Unsympathetic lout!
She clutched her stomach and moaned.
Less than half an hour later, she was surprised to feel the bed sag next to her. "Drink this. It'll make you feel better." Cain lifted her shoulders and held a cup to her lips.
She swallowed, then gasped for breath. "What is it?"
"Lukewarm tea with a heavy dose of rum. It'll take the edge off."
It tasted foul, but it was easier to drink it than to put up a fuss. As he gently laid her back on the bed, her head began to swim pleasantly. She was dimly aware of the smell of soap and realized he'd bathed before he'd come back to her. The gesture touched her.
He tugged at her sheet. Beneath it she wore only a plain schoolgirl's cotton chemise from her days at the Academy and a pair of expensive, delicately ruffled pantalets. Mismatched as usual.
"Close your eyes and let the rum do its work," he whispered.
Indeed, her eyelids were suddenly too heavy for her to hold open. As they fluttered shut, he touched the small of her back and began to massage her. His hands climbed gently along her spine, then down again. She was barely aware when he pushed the camisole out of his way and touched her skin directly. While she drifted off to sleep, she knew only that his touch seemed to have dulled the knife edge of pain.
The next morning, she found a great bunch of field daisies thrust into a drinking glass at her bedside.
17
Summer glided into fall and an air of tense expectancy hung over the house and its inhabitants. The harvest was in, and soon the mill would spring alive.
Sophronia moved belligerently through the days, increasingly snappish and difficult to please. Only the fact that Kit wasn't sharing Cain's bed brought her any comfort. It wasn't that she wanted Cain for herself-she'd gratefully relinquished her hold on that idea. Instead, it was a feeling that as long as Kit stayed away from Cain, Sophronia wouldn't have to face the awful possibility that a decent woman like Kit, a decent woman like herself, could find pleasure lying with a man. Because if that were possible, all her carefully arranged ideas about what was important and what wasn't would become meaningless.
Sophronia knew she was running out of time. James Spence was pressing her to make up her mind whether or not she'd be his mistress, safe and well protected in the small doll's house he'd found in Charleston, away from Rutherford's gossiping tongues. Never one to be idle, Sophronia now found herself staring out the window for long stretches of time, looking in the direction of the overseer's house.
Magnus waited, too. He sensed that Sophronia was coming to some sort of crisis, and he steeled himself to face it. How much longer, he wondered, could he be patient? And how was he going to live with himself if she left him for James Spence with his fancy red buggy, his phosphate mine, and his skin as white as the underbelly of a fish?
Cain's problems were different, and yet the same. With the harvest in and the machinery installed in the mil!, there was no longer any reason for him to work so hard. But he'd needed the numbing exhaustion of those long workdays to keep his body from realizing the great joke he was playing on it Not since he was a kid had he been so long without a woman.
Most nights he was back at the house in time for dinner, and he couldn't decide whether she was deliberately driving him mad or it if was unintentional. Each night she appeared at the table smelling of jasmine, with her hair styled so that it reflected her mood. Sometimes she wore it impishly high on her head with wisps of curl framing her face like soft, inky feathers. Other times she'd arrange it in the severe Spanish style so few women could wear successfully, parted in the center and pulled into a heavy knot at the nape of her neck that just begged for his fingers to undo it. Either way, he had to struggle to take his eyes off her. It was ironic. He who'd never been faithful to a woman was now being faithful to a woman he couldn't make love with, not until he could put her in the proper place in his life.
Kit was as unhappy as Cain. Her body, once awakened, didn't want to go back to sleep. Strange, erotic fantasies plagued her. She found the book Cain had give her so long ago, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. At the time, the poems had confused her. Now they stripped her bare. Never had she read poetry like this, sprawling verse stuffed with images that left her body burning:
Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding,
love climbers, and the climbing sap,
Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of
love, bellies press'd and glued together with love…
She ached for his touch. She found herself rushing back to her bedroom in the afternoons for long, soaking baths and then dressing for dinner in her most attractive gowns. Before long, her clothes grew too tame. She cut off a dozen tiny silver buttons from the bodice of her cinnamon silk gown so that the neckline fell open to the middle of her breasts. Then she filled in the space with a string of glass beads the color of juniper berries. She replaced the belt on a pale yellow morning dress with a long swath of vermilion-and-indigo-striped taffeta. She wore bright pink slippers with a tangerine gown, then was unable to resist threading lime-colored ribbons through the sleeves. She was outrageous, enchanted. Sophronia said she was behaving like a peacock spreading its tail to attract a mate.
But Cain didn't seem to notice.
Veronica Gamble came to call on a rainy Monday afternoon nearly three months after Kit's wedding. Kit had volunteered to sift through the dusty clutter in the attic for a set of china no one could find, and once again she looked less than her best.
Other than exchanging a few courteous words when they saw each other at church or in town, Kit hadn't visited with Veronica since the disastrous dinner party. She'd sent her a polite thank-you note for the handsome, calf-bound copy of Madame Bovary that had been Veronica's wedding present-a most inappropriate gift, Kit had discovered as she was devouring every word. Veronica fascinated her, but she was also threatened by the older woman's self-assurance and cool beauty.
While Lucy served frosty glasses of lemonade and a plate of cucumber sandwiches, Kit dismally compared Veronica's well-cut biscuit-colored suit with her own soiled and rumpled cotton frock. Was it any wonder that her husband showed such obvious pleasure in Veronica's company? Not for the first time, Kit found herself wondering if all their meetings were taking place in public. The idea that they might be seeing each other privately made her ache.
"And how do you find married life?" Veronica asked after they'd exchanged pleasantries and Kit had consumed four cucumber sandwiches to the other woman's one.
"Compared to what?"
Veronica's laughter tinkled through the room like glass bells. "You're without doubt the most refreshing female in this decidedly tedious county."
"If it's so tedious, why do you stay here?"
Veronica fingered the cameo brooch at her throat. "I came here to heal my spirit. I'm certain that sounds melodramatic to someone as young as you, but my husband was very dear to me, and his death hasn't been easy for me to accept. In the end, though, I'm finding boredom almost as great an enemy as grief. When one has become accustomed to the company of a fascinating man, it's not easy to be alone."
Kit wasn't sure how to respond, especially since she sensed a subtle calculation behind the words, an impression that Veronica quickly reinforced.
"Enough! You cannot want to spend your afternoons listening to the maudlin reflections of a lonely widow when your own life is so new and young. Tell me how you're enjoying being married."
"I'm adjusting much like any other new bride," Kit answered carefully.
"What a conventional and proper response. I'm quite disappointed. I'd expected you to tell me with your customary bluntness to mind my own business, although I'm certain you shall do just that before I leave. I came here with the express purpose of prying into the intimacies of this most interesting marriage of yours."