He regarded me thoughtfully. “You do not see yourself as I do, Theodora. There is much to admire. You are a woman of quiet charms, but charms nonetheless.”
I sipped at the brandy, steeling myself against the fiery sting of it. I said nothing, but he did not seem to require a reply.
“Ah, you are looking sceptical again,” he said lightly. “You think me a poor connoisseur, but I assure you, I speak with a master’s eye.” He put a hand to my hair, stroking it and twining a lock about his palm. “Your hair is lovely, almost as black as the wing of a raven. And your eyes are most arresting, so wide and so bright. Those eyes see everything, do they not? Sometimes when we are at table and your gaze is fixed on your plate, I imagine you still see everything that passes. Tell me, can you look into the heart of a man with those eyes?” he asked suddenly, his tone lightly mocking.
“I am no more perceptive than any other woman, and I daresay less than most,” I replied.
“What do you perceive in me?” He dropped his eyes to the glass he turned in his hands, studying the ebb and flow of the brandy.
I hesitated, casting about for the right words. “A wounded thing. I think you have been hurt much in your life, and you do not want people to know it.”
He lifted his brows in surprise, but did not speak and I went on.
“I think you are kinder than you would own to yourself, and I think your spirit is gentler than you pretend. You have taken up a carapace of coldness and sophistry to protect what you do not wish to expose.”
“And what is that?” he asked, his tone a shade less jovial than before.
“Your most secret hope,” I said, dropping my voice to a whisper. “Restoration.”
“What a pretty picture you paint of me,” he said softly, tracing the length of my neck with his thumb. “Everyone else sees me as a man to be envied, but you see the worst of me.”
“Not the worst of you,” I hastened to say. “Only the most vulnerable. A wolf in a trap will snap and snarl at whoever comes near to him out of fear he cannot protect himself.”
“And I am a wounded wolf,” he finished with a mocking smile.
“You may laugh at the metaphor, but I find it apt.”
“As do I,” he capitulated. “But I ought to warn you that what you have seen thus far is the merest sheep compared to the truth of me.”
“Do you think so little of yourself that you wish me to share your low opinion?”
He drew away from me a little then, and I felt the coolness of it. Neither our minds nor our bodies touched, and though I had felt the connection between us, it was lost.
“I put no value upon my stock,” he said, his tone dropping a little. “I see myself as I am, and you would do well to lose your illusions.”
“Will you take them from me?” I teased, thinking to draw him in with good humour.
But he did not smile, and the eyes that had looked upon me with warmth and approbation had turned cool and appraising. “I ought to. For your own good. I gave you the measure of my character early on in our acquaintance, but I have found it is a peculiar affliction of women that they will believe what they want of a man and ignore what he is, no matter how base, how vicious. A woman sees in a man only what she wishes to make of him,” he added bitterly.
“Perhaps it is rather that we see what you might make of yourselves. You had no inclination to better the lives of your vassals, and yet you have done so. Does that not make you improved upon what you were?”
Something stirred in his eyes then, some flicker of cruelty that ought to have warned me.
“You think me caring and disingenuous? Even after I told you what I am? Shall I tell you again? I am a seducer of women, child. I take what I want, where I want, and I will employ any stratagem to secure it.” He moved forward, gripping me by the shoulders. “Look at me, Theodora, and without wishing me to be other than I am. See me, and be warned.”
“You do not frighten me,” I told him, the trembling of my hands belying my words.
“Then why do you shiver? Am I not a horror story to frighten the stoutest heart?” he asked, dropping his head to my neck once more. He put his lips to the pulse at my throat and I felt the pressure of his teeth, poised above my heartbeat.
“Yes,” I whispered into his hair, “and for that I pity you.”
Instantly, he reared back, his hands still gripping my shoulders, his complexion dark with fury.
“You pity me?” he rasped.
“I do. There are stouter walls built round your heart than round this mountain. You take women for pleasure but not companionship, and any intimacy besides the physical causes you pain. Oh, I do see you for what you are. You are a man who wants to be understood, to be taken for all his flaws and all his failures and loved in spite of them. You despise my sex for our follies, and yet yours is the greater for at least we will take love where we can. You would throw it back and scorn the gift of it.”
“You do not love me,” he said, his colour fading to paleness. “You came here for the purpose of being seduced. Do not lie. I smelled willingness upon you the moment you entered the room. Do you think I have been blind to your sighs, your trembling, your longing glances? You are curious and passionate and you will use this night as fodder for your imagination, but do not mask it with the veil of love and think yourself better for it,” he said. “We are cut of the same cloth, Theodora.”
I felt a chill at his words, abashed that he had taken the measure of me so keenly. “At least I do not plate my heart with the cynic’s armour. I believe I will love, and I will be loved, but you dismiss it out of hand as so much foolishness with your taxonomy of women and your scientific seductions. You reduce us all to playthings and formulae, to be won with calculation and guile. That is the real foolishness, for if no woman ever sees you, how can she begin to love you?”
“I do not require love,” he said stonily.
“We all of us require love,” I replied. “You think me childish and silly for clinging to the promise of it, but it is human to want happiness, and if there is happiness without love I am not convinced of it.”
I paused then, watching the play of emotion across his face. I could not decipher it, but I knew he warred with himself, as if something I had said had thawed some part of him long-frozen and removed from the rest.
After a moment he put his hands to his temples. “I shall wake from this and find you are a pipe dream, sent to torment me for my past sins.”
I put my hands over his. “I am no dream.” I kissed him then, offering him my warmth. “I am here. I am real,” I said, kissing him again. He embraced me, returning my kisses feverishly for a moment, until he wrenched himself away. He brought my clothes and dressed me, tenderly as any mother will dress a newborn child. I knew it was dismissal, and I felt only tired and much older than I had when I entered the room in search of my own destruction.
At the door, he cupped my face in his hands. “Do not bombard my defences, little one. They are all I have, and I find myself in danger of growing too fond of you. Believe me when I tell you it would be fatal for us both.”
He kissed me one last time, and I felt the finality of it in his lips. “We will not speak of this again,” he said as he opened the door. “It would doubtless improve my reputation, but it would ruin yours, and I am still gentleman enough to care,” he finished. He closed the door, but gently, and I returned to my room, a more experienced and much more confused woman than I had been when I left it.
14
To my surprise, I slept deeply and dreamlessly that night-whether from the brandy or my physical exertions, I could not say-and I rose the next morning feeling much clearer in the mind. I had gone to the count’s room deliberately, and although he was the experienced seducer, it was I who had gone to him. My courage had failed me once or twice, yet when the moment came, I had seized it. I was fully a woman now, and I felt the difference of it. So many things that had been veiled from me were now revealed, and although my experience must remain secret, I knew I should never be the same. I had gone boldly to claim that which I wanted, and in doing so, I had thrown down the barriers of my diffidence. It seemed astonishing to me that I had ever considered making a home
