The Left Side

Monday, August 26, 1816

“It is not locked,” she said through the door. “You know that. You asked.”

Gideon had knocked all the same. He had stood in his dressing room for the quarter of an hour she had asked of him, with Oakes sent to bed early and no account given. He had taken off his coat and his boots and then wondered whether he ought to have. He had ridden at French squares with a steadier pulse than he had now.

He turned the handle of the white door and went through.

The yellow bedchamber was lit by the fire and two candles. Rain had come on with the dark, and it was beating on the tall windows above the garden. She stood on the hearthrug in her grey gown. She had done nothing in her quarter of an hour but send the housemaid away and take the pins out of her cap. Her hands were folded in front of her, and he could see that she was holding them hard.

He shut the door behind him and stayed by it.

“I must ask you this in plain words,” he said. “You asked me a hard question in the glasshouse, and this is mine. Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You may say otherwise now, or in an hour, or at any time between. I shall hear it the first time.”

“I know you will. That is one of the reasons I am sure.” She drew a breath. “I have never done this, Gideon. I know how it ends. I have sat up at too many lyings-in to be ignorant of that. I know nothing about how it goes along, and I mean to do it properly. So you will have to tell me things, and I shall very likely ask questions at the wrong moment.”

He felt his chest ease a little. She had spoken exactly as she had over a seedling tray on the first day, and he found it steadied him more than any softness could have done.

“Then I had better tell you how I stand,” he said. “I am four and thirty, and I have been a soldier for half of that. I shall not pretend to you that there has been no one. But I have never done this with anyone who mattered. I have not done it at all since before Belgium. I do not know how it goes along either, when it matters.”

“So we are both beginners.”

“I am afraid so.”

“I am not afraid of it,” Linnea said. “I think I like it better.” She unfolded her hands. “Come away from that door. You look as if you were guarding it.”

He crossed the carpet to her. She put up her face, and he kissed her. She was shaking very slightly, and so was he, and after a moment it did not matter. Her mouth opened under his. Her hands came up his shirt front and found his throat again, where they had been once in London.

She drew back. Her spectacles had misted a little at the edges.

“There is a thing I want to ask of you,” she said. “You may refuse it. Will you take off the patch?”

He had known she would ask. He had still hoped she might not.

“It is not a pleasant sight.”

“I did not ask for a pleasant sight. I asked for you.” Her voice was quite gentle. “You turned your face to a window for me in May because I named a thing you did not like. This is the last of it. I should like to know all of what I have chosen.”

He stood a moment. Nobody had seen under that silk since the surgeon at Brussels, except Oakes, who tied it on every morning and looked at the wall while he did so.

He reached up behind his head and pulled the knot. The patch came away in his hand. The air was cold on the skin beneath.

He knew what she saw, because he made himself look at it in the glass about once a month. The lid was closed and a little sunken, with nothing behind it to hold it out. The sabre had come down through the eyebrow, and the scar crossed the lid in a pale seam before it ran on down his cheek. The brow did not quite meet itself where it had been sewn.

She looked at it. She had kept her spectacles on to do it. She gave it the same long, level attention she had given him across a wet glasshouse on the sixth of May, and he stood under it with his hands at his sides and did not turn his head.

“Thank you,” she said.

She put her hands on either side of his face and drew it down. She kissed the closed lid, lightly. He felt her lips there, on skin that had felt nothing but silk for fourteen months, and his breath went out of him. Then she kissed the scar, at the brow first, and on the cheekbone, and last at the stiff corner of his mouth.

“It is a part of your face,” she said, close against it. “I do not know why you thought I should mind it more than the rest.”

He could not answer her. He turned his head and kissed the inside of her wrist instead, where her pulse was beating as hard as his own.

She had got his shirt out of his waistband. He pulled it over his head, because that was simpler than letting her wrestle with it, and stood before her in the firelight. Her eyes went over his shoulders and chest with an interest she did not trouble to hide. Then her fingers stopped, low on his left side.

“And this?”

It was a puckered hollow under the ribs, as long as her thumb, gone white with age.

“A lance. In Spain, five years ago. The fellow came up on my left while I was busy with his friend.”

“Your left again.”

“I have been unlucky on that side.”

“Until lately, I hope,” said Linnea, and laid her whole palm over the place. Her hand was warm. He felt it through to his spine.

