Page 13 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

Dr. Lasalle came on Thursday and pronounced her healthy, underfed, and roughly nine weeks along, and told her briskly that the sickness would pass by spring and that she was to eat red meat and stop climbing stairs at a run. He shook Remy’s hand in the hall on the way out and said something Laurell couldn’t hear, and Remy said, “Yes,” in a peculiar voice, and did not come in to dinner for half an hour.

Nine weeks. A date, now. A month with a name in it: August.

That night Laurell lay in the dark with her hand flat on her own stomach, where there was still nothing at all to feel, and thought: you have a doctor.

Remy stopped going into Storyville on the second Tuesday in January.

He did not decide it. There was no moment at which he sat down and resolved upon virtue; he simply came out of a late meeting at the Cotton Exchange, saw his own carriage waiting at the curb, and heard himself tell Beaudry to go home.

He had been going down twice a week for eleven years. It had been, if he was honest, less about appetite than about the hour between eleven and midnight, when the house was quiet and there was no one in it.

The house was not quiet now. There was a woman in it who argued with the fish man and had opinions about candles, who read the paper before he came down and left it folded to the municipal news with a small pencil mark beside anything about him, who had put a bowl of camellias on the hall table, of all the ridiculous things, in January.

By the third week the servants had noticed. He caught Winston and Mrs. Curry breaking off a conversation in the butler’s pantry with the guilty synchrony of two people who have been discussing their employer for some time. Beaudry began polishing the carriage lamps on Tuesdays out of sheer disappointment.

And there was the letter, which had come on the fifteenth, on heavy cream paper, in a hand he knew.

My dear Mayor Vincent,

Six months is a very long time, and I find myself concerned for your health. My door is of course closed to you by the terms of your own contract, but I trust you have found the girl satisfactory. Should she prove otherwise, you will recall there are no refunds.

I have been asked after her twice. I have said nothing, naturally.

Yr obedient servant, G.

Remy had read it three times and thrown it in the fire, and the phrase that stayed with him was not the threat. It was asked after her twice.

He said nothing to Laurell about the letter.

He said nothing to Laurell about a great many things now, which was itself the trouble. He came home earlier than he had in a decade. He listened to her tell him about the household accounts as though they were a matter of state, and asked questions, and once found himself explaining the entire ward system of the city to her over the port because she had asked why the Sixth always voted together, and she had listened with her chin on her hand and then told him, quite seriously, that the drainage contracts were being let to the same three families and he ought to look at it.

He had looked at it. She was right.

“I don’t know how to explain to my council,” he told her, “that this came to me from a woman who’s not supposed to exist.”

“Then tell them it came to you in a dream.”

“They’d believe it. Half of them believe in ghosts.”

She laughed easily now. He had done that, and was disgracefully proud of it. She reached to refill his glass, and he watched her hands and thought, with the clear and simple terror of a man watching a levee go: I am in love with her, and I have no right to be.

It was a Thursday when Laurell finally asked.

They were in the library. The fire had burned down and the clock had struck eleven some while ago, and Remy had a report on his knee that he had not turned a page of in twenty minutes.

“Remy. May I ask you something impertinent?”

“You may ask. I make no promises.”

She kept her eyes on her sewing. “You don’t go out anymore.”

The report went still.

“In the beginning you went out two nights in the week,” she said. “I heard the carriage. I used to lie awake and listen for it coming back, and tell myself it was none of my concern, which it isn’t. And then it stopped.” She looked up. “Mrs. Curry says you haven’t been to Storyville since Twelfth Night. She says it as though I’m responsible.”

“Mrs. Curry talks a great deal.”

“Is it because of me?” Her voice was quite level. “Because if you have stopped on my account—if you feel you can’t, with me under your roof—then I would rather you went. I couldn’t bear to be the reason for—” She stopped and started again. “I have taken enough from you. I won’t take that too.”