Wild Wind Westward Page 15

  “What are you writing, Eric?”

  It was Joan, coming down the stairs. She had been in the house all the while. She was barefoot, and her rich red hair fell upon a white robe, wrapped loosely about her. She looked cool and lovelier than ever. She walked over to the table and, without embarrassment, scanned what he had written.

  “What strange letters!”

  “Norwegian.”

  “You are writing your beloved?”

  “Yes.” Eric was glad she could not read his language.

  This did not hinder Joan’s desire to know. “What are you saying?”

  “That I am well. That I hope she is.”

  Joan seemed to think something over a moment, then: “Eric, you are suspicious of us, again, aren’t you?”

  “No,” he lied.

  If she believed him, he could not say, and had no time to consider. Because there at the table, right next to him, she let her robe fall open, to reveal her breasts, full and firm and perfect. Eric’s eyes were drawn to them, and he felt the sweet rush of his masculinity, instinctive and ungovernable, responding to her. She was bending toward him, bringing her mouth down to him, lips parted, soft and red as lust, glistening like the dew-laden petals of a flower.

  “You must never think to leave us,” she was saying, as he felt her tender hand on the back of his neck. “You must never leave us and I will give you a reason not to…”

  And he was already getting to his feet, his arms going out, embracing her. The rest of her robe opened, and she came into his embrace, kissed him hard, her mouth open and her tongue probing, snaking around his own. Her body pressed savagely against his, and she ground her hips and moaned. There on the table lay a letter of love to Kristin, who was far away across the cold Atlantic, but in Eric’s arms was flesh as hot as the night, and ten times more yielding. Eric had not loved a woman since Kristin, in June, more than a year ago. However desirous of fidelity his mind might be, his body knew its needs. Already he was burning with lust, the force building, ready to blast from his body, and that was what Joan seemed to want. Her hands were everywhere on him, unbuttoning and plunging.

  “Upstairs,” she gasped, “upstairs, in my room.”

  Eric tried to fight his own desire, but it was useless. Joan held him, led him up the steps, he in her tender, ever-stroking grip, and they fell, gasping and clutching, upon the bed in her little room. Joan was just about to pull him into herself, to wrap herself about him, close upon him, when the door downstairs opened, then banged shut.

  “Joanie!”

  “It’s Mick!” Joan cried, in a stifled gasp, and in her eyes, by twilight, Eric saw again that bizarre, half-buried aspect of concealed meaning once again, of a portent teasing yet sinister, veiled but profound.

  Boots coming up the stairs. “Joanie!” A cry of urgency. Something must have happened.

  “Quick,” Joan told Eric. “Get in the closet. Get in the—”

  He did not have to be told twice. Grabbing shirt and trousers from the floor—he would dress inside—Eric slipped in among her perfumed dresses, and pulled the door closed. He heard Mick enter the room.

  “Joanie?”

  “I was trying to get a little rest”

  But there was something in her voice.

  Eric expected Mick to say something, to tell whatever it was that had caused him to burst into the house and mount the stairs with such urgency. Instead he heard Joan say, “Not now,” in a voice quivery and irresolute, as though she had not the strength to hold away whatever it was. The closet was a drugged chamber of perfume. Eric felt weak and wavering, assaulted by the hot fragrance. Outside, over the city, twilight had settled, and in Joan’s bedroom the very air was dusty-rose and drowsy; sweet, almost palpable air, that caressed and softened the golden-bare skin of riding lovers, lovers seen by Eric through a crack in the wooden closet door.

  Yes, he saw it, but he did not grasp what he was seeing. Horrified, he pulled on his clothes, and leaped from the hiding place to do battle for Joan’s honor, fearing that she was too ashamed to cry out for his help. So, with murder in his heart for the unspeakable Mick, Eric plunged from the closet. A guttural, maddened, challenging cry was already on his lips, could not be retrieved, when he saw Joan’s face, and recognized the truth. It was there in her glazed, heavily-lidded green eyes; in the dazed, unsmiling slackness of her soft red mouth; in the animallike flare of her fine nostrils. The truth was there, too, in the wrap of her legs high around Mick, and in the clutch and pull of her strong haunches as she milked him.

