I was feeling so antsy after one cup of tea that I left the drawing-room as quickly as I politely could, and went to go moon by the front door in hopes of seeing Twister drive up through the gate. Unfortunately, I didn't have the patience to moon properly, so I kicked the door closed in a pettish gesture that did the door no harm but nearly broke my toe, and slouched grouchily back to my room.
I did some more kicking when I got there, glad I was wearing good country brogues instead of stylish thin-soled Town shoes, taking out my frustration on the table by the door and the small chair by the bureau (having learned my lesson with the door, I stuck to kicking the smaller furniture). I was about to kick the waste-paper basket, which was made made of fur and claws to look like a bear's foot, when I heard a very strange growling noise.
Curious, I turned to see where the noise had come from, but sound is difficult to trace in stone rooms, with the echo of a vaulted ceiling distorting it; I stood at alert, listening for it to repeat. When it did repeat, I peered toward the fireplace, whence the sound seemed to come. The third growl came, and stone room or no stone room, the sound was quite definitely coming from the bearskin rug. Then the bear moved, the head lifting eerily and staring straight at me, the whole thing lurching forward like it was trying to get up.
I didn't quite scream, but I gasped loudly enough that it might have been interpreted as a scream, and the great lurching bear laughed. Clutching at my thumping heart, I fell back into the little chair I'd just kicked and heard it laugh again.
"Oh, that was worth sweltering for a half-hour under that rug," Twister's head emerged from under the bear's head, his hair skewed every which way and his face alight with hilarity, "If you could see your face!"
"God damn it, Twister, you took ten years off my life!" I shouted to relieve the tension I felt in my chest, which had been momentarily clenched in terror and wasn't yet ready to unclench, then threw the nearest loose object at him: it was a cigarette box, which missed him by a mile, and cigarettes went flying all over the room.
"Oh, boy, that was priceless!" he kept on laughing, sitting back on his haunches and letting the rug fall off of him into an undignified pile. He didn't have a stitch on, which made my tension move immediately from my chest to other, more easily relieved parts. I threw myself at him, wrestling him down to the floor, and a good time was had by all.
"How long have you been hiding up here?" I asked some time later, when our breathing had slowed to a point that speech was possible.
"Not too long," he replied, his voice rumbling in his chest under my ear, "I got Pond to sneak me in when I arrived, a bit before four. And he only knew I meant to surprise you, which in fact was all I'd intended. You were to come in and find me in your bed. But once I got here, this rug absolutely begged to be put to use."
"I would have preferred to find you on the rug rather than under it," I punched him lightly in the ribs.
"The housemaid who popped in here to check your towels about five minutes after I went to ground would probably have disagreed," he punched me back, then tickled me.
"Don't be so sure," I giggled, the picture formed in my mind of a housemaid finding an unknown man lying naked on a bear rug, "Housemaids can be particularly depraved. And if it had been one of my footmen, you might not have escaped with your honour. One of them practically raped Claude Chatroy."
"Really?" he sounded concerned, that wonderfully attractive professional tone rising in his voice.
"Practically, but not really," I said, smiling up at him, "I doubt seriously if he resisted in the slightest."
"I guess a short stretch of white-slavery opens a chap's boundaries a bit," he laughed.
"If Claude has any boundaries at all, I've yet to witness one. I haven't heard of anything he won't do, except act like an adult."
"Unusually censorious of you," he said, grasping my chin to turn my face toward his, "Do you want him?"
"What?" his question made me draw back in astonishment.
"He's a very beautiful boy," Twister said in a odd way, as if pointing out something that I must have neglected to notice.
"Do you want him?" I suddenly felt a sensation that I hadn't felt in years: I was jealous. I hadn't felt that particular emotion since Eton, when my pubescent ideals of romance were rather busted by Jingo getting off with the captain of the rugby team, whom I also fancied, and then telling me about it in lurid detail next night in bed. It was an unpleasant sensation.
"I've never met him," he pointed out, "You may remember that you left the party before I arrived, the night we raided the Marquis de Mazan's little slave auction."
"But you know he's a beautiful boy?" I frowned. How had he known that? I don't think Claude was that well-known outside of his family circle, he certainly wasn't photographed for the society magazines like Caro was.
"There were pictures at the auction," he laughed again, a naughty laugh, "They'd been distributed like a programme. Quite interesting pictures, if you know what I mean."
"Golly!" I gasped, "I hadn't thought there'd be pictures. Claude didn't mention it."
"He may not have known, he was pretty well drugged. They were all burned, though, oddly enough," he looked off into the distance, his work life intruding a little bit, "The whole packet of programmes we got off the guests were accidentally sent to the incinerator. Quite a lot of evidence from that raid went missing, in fact, and then the evidence room clerk suddenly quit his job. It was distinctly fishy."
"Huh," I grunted noncommittally. It sounded to me like Silenus may have been responsible for that, ensuring that no scandal could possibly attach to Melinda Cumming, the other abductee who'd been auctioned along with Claude--and whose father was a Member of Parliament, now deeply in Silenus's debt, "Did they give you any interesting ideas, before they were burnt?"
