CHAPTER NINE
Remy had been sitting in the chair by his own cold fireplace for an hour and a quarter, still in his shirtsleeves, still with Storyville mud on his boots, when he heard the bolt go back.
The door opened. Laurell stood in it in a white nightgown with her hair over her good shoulder and the strapping showing at the neck of it, and he was on his feet before he knew he had moved.
“You should be asleep.”
“So should you.”
“I was—” He gestured vaguely at the chair, the fireplace, the last four hours. “Thinking.”
“You were sitting in the dark listening to see whether I was breathing,” Laurell said. “I could hear you not turning the pages.”
Remy’s answering breath came out ragged.
She came in. She looked around the room with frank curiosity—she had never been in it, in two months, not once—and she took in the plain bed and the shaving stand and the single photograph in a silver frame on the mantel, and her eyes went to it and stopped.
“Is that her?”
“That’s Mary.”
Laurell went and looked. A young girl in a stiff collar, her hands folded, unsmiling because the exposure had been long.
“She’s lovely.”
“She was eighteen.” Remy heard his own voice as though from some distance.
“So was I. I met her in the spring and we married that September, and fourteen months later she and the baby were both dead, and I was nineteen years old with no idea on this earth what to do with myself.” He came and stood beside her.
“So I went to work. That’s all it was. I went to work for twenty-one years, and I bought a house too big for one man, and I furnished a room in it for a girl who never saw this city. ”
“Remy—”
“Let me. I’ve been sitting here an hour getting it in order and if you stop me I shall lose my nerve.”
Laurell was quiet.
“I loved her,” Remy said. “I want you to understand that I’m not going to stand here and tell you I didn’t.
But I have been thinking, since about ten o’clock, that Mary was the love of the boy I was.
He was nineteen and he thought that was the whole of the world, and it was, for him.
” He looked at the photograph. “And that boy has been keeping her room aired for twenty-one years, and he has been keeping me in it with her. I stopped wanting anything. I told myself I was faithful. I wasn’t faithful, Laurell, I was hiding, and everybody in this city thought I was a bachelor of confirmed habits, and what I actually was, was a man who had decided at nineteen that his life was over and had been very busy ever since. ”
“And then you bought a girl out of a brothel,” Laurell said.
“And then a woman walked into my house,” he said, “and put camellias on the hall table in January.”
Her breath caught.
“You asked me why, that day in the parlor. When you cried, and I told you the house was too large.” Remy turned to face her. “That was a lie. It was the only one I have ever told you and I have been ashamed of it ever since, so here is the true answer, and I am going to say it very badly.
“I don’t want to rescue you. I did, at the beginning—it made me feel a fine fellow, and God knows the city was owed it.
But somewhere in January it stopped being that, and what I want now is to marry you.
Not to give you my name because Gauthier is at the door, or because there’s a child, or because it solves anything for anybody.
I want to marry you because I have not eaten a meal alone since Twelfth Night and the thought of doing it again makes me feel ill. ”
Laurell had both hands pressed to her mouth.
“I want to come home at six and find you cross about the fish man,” Remy said.
“I want you telling me which contracts to look at. I want thirty years of arguments about candles. I want your things in every room in this house—your comb on my washstand and your book face-down on my chair and your hairpins in places I will never in my life understand.” His voice began to go.
“And I want that baby. Not as a condition or a complication—I want him, Laurell. I opened the nursery in January and lied to Winston about it being damp, and I have been standing in that doorway ever since like a fool. He is going to be born in August and I intend to be there, and I intend to give him my name that morning without one moment’s hesitation, and I will horsewhip any man who ever suggests within his hearing that he is anything other than my son. ”
“Remy—”
“And if there’s never another,” he said.
“If it’s only ever him. It doesn’t signify.
I have spent twenty-one years grieving a child I never met and I am not going to spend one hour of the rest of my life measuring the one that’s coming against it.
