Remembrance

That statement should have engendered some questions in his mind but he couldn’t seem to think what they were. “Who are you?” he whispered.

“Your guardian angel, honey,” she answered. “Who would you like for me to be?”

“I can’t think that I’d want you to be anything other than what you are,” he said as he ran a hand up her arm.

Abruptly, the woman dropped his head on the hard bed, making sparks of light fly through Tavistock’s head and eliciting a groan from him.

“Don’t you have a wife?” she asked and there was anger in her voice. “Don’t you have a wife who spends a lot of time alone while you go tomcatting around the world?”

Her slang was unfamiliar to him, but he understood the gist of what she was saying. “She doesn’t—”

“So help me, if you tell me she doesn’t understand you, I’ll hit you with a poker.”

At that Tavistock laughed. “I’m afraid she understands me too well. May I have more of that drink of yours?”

This time she did not hold his head but held out the cup to him at arm’s length. In his blindness, he had to flail his hands around to find the cup.

When the woman was silent, he listened to hear where she was, but the roar in his ears was too loud to hear anything clearly. Something about her intrigued him. “How did I get here? Please, you must tell me everything.”

“I brung you,” she said in her odious accent, but he was disliking it less with each swallow he took of the warm liquid in the cup.

“No,” she said softly, and he felt the hard cot move as she sat beside him, “you tell me all about yourself. Why was you ridin’ that pore horse so hard? You nearly killed it.”

He gave a snort of laughter that made his head hurt, but the pain was easing with the help of the magic elixir in the cup. “If I started to tell you the problems of my life I’d never stop.”

“I am a good listener,” she said softly, forgetting to speak in the exaggerated accent she had been affecting. Tavistock didn’t seem to notice.

There was something about the strangeness of the situation, his blindness, the warm room, the softness of the woman in spite of her attempt at coolness, that made Tavistock want to talk. “Have you ever loved anyone so much that nothing else in life mattered? Loved someone so much that you couldn’t eat or sleep or work?”

“Yes,” she answered and he could tell from her voice that she did know. “The person is your reason for living.”

“Yes, she is.”

“Ah,” the woman said. “Your Lady Fiona.”

Tavistock smiled into the darkness that surrounded him. “Fiona. She is nothing. An empty shell. I own pieces of jade with more soul than she has.”

“Then who?” the woman whispered. “Surely not your wife. It is common knowledge that you plan to divorce her.”

“Yes, I love her and only her.”

“Then why…”

“I must,” he said fiercely, which made his head hurt. “I must. I must. I—”

“Ssssh,” she said and again pulled his head to her breast, but this time she stretched out beside him. To his shock, Tavistock felt her slim bare legs next to his. “What is wrong?” she whispered into his ear, and her soft voice combined with the roar that was there made her voice seem f

ar away and not real.

“I cannot make her mine,” he said, knowing that he’d never said the words to any other person in his life.

“Cannot…,” she said, moving her hips against his side, her lips on his ear.

In the last few years he’d been to bed with several women, some of them renowned for their expertise in lovemaking, but he’d never felt the flush of excitement that this woman was sending through him.

“You seem like you could do anything you wanted to do,” she practically purred as she rolled off the bed.

Tavistock had no idea what his hesitation was, but there was something holding him back from taking this woman. Abruptly, with a quick gesture, he tore off his blindfold. For a moment he could see nothing and for a moment’s panic, he thought he truly was blind. But then he had a vague impression of a one-room cottage, a tiny fire in a brazier in one corner. Little furniture and that of the simplest, crudest sort. Outside the one window the darkness of night, the oak door heavily bolted.