Love and Scandal, page 9
She smiled back at him. To any of the twenty or thirty people in the room it would look, no doubt, as thought they were having a charming conversation, when all she wanted to do was box his ears. Scornfully, she said, “Do you really think a London rake is so very different a creature from the charming but amoral dairyman, who has all the village maidens swooning with love for him? Their language may differ, and their manner of dress, but judging by the success of my novel, I would say the characterization is the same.”
His look of boredom sharpened into something else. “A rake and a dairyman!” He shook his head. “Nonsense. They have nothing in common and to suggest otherwise is an insult. If you expect me to believe you, then tell me this—where did you get the idea for such an exploration of life? And to set it in London, too! Why not stay with a novel of village or countryside life?”
Anger changed to understanding. Of course he could not imagine where she came by the idea. She didn’t even completely understand it herself, but that some element of it had nothing at all to do with a rake, or city life, or sexual conquest, but had to do with the journey of the soul. That any writer of merit could render. The rest was just details and could be filled in with research and imagination.
Collette gazed off into the dim corners of the room, not really seeing any of it. The images from her book were vivid in her mind, sometimes sharper and more real than the life around her. “I cannot say what moved me to write about Lankin. He came to me and fascinated me. His rakishness could have its substitute in any behavior taken to extremes. The gambler, the opium eater, the drunk… All excesses have at their core the same drives, don’t you think? Lankin uses his sexual conquests to dull the pain of his own inadequacy, even while he is filled with a kind of conceit, the conceit that only he matters, only his thoughts and his concerns. In the end, his salvation only begins when he understands how false a life that is. His reformation… That troubles me still because reformation was not necessary—only full knowledge of what drove him was vital, a deeper understanding, you see. That he attains. Even as he is dying, he comes to realize he is only beginning to truly live. That is the saddest part for me. His self-knowledge comes too late. And yet, I could not change his fate.”
She plucked absently at the smooth fabric of her dress and stared down at her hands, the smooth fabric of the gloves concealing the ink stains that tattooed her fingers. “Do you know, my Aunt Nettie was a London belle during King George IV’s regency? A celebrated beauty, I believe. She had four London seasons before marrying and going to India, and has told me so many stories, that coming to London I felt like I was coming to a place I had explored once but had not seen for many years. The gardens of Vauxhall, these beautiful houses of Mayfair,” she said, waving a hand around the salon, the ornate furnishings and high ceilings. “Rotten Row and promenades of Hyde Park, the theatres and churches… I have seen it all through her eyes. If the novel has a faintly old-fashioned air, it is because my aunt has not been to London in…oh, twenty-five years or more.” She glanced over at Jameson, realizing he had been silent for some time.
His expression had devolved into an open stare of astonishment, and Collette’s stomach convulsed. He is beginning to believe me, she thought. What have I done?
He shook his head. “It is not possible,” he said, a faint hint of desperation in his fine voice. “When I was reading the novel, I thought, ‘I have felt like that before. I have said just that same thing, and to just that sort of person.’ How could you have…? Where did you…?” He shook his head again, falling silent.
“I take that as a compliment,” Collette said. It thrilled her to learn that an acknowledged rake should recognize the core of truth in her writing. She had labored long over every sentence, every phrase, every deeper meaning, and his wonder was heady praise, whether he knew it or not.
Even longer had she worked on the plotting, every nuance working toward the eventual, inevitable resolution, her hero’s death. For a while she had not been sure if it was right to leave the conclusion with some ambiguity. Lankin’s search for Susan, his first innocent conquest, remained unresolved in the end, but life was not tidy. It would not do to tie up all the ends like a neat parcel, ready for the post. Life was a messy business, and the verisimilitude of her novel lay in that truth.
Jameson stared into her eyes for a long time. His own eyes had deepened in color until in the false light of the salon they looked almost black. Fear seized her, for if he believed her, then she was in grave danger. She was attracted to him physically—that much was evident by her reaction to his kisses on the train—but perhaps, she had thought, that was only because he was the embodiment of her rakishly handsome character, Lankin. That attraction was artificial, driven merely by his good looks, his skill in the sensual arts and her own curiosity. But if he was deeper in character, if he was searching for truth as it seemed from his earnest gaze, then… Collette gazed into the depth of his eyes, and the inner voice spoke again.
Save me, for I am drowning, losing myself within a man as I swore I never would, and I am afraid. He could change me against my will. I would become someone else; a woman in love is a woman without thoughts and feelings and beliefs of her own, and I cannot let that happen to me.
The voice quieted, and still he gazed into her eyes. She looked away from him, desperate to break the contact that riveted her. She glanced up to find that Philoxia and Henny were drifting in their direction, intense curiosity and alarm on their faces. She didn’t have much time to accomplish what she had set out to do. It was now or never, she feared, and she had not exposed her soul to this man without a reason. She needed something from him and had realized within minutes of meeting him that telling him the bald truth was the only way to attain her end.
She turned to Jameson. “I feel you may believe me now, that I am indeed Colin Jenkins, the author of Last Days. You can see now my interest in to whom authorship is attributed. I have my own reasons for being displeased that it has been attributed to you. I would ask—plead with you really—will you be honest? Will you tell the truth? Own up, Mr. Jameson. Tell the public you are not the author of Last Days.”