  Eric’s cry filled the room, absorbing and blotting out the lesser cries of pleasure.

  “Eric!” cried Joan. “I told you—”

  Mick, his face twisted and slack, looked up and saw Eric standing there, his fists upraised. Then he looked down at his sister. “He was here?” he accused her, with hurtful incredulity. “You let him in here? With you?”

  Still reeling at what he had witnessed and heard, Eric was stunned all the more by Mick’s rueful cry of lover’s jealousy. Now he understood fully the dark attraction, privately savored but imperfectly veiled, between Joan and her renegade brother.

  With a muted snarl, like a sob, Mick sprang naked from his sister’s body, from the bed, and hurled himself at Eric, who, however confused, was nonetheless braced and ready. Eric dealt a blow whose force traveled back up his arm, through his shoulder, all down along his spine. Mick hurtled backward twice as fast as he had been rushing forward toward Eric, flipped over the bed, and came to rest, unconscious, against the wall.

  “You’ve hurt him!” cried Joan, sliding down the bed to inspect and caress her brother, her lover. “Oh, you’ve hurt him.”

  Apparently Mick was still alive. He breathed. He stirred.

  “I didn’t know…” Eric began.

  Joan, still naked, sweaty from love, her matted red hair trailing tendrils of passion, slid up onto the bed again.

  “It doesn’t matter whether you knew or not,” she said, “but you’ll have to leave now. He’ll kill you. He’ll come after you and kill you.”

  On the floor, against the wall, Mick groaned.

  Joan was very composed now. “Don’t judge,” she said. “Love is hard to find. It’s simply the way things are. Can you understand that?”

  She was looking at him with her muted half-smile, that held still the hint of some forgotten meaning, a knowledge of love more perverse and indomitable than death.

  Eric retreated toward the door.

  “What will you do now?” Joan asked him. “Don’t stay in New York. He’ll kill you if you stay in New York.”

  Eric left her there, and did not answer. He went to his room, pulled on his boots, threw clothing into his pack, and pushed the bed away from the loose plank. It was almost dark now, but his fingers closed around the oilcloth. He felt the paper bills inside, and thrust the packet into his shirt, stuffed it down into his belt. Racing downstairs, he seized his half-finished letter from the table, and jammed it into his pack, along with the bottle of ink and the pen. Then he was outside and walking down the street, jostled by people standing on corners, trying to avoid the full weight of the summer heat.

  “Hey, what’s the big hurry?” complained someone Eric bumped into. “Where do you think you’re going, anyway?”

  A good question.

  Eric walked at least a mile before he realized that, however shocking his departure from the house of the Leedses, he was, at least, quit of them. The knowledge made him feel better, and so did the thickness of the money-filled oilcloth at his waistband. He had money. He would go to a hotel, get some sleep, and plot his future course.

  It was not until he was in the lobby of the Stuyvesant House, unfolding the oilcloth for a bill to pay his lodging, that he found he had been robbed.

  “Those shreds of newspaper won’t buy you a bed here, mister,” the desk clerk was saying.

  Fighting a sense of devastation, Eric went back out into the heat and the night.

  T
he letter he mailed to Kristin, some days later, was not at all the one he had intended to send, in happier times now gone.

  IV

  The Rolfson yacht, Viking Serpent, sailed south on the rolling North Sea, and entered the English Channel. Each day, as England drew nearer, Kristin felt more and more exhilarated. The green coast of Britain glided by to starboard, and, leagues behind, Norway fell away. Now I am out in the world, just like Eric, Kristin thought, and surely we will meet somewhere. It was more than a hope; she believed in it with all the passionate conviction of her young heart.

  “You certainly seem to be enjoying yourself, my dear,” remarked Gustav gloomily.

