Trial by Desire

Instead, Ned remembered the conversation as a dim, drunken mistake. Mutual confession hadn’t brought them closer; instead, Ned had wanted to scrub all memory of that conversation from his mind. Harcroft had been a good friend, before; after, Ned had wanted to stay very, very far from the man, as if he had been the source of contagion. As if speaking about the thing that afflicted him had somehow made it more real.

The fire crackled in front of them, and Ned shook his head.

“What was it like?” Harcroft fingered his glass of port. If he’d done more than wet his lips tonight, the level of liquid in the glass didn’t show it. Since the evening of the mawkish confessions, Harcroft, too, had scarcely touched spirits. He’d barely sipped his wedding toast.

“What was what like?” Ned asked uneasily.

“China.”

A safe enough topic. So it might have seemed, were Ned’s journey not so inextricably bound with the subject of their conversation on that night. He set his own glass aside and shut his eyes. Images flashed through his head—high green hills rising steeply out of the clear blue glass of the ocean, vegetation choking every inch of land; humid heat and the overpowering stench of human waste; the glint of water off polished steel, the sun hot overhead; and then, once he’d left Hong Kong, the delta of the Pearl River, obscured by the acrid smoke of cannon fire.

This evening, Ned had no desire to delve into those feelings. Not at any length at all.

Hot was finally the word Ned settled upon. “So hot you sweat buckets, and so damned humid those buckets never evaporate. I was wringing sweat from my coat half the time.”

“Ha. Sounds uncivilized.” Harcroft stretched out and hooked his feet on another chair, pulling it closer to use as a footrest. The fire snapped again, and a small draft brought the smell of woodsmoke to Ned. The faint scent seemed an echo of those sulfurous clouds of gunpowder in Ned’s memory.

“If civilization is waltzes and twelve-piece orchestras playing in gilt-edged drawing rooms, then, yes. It was uncivilized.” With his eyes still closed, Ned could feel the soft swell of water rising underneath his feet. A small smile played across his lips.

“What else might civilization be?” Harcroft’s voice was amused.

In Ned’s mind, a ragged breath of low mist obscured the mouth of the river—no mere cloud of water vapor, but smoke, acrid and sulfurous. Shredded remnants of cannon fire.

“I think we carry our civilization inside us,” Ned said carefully. “And our savagery. I suspect it takes very little for anyone to switch from one to the other. Whether you happen to be British or Chinese.”

“Blasphemy,” Harcroft said with very little heat. “Treason, at least.”

“Truth.” Ned opened his eyes and glanced at Harcroft.

The man had folded his hands around his glass. He stared into the liquid, as if he could discern all civilization in its golden depths. When he finally spoke, his voice was low. “Is your savagery so close to the surface, then?”

This was coming rather too close to that drunken conversation.

As for savagery … Before he’d trekked halfway round the world, the word savage had connoted all kinds of strange and different things: cannibalism and half-clothed women. After, he thought more of Captain Adams. Or that acrid bank of mist, rising over rubble. Or the dens where the opium-eaters retreated, to escape a world they did not dare remember.

“My savagery?” Ned asked. “That’s rather the wrong word for it.” Savagery also entailed action, and for Ned, the dark times that visited him were quite the opposite of action. He’d never wanted to eat anyone’s flesh or murder anyone’s mother. At his very worst, what he’d wanted more than anything was simply to … stop. Sometimes he still wanted to stop; the only difference was, now he’d learned not to.

Ned blinked, and the firelight caught his port, the light glinting off it like steel, flashing the hot sun against water.

Harcroft simply stared into the fire. “It’s not savagery to teach someone a lesson. To show someone his rightful place in the world. Sometimes you need a show of strength to demonstrate that rules are not to be trifled with. You may call desire for order and dominance in yourself savagery, but we both know the truth. It’s the way of the world.”

“But one can go too far,” Ned interjected. “We’re the ones who continue to insist on our right to poison the Chinese with opium. We’ve killed women and children. One doesn’t need to commit savagery to show strength.”