He gazed at her still, his dark eyes locked on her face, tracing her lips, her brow line, her chin, and then meeting her eyes again. His expression was troubled, turbulent like the gray channel waters on a wild winter day, a view she loved even more than those same waters on a sunny, blue and green day. Every time she allowed her gaze to linger, locked with his, she felt like she was being dragged in by the current of his personality, in danger of drowning. She broke the connection with an exasperated sigh.
“I will have to think on this.” He followed her gaze and saw Henrietta Dancey and Philoxia Bertrand bearing down on them. “I will consider all you have told me, and then I would see you again to discuss this further. When may I see you?”
Her eyes widened. She had not thought to see him in social circumstances. She was not prepared. What would she do?
“Accompany me to the opera,” he said, his tone urgent. He grasped her hand and held it to his chest. “Tomorrow night. Say you will, Collette, please. I have a box. Perhaps one of your friends would be so good as to accompany you?”
She could feel his heart pounding through his evening jacket. “I can’t.”
“Please.”
“I… I’ll have to see,” she cried, staring into his eyes, lost in their dark depths. “I’m not prepared for social—”
“Your gown is just fine,” he said, his intimate knowledge of women perhaps bringing him understanding of what stalled her. He stroked her palm through the glove. “Under cover of all the screeching and moaning of the singers, we can talk some more, and I can tell you what I am prepared to do.”
“You will be prepared to tell the truth,” she said indignantly, tugging at her hand.
“Ah, but there are many ways to approach the truth. Besides,” he said, recovering his jaunty tone, “you have not wholly convinced me that you are Colin Jenkins. Another meeting will be necessary. Tomorrow night.”
He stood and pulled her to her feet, then bent from the waist and laid a practiced kiss a proper inch in the air above her glove. “I will consider it done,” he said, releasing her hand from his iron grip. “’Tis late in the season, but a few performances remain for this particular opera, and if we do not enjoy the singing, I am sure we will enjoy the company. I know I will.” He bowed to her, greeted Philoxia and Henrietta, and then drifted away to talk to others.
Collette was stunned. She was confirmed in her belief that though others felt she had successfully rendered a rake’s life and reform in her novel, she had not done the creatures justice. He had mesmerized her once again until she had acquiesced to going to the opera with him.
Jameson circulated, talking and laughing, flirting and drinking just as he normally would, even though his mind was madly whirling beneath his affectation of normalcy. Old Hawley, another collector of manuscripts, asked him about the Henry Fielding manuscript and he told the story he had invented to explain his sudden trip, of going all the way down to Kent only to find it a fake. A voracious widow, Mrs. Allen, flirted outrageously with him and he responded with just the right amount of salacious wit to keep her giggling, while delicately evading her blatant invitation to her boudoir. Percy Conway demanded to know what Jameson thought of his new poetry collection, but honesty would have been rude in this case, and so Jameson murmured that it was so very indicative of Percy’s soul, was it not? The young man smugly preened.
But all the while he kept his eye on Collette. She was simply dressed in an indigo gown with a modest flare, a slim, serious, bespectacled figure in a room of women garbed in bell-like dresses of enormous proportions. Her hair was unadorned, while every other woman in the salon had jewels or silk flowers or gaudy ornaments in their coroneted, braided, looped, curled, pomaded hair. Every simple detail merely elaborated on the theme; Collette Jardiniere was different from any other woman in the room, different in thought, different in temperament, different in heart and soul.
Unlike him, she did not attempt to appear unconcerned and relaxed. She darted glances toward him and her forehead creased in troubled lines. Her friends, Henrietta Dancey and Philoxia Bertrand, spoke to her for a few moments, but she appeared to wave off their concern and they left her to sit alone.
He, too, was troubled as he talked and laughed with acquaintances, only one small part of his mind taken up with the social interaction so much a part of his existence. Was she telling the truth? Was she Colin Jenkins? It was unthinkable, unimaginable! How could that girl—for though he judged her to be in her late twenties, she appeared no older than a girl with her narrow, solemn face and unblinking stare—how could she write a work like Last Days, as she called it familiarly, as one would shorten an old friend’s name? How could a work that explored the inner life of a man who lived a rake’s life in London come from that quiet country spinster?
And yet…something whispered to him that she was telling the truth, something in her eyes and her expression and her explanation. If she was lying, it was a brilliant dissemblance. But surely she would not risk saying something so outrageous if it were not true?
Philoxia, the hostess of this literary salon, led a balding, bearded man over to her seated friend and he bowed before Collette. At her invitation, one wave of her white-gloved hand, he sat beside her. Who was it? Who would partake of her delicious conversation and stare into her gold-flecked green eyes? Jameson glared through the dim light. It was that failure, Mr. Anthony Trollope, he realized, a fellow who haunted the literary scene on the coattails, or rather skirts, of his well-known mother, Frances Trollope. He would never amount to anything beyond the civil servant he was and would probably always be, and was doomed to remain, as a writer, a scribbler of Irish tales and everyday sundries. Why was he not in Ireland, at his Post Office appointment?
