all the girls. He was a natural flirt, that was all.
Besides, there was to be none of this lovey-dovey frippery for Edie Crossland. She had not spent the last seven years wedded to the Women’s Suffrage movement to be swept off her feet by a fellow in a peaked cap who dropped his aitches. It was inconceivable.
No, he was a helpful friend, and that was as much as he could be. Love was the silly trap into which so many good women fell. It was not going to catch her.
And why was sleep staying so stubbornly away tonight? An hour ago, as she toiled up the back staircase, she had been fantasising about her old bed with its pile of pillows and patchwork throw. Every limb ached, her feet were blistered and her eyelids were gritty with the day’s exertion, and yet her mind would not let her be.
It persisted in going back over the emotions of the last forty-eight hours, so that she swirled in a vortex of fear, exhilaration, curiosity, humiliation, attraction.
The narrow bed was less than comfortable, and the air of the high-up room was thick and humid. She needed to clear her head.
Slippers and dressing gown on, she stole out of the stifling dormitory and down the uncarpeted back stairs, as quietly as she could. At first, she had no notion of where she might wander, but it soon occurred to her that she could find Lady Deverell’s room and stand, albeit divided by the door, in the close presence of that fascinating woman.
She had had the opportunity to drink her in at yesterday’s dinner, but today had brought disappointingly few glimpses of the red-haired beauty. She had watched her cross the lawn in her riding habit, head low and stride determined. How much better, though, to perhaps see her, through a keyhole, in repose. The mask she wore every day would be stripped away and she would see the woman behind it, unadorned and unshielded.
Edie slunk on silent feet along the confusing maze of corridors she had negotiated earlier in the day, trying to remember which had led where.
A wrong turn took her to the library, and she was at once thrilled and soothed by its familiar bookish smell, naturally drawn to the shelves where she squinted to make out the gold lettering on the spines. But the night was too cloudy and the light from the arched stained glass windows too dim as a consequence.
There would be no reading in here tonight.
She found at length the right staircase and the corresponding corridor and walked along it swiftly, taking no notice of portraits and busts that might otherwise interest her, until she was in the wing that housed Lady Deverell’s private rooms.
Did she sleep with Lord Deverell? He had a private bedroom and dressing room at the far end of the same corridor. She knew this was a usual arrangement in the grandest of the old family houses, but it struck her as strange. Did they make appointments for love? Or were the separate rooms a mere formality, an age-old habit they did not possess the modernist urge to break?
Here was her door.
And, oh.
What were these noises coming from behind that door? Surely Lord Deverell was in London? He must have returned straight after the gathering, Ted driving him through the night back to his wife’s side. He must be in the grip of passion.
Edie put her hands to her furiously heating cheeks, guilt-ridden at her snooping now. She should not be here. She should go back to bed immediately.
And yet she found she could not come away from the luxurious moans and sighs that poured through the keyhole.
The act of love. That thing she despised and feared, and yet was fascinated by. She had read Freud and found it terrifying, throwing the book aside in repulsion. No man would make her want to do such a thing.
But what was such a thing? She had never seen it, and reading about things was not always the same, loth as she was to admit the treacherous fact.
Lord Deverell, she knew, was a man nearing his sixties, while his new wife was barely forty. Did she desire him, truly? Surely everybody knew it was a transaction – his wealth and status for her fleshly charms and charismatic glamour.
But love?
Perhaps it was. And, if so, what did love look like? She bent to the keyhole, all the while in a kind of horrified trance, her body driving her towards actions of which, in the light of day, she would strongly disapprove.
At first, she saw that the room was in dim light, the gasoliers on the wall turned down low. The huge four-poster bed could be seen only from an angle that hid the heads of the occupants, but she could see the lower portion, and two pairs of feet protruding from the covers. The larger pair lay between the smaller, and the sheets and counterpane rose up from them into an arch – an arch that moved, quite vigorously and in a rhythmic pattern that matched the low grunts emitting from the unseen upper half.
If this was love, it seemed awfully brutal, thought Edie with dismay, and really little more than animalistic. The creak-creak-creak of the bed springs masked some words being spoken, but then a female voice grew louder and higher, and they became distinct.
‘Yes, you awful, awful beast of a man, have your way with me.’
Edie grimaced. It sounded so savage, almost as if she hated her husband. Perhaps she did.
And then tears came to her eyes as she matched the violent, half-delirious voice with the mellifluous tones she had heard on stage, playing Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. This was what she had come to – loveless coupling with an old man who had bought her.
‘Oh, Ruby Red, you’re mine, you are,’ vowed a deeper voice, snarled up in pain by the sound of it.
‘I’ve told you, don’t call me that!’ objected Lady Deverell, and then her words were muffled, as if he had placed a hand across her mouth.
‘I’ll call you what I damn well like, you bitch.’
Edie drew in a great breath, almost nerved to hammer on the door and drag that dreadful man off his poor wife. But then she heard the most unexpected sound, a high-pitched melting into pleasurable surrender, still coming from behind the obstructing door but none the less clear for it; then falling, sobbing, into a deep sigh.
‘That’s it,’ hissed Lord Deverell, almost inaudibly – but by now Edie’s ear was honed and she caught every syllable. ‘You love it, don’t you? You love what I do to you. Oh, God.’
And now it was his turn to tumble into that dangerous uncontrollable place his wife had just visited.
He made the most terrible, frightening sounds, like a man raging into battle, and Edie saw his feet stretch straight out, every muscle tense, then relax.
The feet flexed and moved, all four together, while the coverlet tent collapsed. The voices lowered to murmurings and languid kissing.
Edie, feeling horribly sick, stood straight, wanting very much to run outside and get some air, regardless of the lashing rain, which had begun again.
She heard Lady Deverell from behind the door say, ‘Oh, darling, must you?’ and then – oh, heavens! – the Lord’s reply, very close to the door.
‘I promised Mary. She’ll garrotte me if I disappoint her again.’
Was that
