“This next dance is already given,” she said when he kept her hand firmly in his own.
He smiled and slipped an arm around her, his hand set firmly at the center of her back. Le Cherche brushed aside the man who tried to take his place as Electra’s rightful partner for the next dance. She began to protest, but Le Cherche’s authority was so complete that she found herself being guided smoothly to the center of the room for the Valse a Deux Temps. Ballroom dancing was relatively new to Paris, and opinions were still divided as to whether it was too immodestly intimate. Older guests were still uncomfortable with the sight of a roomful of women being held in men’s arms, faces so close that one’s lips might accidentally brush a strand of the partner’s hair. Electra had been prepared for this new fashion at the balls, given lessons not only on where to place her feet but her eyes, taught how to gently repel advances that could possibly make her vulnerable to charges of immodesty. In Le Cherche’s arms, however, she found herself led by a man who was not accustomed to resistance in his partners. His hands, the set of his shoulders and torso, the quick shift in the position of his hips in relation to her own—her lessons had been with an inexpensive, second-rate dancing master whose lumbering exactitude had demanded concentration on her part—but this partner was effortlessly nimble. He seemed to not only guide her movements but anticipate them. She felt herself stepping perhaps too close, inhaling the scent of his hair when a turn brought her into contact with a tendril. Worse, she felt him feel her pleasure, felt him respond by offering new chances to test the limits of the dance’s illicit opportunities. Midway through the dance she became aware of stares, unfriendly and coolly assessing stares that presaged gossip linking her to this arrogant man. She pulled abruptly away. “Thank you for the dance, Monsieur Le Cherche,” she said hastily, and turned her back upon him as she retreated. “Momma, it is time to go,” she said quietly when she reached the room where the evening’s midnight repast was just being laid out and her mother lingered at the edge of a circle discussing new matches being made that night. “Call the carriage. Please.” Something about her daughter’s expression led the older woman to make her apologies without hesitation.
“Did something happen?” her mother asked when they were alone in the carriage.
“Nothing, Mother. I am simply tired.”
But they both knew this was a lie.
*
On my next reading afternoon with Mrs. Daniels I found her flipping through a much, much handled book. The pages had swollen with damp and then been awkwardly pressed again, leaving the whole thing lumpy. The spine was broken in so many places that some pages were threatening to flutter out and away. She handed it to me.
“Start in the middle of the page,” she told me. “Our main character and her employer are talking to each other after she’s just saved his life by smelling smoke, running into his bedroom, and putting out a fire.” She jabbed at the line she wanted and handed over a thick book. I read:
‘I knew,’ he continued, you would do me good in some way, at some time;—I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not—did not—strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing. People talk of natural sympathies; I have heard of good genii—there are grains of truth in the wildest fable. My cherished preserver, good night!’
Strange energy was in his voice, strange fire in his look.
Till morning dawned I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah, and now and then a freshening gale wakened by hope, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne; but I could not reach it, even in fancy,—a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually drove me back. Sense would resist delirium, judgment would warm passion. Too feverish to rest, I rose as soon as day dawned.
“What’s wrong with the lady?” I asked.
“She is falling in love with the man whose life she has just saved. In these kinds of stories it is a requirement that someone’s life be saved.”
“What was the good thing she did for him?”
Mrs. Daniels sighed the sigh she sighed when she thought my question was tiresome. “The man, unknown to the young woman who is too feverish to rest, has a wife. That wife set his bed on fire, trying to kill him.”
“Why would his wife set him on fire?”
“Who knows why any wife wants to set her husband on fire, my dear, but in this case it’s possible that the wife knows that her husband is falling in love with another woman—our heroine. Also, he locked the wife in his attic and hired a woman named Grace Poole to keep her prisoner there. Perhaps this too disturbs her.”
“Why would the man lock up his wife?”
“He argues that his wife is intemperate, wild, impetuous, unfaithful. Crazy.”
“Is she?”
“Possibly. But then again, those words describe the husband himself to a tee, so perhaps he misreads the lady.”
Mrs. Daniels put on her glasses and turned to the last third of the book, checking margins and dog-eared pages. She found a spot, hit it with her pointer finger, and passed it back to me. “Here,” she said, “I give you the attic-bound wife.”
In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell; it groveled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.
“Mrs. Daniels, this lady looks definitely crazy to me.” I had heard Arnold Strato use the word “definitely” on Tuesday and had used it myself about seven times since then. “Definitely.” Eight times. I set the book down. “Is she okay in the end?”
“I’m afraid the things that happened to her destroy her. She is not saved.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, indeed.” Mrs. Daniels nodded.
“How could she have been saved?” I asked.
“She needed to be beheld, seen by someone who loves what he or she sees.”
“Mrs. Daniels, have you ever saved a man?”
“Perhaps. The man in question believed that I had.”
“What did your husband need to be saved from?”
“The man in question was not my husband.”
“Oh.”
“It isn’t quite as simple as Miss Eyre would lead us to believe, but she does manage to touch on some of the salient feelings. That is why I read her every now and then. Also, she reminds me.”
I wasn’t sure what she was thinking of, but I determined right on the spot that I too was going to have things I wanted to be reminded of. Whatever they were.
NEAVE