Silk and Secrets(103)

A spasm crossed Juliet's face and she bent her head, retreating into a tight little ball, but she said nothing. A stray beam of early sunlight glinted mockingly from the gold chain around her neck.

Her very silence increased Ross's anger. He had never spoken of what he had seen in Malta, but now the anguish could no longer be denied. "It never occurred to me that I would find you in bed with another man," he said bitterly. "It had been only three weeks, Juliet. Three bloody weeks! Was he the first, or had you found a different man in every hotel between Chapelgate and Malta?"

She shook her head, her long hair veiling her face, but she made no attempt to defend herself.

Ross rolled out of the bed and stalked to the window, which was covered with slatted blinds that admitted air and light. Staring through the thin slats at the empty courtyard, he snapped, "Have you nothing to say for yourself? Surely you can find a confession or a denial or a boast. Say something, dammit. With a little effort, perhaps you can convince me that I went to the wrong room."

"I can't deny it. What you think happened that night... happened," Juliet said, her voice almost inaudible. "You are right to despise me. But having come all the way from England, why didn't you try to see me, if only to tell me what you thought of me?"

Ross swung away from the window and flattened his trembling body against the roughly textured wall, his nails digging into the plaster as he struggled vainly to master himself. The answer to her question was the blackest piece of self-knowledge he had ever faced, and it shamed him. Nonetheless he answered, for in his rage he wanted Juliet to know what she had done. "I left because I was afraid that if I saw you, I might kill you."

For an endless time, only the rasp of Juliet's shallow breathing disturbed the stillness. At length she said bleakly, "This is why I have tried to keep my distance from you since Serevan. I feared that if we became intimate again, all the barriers and denials that made it possible to live would be destroyed. And that is what has happened."

She slid from the bed and knelt on the floor, lifting her crumpled robe and holding it in front of her while she blindly gathered her clothing with her other hand. In the distance, muezzins could be heard calling the faithful to prayer from a dozen different minarets. It was light enough now to see detail, though objects were still flat and colorless.

Bleakly Ross wondered how it was possible to go from joy to disaster in a handful of moments. Juliet was right that intimacy had destroyed the barriers; for years he had successfully suppressed his anger, even through the last difficult weeks when he had been constantly with his errant wife. But in some mysterious way, becoming lovers again had weakened his control, and once it began to unravel, his anger was unstoppable.

As he tried to understand why, he suddenly realized that Juliet was crying, huge soundless tears running down her face as she fumbled for her scattered garments. Her grief was all the more devastating for being expressed in total silence.

The pain inside him did not diminish, but the nature of it changed, as did his anger. He swore a wordless oath at himself. He could feel her drawing away from him emotionally and knew that soon she would be gone past recalling.

The thought was unbearable. For a brief ugly moment he had wanted to wound his wife, to make her suffer as he had suffered. Yet by doing so he had hurt not just her but himself, for he could not endure the sight of her pain, no matter how much she deserved his fury. His voice raw, he said, "Juliet, I'm sorry I lashed out at you. I shouldn't have done it."

"I'm sorry too—for everything. I was mad to think the past could be overcome. Remember the poetry of Omar Khayyam?" She looked up at him, her eyes wide and bleak, the long lashes clumped by tears. "The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on. And all your piety and wit, won't call it back to cancel half a line. Nor will your tears wash out a word of it."

She closed her eyes, her face twisted with misery. "Last night I wanted to give you the only gift in my power. Instead I hurt you unforgivably, and not for the first time."

Swiftly he crossed the room and knelt beside her. The knife wound which he had seared with red-hot steel was now a sullen, almost healed line curving around her upper arm. It was a reminder that there was no one like Juliet anywhere and that her uniqueness was what he had loved about her.

Choosing his words with care, he said, "I can't say that the past doesn't matter, because it does, enormously. But that was then. This is now."

"The past is now, for we are what our deeds have made us. Last night was a mistake. We opened Pandora's box, and I don't think it is possible to have the pleasure without the pain."