“Until lately,” he agreed. It was all the voice he had.

He took off her spectacles himself. He folded them and set them on the table by the bed, with the black patch beside them. She blinked at him.

“Can you see me?”

“I am short-sighted, Gideon. At this distance I can see you better than anybody in the county.”

He began with her hair. There were more pins in it than he would have believed. He drew them out one by one and put them down, and the heavy brown coil came loose and slid over his hands to her waist. It smelled of lavender and a little of peat.

Her gown fastened behind with tapes. He turned her by the shoulders and undid them slowly. He was in no hurry, and he did not want to seem to be. The grey stuff slipped from her shoulders, and she stepped out of it. Her stays laced at the back. His hands had been steady enough to hold a lens for an hour, and they were clumsy on the knot. She laughed under her breath and told him which end to pull.

Then there was only her shift. She turned round to him in it, with the firelight coming through the cambric.

She was freckled over the shoulders, as she was on her forearms and across her nose. He had wondered about that since a dry Monday in May. He put his mouth to the place where her neck met her shoulder, and she made a small sound and brought her hands up into his hair. He felt her fingers on his scalp, the stained forefinger and the rest, holding him where he was.

“Tell me if I go too fast,” he said against her skin.

“You are not going fast at all. I begin to think you are doing it on purpose.”

“I am. I have waited three months and three days. I do not mean to hurry the next hour.”

He drew the ribbon at the neck of the shift. She lifted her arms for him herself, and it went over her head and onto the floor with the rest.

He looked at her, because she had looked at him. She was long and strong and pale where the sun had never reached. Her breasts were high and small, her waist ran into the full curve of her hip, and her thighs were long. She stood still under his eye, with her chin up and the colour flooding down her throat.

“Well?” she said. “I told the Master I was no beauty. He did not contradict me.”

“The Master did not see what I see.” It came out roughly. “You are the loveliest thing I have ever been allowed near, and I am half afraid to touch you.”

“Then I hope you will get over it,” said his wife, “for I am growing cold.”

He picked her up. She gave a gasp of surprise and caught him round the neck, and he carried her the four steps to the bed and laid her down on the faded yellow silk. He got rid of the last of his own clothes, and she watched him do it with her short-sighted frown, quite openly. Then he lay down beside her, on her right, so that he could see all of her.

He was careful. He had promised himself that he would be. He learned her with his hands first, as she had taught him to learn a flower, one part at a time. He found that the skin on the inside of her elbow was as soft as the inside of her wrist. When he closed his palm over her breast, her breath stopped, and when he bent his head and put his mouth there, it came back in a rush. She shivered if he touched the hollow beside her hip bone.

She was learning him as well. Her hands went over his back and his arms, and down the long muscles of his flank. She asked him once, quite seriously, whether a thing she was doing was right. He told her, when he could speak, that it was a good deal more than right.

“Good,” she said. “Then I shall go on with it.”

He slid his hand down over her belly and between her thighs. She went very still. He watched her face. Her eyes were wide and dark and fixed on his, and her lips had parted.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Yes. Oh. Yes, like that.”

He kept on, slowly, until her hips began to lift against his hand and her fingers dug into his shoulder. She said his name in a voice he had not heard from her before.

When he moved over her, he held his weight on his arms. “It may hurt you. I am told that it does, the first time. Say stop and I will.”

“I know it may. Go on, Gideon.”

He went as gently as he knew how. He felt her stiffen and catch her breath, and he stopped where he was, with every muscle in his back locked. The rain beat on the glass. He could feel her heart against his chest.

“Wait,” she whispered. “Only a moment.”

He waited. It was the hardest thing he had done in his life, and he would have done it till morning. He kissed her forehead and her closed eyes. After a little her hands, which had been fists against his shoulder blades, opened and lay flat.

“There,” she said. She sounded surprised. “It is going off. It is not so very bad. Go on. I want the rest of it.”

She moved under him first, a small, uncertain lift of her hips, to find out what would happen. What happened made her eyes fly open.

After that he was not careful for very long. She would not let him be. She got her long legs round him and her hands in his hair and pulled his mouth down to hers, and she met him as she met everything, with her whole attention and her whole strength. He forgot his face. He forgot that there was a side of him he could not see from. There was only her skin, damp now and hot under his hands, and the sounds she made against his neck, and the way she said his name when he found the place and the pace she wanted.