  Kristin was standing at the yacht’s railing, luxuriating in the sun on her face, the wind in her hair. Her husband had come up on deck after another long stint working on his business papers in the stateroom. Each day, in contrast to Kristin, Gustav grew tenser and more irritable. Kristin thought she knew why. Hitherto, in all business dealings, Gustav had been able to rely upon the native cunning, not to mention the physical proximity, of old Adolphus. Now, however, he was alone to face Britain’s leading banker, alone to manage perhaps the most important business deal upon which the Rolfsons had yet embarked. Lord Anthony Soames was no Lesja farmer, to be deuced by forgeries and a bought judge. And Soames, once crossed was capable of waiting for years to get even. Gustav was suffering from a bad case of nerves.

  Kristin admitted that, yes, she was savoring the voyage. He gave her a speculative glance. “And you have no sense of trepidation about meeting the English?”

  “Should I have, husband?” she asked, thinking that he was referring to the role she might have to play with Lord Soames.

  Gustav had been thinking of that, indeed, but it was a matter far outweighed by his own tension. “We must make a fine impression,” he muttered. “Everything depends on it. And you, particularly, must do everything Lord Soames wishes.”

  “Everything, husband?”

  “Well, perhaps it will not be necessary. But…” He stared morosely out upon the tumbling waves, running his hand over the pristine polished mahogany railing of the vessel, but not even this vast gorgeous toy of a ship gave him pleasure today.

  “Husband,” Kristin told him, “I have told you I shall do what I can, and you should know that I am one who keeps her promises.”

  Including the promise made at Sonnendahl Fjord, she thought, smiling inwardly.

  “If your business goes well in England,” she asked carefully, “how soon will it be before you embark upon your American adventures?”

  “And why do you want to know?”

  “I thought you knew. I am your wife.”

  He accepted her curiosity, and explanation, without much thought. “Oh, sometime next year, I expect.” He sighed. “If all goes well with Soames.” Then he returned dourly below decks to his work.

  Next year. Kristin was worried. Even if, somehow, she managed to find Eric, two years would have elapsed. Two years. And he was a young and handsome man. His body was sure to grow hungry, demanding that its needs be met.

  No, she would not think of that, she would not think of it.

  According to plans made by letter during previous months, Gustav was to dock at Southend-on-Sea at the mouth of the Thames, and send a messenger to Lord Soames’s house in London, announcing his arrival. Soames would arrange to have the yacht escorted up the Thames to a berth along the river, from which Gustav and Kristin would disembark before proceeding to the Lord’s home. Consequently Gustav’s anxious discomfiture was very great when, docking at Southend, he found Soames’s man waiting with a message of his own. Gustav had been enjoying a fine mood for a change, noticing how splendidly the Viking Serpent compared to so many of the vessels sailing in and out of the Thames. The flag of Norway rippled and snapped atop the mast, blue St. Olaf’s cross on a bright field of red, and beneath it the personal crest of the Rolfsons (recently designed) stood out just as proudly in the brisk offshore wind. The crest gold on a field of white, displayed two Viking battle-axes, crossed, and in the V formed thereby was the plumed and visored helmet of a medieval knight. The crest was imposing but, Kristin felt, presumptuous. It was a crest for Eric, she thought, for in it was the spirit of the old Vikings from whom he was descended. From whom Gustav was not.

  Lord Soames’s man barely noticed the flags, however, as he came on board inquiring after Rolfson.

  “I am he,” Gustav said, striding across the deck.

  The messenger tried very hard but could not keep from staring at the lurid scar on Gustav’s face. “What is your business, man?” Gustav demanded, both angry and unsettled.

  The man handed over an envelope, which Gustav ripped open and read. His face darkened. “Thank you,” was all he said.

  When the messenger had departed, Gustav ordered the yacht back out to sea. “Soames is not in London,” he declared irritably. “He has gone to Cowes, on the south coast. Queen Victoria is summering there, and Soames has been called to offer his counsel upon some matter.” He thought it over, not without a touch of fearful despondency. Gustav Rolfson had never advised the King of Norway about anything. “It is probably just a British trick,” he decided. “He is undoubtedly trying to throw me off balance, and then he will demand more than the usual rate of interest.”

