“How dull you make it sound!” he observed.
“It is not dull to want to know that one will always be fed and clothed and have a roof over one’s head. Only someone who has never faced the specter of the workhouse could think security to be dull. Rosamund was forced to earn her way in the world. That means the greatest luxury imaginable to her must have been Malcolm’s stability. His predictability would have consoled her, would have made her feel safe as nothing else in the world possibly could.”
“You would never do that,” he said suddenly. “You would choose the lightning.”
I turned to look at the fire. “We are discussing Rosamund,” I reminded him. “And she chose Malcolm. I presume you did give her a choice. You offered her marriage?”
“I did,” he told me promptly. “Or at least I tried. She wouldn’t let me finish. We were sitting on the little shingle beach overlooking the Sisters. Her hair had come loose, masses of dark hair, tossing in the wind. She sat there, plucking the petals off a flower, offering each one up to the breezes. ‘He loves me, he loves me not,’ she teased me. And that is when I took her hard by the shoulders and told her of course I loved her. By way of response, she broke the flower in half, throwing the pieces of it to the beach. ‘Then you’re a fool,’ she said, with such maddening coolness you would have thought we were strangers. And only the previous night she had been in my bed, clawing at me like a wild thing.”
His hand tightened again around the glass and for an instant I thought he meant to throw it. Instead, he put it with great care onto the table at his elbow. “She told me that she intended to marry Malcolm and that was the end of it. Nothing I could say would dissuade her. I am sorryto say I was ungentlemanly enough to threaten to reveal our dalliance. The previous night was not the first time we had been together. Four, five times over that month. It was like a game to her at the beginning. She was reserved and cool, as untouchable as a Renaissance Madonna during the day, when others were around. But when we could steal a few moments alone, she was unleashed, like nothing I had ever known, demanding and violent in her passions.”
I said nothing. He went on, talking almost more to the fire than to me. “When I threatened to go to Malcolm with the truth, she laughed. She said it was my word against hers and who would believe a libertine like me? The next morning, they announced their engagement at breakfast. I shall never forget the air of triumph about her as she clung to him. He was so damnably proud of it, making everyone look at the Romilly betrothal ring on her finger. I could not bear the sight of them. I left that same day. I told Malcolm that my father required me to accompany him on a trip to Russia and that I had left it too long. He pleaded with me to stay, to stand up at his wedding as his supporter, but I told him Father insisted, and I went. I never saw her again.”
“When did you give her the harpsichord?”
A cruel smile touched his lips. “I found it in London, just before I left for Russia. It had already been decorated with the mythological scenes and I thought it would be a grand joke if I had my own face painted onto the image of Jupiter and the striped roses added to garland Leda’s head. It took the artist only a day to make the changes, and I had it sent on to her, a sort of secret engagement present. Only she would know what it was meant to represent. She practiced every day, you know. I loved to think of her playing and looking down at the image of us together in a way that only we would understand.”
“And so you went to Russia?”
“I did. My father had been increasingly insistent that I travel with him on an extended tour of Russia, where he was bound by his diplomaticinterests. He was noticeably pleased when I finally agreed. I could tell he was delighted because he unbent enough to smile at me. Whilst we were abroad, I consented to another of his schemes. I permitted him to arrange a marriage with the daughter of an English duke who had taken a diplomatic posting at the court of the tsar.” He paused, then pushed on, unburdening himself of the last. “I loved Rosamund with every atom of my existence, and still I married another woman, a plain and unlovely woman I loathed and whom I punished with silence and unloving attempts to get an heir until she died from sheer disillusionment. There was not a moment of our marriage that I did not make her feel the weight of my disappointment that she wasn’t someone else.” He went on, cataloguing his sins for me in a quiet voice limned with self-loathing. “I thought to make a decent husband, at least I meant to try. I went along with Father’s arrangements for my marriage. I played the dutiful husband, whatever the cost. I gritted my teeth and made love to my wife. Until the telegram arrived.”
