Page 250 of The Ladies Least Likely
She loved him, and to be fair to him, she had to let him go.
She turned on her side, but he read her easily and didn’t let her withdraw. Instead he snaked an arm around her waist and pulled her close against his body. With the heat of his chest and legs against hers, her bottom nestled in his groin, she felt the tinge of annoyance and selfishness melt into a quiet grief.
“Tell me what you wrote to me,” he whispered into her hair.
She closed her eyes. “Dear Renwick. Having a fantastic time at school. Scads of handsome men posing nude for me. Have fun blazing your trail through the courtesans of France and the Italian states. Yours, Harriette.”
His throaty chuckle ran all through her body, a thrill that went deep. “Dear Rhette,” he answered. “Miserable in Paris. Paying for prostitutes who I pretend are you. Dreaming of you in the dark. Wish you were here to wander through the King’s art collection with me at the palace of the Louvre. Please climb my balcony and rescue me. Yours, Renwick.”
He snugged his arm around her waist, tucking his hand beneath her, holding her tight and safe against him. Tears squeezed again from beneath Harriette’s closed lids. This was heaven, and the sweetest torment at the same time.
“I don’t know where to go from here, Ren,” she whispered.
What she meant was, she had no idea how she could leave him. How she could physically unlock her arms and let him go, and move on to another country, another life that didn’t include him. If the pain in her chest at the very thought were an indication, the effort would shatter her heart and she would expire from it.
And then what would happen to Löwenburg? What would happen to him?
“I know,” he murmured. She had the sense that he knew precisely what she meant.
“You know, when Scarpa did his first surgery, I didn’t see how I could ever walk again. If I didn’t die from the pain, or from infection, I was convinced he had truly crippled me. I cursed him for making me think he could improve me, for trying to change my fate. Before him, I’d at least been a cripple who could hobble about on his own legs. I was sure he’d consigned me to a wheeled chair.”
“Jock refuses one,” Harriette murmured sleepily. “Says he wants to be able to look another man in the eye.”
“But I lived through it,” Ren said after a while. “I healed, after a fashion. It was the most furious pain I had ever known, and I had to endure it several times, as he kept trying new things and then correcting what he’d done. But I am walking now, and I have Scarpa’s shoe, and while I will never win a footrace, or promenade with you through a country dance, I have something. And I still have my dignity, or so I like to think.”
Harriette told herself to breathe. She knew what he meant. Parting from him would break her completely, but she would heal and go on, limping and scarred. And so would he. In poems and novels, girls withered away when they couldn’t have their love, like poor Echo pining for Narcissus. Harriette was practical and sturdy; she would survive, and she would have a life.
But for the moment she had Ren. She clasped her arm over his.
“Dear Renwick,” she murmured. “In London now and setting up shop as an artist. I have to marry and move away. But I want you to know I will never forget you.” Her breath hitched, but she pressed out the next words. “You will always be in my heart.”
His arm twitched, and he didn’t respond. He was asleep.
Downstairs, the tall case clock chimed once. Ren had adjusted the weights and restarted the mechanism while she mixed the pudding. She wished now he had left it still, the way the clock had been stopped in the Demant house the moment of her mother’s death. Let time belong elsewhere, and let them stay together here in this bed, in the shadow of the dying fire, clasped together in eternity like some fairy tale.
In her dream she was standing again before the walled-in churchyard while the mute knocked his tall staff against the wooden gate. The vicar opened it and stood frowning down at her, his black stole dark against his white robes.
What do you have for me?he boomed, and Harriette held up a small wooden casket carved with her initials and inlaid with jewels. Her face burned with the hot rush of tears as she held it toward him.
I have come to bury my heart.
The next day,dressed again in her blacks, Harriette sat against the wall in a cavernous room within Ren’s factory. The great looms, powered by the flow of the gentle River Sheppey, stood silent for the time being, the immense and constant thrum and throb of their turning parts stilled. Every man, woman, and, she was surprised to see, some children, stood at attention as Ren spoke from one of the raised platforms that encased the machinery.
Mr. Fripp, the manager, had explained to her that children were employed because they were small enough to wriggle beneath and around the machinery of the looms to reset threads or restore pieces that had slipped free, their smaller bodies and hands able to access places that adults couldn’t.
“Not while the looms are in motion, I hope?” Harriette had asked, but Mr. Fripp merely showed her to a discreet place at theback of the room where she might look on, unnoticed, while Ren rallied his troops.
She wondered which of the men standing at attention, caps in work-roughened hands, had used those same hands to wreak havoc on the town of Shepton Mallet last night. They had emerged from the Manor to find the village looking as if a great wind had passed through it. Shop windows had been shattered, and they stepped around owners sweeping glass from sidewalks and clearing pieces of broken furniture from the streets.
A wagon once full of hay sat, still smoldering quietly, in Market Square, possibly the source of the conflagration they’d seen last night. There was a sullen mood over the town and a tight, angry emptiness in the air. Sheriff’s men, wearing the badges of their newly deputized offices, walked the streets surveying the damage, and the buzz of gossip named men who had been injured, women who had been trampled, who’d contracted burns, and reporting, in hushed tones, that two men had died.
Died. Harriette felt the smoke in the air sting her nose as she took this in. The fear of loss and agony of unwished-for change had left this destruction, led men to wreck what they could not keep.
She understood a little bit of what must have driven them; she wanted to rail and screech against her own fortune, change her future, too. But she couldn’t. Instead she drew her heavy veil over her face and let it shield her as she and Ren walked to his factory, as he spoke with Mr. Fripp, as Mr. Fripp halted the machines that spun the cotton and called everyone who had shown up for work that day to the great room.
Harriette was glad the veil hid her blush and her improper thoughts, for she was not able to dwell with appropriate decorum on the gravity of the situation here. She was not able to hold on to thoughts of her mother’s loss and what that meant.As Ren stood before the crowd in his saffron silk suit and copper buttons, with the black armband on his sleeve, she recalled how she’d awoken that morning to the sweep of his hand over her body, brushing her neck and her breasts and down her belly to walk his fingers between her legs and stir her arousal.
How she’d turned in his arms and thrown a leg over his hips and fit him inside her like he belonged there. How they’d stared into each other’s eyes wordlessly as they rocked together, languid and slow, taking their time, drawing out the sensations as long as they could until the pleasure overcame her first and she shuddered and melted against him while he ratcheted to his own release, joining her as the climax rippled between them, passing back and forth.