He’ll be mine in every way that counts, and every way that doesn’t is only paper. ”
The room was very quiet.
“I love you,” Remy said. “That is what I should have said in the parlor, and instead I stood there and offered you settlements, because I was too much of a coward to put myself where you could refuse me. So I’m doing it now, with nothing in my hands, on the worst night of your life, in my shirtsleeves.
” He got down, with some difficulty, on one knee, and looked up at her.
“You may go to the Kilnworthys tomorrow if you wish and I will drive you there myself. You may take the house in Baton Rouge and live in it and never see me again and I would still count this winter the best thing that ever happened to me. But I am asking. Laurell, will you marry me?”
Laurell Beaumont looked down at him for a long moment.
“I had a speech,” she said unsteadily. “I had a whole speech. I came in here to tell you that I still meant to go.”
“Ah.”
“It was a very good speech.”
“I’m sure it was.”
“I’ve forgotten every word of it.” She sank to her knees in front of him, careless of her shoulder, and took his face between her hands. “Yes.”
Remy shut his eyes.
“Yes,” Laurell said again, fiercely. “Yes, and yes, and I have wanted to say it since the day you knelt on the parlor floor with my tears all over your coat—and I never once believed it was possible, not once, and if you say a single sensible thing about waiting until I’m calmer I shall hit you with a chair as well. ”
He laughed and pulled her in and kissed her, and it was nothing at all like the kiss in the library. There was no bookcase at her back and no eight hundred dollars between them; there was only a man on the floor of his own bedroom with his hands shaking in a woman’s hair.
When at last he drew back, she was crying and so, to his considerable surprise, was he.
“Friday,” he said. “Father Reynaud will do it in the front parlor.”
“Friday.”
“You may have any wedding you like afterward—cathedral, four hundred people, the whole miserable business. I’ll give you Easter if you want it. But Friday you are going to be Mrs. Remy Vincent, and let this city say whatever it pleases.”
“It’s going to say a great deal.”
“Let it.” He got to his feet and drew her up with him, and then, because she swayed, simply lifted her and carried her back through the connecting door and put her into the bed that had been waiting twenty-one years for somebody to sleep in it.
“Now go to sleep. You have been kidnapped and I have been proposing, and we are neither of us fit for anything.”
“Stay,” Laurell said.
He hesitated exactly one second. Then he lay down on top of the counterpane in his shirtsleeves, and she curled against his good side with her head on his shoulder, and neither of them said anything else.
She was asleep in four minutes. Remy lay awake a good while longer, watching the ceiling of his dead wife’s room, listening to the living woman breathe, and thought that he was going to be somebody’s father in August.
They were married on Friday afternoon in the front parlor, with rain on the windows and every candle in the house lit against the gloom.
Laurell wore the rose silk. Mrs. Stratmore had come herself at seven in the morning with two apprentices and taken it in at the shoulders, and had cried, and had denied crying, and had charged him double.
There were eleven people present. Father Reynaud, who had baptized half the Sixth Ward and asked no questions whatever.
James and Lilian Kilnworthy. Chief Willauby, who arrived in a shocking green waistcoat and gave the bride away, and who had also, that morning, seen Abelard Gauthier committed for trial on charges of abduction and false imprisonment on the sworn statements of one police chief, one nine-year-old kitchen maid, one hired man named Cobb who had discovered a great enthusiasm for testifying, and one son.
Mrs. Curry wept from the opening words. Winston did not, and was very nearly convincing.
Josie and the cook and the two housemaids stood along the back wall, and Ann stood in front of them all in a new blue dress with her chin up like a small soldier.
“Do you know what they’re saying?” Lilian whispered, pinning the last camellia into Laurell’s hair.
“I have some idea.”
“The Picayune printed every word he said in that street. Every word, Laurell, on the second page.” Lilian’s eyes were shining.
