Wicked Becomes You(54)

“The next station, then. I can figure out Barrington myself.”

“No,” she said quickly. “And I wasn’t going to cry. It’s only—” She slanted another glance at his angular face and swallowed her next words.

It’s only that you’re rather frightening, she wanted to say. Alex had come into the room this afternoon and taken the seat next to Elma, ignoring with grave dignity her insistence that he leave or be thrown out by security. Capturing her hand, he had meekly invited her to recite his sins. Meekly! Gwen had never seen him meek in her life.

Naturally, Elma had obliged, unleashing a volley of accusations about his black character and his terrible effect on her charge. In reply, he had nodded, squeezed her hand, and made numerous sympathetic murmurs of accord.

Just when it had looked to Gwen like she was about to be shipped back to London, Alex had introduced, with all apparent amazement, the idea of how trying his behavior must have been for Elma—which insight somehow had led the discussion off-course entirely, traversing various subjects including the misery of a life spent beholden to ingrates, the endless anxieties of keeping face in society, and the woeful injustices to which beautiful women of a certain age proved subject. Another conversational sleight of hand had then narrowed focus specifically to Mr. Beecham, at which point Elma had burst into tears and collapsed onto Alex’s shoulder, wailing as he’d patted her arm.

Indeed, Gwen could feel certain of only one thing: by the end of the conversation, Elma had felt convinced that she was the one in need of a holiday. “From every obligation that troubles you,” Alex had specified. “Including Gwen, of course.”

Now Elma was four cars ahead of them, on the first leg of her journey to Lake Como, in northern Italy. Before leaving, she had secured their repeated and ardent reassurances that they would not breathe a word of her jaunt to anybody, most of all Mr. Beecham. The three of them planned to reunite in Marseilles in five days’ time.

“It was just . . .” She paused. “A very sudden departure. I am a bit—addled, I suppose.”

“Hmm.” He seemed to accept this. “Perhaps you require some dinner.”

The carriage Alex had booked contained three sleeping compartments and a small sitting area, where lunch was served atop trays the porter screwed into the floor. The spread was far more impressive than what the English railway might have mustered: first came the prawns, radishes, and chilled Marennes oysters, accompanied by a fine Madeira. The main course, to be delivered in an hour’s time, would consist of braised partridges with garnishes of Gruyère cheese and salade à la Romaine. For dessert, they were assured a choice selection of fruits, coffees, and cognacs.

It promised to be a long dinner in which to avoid Alex’s eyes.

“Enough,” he said curtly after the prawns arrived. “Something ails you. If you’re regretting your rashness, tell me. I can put you on a returning train at Lyons.”

“Nothing ails me,” she said for the fifth time. She stared fixedly out the window. They were traveling past breathtaking scenery: ancient manors perched atop cliffs that glowed in the vermilion sunset; stands of woods that rose up suddenly and cast the compartment into a darkness broken only by the dim light of the single lamp above them; and then, as the woods fell away again, great fields of sunflowers, beyond which, in the distance, lay small towns, church spires, and the turrets of crumbling castles, picturesque as any fairy tale.

She felt curiously divided in herself—on the one hand, painfully alive, vibrating in sympathy with the entire universe, so that even the great metal tube in which she rode seemed somehow of a piece with her. The train flew through the countryside, carried by its own unstoppable momentum, unembarrassed by the way its shrieking, clanging, squealing progress scattered flocks of sedate sheep and startled sleepy birds from branches into great cawing clouds of disapproval.

On the other hand, the train had a known destination, whereas she felt strangely unmoored, as if she were hurtling freefall through the sky. Hours before, Alex had pulled Elma into his arms and spoken gently and persuasively to her of possibilities she had not dared imagine for herself. Elma had been persuaded by his speech. Gwen had felt bespelled by it.

Last night, she had not dreamed she would be leaving Paris. This evening, she would be halfway across the country from it. Was this always the way he lived? The freedom of it seemed mad and dangerous and exhilarating. The world stood so open to him.

And now he had laid it open to her.

She dared a glance at him. Interrupted in his own study of her, he smiled. That smile, while designed to be an admission—Yes, you caught me looking—seemed so companionable and charming that it hit some sweet, painful nerve in her breast. She felt almost breathless, and on the footsteps of that sensation came an odd and unsettling fear.