Still, Collette and Trollope appeared to find much to talk about. The first faint stirrings of resentment in Jameson’s breast took him by surprise. He left the group with whom he stood and circled at a distance the couch they sat on, wondering what it was they spoke about. And yet, what was his concern if Collette should waste her time talking to a literary nobody? The man was a bore, though Collette evidently did not find him so, judging from her intent conversation. She had stopped even looking up and no longer sought Jameson out in the crowd.
What were they talking about?
“Jameson, you old dog, where have you been lately? Avoiding the press? Or courting it!”
The voice behind him startled him out of his reverie. He turned to find himself accosted by a friend and fellow rake, Sainsbury Ellice. He groaned at yet another suggestion that someone had read that damned story in Wilson’s Gazette and believed him the author of Last Days.
“Now, Sain,” he said, deliberately making his voice laden with ironic detachment. “I really had thought to be safe from you. I didn’t think you read anything more taxing than your invitations!”
The man chuckled and slapped Jameson on the back. “I don’t as a usual thing, but the season’s over and invitations getting thin. Must keep myself occupied somehow when I’ve run out of money for gambling, m’mistress is cheating on me and I am sick from too much brandy.”
“Don’t tell me you believe the scurrilous nonsense, though.”
Sainsbury raised his thick, dark eyebrows. Jameson had been told on more than one occasion that he and Sain looked enough alike to be brothers, but he couldn’t see it. Sain had bright blue eyes, dark hair and the beginnings of dissipated little lines around his eyes. Threads of red veins crossed his cheeks, the remnant of too much brandy and too little sleep.
They had similar habits, and their taste in pastimes, drink and women was much the same, but Sain went at it a little more fervently and had no other interest in life. Where Jameson had investments and business dealings, Sain lived on a quarterly allowance meted out by his father, an elderly war hero from the Napoleonic era. It was a good thing the old man handled his money, or Sain would be broke, as he had no goal in life but to carouse away all his waking hours. That, Jameson liked to believe, made them very different creatures.
“Of course I don’t believe it, you dolt,” Sain scoffed. “I know you too well. Think what you will of my academic strengths. I have read that particular piece of trash and know you would not write such odious garbage.”
“Trash? Garbage? Watch yourself, Sain,” Jameson said, glowering at his friend. “I think it is as fine a piece of work as I have ever read, and you must admit I have more right to judge than do you.”
His friend gazed at him, a considering look replacing the skeptical one on his face. “Perhaps you are the writer, after all, or you wouldn’t be so damned touchy about it! Last Days of a Rake! Dismal piece of nonsense. If you’re going to write something, I say pattern it after some o’ that scandalous French folderol, and don’t moan on about dying from our vices.”
Jameson stared moodily over at Collette and Trollope on the sofa near a large window. She was totally enthralled by what the man was saying as he waved his hands in the air, tugged at his beard and became more animated than Jameson had ever seen him. She nodded vigorously, and he caught her hands up in his.
“I am not the writer,” Jameson said, through gritted teeth. What were they talking about? The question screamed through his brain, torturing him with persistent nagging.
“If you say so, old man. What is wrong with you though, and why are you staring gloomily at Trollope? You two having a feud? Wouldn’t think you would stoop to fight with a pettifogging civil servant. Not the done thing, you know.”
Roused from his unsuitable preoccupation, Jameson determined that he was really being ridiculous. What was it to him if Trollope and Collette were talking like old friends, heads together, a radiant smile on her piquant face? Her green eyes probably glinted with those flecks of gold that seemed to glow when she was excited or perturbed, and she—
Damn it! He was doing it again, obsessing about a little country nothing who must be mad to claim authorship of a novel about a legendary rake! He had to get away.
He turned to Sain. “What do you say, old man, that we go and find some sport? My treat.”
“Good go!” Sain said, clapping his hands together. “I’ve had enough o’ this literary claptrap to last me an eon. Lead on! ’Specially if you’re paying the way.”
The two departed with only one backward glance on Jameson’s part at Collette. She was still caught up in conversation with Trollope, her reed-like figure bent toward him. Jameson would see her tomorrow night and perhaps even stoop to using his wiles to make her a little in love with him again. She would be no match for his abilities, and he knew it. For the first time in his life, twenty-four hours seemed a long time.
Eight
Collette sat at her desk, gazing down at the spidery script, her own handwriting, in front of her in the yellow pool of light that spilled over her page from the oil lamp. She was trying to concentrate on the beginning of a new novel. It was not the first time she had tried. In Listerwood she had made many starts, but they had all seemed false and overwrought. Last Days had come so easy in one sense. Lankin and his story had come to her as if it were a dream she had and merely needed to write down.
The agony came in the rewriting process, the polishing of her work to a golden sheen, the exploration of every theme, the aching need to be sure her hero’s motivation rang true and his speech was just right. Writing was sheer delight, rewriting torment. She kept expecting another novel to come to her like a lover in the night, but it eluded her. It was hard work, not the free-flowing expression of her soul that Last Days was. She wasn’t afraid of hard work, but surely she should have some feeling that it was going somewhere!
