Excerpt 1 continued...
Suite 1, Mov. 6 - Allegro Moderato, The Sweetheart’s Gambit
The next morning James awoke, his resolve still firm. He summoned the staff and gave them their instructions. He moved through his rooms with a clipped efficiency, directing the valets as they slowly stripped the Rue de Monceau of his presence, piece by piece.
He had not yet spoken to Grand-mère, but of course the staff and perhaps even the very house itself was breathing the news of his departure. The moment would come when she would summon him and inquire, perhaps even make demands, but for now, it seemed, she held her peace as he methodically disturbed his own.
In the late morning, a footman climbed the stairs to the etage where his rooms were, appearing at his door just as he was finishing his inventory of a newly packed trunk. The footman maintained the unreadable expression one in his profession should as he announced, “Mademoiselle de Montreuil is in the petit salon, Monsieur. She is accompanied by her aunt, Madame de Valois.”
James paused, adding one last silk waistcoat to the trunk. In a moment, James understood how Grand-mère would play her part of this match. He had thrust, her silence had been her parry. Now her counter-attack had arrived.
He found them in the ornately decorated petit salon, the choice of room already a move toward intimacy rather than receiving them more formally in the grand salon. Surely Grand-mère’s hand was in this choice, she would have directed the staff to expect to receive visitors in that room. Shortly after she sent a messenger running to the Montreuil home, that is.
James entered and nodded to the aunt, a woman whose face was a testament to decades of bored attendance at social functions, who was already settling into a deep bergère chair in the corner, her chin resting on her chest, her breathing rhythmic and shallow. She was the perfect, silent sentry, a role aunts had always played in these situations and more necessary in the conversation that was about to transpire.
Roseline had not taken the sofa as would have been expected. Instead, she stood by the window, the afternoon light catching the daring curve of her gown. It was a sweetheart-cut, a style far more suggestive than the usual afternoon attire of a young woman of her rank. The pale cream silk dipped low, accentuating her upper torso and the delicate line of her throat. In this he felt compelled to credit her – she looked less like a pawn and more like a queen who had decided to take the field herself.
“Bonjour, Mr. Harrington,” she said, turning toward him with a smile that was perfectly composed. “I hope you do not mind the intrusion. We were passing by on our way to the milliner’s and I thought I might see if you were still planning to attend the garden party at the Hautbourgs this Saturday. I was so looking forward to our walk through their conservatories.”
As she spoke, she held out her gloved hand to summon him. He crossed to her, took her hand gently and nodded to her with a slight bow. This was the closest and the most alone they had been in all their supposedly coincidental encounters and he became suddenly aware of her feminine allure to a degree he had not yet. The timing of this recognition was irritating to him even as he took a deep breath to draw it slowly in.
Recovering from his bow he said, returning her elegant French with his best approximation of the same, “You are very kind, Mademoiselle. I would have loved to share that stroll with you.” He then turned and motioned to the sofas where they could sit and continue their conversation. “Indeed my time here in Paris has been wonderfully accentuated by our occasional conversations.”
“Your time here?” she replied, with a feigned innocence he admired. “Why, Mr. Harrington, you speak as though your time here is short, surely you are here another month yet, I have it on good word that we are to have the pleasure of your company the week after next at our family’s grand reception.”
He continued to be singularly affected by her, noticing the movement of her lips as she pronounced her French with such careful placement of the tongue, conveying a subtle warmth that either he had ignored until now or perhaps she had never displayed so expertly.
“Dear Mademoiselle, I am afraid my plans have shifted quite suddenly. An urgent matter requires my return to New York ahead of the original schedule.”
Roseline’s smile didn’t falter, but her eyes, dark and intelligent, narrowed slightly. “But of course, you have matters to attend to. Even as we,” the word we gave away that she was here on an errand not solely of her own design, “had hoped to find, er,” she tilted her head slightly, her hands gently clasped in her lap, and he saw the coquette emerge in even these slightest of motions, “to find matters that would be of interest to you here in our city.” And now a glance up from lowered eyelids. “Perhaps you might reconsider?”
James was not blind to the invitation nor to the presence of its presenter. Steeling himself, he spoke clearly. “Certainly I shall return to Paris when my business requires it – after all, the grand Exposition is next year, giving me more than sufficient reason to return in hopes of seeing the final designs of the concourses there.” He didn’t intend for his future intentions to exclude her, and when he realized he had done just that he hastened to add, “And we shall have ample opportunity to meet again then, just as we have so frequently and... spontaneously encountered one another throughout these past months.”
He let the words hang in the air, a plain accusation of the plans that had been laid for him, which he had only discovered in the library the day before. Plans which he was growing to understand she had been well aware of even as he had been left ignorant.
Roseline paused, a single beat of silence passing between them. She glanced toward the corner where her aunt had assumed a state of convenient slumber, which was likely a convenient ruse, a front that would permit Roseline to stray beyond the boundaries of appropriate comportment. She glanced for a moment, calculating. When she turned back to James, he could see that the mask she had so carefully maintained for this entire visit was being slowly set aside.
“We could spend our lives speaking in riddles, James,” she intoned, her voice huskier, lower. Her decision to call him by his Christian name was a bold and surprising move, James could see the family had been correct to put her on the board for this bold maneuver. Her delicate pose shifted only slightly even as her eyes and face altered before him to become plain. “But the time for riddles has passed as your decisions, motivated by whatever they are, has forced me to speak forthrightly to you.”
