regularly seduced their servants, but he did not. When he was fifteen he had fallen in love with a parlor maid at the London house: his mother had guessed it within a few days and sacked the girl immediately. His father had smiled and said: “Good choice, though.” Since then he had not touched an employee. But he could not resist Ethel.
She said: “Why have you come back? You were expected to stay in London all of May.”
“I wanted to see you.” He could tell that she found it hard to believe him. “I kept thinking about you, all day, every day, and I just had to come back.”
She bent down and kissed him again. Holding the kiss, he slowly fell back on the bed, pulling her with him until she was lying on top of him. She was so slim that she weighed no more than a child. Her hair escaped from its pins and he buried his fingers in her glossy curls.
After a while she rolled off and lay beside him, panting. He leaned on his elbow and looked at her. She had said he was beautiful, but right now she was the prettiest thing he had ever seen. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair was mussed, and her red lips were moist and parted. Her dark eyes gazed at him with adoration.
He put his hand on her hip, then stroked her thigh. She covered his hand with her own, holding it still, as if afraid he was going too far. She said: “Why do they call you Fitz? Your name is Edward, isn’t it?”
She was talking in an attempt to let their passion cool, he felt sure. “It started at school,” he said. “All the boys had nicknames. Then Walter von Ulrich came home with me one vacation, and Maud picked it up from him.”
“Before that, what did your parents call you?”
“Teddy.”
“Teddy,” she said, trying it on her tongue. “I like it better than Fitz.”
He started to stroke her thigh again, and this time she let him. Kissing her, he slowly pulled up the long skirt of her black housekeeper’s dress. She wore calf-length stockings, and he stroked her bare knees. Above the knee she had long cotton underdrawers. He touched her legs through the cotton, then moved his hand to the fork of her thighs. When he touched her there, she groaned and thrust upward against his hand.
“Take them off,” he whispered.
“No!”
He found the drawstring at the waist. It was tied in a bow. He undid the knot with a tug.
She put her hand over his again. “Stop.”
“I just want to touch you there.”
“I want it more than you do,” she said. “But no.”
He knelt up on the bed. “We won’t do anything you don’t want,” he said. “I promise.” Then he took the waist of her drawers in both hands and ripped the material apart. She gasped with shock, but she did not protest. He lay down again and explored her with his hand. She parted her legs immediately. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing hard, as if she had been running. He guessed that no one had done this to her before, and a faint voice told him he should not take advantage of her innocence, but he was too far gone in desire to listen.
He unbuttoned his trousers and lay on top of her.
“No,” she said.
“Please.”
“What if I fall for a baby?”
“I’ll withdraw before the end.”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” he said, and he slid inside her.
He felt an obstruction. She was a virgin. His conscience spoke again, and this time its voice was not so faint. He stopped. But now it was she who was too far gone. She grasped his hips and pulled him into her, raising herself slightly at the same time. He felt something break, and she gave a sharp cry of pain, then the obstruction was gone. As he moved in and out, she matched his rhythm eagerly. She opened her eyes and looked at his face. “Oh, Teddy, Teddy,” she said, and he saw that she loved him. The thought moved him almost to tears, and at the same time excited him beyond control, and his climax came unexpectedly soon. In desperate haste he withdrew, and spilled his seed on her thigh with a groan of passion mingled with disappointment. She put her hand behind his head and pulled his face to hers, kissing him wildly, then she closed her eyes and gave a small cry that sounded like surprise and pleasure; and then it was over.
I hope I pulled out in time, he thought.
Ethel went about her work as usual, but all the time she felt as if she had a secret diamond in her pocket that she could touch from time to time, feeling its slick surfaces and its sharp edges when no one was looking.
In her more sober moments she worried about what this love meant and where it was going, and now and again she was horrified by the thought of what her God-fearing socialist father would think if he found out. But most of the time she just felt as if she was dropping through the air with no way to arrest her fall. She loved the way he walked, the way he smelled, his clothes, his careful good manners, his air of authority. She also loved the way he occasionally looked bewildered. And when he came out of his wife’s room with that hurt look on his face, she could cry. She was in love and out of control.
Most days she spoke to him at least once, and they usually managed a few moments alone and a long, yearning kiss. Just kissing him made her wet, and she sometimes had to wash her drawers in the middle of the day. He took other liberties, too, whenever there was a chance, touching her body all over, which made her more excited. Twice more they had been able to meet in the Gardenia Suite and lie on the bed.
One thing puzzled Ethel: both times they had lain together, Fitz had bitten her, quite hard, once on her inner thigh and once on her breast. It had caused her to give a cry of pain, hastily muffled. The cry seemed to inflame him more. And, although it hurt, at the same time she, too, was aroused by the bite, or at least by the thought that his desire for her was so overwhelming that he was driven to express it that way. She had no idea whether this was normal, and no one she could ask.
But her main worry was that one day Fitz would fail to withdraw at the crucial moment. The tension was so high that it was almost a relief when he and Princess Bea had to go back to London.
Before he went she persuaded him to feed the children of the striking miners. “Not the parents, because you can’t be seen to take sides,” she said. “Just the little boys and girls. The strike has been on for two weeks now, and they’re on starvation rations. It wouldn’t cost you much. There would be about five hundred of them, I’d guess. They’d love you for it, Teddy.”
“We could put up a marquee on the lawn,” he said, lying on the bed in the Gardenia Suite with his trousers unbuttoned and his head in her lap.
“And we can make the food here in the kitchens,” Ethel said enthusiastically. “A stew with meat and potatoes in it, and all the bread they can eat.”
“And a suet pudding with currants in it, eh?”
Did he love her? she wondered. At that moment, she felt he would have done anything she asked: given her jewels, taken her to Paris, bought her parents a nice house. She did not want any of those things-but what did she want? She did not know, and she refused to let her happiness be blighted by unanswerable questions about the future.
A few days later she stood on the East Lawn at midday on a Saturday, watching the children of Aberowen tuck into their first free dinner. Fitz did not know that this was better food than they got when their fathers were working. Suet pudding with currants, indeed! The parents were not allowed in, but most of the mothers stood outside the gates, watching their lucky offspring. Glancing that way, she saw someone waving at her, and she walked down the drive.
The group at the gate was mostly women: men did not look after children, even during a strike. They gathered around Ethel, looking agitated.
“What’s happened?” she said.
Mrs. Dai Ponies answered her. “Everyone have been evicted!”
“Everyone?” Ethel said, not understanding. “Who?”
“All the miners who rent their houses from Celtic Minerals.”
“Good grief!” Ethel was horrified. “God save us all.” Shock was followed by puzzlement. “But why? How does that help the company? They’ll have no miners left.”