“Sometimes these things happen by … by accident.” There was something strangely earnest about Harcroft’s tone, and he looked away, an oddly rigid set to his jaw.

“You call those things accidents?”

“Sometimes, you know—I suppose I can understand how it all starts. The beast just grabs you by the throat, and before you know it … “ Harcroft looked up and met Ned’s eyes. “Well. You know.”

Ned did know—at least, he knew how it happened for himself. But he had learned how to control his responses, how to pretend that he was like everyone else. But then, neither of them was soused enough to tell the full truth, and so Ned had no idea what Harcroft meant.

“I know that you need to be ready,” Ned said. “You need to be stronger, better than it, so that the next time it reaches out with cold fingers, you are faster than it, and it can’t touch you.”

Harcroft looked into Ned’s eyes for a very long time. Finally he looked away. “Yes,” he said. “That’s it. Of course.” The wood on the fire crackled, and a log fell. Sparks flew up.

“As we’re done talking about China, how do you find England, by comparison?”

Gray. Rainy. Even the birds sounded different. He had come home, but every aspect of that home had been rendered foreign in his absence. Even his wife. Especially his wife.

“I find England cold,” Ned finally said. “Damnably cold.”

THE NIGHT HAD BECOME even colder by the time Ned waved his valet away. After the servants left, he carefully snuffed the fire they’d started in the grate. He didn’t want the warmth. The chill kept his mind sharp.

Only a single candle on a chest of drawers cast a little light. Now yellow light fell on the door that connected his room to the room where his wife slept. Without asking, the servants had put him up in the master’s quarters; even the architecture seemed to think a marital visit was a foregone conclusion.

Any other man would not have needed to think any farther than that. Kate was his wife; and she was willing—if grudgingly so. She was also damnably arousing. There was no reason not to take her, then—no reason that would have signified for any other man.

Ned set his jaw and walked to the connecting door. He had been expecting a rusty squeak—some resistance to signify that this door had remained closed for years. But it opened easily. Some servant with no sense of the symbolic had kept the hinges well-oiled during the years of his absence, as if their marital life had merely been cast into temporary abeyance.

Her curtains were pulled back, and the moon cast a shimmery light along the floor, highlighting a path that led to her bed. Her seated silhouette was outlined in silvered clarity. Her slender limbs were drawn up in front of her; her arms were clasped about her knees. He could see the delicate arch of her foot, peeking out from underneath a white chemise.

She turned abruptly at the sound of the door. “My God, Ned. You nearly scared me out of my skin.”

Aside from that long fall of muslin, it appeared that skin was essentially all she was wearing. His mouth dried.

It had been a long time. And damn, he wanted her. He wanted to claim the curves that lay under that fabric. He wanted to cross the room in one bound and press her against the feather tick. Desire coursed through him, pounding in his ears as powerfully as a flooding river, pulling all his good intentions downstream.

She pushed her legs out in front of her, exposing a smooth curve from foot to calf. Her feet flexed, pointed, and then she stood in one graceful movement. The moonlight rendered the white stuff of her shift translucent. He could see the curve of her waist through that thin fabric. His hands yearned to touch her.

She’s yours. You might as well take her.

She frowned at him. “You’re wearing a surprising amount of clothing.”

“I am? I hadn’t realized.” The thick fabric of his trousers was the only protection he had, the scant armor behind which he could hide the truth of his physical response. He’d been erect since he’d walked in the room.

He didn’t move forward. Instead, he concentrated on the rise and fall of his breath. He was in control, not his pounding desire. Not his fevered imagination. He was in control. He wasn’t a savage.

But then she moved toward him. The gown rippled about her, fading into translucence where the light from the moon shone through. She set her hands on her hips—a movement that only cinched the fabric about that gentle curve. The material slid against her skin in a soft whisper. It was a challenge she issued him, even if she didn’t know it yet.