"Not really my cup of tea," he stroked my back absently, "All the tying-up and blindfolding and flogging. Sadomasochists are so terribly devoted to their equipment."
"You're evading the basic question," I nestled back down against his chest, the spurt of jealousy having mysteriously spent itself already; now I was just curious, "Did you find Claude attractive? Would you like to have a go at him?"
"Well, he's a superb physical specimen," Twister said thoughtfully--and from my vantage-point, I could see that his thoughts were of an arousing nature, "But I don't know him. I'm not really one for casual encounters with relative strangers."
"While casual encounters with relative strangers are among my favourite things," I admitted. Might as well get into this topic now, while we were comfortable.
"À chacun son goût," he said, a chuckle rumbling in his chest.
"Does that mean you wouldn't mind if I went tom-catting around?" I raised my head to look him in the eye.
"I think I'd mind if I knew the particulars," he said very seriously, meeting my eye, "Or if I knew the man. But as an abstract notion, I can accept that as part of your nature, it's what makes you you. And you have also evaded the basic question: do you want to have a go at Claude Chatroy?"
"I might if I didn't know him," I laughed at this fundamental difference between us, "He's lovely to look at, but he's much too young, and you'll not find a bigger goof in all of Gloucestershire."
"I just wondered if you were jealous. Your tone when you spoke of him was rather bitter."
"I guess I am a little jealous," I thought it over, doing a quick examination of my feelings, something that I still wasn't very good at doing, but Silenus was encouraging me to make a practice of it, "but not because I want him. I just sometimes wish I were as blithely idiotic as he is. How pleasant it must be to go strolling through life without a care, too stupid to even know how boring you are, with men and women throwing themselves at you, and all you have to do is stand still."
"I hadn't thought of it that way," he raised his eyebrows and stuck out his bottom lip as he considered the idea, "I think I'd rather be intelligent than beautiful, though."
"How fortunate for me that you're both," I reached up and twined my fingers in his wavy golden hair.
"Which would you rather be," he wondered, doing the same with my hair, pulling out a long coppery curl from the front and twining it around his finger, "if you couldn't continue to be both?"
"I don't know," I said honestly, scooting up his side so I could kiss him, "Beauty is so temporary, but then cleverness seems always to get me into trouble."
"Curiosity is what gets you in trouble, not cleverness," he corrected me, but by then we were so wrapped up in each-other's hair, and then wrapped up in other parts, that we weren't really concentrating on speech.
Some time later, Pond made a discreet sound outside the door before entering, giving us time to disentangle ourselves and pretend to be decent. Twister called bags on the first bath and disappeared into the bathroom, so I slipped into my dressing-gown and curled up in the big chair with a cigarette and my thoughts. Pond went around opening the windows, saying the place smelt like a gymnasium, and started laying out my evening clothes.
When it was my turn in the tub, Pond followed Twister into his room to help with the dressing, though Twister was a great deal more firm about doing certain things for himself than I ever could be, so he was back before I even finished drying off; as a reaction to being thwarted by Twister, he was excruciatingly meticulous with my toilette, and I looked as perfect as a magazine illustration when he finished with me.
"You look as though you've been lacquered and polished," Twister remarked when we met again in the corridor on the way out of the tower.
"I think I was," I laughed, "You wouldn't let Pond dress you, so he took it out on me."
"I like Pond, but I'm not fond of being valeted. If you could find a way of mentioning that without hurting his feelings, I'd be much obliged."
"He'll probably ask me to mention to you, without hurting your feelings, that you need to be valeted more thoroughly. I decline to become involved, you'll have to settle it amongst yourselves."
"Selfish beast," he reached out to pinch me, catching me on the backside and starting a merry and entirely childish chase down the Great Stair and into the hall.
Skidding through the archway on the shining parquet floor, I nearly collided with a girl, whom I took to be Miss Lavender Brazington of Haresden Hall. She was rather pretty but very young-looking; if I didn't already know she was old enough to be at University, I would have guessed her to be a tall twelve-year-old: her cornsilk hair was very long and tied with a blue ribbon, and her gauzy white evening dress was built in such a way as to somehow suggest a pinafore.
It was a very interesting effect, and when I found Caro dancing attendance on the girl in a distinctly flirtatious way, I realized that Miss Brazington was just my fiancee's type. It was good to know, I had frequently wondered what sort of woman she'd be bringing home with her when we were married.
With the arrivals of Twister and Miss Brazington, my little party was complete, and I felt an immense sense of satisfaction as we walked in to dinner together, Dotty, Lady Faringdon on my arm in proper precedence, the rest of my guests paired up neatly as we promenaded into the dining-room; it was such a wonderfully grown-up feeling, looking down the long table, raising my eyes above Aunt Em's head to look at my mother's portrait. I thought she'd be proud of me.
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