“Mrs. Delahoussaye told my husband at the Charity Hospital board on Wednesday that she had always known the mayor was a romantic. Three ladies have called at our house asking whether it’s true that he carried you out of a burning building. ”
“It wasn’t burning.”
“I know. I didn’t say so.”
The ceremony took eleven minutes. Laurell heard perhaps half of it.
She said the words when she was prompted, and Remy said his in a low, steady voice without once taking his eyes off her face, and when Father Reynaud pronounced them man and wife the entire back wall of the parlor burst into applause, which Winston afterward maintained had been started by Mrs. Curry.
Remy kissed his wife. Then he kissed her again, rather longer, until Willauby coughed.
They dined, all of them, and it went on until nearly nine. Ann fell asleep in a chair by the fire and had to be carried out by James, who did it as though he had been carrying children about for years.
And at last the house was empty, and quiet, and Laurell stood in the doorway of the pink room with her heart going far too fast.
“I have something to say about this room,” Remy said behind her.
“Oh?”
“It’s a perfectly good guest room, and I’ve been thinking that you might want to make a sitting room of it, or a nursery, or turn the whole of it out into the street.” He took her hand. “But you are not sleeping in it tonight, or any night hereafter, because my wife sleeps in my bed.”
Laurell let him lead her through the connecting door, and heard it close behind them, and thought that she had been afraid of that door once, two months and a lifetime ago.
“Remy.” She turned in his arms, and her hands were unsteady on his shirt studs. “I should tell you—I don’t know anything. I’ve done this once, in a garden, badly, in the dark, and it was over in a few minutes and it hurt, and I have been dreading you finding out that I—”
He stopped her mouth with his own.
“Then you have never done this at all,” he said against her lips. “Not once.”
“Your library,” Laurell said, and felt herself go scarlet. “I have thought about your library every single night since.”
Remy’s eyes closed. “So have I. It was the finest and stupidest hour of my life, and I have twenty-one years of wanting to make up for, and tonight I have no intention whatever of hurrying.”
He undressed her by lamplight, slowly, and she discovered that being looked at was not what she had braced for—that his hands stopped, when they came to the new soft roundness low on her belly, and stayed there, warm and open, for a long moment before he bent and put his mouth against it.
“Remy—”
“Hush.”
He laid her back on the bed, and he was careful of her shoulder, and he was not careful of anything else.
He kissed her throat and her collarbone and the swell of her breasts, and when he closed his lips over one aching nipple Laurell’s back came off the mattress with a cry she couldn’t have swallowed if she’d tried.
Nothing in that garden had prepared her for this.
Nothing had prepared her for a man who took his time, who watched her face, who murmured filthy and tender things into her skin while his hand slid down over her belly and lower still.
“Open for me, sweetheart.”
She did, shaking. His fingers stroked through the slick heat of her, unhurried, learning her, and when they found the spot that made her whole body jolt he made a low, satisfied sound and did it again, and again, until she was clutching at the sheets and saying his name in a voice she didn’t recognize.
“That’s it. Let me have it.”
The wave took her so hard she sobbed. He worked her through it, gentling her, and by the time she came back to herself he had moved over her, braced on his forearms, his eyes dark in the lamplight.
“Say yes,” Remy said. “In this bed you say yes to me or nothing happens at all, for the next fifty years. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Laurell said. “Yes.”
He came into her slowly, and there was no pain in it at all, only a full sweet stretching ache and the extraordinary intimacy of his face six inches above hers.
He held still, trembling, until she moved beneath him—and then he began to move, and she rose to meet him, and it built between them until she was clinging to his shoulders and he was saying I love you into her hair on every stroke, and when she broke apart the second time she took him with her.
Afterward he pulled her against his chest and drew the counterpane over them both, and Laurell lay in the dark listening to her husband’s heart.
“I’m going to keep waking up,” she murmured, half gone already. “To make sure.”
Remy’s arm tightened. “I’ll still be here.”