  “Yes, husband,” Kristin agreed dutifully.

  Under pressure as he was, her quiet reply, with its hint of counterfeit obsequiousness, served to goad him, and he lifted a hand to slap her across the face. But her cool, level stare held back the blow.

  “Go ahead,” she said, “if it will please you.”

  “You,” he rasped, “oh, but you will learn, you will learn.”

  I hope so, Kristin thought.

  Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, was the summer retreat of nobility. Warships of the British navy patrolled the waters of the English channel, in attendance upon the royal yacht of Queen Victoria, and the lesser vessels of lesser nobles. Gustav’s captain made the proper hailings, received appropriate authorization, and soon the Viking Serpent glided along Spithead channel to the port of Cowes itself, where Lord Soames had said his yacht would be. Kristin was amused, watching her husband wringing his hands, lest this beautiful ship his father had unjustly won be outshone by the craft of his intended benefactor. Gustav turned almost as white as the great gleaming yacht that bore down on them from the west, and recovered slowly and slightly when it proved to be the royal yacht itself, out for an afternoon cruise. “I’ll have one like that someday,” Gustav promised himself, in a low menacing growl.

  He was considerably cheered to see that Soame’s yacht, Dare, which they soon hailed, was somewhat smaller, though no less elegant, than the Viking Serpent.

  “He can’t help but be impressed,” Gustav gloated as the two crafts moved together on the water.

  But, once again, Gustav was rendered rueful and crestfallen. Lord Soames regretted, in another missive, that he had been compelled to return to one of his country houses in Kent, southeast of London, but he would be there for several days, and the Rolfsons might make haste to join him, if they pleased.

  “The bastard,” Gustav roared that night pacing up and down in the mirrored master cabin, “he is making sport of me, and trying to unnerve me. He shall see, though. He shall see!’’

  But Gustav was more than a little fearful now that everything would go awry, that he would return to Oslo a failure. The fear unmanned him, temporarily, and he was unable to bed Kristin.

  “It is all right, husband,” she told him. “I do not mind.”

  By the time Gustav and Kristin drove into the vast, sweeping green grounds of Daredale, Lord Soames’s Kent estate, Gustav was as jittery as a victim of the St. Vitus’s dance. “I hate to admit it,” he admitted, “but this Soames fellow knows how to soften a man, the better to gain advantage. It is something I shall remember in my own business dealings in years to come.”

  Gustav had hired the most eleg
ant carriage in Dover, where the Viking Serpent had docked, but it was clear that Daredale had seen far more splendid vehicles. Every hedge, every tree, every flower that grew upon the hundreds of green acres was in precisely the right spot. Gardens were laid out with mathematical precision, and even the rippling streams had been channeled perfectly to delight the aesthetic eye. The great house itself, with gables and chimneys, reflected solidity and power, a quiet splendor that was almost indolent, like the home of a careless god. By comparison the Rolfson mansion in Oslo was but a gardener’s cottage, residence of nervous usurpers.

  Although her husband was decidedly tense, Kristin, by contrast felt a quiet anticipatory excitement. So many things were happening, and she was learning much. In addition her husband’s anxiety had given her an opportunity to put the Rolfsons in proper perspective. They were not so rough and indomitable as they had seemed! It was not folly to think that someday she might wriggle out of their grasp.

  Inside, Daredale was a sumptuous museum of paintings, tapestries, statuary. The Rolfsons were admitted by a butler of cold bearing, shown into a long, dark room that seemed part library, part conservatory, given tea, and informed that Lord Soames would be with them shortly. But the tea remaining in the pot had long since grown cold when the butler returned to say that, through some mistake, Lord Soames had been out riding. Gustav and Kristin were to be shown upstairs, given rooms. They would dine at Dare-dale, and stay the night.