Chapter Two #2
“Quite the opposite. I’m a man who almost died and became a statue,” he said with a rueful chuckle.
“You see, for the weighty sum of five pounds, I agreed to be coated in plaster of Paris so that the sculptor could make a bust.” He gestured briefly at his upper half, and Maria gave a nod, as transfixed as Ranulph.
The man did, now that she noticed it, have a rather admirable shape.
She could see why a sculptor would want to make a model of him.
“Fool that I was,” he went on. Then he wagged a teasing finger at the boys. “Learn from me, and don’t ever let anyone coat you in plaster, not even for five hundred pounds, much less five, because you won’t be around to enjoy them.”
“Why not?” breathed Gerry.
“Because it happens that, when plaster starts to harden, it gets very, very hot inside. It barbecues you. I had to beg for my liberation with almost my last breath.”
The twist of his mouth when he said this told Maria he was half joking, but seeing both boys’ eyes grow round as buttons, she felt obliged to say, “How fortunate you were rescued in time and that no lasting harm was done. But I do hope that sculptor learned his lesson! Otherwise I daresay it will be all too easy for him to find other willing victims in Oxford.”
“Ah, lads, do you hear this wisdom? Your mama knows how many poor, desperate Oxonians walk our streets. She would never let anyone entomb her alive for such a paltry sum.”
“She’s not our mama,” said Ranulph roundly.
“Your sister, then. I thought she looked quite young to have two such strapping sons.”
“She’s not our sister!” cried both boys, bouncing and laughing. “That’s our aunt!”
“My mistake.” He bowed, more plaster flecks rattling down. “An honor. Much as I would like to dally here, however, I’m afraid if I do not rid myself of the remaining plaster, I may yet go up in flames.”
“No doubt the money burns in your pocket as well, if you took such risks for it,” she remarked, in what Mrs. Dere might have deemed a saucy tone, had she been present. But she was not, and in her retelling of the story, Maria left this part out.
He grinned at her. A devilish grin, with his overheated, red countenance. “It was well worth the pains, as you too would think, if you had as little money as I do. Good-bye.”
That had been the sum total of the encounter a few months earlier, and while Maria had not forgotten it, neither had she dwelt upon it.
She had thought of it and of him for perhaps the same amount of time she spent mulling over George Denver.
That is, an afternoon. But now, as she sat before her hotel window, it was time to dwell.
For if, by this quirk of fate, the plaster man was to be her husband, she must pore over her two short meetings with him to extract what information she could.
She must examine her mixed feelings and unmix them, if possible.
If calamity had befallen her, as everyone seemed to believe, her life wrecked by one fatal mischance, why then did she persist in feeling that undeniable thread of—yes—of anticipation?
The obvious answer was a humiliating one, and anyone who guessed it would think her frivolous and light-minded.
But it was the honest, undeniable truth.
Because would there have been any anticipation, any feelings to unmix, if it had been some old or feeble or hideous man, or some lecherous reprobate, who stumbled into her bedchamber in the middle of the night?
If she had waked to find herself wrapped like an eel about such a person?
Had it been so, would she not then have begged to be ruined, rather than be joined to such a person forever?
She would have. It could not be denied.
Therefore, firstly—and her color rose as she confessed it to herself—she had found Mr. Benjamin Ellsworth a good deal better looking when he was not red, agitated, perspiring, and dribbling “rocks and pebbles.” He truly must have been in a state that day, nearly burned by the curing plaster and escaping by the skin of his teeth!
At the Bolt in Tun, clad only in shirtsleeves, his black hair rumpled and dark eyes uncertain, he had been altogether a different man.
And, if that was what he looked like when recovering from illness and just waking up, what would his appearance be under ordinary circumstances?
Very, very fine, she imagined. Heaven knew she herself did not look her best the moment she awakened, and it was mortifying to think he had seen her night-capped and disheveled, thrust upon him as his inevitable wife merely because he stumbled into the wrong bed.
Yes.
There it was.
It might prove she was a shallow girl at heart, but Maria understood that she was now inclined to consider Mr. Benjamin Ellsworth in a new light simply because he was handsome.
“Dreadful,” she whispered. But though she reminded herself that “beauty is only skin-deep” and “handsome is as handsome does,” etc. etc., there the fact remained.
The fact remained that Mr. Ellsworth was handsome and—oh, dear!
—pleasant to snuggle with—or had certainly been so when she imagined him a warm, comfortable, comforting bolster.
Solid. Firm. Sure. She would—still speaking the truth—she would like to wind herself about such a bolster again.
Which was not something Maria had ever thought when made to share a bed with her sister Frances.
Frances always snatched the covers and kicked in her sleep and once even, in the throes of a dream, shoved Maria out of the bed entirely.
Feeling a trifle feverish herself, she leaned to press her forehead to the cool glass pane, only to have Mrs. Dere say sharply, “Maria! You will be seen!”
She drew back at once, muttering an apology, and went right on thinking.