A Lady Under Siege(70)

She lifted her eyes to him. Her look of surprise told him what he’d said was true.

“If you know everything, why do you toy with me?” Sylvanne cried. “Why did you come here if you knew there would be a knife?”

“Your maid told me it would come out later.”

“That was her idea—and she almost persuaded my vacillating mind. My maid is a traitor.”

“Not a traitor. She wants to see you happy.”

“If she wants me happy, it’s so she may abandon me in good conscience.”

“That’s very perceptive. I admire the sharpness of your thoughts. Do you know what would make me happy?”

“To be alive.”

“Yes, that, of course. I’m happy to be intact. But what would make me even more happy would be to make love to you. Not to your surface thoughts, but to a deeper soul within. I speak of Meghan, of course. Hold still, damn you.” She had turned her head away, and now he forced her again to look into his eyes. He looked searchingly into hers. “I’m going to call you Meghan. I’m going to say I love you. I love you, Meghan. I want to make love to you now, in gratitude.”

He loosened his grip, and lay beside her, as if expecting his words to be enough to turn her into a willing partner. But Sylvanne would not be compliant, or yielding. She raised her mouth to his shoulder and bit him savagely, her teeth deeply puncturing his skin. He cried out in pain and shoved her roughly away from him. “Damn you to hell,” he howled. “Your mouth has proved more dangerous than the knife!”

He climbed off the bed. Sylvanne pulled the sheet up to cover her nakedness. He knelt by the bedside and poured water from a bucket into a basin on the floor, then dampened a cloth and dabbed at the scrape on his side where the knife had barely broken the skin. Then he attended to the more serious bite wound on his shoulder, where her teeth had done real damage.

“Likely this mangled flesh is better left alone,” he said, examining the gash in the faint candlelight. “I’ll put a shirt over it, and let it dry on its own.”

He came back to where she lay curled upon the bed. Sylvanne turned her head away again so as not to look at him. “I’ll say one more thing, to Meghan, if I may,” he pronounced. “Dear Meghan, before the knife came out, in those candle-lit moments while Sylvanne so beguilingly playacted the temptress, I felt you watching. I felt your presence in a new way, as vibrations from some secret place. But then the blade glinted like a candle’s flame, and suddenly what might have been beautiful turned ugly, and violent. Still, I did my best to reach you, to give myself to you.”

He took Sylvanne’s chin in his hand and forced her to look at him. “I need to meet your eyes. Meghan, I want to say I love you.”

“Your love is too strange,” Sylvanne muttered.

“So it might seem to you,” he answered her. “Please understand that in a way I feel love for you too. Love in the form of admiration. Beyond your undeniable beauty, the depth of your loyalty to your husband is a testament to your fine character. I’ll leave you now.”





35





When ten-year-olds decide they don’t like life, they can be extremely good at keeping to that philosophy, at least in the short term. But soon enough their natural inclination for joy and laughter wins out, and what they long for is some tiny scrap of evidence that life is good and sweet, so that they can officially change their minds about it. For Betsy that little scrap was indeed truly scrap, a gift made up of bits and pieces of abandoned and salvaged old bicycles, disassembled, redesigned, and cobbled back together into an eccentric unicycle.

She discovered it leaning ready-to-ride against the handrail of the stairs of her back deck when she went out to the garden one day after breakfast. She had just started to examine it closely, running her fingers over the scorched grey metal spots where it had been so recently welded, when she heard Derek call out to her.

“You like it?”

“My mom told me this would happen,” she replied curtly. “She said, he’s a man, men never apologize with words, they try to buy their way back into your good books.”

“I didn’t buy it, I built it with my own hands.”

“That’s because you’re cheap.”

“But do you like it? It’s three-quarter sized, I made it petite, just for you. It could be the only one like it in existence.”

Betsy stepped down to the second of the deck steps, and tried to mount the unicycle from there. “Go around the other side of the railing,” Derek advised. “You’ve gotta get yourself right above it, and feel for that point of perfect balance, then you’ll be on it in no time. You’ll be pedalling it around on the trampoline like a crazy little circus freak!”