“Naturally. She will be bothered enough by her disappointment. There was no need to punish her purse as well.”
I struggled to understand him. “That you took the fabric from her astonishes me, but that you can speak of it so calmly is incomprehensible. She paid for the cloth. She has a right to it.”
He dropped the feather and turned to fix me with such a look as I had never yet seen upon his face. “I am master of this castle and lord of this land. No one has a right to anything that I wish for myself.”
There was no possible response to that, so I did not attempt to make one. Instead, I placed the fabric upon the table and dropped the lowest and gravest curtsey I could manage and turned to leave.
Once more he recalled me at the door. “You will not keep it then?” he asked evenly.
I turned back to him, hands fisted. “You wish me to help you upset a poor old woman? How could I possibly keep the cloth when I know what was done to retrieve it?”
“That poor old woman is vicious as a viper, and you would do well to remember that,” he said calmly. “She took the fabric from sheer malice, she told me as much when I taxed her with it. She does not like you and she knew you wanted it, so she took it. It was childish and unworthy, and she violated every rule of hospitality in treating you thus. In disrespecting you, she disrespected me, and that is unacceptable. I gave her the choice of permitting me to pay for the fabric or resigning her post and leaving the castle at once for her transgressions. She was grateful to take my money and be done with it.”
I felt the hot rush of anger ebb a little, even as I wished to hold fast to it.
“It still seems wrong to be so high-handed,” I said, my voice sounding feeble even to my own ears.
“And did you not identify this as a feudal place?” he asked.
“I did,” I admitted. He took up the fabric and put it into my hands.
“Take it.”
“I cannot possibly. I am still uneasy about the method by which you acquired it,” I told him with some asperity. “And even if that were not true, I could not accept a gift from you. It is not proper.”
“Proper? I think we have passed beyond the pale of propriety, Miss Lestrange.” He put his head to the side, and I saw that his eyes were clear and alight with some anticipated pleasure. “You will not do this to please me when I have done so much to please you?”
“Please me?” I paused and suddenly my bodice felt uncomfortably tight, constricting me. Had he made the improvements in the village at my urging? “The digging of the new well?”
“And the pasture, and the school, and the church,” he added, numbering them on his fingers.
“You did not do those things to please me,” I said faintly. I could scarcely hear my own voice over the drumbeat of my pulse in my ears.
He leaned forward, his lips brushing my ear. “Didn’t I?”
I closed my eyes at the sensations that assaulted me. “You have owned that you do nothing you do not wish to do. It pleased you to make those improvements.”
A warm exhalation passed over the flesh of my neck, summoning and warming the blood beneath. “It pleases me to please you,” he murmured.
A single fingertip stroked downward from jaw to collarbone, tracing the pulse that surged and fluttered there. His other hand came around my waist firmly, possessing, even as his lips coaxed.
But it did not come. Instead he covered my mouth with his own and thrust his hands into my hair, wrenching aside the pins and plaits as he pressed me against the worktable.
His kisses were a revelation, for I had never imagined such things. Rather than frightening me, his abandon challenged my hesitation, and my passion rose with every proof of his.
He broke off suddenly, his lips so near to mine I could still feel the warmth of them. He put a fingertip to the first of my buttons, twisting it.
“Your gown buttons in the front, like a maid’s,” he said, his voice low and soft.
I swallowed hard as his fingertip brushed the bare skin above. “I have no maid. I must dress myself,” I replied.
“Shall I be your maid?” he asked, sliding his fingers behind the decolletage. My knees failed me then, and he held me firmly against him with one arm as his other hand continued its work at my buttons, sliding intimately under my chemise.
“What if it were true?” he murmured against my lips. “Everything you hope and everything you fear. Is that what you have come for?”
“Yes,” I said, opening to him.
He slipped each button from its hole, and with each another of my doubts slipped away. There was no space for them, crowded as my head was with the feel of him, the scent of him, the taste of him still hanging upon my lips. I had merely sipped of him yet, and I craved the whole.
“‘What will you say tonight, poor solitary soul, to the kindest, dearest, the fairest of women?’” he murmured. It was Baudelaire, a lingering line from the poems he had given me. “‘There is nothing sweeter than to do her bidding; Her spiritual flesh has the fragrance of Angels, and when she looks upon us we are clothed with light,’” he added.
He punctuated the poem with kisses, tracing his lips over my skin with every syllable. “‘Be it in the darkness of night, in solitude, or in the city street among the multitude, her image in the air dances like a torch flame.’”
He drew back, the smile of Mephistopheles touching his lips. “Do you remember the rest?”
“‘I am your guardian Angel, your Muse and Madonna,’” I said obediently, my breath coming in short gasps.
“Yes, I think you are my Muse,” he said, clasping me to him and gathering me up as if I were a small child. I had not realised the strength in him. I had looked at his elegant clothes and taken him for a plaything of fashion, but the man who carried me to the little sofa and bore me down into the cushions was no idle creature. He was hard and fit, and when I drew his clothes away with impatient fingers, I could have wept at the beauty of him.
The pleasures we took upon that little sofa I could never have anticipated. He was neither tender nor rough, for although he coaxed responses from me, he had his own joys of me as well, and I was glad of it. The thought of playing the student to his tutor would have been unbearable. But we were equals, demanding of and rendering to each other the fullest of physical pleasures, and I realised how fortunate my choice had been. Had I surrendered myself in the marriage bed, my own satisfaction would have been illicit, a thing to be stolen from my husband. With a lover, it was a holy thing, a sacrament to the act itself, celebrated by the ordained. This liberty to do and choose whatever I liked made me bold, and my boldness pleased him and there, upon his grandfather’s velvet sofa, he engulfed and consumed me and burnt me to ash to be reborn.
The act itself I cannot remember, not clearly, for the pieces have broken and fitted themselves together again like tumbling shards of kaleidoscope glass. I remember the feel of his back, the long silken muscles sleek beneath my fingers. I remember the little cries and the sweetly whispered words, those that urged and those that begged, and above it all, the astonishing duality of the act itself. The physical was so much more primitive than I had expected, and yet the emotions were exalted. I had expected release and relief and pleasure, but not tenderness. I had not expected to care for him.
And when it was over and his head rested upon my breast came the rush of sweetness. I knotted my fingers in his hair, thinking of Samson, and how a man is never so vulnerable as when he sleeps in a woman’s arms. And I kissed him then, as I had not kissed him before. I had always waited for him to press his lips to mine, but as he drowsed, sated and entwined, I put my lips to his brow, as if to mark him for my own.
After a little while, he roused and stretched and poured out brandy for us both. “A restorative,” he said, with only a trace of mischief.
I had wrapped myself in the length of dress fabric, preserving the vestiges of my modesty.
“You oughtn’t cover yourself,” he told me. “It is a crime against nature.” He tugged at the cloth and I pushed his hand away.
“Stop,” I said, but the word carried no force.
