up and left?” he said, for something to say as he thought furiously.
“I helped him pack,” she said. “I wanted nothing of his, nothing. Why, I even threw his bottles of Dr. Pierce’s Peruvian Elixer and Dr. Chase’s Celebrated Syrup and all the rest into the suitcase so hard they almost broke, and just thinking of the mess it would make if it mixed in with all his bottles of macassar oil made me laugh for the first time since we’d been married.
You don’t use macassar oil,” she remarked suddenly and shyly, gazing at the overlong hair at his nape, glad to forget the past in order to remember how his hair always felt as clean and soft as it looked, not slick or caked with dried oil as was other gentlemen’s.
“Lilac tonic does for me,” he said absently. But then, his cheek against her hair, he mused aloud, “and you always smell like flowers and rain.”
As she turned her head to smile, he looked down to her, and their lips were so close it seemed only natural that they touch.
It was simply a meeting of mouths, but it was never that simple with them.
But the intense joy of it, which was as startling and considerable to both of them as it always was, lasted only a moment.
Because he pulled back, thinking, through the haze of pleasure, that it was wrong to take advantage of her now—as she pulled away despite, or because of the ecstasy of it, not so much because of the morality of it, but because it was wrong to offer what she couldn’t give.
Yet, if she gave herself to him, she thought in the next moment, staring at his lips still damp from her own, she’d know: once and for all, she’d know, wouldn’t she?
He, of all people on earth, would tell her the truth of her condition when he discovered it, wouldn’t he?
How could it be wrong if it was as much a medical investigation as an act of true love?
She leaned forward to him again, delighted to find such a wonderful, simple solution to all her problems at once—only to turn away at the last, when she thought of the exquisite shame of having him not only discover her flaw, but having to conceal his disgust when he did.
He was too busily trying to summon enough resolve not to take her mouth again to notice her own struggle.
And after he’d won that inner battle, too busily occupied with finding the control necessary to keep her on his lap without startling her by how intensely he’d reacted to her, to notice her aborted offer.
They gazed at each other in mutual despair and frustration.
“But we can’t end it now,” he said, and though it was only a thread of half a thought, she understood.
“No, not now,” she agreed absently, although she knew it was the wrong thing to do, not only to say.
“You are so very lovely,” he breathed, shaking his head slightly as he touched her soft, dark hair again.
She traced the thin scar on his lean cheek with one finger and then gazed at his mouth again.
They both realized it at the same time. He looked away and coughed even as she sprang up from his lap. Because in a moment they’d have been back where they began, and though they both wanted to be, they knew now where that would end, or rather, would not. And neither of them was ready for that.
“Still,” he said, rising and tugging at a sleeve, glad of the cloak he’d over his arm, “Josh and Lucy are waiting on us at Delmonico’s. We don’t have to rush into any answers right now, do we?”
“I have to change my clothes,” she said, gazing down at her sadly crumpled afternoon dress.
“I can wait,” he said, as he thought: I have to, don’t I?
“I’ll be quick about it,” she promised, as she thought: Don’t leave me.
“I swear there are more Indians here than back home,” Royal said as they drove down the avenue, “I seen one on every street corner since we got off the train.”
“But they’re wooden,” Peggy giggled.
“Makes no never mind,” Royal insisted. “They look mighty fierce to me. Old Henry, back home, looks no-count next to them, don’t he? And he’s full-blooded. Oh yeah, and he sends his best. Gray.”
“Lord!” Gray said as he urged his team around a paused hansom cab. “He must be a hundred and six now.”
“Claims to be hundred and twenty and I don’t doubt it,” Royal said, and smiled.
But then. Gray thought. Royal never seemed to stop smiling.
It changed him. He was still bone thin and rangy, and however fashionably he was dressed today, he still wore his Stetson.
But his craggy face was always wreathed in smiles now, and one long arm was always around his new wife’s waist, as though he feared someone would steal her from him if he let go for a moment.
And he hadn’t stopped talking since they’d picked him up at the hotel this morning.
That alone was enough to make him seem like a stranger, albeit a happy stranger, Gray thought, feeling obliquely betrayed as well as pleased and amused by his friend’s obvious newfound content.