Havemercy Read online

  “I know,” Hal said, the light in his eyes dimming. “The Mme—”

  “Hang her,” I muttered. “She doesn’t know anything. Yet—and we must both remember this—it is as much her house as it is my brother’s, and though he is a good man in many respects, he is content in the simplicity of his countrified existence. He isn’t searching to expand his mind or open his heart any further than his wife is willing. It’s enough that he tolerates my presence here, and that his wife does. Despite their differing levels of graciousness.”

  Hal reached out as if he meant to touch me again, then thought the better of it. “I know,” he repeated sadly.

  “And you should take your leave,” I continued. I knew full well I was exhibiting more self-restraint than I ever had in my entire life, but if my brother was making his rounds that evening and found Hal missing from his tiny corner of a bedroom—and yes, I’d seen it, and yes, it was bordering on the inhumane, his bed cramped in a slope-ceilinged corner, barely more than ample closet space—then doubtless his suspicions would be aroused. My dignity and my status in the household would not withstand any more blows than they already had. It was Hal and Hal’s place in my brother’s castle that worried me, and, I felt, out of Hal’s best interests that I acted so decisively now. Such a thing could not be rescinded nor could it, in the country, be defended. Hal was going to be a tutor, and I saw very keenly that he was eager for the post; he loved my niece and nephews very tenderly, and was better with them than one could imagine possible. He was goodness through and through, and therefore his heart was more vulnerable than most.

  I could protect him, even if I’d never been able to protect myself.

  “All right,” Hal said, and he stood from the chair very slowly, as if it pained him to do so. After that he slipped away—his silhouette outlined for a moment in the doorway—and closed the door carefully as he left.

  And so began our little charade.

  Hal didn’t have the requisite nature for it. It was well enough when I wasn’t there, when Hal was playing with the children or discussing a book with Alexander, engaged in the task of testing the young boy’s comprehension and depth of critical thinking. Yet when we were in the same room together—and when we weren’t alone—I saw him struggle with the task I’d set him. Whether or not it was in his own best interests had nothing to do with the way his face fell each time I was curt with him, or turned down his entreaties to come and join him and William for another story. It pained me to be cruel to him even in appearance alone, but I was certain he was clever enough to realize I was only acting my part of the shadow play we’d decided on.

  Yet it seemed that I was much too convincing in my role. He came to me that first night, hesitant and unsure.

  “I thought . . . you might have changed your mind,” he said.

  At once, remorse engulfed me. I could never apologize enough, I thought, and stepped firmly on a blooming impulse to cross the room and hold him as closely as I had in the boathouse.

  “Hal,” I said carefully. “I was acting. We’d both decided—”

  “I knew that,” he said, shutting the door and ducking to hide his expression. “I knew that, and yet—You were so convincing, I did think it might have been possible you’d thought things over again, and—”

  “I would have told you,” I promised, over a rising sense of uneasiness that it was not my tutoring he spoke of. “Barring a sudden onset of madness, I don’t believe I’ll be thinking anything over anytime soon.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment after that. I took it upon myself to choose the text for that night, a small and meaningless gesture of apology for the things I could not change. If I thought about it in this way—that Hal was my pupil, and I his mentor—then like any good teacher I must allow each new discovery to take its natural time. When we were alone, it grew more difficult to ignore the temptation to encourage and reward any way I pleased, mix poetics with the physical, guide his study of the complicated structure of old Ramanthe and kiss him for the pleasure of seeing his neck bowed to the task, or the pleasure of seeing his eyes alight when he’d solved some new, more complicated problem.

  I did so want to kiss him yet knew that I could not.

  There were times during the day when I was unnecessarily sharp with him. There were also times when I was no more than brusque—and that, I thought, was what hurt him most of all. After a few days of this behavior, of his eyes the color of bruises at every hurt, however scripted, I decided against my better judgment that to prolong our studies together in the nighttime hours after the rest of the house lay abed would not be too much to ask. There was a certain privacy to working late into the night, as though the silence of the house enveloped us, left us cut off and safe from the country and its prejudices.

  The only problem in this plan was that Hal had exhausting days taking care of the children, and the more hours he spent conscious and studying, the more meals he required to relieve his fatigue, so that a mere week after my proposed extension of our time together, we began sneaking down to the kitchen like children to concoct something suitably filling with which we might fuel our studies.