He felt it take her. Her whole body drew tight as a bowstring and then shook. And she laughed, a short, breathless, astonished laugh, with her head thrown back on his mother’s pillow.

He had heard that laugh over a map and in a wet lane, and he had not thought to hear it here. It finished him. He buried his face in her hair and let go of everything he had been holding since November.
***
The fire had burned low. One of the candles was out.

He lay on his back with her along his left side, where he could not see her without turning his head. He found that he did not need to. He could feel all of her. Her head was on his shoulder and her leg lay across his, and her hair was over both of them like a rug.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“A little sore. It was worth a great deal more than that.” She yawned against his collarbone. “Nobody told me about the last part. I have been at fifty childbeds, and not one of those women ever mentioned it. I shall never forgive them.”

“Was that why you laughed?”

“I laughed because I was surprised. I thought I knew what my own body was for. It appears that I knew about half.”

He felt his own mouth pull, on the stiff side as well as the other.

“That is ten,” she murmured.

“Ten of what? You have been counting since June, and you promised to tell me before long.”

“Your jokes. You made the first with a table knife and a drop of pea soup, and I wanted another so badly that I began to keep a list. You have no idea that you make them. That is the best of it.”

He lay and thought about that. A woman had wanted his jokes enough to count them, through a summer when he had believed himself poor company for a dog.

She raised herself on one elbow. Her hair fell forward. She looked down at his face from a few inches away, the left side of it, bare. Then she put out one finger and traced the scar. She began at the broken eyebrow. She went very lightly over the sunken lid and down across the cheekbone to the corner of his mouth, and rested there.

He held still for it. It was easier than he had expected. In all his life it was the only time he had been looked at so closely and felt no wish to move.

“May I ask you something?” she said. “You need not answer.”

“Ask.”

“What do you see, with the eye that is left?”

He turned his head on the pillow, to the left, until she filled the whole of what sight he had. Her hair was tangled, and there was a freckle at the corner of her mouth that he had not noticed before. Her hazel eyes were soft and unguarded, and a little anxious about his answer.

“You,” Gideon said.

Her face changed. She said nothing at all. She put her head down on his shoulder again, and her arm went across his chest and held on tight. He felt something wet against his skin, and he did not remark on it.

He had not expected to sleep. He never did. He lay listening to the rain and to her breathing as it slowed, and meant to keep watch over both. The next thing he knew was grey daylight.
***
It was morning, and the rain had thinned to a drizzle on the glass. He had slept seven hours together, and he could not remember when he had last done so.

Linnea was asleep on his left arm, which had gone dead to the elbow. He did not move it. Her mouth was a little open. On the table by the bed her spectacles lay folded, with the black silk patch beside them.

The white door stood wide. He had shut it behind him last night and opened it again an hour later, to fetch the water jug from his dressing room, and he had not thought of it again. Through it he could see his own shaving stand and the corner of the bed in the room beyond, with its covers turned down and never touched.

A latch clicked on the far side.

He knew the step. It was heavy on one foot and light on the other. Bat Oakes came into the dressing room with the brass can of hot water in one hand and a towel over his arm, as he had come at seven every morning since August of last year. He set the can on the stand. He looked for his master in the bedchamber beyond, and found a bed nobody had slept in.

Then he saw the open door.

Oakes stood quite still for a second. He did not look through it. He looked at the door itself, and at the old key in its lock on the far side. His weathered face did the same complicated thing it had done on the night Gideon told him the pirate would go upstairs.

He turned on his heel, as smartly as a troop sergeant on parade, and limped out without a word. The latch clicked again. He had left the water.

Gideon let his head fall back on the pillow. He would be told about this later, at some length, with a razor at his throat. He found that he did not mind.

Linnea stirred and settled closer, with her hand on the old lance scar. Above them in the east wing three children were waking. The boy would be reading his thermometer, and the smallest would be asking for the pirate. Down in the garden six hundred and twelve panes were taking the first light.

He thought of Quince’s letter. The Chancellor would not sit before November, and Pargeter might still object.

In May he had stood at a library window and reckoned what that pleasant, sandy man could take from him. It had come to three children whom he hardly knew, and a duty he had failed in. He had thought it the whole of his stake.

Now he lay with his wife’s hair across his chest and reckoned it again. He had a great deal more to lose than Rupert Pargeter had ever threatened.
***