“What telegram?”
“The one Rosamund sent on the eve of her wedding to Malcolm,” he said. “I didn’t receive it, you see, not for a month. My wife and I took a wedding trip.” His lips twisted as he said the word “wife.” “Her family had a villa on the Black Sea and we went there for some weeks. Our communications with the outside world were spotty. Few letters and no telegrams were forwarded. We collected all of it when we returned to St. Petersburg, a pile of correspondence that had been accumulating for four weeks. Four weeks during which Rosamund believed I received her wire and did not care enough to respond.”
“What did the wire say?” I asked gently.
He shrugged. “She had bridal nerves. Thought of calling the whole thing off and coming to me. I had only to say the word and she would be mine. I suppose it finally got to her, the notion of spending the rest of her life with a fellow so profoundly unexciting that his notion of hedonism is to take two baths a week instead of one.”
“Would you have responded?” I asked. “Would you have told her to call off her wedding to Malcolm and come to you?”
“I would have torn down the Caucasus with my bare hands to get to her,” he said simply.
“Even though she had already broken your heart by refusing you?”
“Nothing would have mattered to me,” he insisted. “Only that we were together. But by the time I received it, she had married Malcolm and vanished. I learnt of it from the English newspapers the same time I received the telegram.”
“What a cruel irony,” I said. “I wonder what became of her?”
“That is the question which torments me. It tortured me then, it tortures me still. The idea that I had been so very close to my dearest wish annihilated me. I am afraid I became rather unhinged. I lashed out, principally at my wife. The night I learnt of Rosamund’s disappearance, I made my wife sit up until dawn, pointing out her every shortcoming. I told her about Rosamund, in detail, lurid, disgusting detail. She was a gentle creature and I flayed her with my scorn, choosing each word with care so it would wound the deepest. I never struck her, but by God, I opened her to the bone with every word. I broke something within her that never recovered. She had conceived a child, and heaven only knows what sort of little monster it might have been, gotten in such circumstances. She suffered in childbed, and when they told her she had to rally, to fight for herself, she simply turned her face to the wall. She had no will to live because I took it from her. And all because I could not forgive her for being someone I did not want.”
His eyes were veiled with tears, and I slid to the floor in front of him, holding out my arms. He collapsed into them with a suddenness I could not have anticipated. He clung to me as a drowning sailor will grasp a spar, too desperate even for hope. He did not weep, at least he made no sound. But his shoulders heaved once or twice, and when he drew back, I kept my face averted until I was certain he was once more in command of himself.
“So now you know the worst of me,” he said in a ragged voice. He cleared his throat hard, smoothing his hair with one elegant hand, trying to regain something of his dignity.
“You must have been in such terrible pain,” I told him.
He gaped. “I just told you—”
“I know what you said. And I know from my own observations that you are difficult and capricious and sexually rapacious. But I hope you will credit my experience where men are concerned. You might have been monstrous to your wife, but you are not truly beyond redemption, no matter how diabolical you care to think yourself. You could not be such a blackguard and still regret your treatment of her, Tiberius. You are warm and generous and you are a man of honor, at least by your own lights. You must have suffered acutely at Rosamund’s hands to have paid back your pain upon your innocent wife.”
He shook his head as if to clear it. “Dear God, no wonder Stoker—” He broke off. “I have never, until this moment, known true loyalty, Veronica.” He seized my hand and kissed it. “Whatever you ask of me, from now until I draw my last breath, I am your sworn cavalier.”
I retrieved my hand. Tiberius had, as was his custom, taken refuge in gentle mockery, but I knew he was sincere.
“What happened after your wife died?”
He passed a weary hand over his eyes. “We were still in Russia at the time, so I consoled myself with every imaginable sort of Slavic debauchery. I marinated myself in vodka and slept with half the court, including the tsar’s brother. A few months of that should have been the end of it.”