What went unspoken between them was unnecessary to articulate. She knew that he knew and he now knew the same. Instead of pieces put into play by their families, Roseline was insisting in this moment that she was master of this game. For a moment he admired this about her, seeing in her a fiery resemblance to Grand-mère, which disarmed him.
Seeing him alter his composure, however slightly, caused her to continue. “I have, shall we say, high hopes for our continued association.”
“Roseline – “ he used her Christian name for the first time and it arose in him in such a way that he could almost taste it, and for a moment it tasted sweet to him.
“No, let me speak,” she interrupted, standing abruptly, drawing him instinctively to his feet as well. The gap between them was modest and she stepped forward toward him, narrowing the distance that kept them appropriately apart. At this distance — her excited breathing, the color that that came to her cheek, all of it enfolded in the broadly floral scent of her perfume — he nearly felt that in this moment all his resolve might melt away and that it would bring to an unexpected but not wholly undesirable end the last twenty-four hours of emotional storm he had endured. Perhaps this was the climax of a long-resisted but ultimately correct path. He could live in Paris, he knew that. He loved everything about it here, and at such a far remove from his father’s control – although not Grand-mère’s – perhaps he and this bold, beautiful young woman could indeed choose to build something more than they were being handed.
Did she see this deliberation in him? She certainly knew how to strike the iron when it was heating to its most malleable point. “James,” she nearly whispered, in a dusky voice that even an Aunt attempting to discern through feigned sleep could not perceive, “I long for a life that is freer than the one I have been offered here.” There was an insistence on her face that he found powerful, compelling.
“Mademoiselle,” he attempted to interject, inserting a separating distance between them with formal titles and reminders of propriety, even as his own heart beat madly over the many conflicting urges he felt in this moment.
She continued, “Paris as we know it is already a museum, and I am one of its exhibits. An alliance with an American... with you... it offers a path to a new union for us both, and our families, and our countries.” Clutching her hand to her breast now, she exuded a sincere energy that he feared he could not resist. “I want the American energy. I see that energy in you. It is in the way you stand, the way you look at the stones of this city as if you could command them.” Now he found her two steps closer to him and hadn’t even been aware of her movement. She reached out, her fingers ghosting over his sleeve. Instantly his mind recalled the touch of the girl in the Boulevard de Clichy the night before. But where the girl in the alley had been desperate, Roseline was precise in contrast. Her hand moved to lightly rest on his chest.
“I am a woman of my world, James, but I am also a woman of flesh,” she whispered, looking up at him, affording him a view of her delicate face, her gaze bold and unwavering, and the curve of her body. Her hand pressed more confidently now. “I feel a warmth within me when you are near. I am confident that I could be, that we could be…. Do you not feel the same?”
James felt the roar of his own blood. He avoiding looking at the swell of her body, the rise of the cream silk, avoiding acknowledging the vitality he had been wrestling with that now suddenly surged toward her. He saw in his mind the fire the artist had drawn in him, and he wondered if the fire he felt inside now was the closest he would get to it. For a moment, he lingered almost lovingly in an imagined life with her — a luxurious existence where they both used their families’ lands and gold to build the world anew.
Was this the cage he should ultimately settle in? If he were to ultimately come to rest in a cage of some kind, why not this one, indeed? A cage which first Grand-mère, then father, and now this beautiful heiress had designed for him, gilded more elaborately than he could have ever hoped. His body seemed to urge him to surrender, his mind was of no assistance in the matter. But it was his heart that ultimately spoke to him with the most force.
The image of the artist had stirred him, but now the words the artist offered returned to him with a new authority. “Money is also a cage, Monsieur, ne m’y enfermez pas avec vous.”
James first gently, then resolutely, took her hand from his chest and, summoning every ounce of resistance he could find, he stepped back and effected an almost regal stance, separating their bodies just enough to interrupt the flow of her heat through him.
Clearing his voice, he finally spoke, “You are a remarkable woman, Mademoiselle,” his voice regaining its structural stability and power. “I wish you the fulfillment of every desire which you so honestly shared with me now. I shall never forget the trust you placed in me to share it so, and I will never betray it.”
He stood taller, the polite parrying of the afternoon replaced by a cooling, final clarity.
“My matter is indeed urgent. More so than I understood even just this morning. I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am,” he hesitated, “unable to serve in the role that has been cast for me.”
Roseline looked at him, her face hardening into a mask of regal indifference that rivaled his grandmother’s. She didn’t argue. She didn’t plead. She simply withdrew her hand and smoothed the silk of her skirt.
“Then I wish you luck with your building, Monsieur Harrington,” she said, her pronunciation of his name suddenly taking on a foreign tone, as if the syllables offended her French tongue. “I wish you a good journey and,” now her haughtiness broke somewhat, “everything your heart truly desires.”
He gave a slight bow at the waist, nodding respectfully. It was a draw, in his estimation, and he remained inclined as she turned toward the sleeping aunt, and saw her supposedly sleeping form miraculously arise, Lazarus-like, jumping to her feet to accompany her niece. James watched them depart, the cream silk of Roseline’s gown shimmering one last time before she vanished into the vestibule.
He stood alone in the petit salon, the silence of the house settling over him like a shroud. He only now understood the completeness of her effect on him, leaving his body wrung out, with a light sheen of perspiration covering him from head to toe. This feeling drove out what was left of his desire for her, leaving a hollow ache and a simultaneous, soaring sense of relief. He had survived the sweetheart’s gambit. Now, there was only the journey across the sea in search of the truth of the world he intended to build, guided by his wistful heart.