Short Story: Amber Scorched with Honey (Maud Gonne finds Lucien Millevoye is Married)

As promised, this is a chapter extract from my work in progress that also works as a freestanding short story, in which Maud Gonne discovers that her newfound love, Lucien Millevoye, is married. Then comes the evening that’s been walking towards them since they met, inevitable as rent day. Maud Gonne arrives home late, cheeks lit, hem dusty, the skin of her bare throat and shoulders alight, from their treatment by her lover’s deft fingertips and lips. The lamps are not doused as they ought to be by that hour and sitting up in the drawing room is Great-Aunt Mary, a shawl about her shoulders and a look-and-a-half upon her face. ‘So, you are home. Et où étiez-tu?’ ‘At the Casino.’ ‘And with whom?’ ‘Rose and Lady Jane.’ The two friends who had agreed to back her, if asked. ‘Non!’ Great-Aunt Mary gives a small, lethal clap. ‘Lies and intrigue!’ She has it on authority: Maud Gonne has been seen, unchaperoned, with a gentleman. The Comtesse de Vichy called this evening before dinner, twisting her pearls at having to tell her friend that her carriage halted on the road out of town to admire a tangled little wood when she spied a well-dressed couple lying down on the grass—lying down! on the grass!—and imagine her distress when she recognised the girl to be dear friend’s great-niece. Great-Aunt Mary had spent the evening making further enquiries. The porter had seen them by the lake. A bath-attendant had seen them in another copse. Royat had more eyes than trees and Maud Gonne and has been giving them far too much to observe. Maud Gonne, all alight these past days, felt something else catch now and flare—not shame or guilt, but irritation. Great-Aunt Mary, whose hobby was launching professional beauties, who had polished her up and paraded her around the promenades of Paris and Hambourg and Royat, was suddenly climbing the high altar of virtue? ‘Please don’t be cross, Aunt. Yes, I was with him.’ ‘How many times have I told her, and your sister? You must not make themselves a subject of talk for any man less than a marquis.’ ‘Mon Millevoye may not be a marquis but he serves his country by writing with courage. If you heard his—’ ‘His what? Hot-air scribblings in a newspaper he does not own?’ Great-Aunt Mary flicks an invisible speck off her lap. ‘We have all read the thoughts of this scheming Number 2—or is it Number 10?—to the gènéral, and I can assure you, my dear—’ ‘You are unjust. He is a man of true honour, a patriot who dearly loves France, and who—’ ‘It’s all the same to me, ma chère, what this insignificant pen-pusher from Picardy loves. And all the same to you.’ Something in that ‘all the same to you’ makes Maud Gonne take a half-step back. Before the comtesse has the words out of her mouth, she already knows. ‘Mon Millevoye is married,’ her aunt is saying, dropping the word like a cannonball on the drawing-room rug. A small, tight stillness comes over her. A cold spiral of truth is working its way down over the hot denial that wants to scream out. ‘Married, with a son.’ Maud Gonne allows herself only one small blink. ‘So honourable he forgot to inform you, I see,’ Aunt Mary says, but the sight of her niece trying to swallow the news softens her starch. ‘Come.’ She pats the cushion beside her. ‘Come here, child. Sit.’ ‘I prefer to stand, thank you.’ Her body is holding itself upright by instinct. If she sits, she’ll soften and then she is lost. ‘Very well, then. Stand and listen to what you already know. ‘I have launched more beauties than a shipyard, my dear. The stupid ones move too quickly. You are not stupid? Or I have always thought you are not?’ This is the second time Maud Gonne had had to endure that sentence from an adult. Tommy had used these selfsame words when she accepted a proposal from an unsuitable Italian last year. Are they right? Is it stupid, to follow your heart, to allow your impulses? Why would God make Italian moonlight so affecting, and men like Lucien so overpoweringly seductive, if one was not meant to succumb? The comtesse was still discoursing. ‘The clever ones can mistake heat for altitude and, pouf! they melt away. The great ones turn desire into destiny. They choose the scandal that becomes legend, not gossip.’ ‘And what, Aunt Mary, of love?’ ‘Oh love,’ the comtesse says, with a laugh light and sharp as a dressmaker’s pin. Maud Gonne has a formidable chin and she raises it now. ‘I am not yet of age, Aunt, and I know I have much to learn but love is the one law I intend to obey. I will not be made ashamed of loving him.’ ‘No, child. Be ashamed of squandering yourself.’ She gestures to the room around them: the silk damask catching the lamplight, the soft aubusson rug, the great gilt mirror and the velvet portières, the cellarage with cut-crystal decanter, the spray of hothouse lilies laying out their expensive breath. ‘I have this life through care in choosing which men received my “love”.’ ‘Mon Millevoye may not be a marquis, he may not have a title or a fortune, but he has a country. The country you love. For that he will fight to the last.’ ‘And you?” ‘Me?” ‘I have trained you for greatness, you are not even playing clever. You are fighting like a chorus-girl on a picnic rug.’ Maud flushes. ‘You speak of love. Love is but a key. The question, cherie, is: which lock will it open? For a wife love unlocks the law, the legacy, the lineage. For a mistress, it unlocks things a wife cannot risk. But for either, the man must be worth the opening and so I must insist. You will refuse to see this arriviste again. And now my dear, do please sit.’ Maud Gonne hesitatingly lowers herself onto the chair, bracing herself, alert to every tick of the clock. The comtesse rises with the air of one who has straightened a mess, crosses to the cellarage, takes out two brandy glasses, and returns with two small cognacs. ‘À nos conditions,’ she says, pushing a glass across the low table towards her niece and raising her glass. ‘And if I refuse?’ Maud Gonne asks. ‘We shall leave on the morrow.’ Maud Gonne recognises that sentence. They both do. It was what her father said as he removed her from Great-Aunt Mary’s care in Hamburg last year, whisking her away to see Tristan und Isolde in Bayreuth. Awareness of Tommy, of the loss of him, enters the room, with that deathly draught the loss brings into every place he once warmed. Aunt Mary feels in it her victory, and presses her case. ‘Cherie, remember what your dear, departed father prized. Courage, yes? But courage ça vaut le coup. When you walk into your first affair, you must walk in as his daughter.’ ‘But your terms, Aunt, are not Tommy’s.’ Maud Gonne knew that for the Colonel—as for Kathleen and her cousins and her friends—the rub would be the thing itself: any affair at all with a married man, Marquis or otherwise. Millevoye is a married man! Millevoye is married, a father. She needs to get away from her aunt to unravel the shock. ‘Your father would agree with me. If a gentleman cannot lift you, you are choosing to be lowered. ’ Tommy would never put it so crudely but would agree with the sentiment. She knows the words he would actually say if he were here—the same words he said last summer when Aunt Mary had her near snared by the Prince of Wales in Hamburg, the same words he’d said the summer before, when she got herself into that scrape with the American and the Italian in Rome: no promenades after dusk, no carriages with blind covers, no secret assignations, no deceit. And yes: If you cannot behave as a lady should, we shall leave on the morrow. ‘So,’ says the comatose. ‘À ton avenir!’ She tips her head and swallows. Maud Gonne picks up the tulip stemmed glass, tilts it to the lamp. Just like last time, the comtesse has polished her up, left her to shine in an unlatched window, and then blamed her for looking the wrong way into the gaze she was trained to attract. Only this time Tommy won’t be coming to rescue her. She can taste the liquor—amber with a scorch of honey. Quietly she pours her measure into her aunt’s glass, and sets the empty glass down. Then slowly, without a trace of flounce, drawing on all the grace Aunt Mary drilled into her, she exits the room.