  My only concern was the cook, and what she would say to my brother’s wife if she found the two of us quite alone together in the dark pocketing bread and cheese and whatever else we might find left over from that evening’s meal. I found myself quite keen on never learning what would happen if we were caught, and so it was that I discovered the pantry, with its simple array of plain spices and herbs. It was not particularly large, and there were certainly cobwebs about the ceiling, but it would do, I decided, if ever we were in a pinch.

  Additionally, there were few things that didn’t go down better with a sprinkle of rosemary.

  After that, our routine carried on in very much the same fashion, with our breaks at midnight to rifle through the kitchen like common burglars. I mastered the urge to suggest that Hal stay, when we finished our studies and his head drooped low to nearly sleeping in his chair.

  I wasn’t made for the role of a teacher for the same reasons I’d never been a good student: I was too selfish, too impulsive. What I needed I took, and there were a few times when I nearly gave into my less noble desires, without any thought for what would come of my capriciousness.

  Hal didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, he didn’t seem to notice a single one of my flaws. And, as I’d suspected, he was as eager and quick to learn as he was to please. He was as open as the country gentry were not.

  I would ruin it, I was certain. It was only a matter of time. It was not in my nature to deny anything I wanted so wholeheartedly, and to my dismay I was gradually beginning to discover that Hal fell into that category. On some days when I was feeling particularly maudlin, it seemed Hal was the category.

  We stole rolls from the kitchen at night—by light of a candle-lamp we read together and tangled in the handsome words, but not in body. In this setting, I did my best to tutor Hal on the correct pronunciations—but there was no more than that. There were times when I thought Hal disappointed with this reserve on my side—what must have seemed part-infuriating coyness—but he said nothing and was content to let me brush the hair back from his brow and out of his eyes, and watch him as he read with the unsteady flickering of the candlelight illuminating his face and causing the freckles to stand out sharply against his pale skin.

  Then, things changed.

  The first change came a few weeks after we began our system of reading late into the night and descending upon the kitchen to raid the leftovers, experimenting with the heady aroma of the cook’s spices and trying not to disorder her most prized possessions.

  It was a weekend, I believe, and Hal had completed a very difficult text in the old Ramanthe. Though by then it wasn’t much of a reward, I still took it upon myself to congratulate him and suggest we take pains to discover what had happened with the unfinished dessert from that night’s dinner.

  We’d been in the kitchen, speaking softly,
and Hal had found us spoons and everything had been going very much as it always did until I heard the footsteps from outside the door. Without a second thought, I whisked Hal with me into the pantry.

  All around us was the smell of the simpler herbs and spices—cinnamon, rosemary, sage, and thyme—and I stood close to him so that the little spice bottles rattled when he trembled and stumbled back against them.

  “Careful,” I whispered.

  He said nothing at all, only inhaled soft and sharp as though he’d seen a spider.

  When I looked down I met his gaze, touched with nervous apology, and I scarcely had the time to wonder why before he put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me.

  For a moment I could do nothing at all, frozen in place and the blood pounding at my temples as if anticipating a fight. There was silence in the kitchen.

  His mouth was very warm.

  As if jerking awake from a deep sleep, I forced myself to straighten, in a slow but firm refusal to give in to the dizzying wave that threatened to break over me. I saw Hal’s eyes, wide and frightened of what he had just done.

  We both recovered ourselves at the same time.

  “Please,” he said, just as I was stepping away. I didn’t hear what else he said after that. I’d already made my swift escape, smoothing out the front of my shirt and all but fleeing back to my room.

  It wasn’t the right thing to do. I knew this even as I did it. Whatever promises we’d made to each other, whatever stage we’d agreed to play upon, I knew full well that our rules didn’t extend to this matter. My leaving was no act for our audience, for there had been no audience to witness Hal’s declaration; it had been only me and the cook’s spices, mute in their bottles. It was not for their benefit that I’d flown, and certainly not for Hal’s.

  No, it was only for me, selfish as I’d ever been. I’d always known, of course, that I would do something to ruin our cautious happiness. I just hadn’t suspected it would be so soon.

  I closed the door behind me, the dead bolt sliding into place with a sure thump that echoed the lead weight in my stomach. My only reprieve, so small as to be almost laughable, was that the cook hadn’t caught us at our game. Luck was on our side, but I knew how simply and how swiftly luck could turn. We’d been far too careless.

  Hal didn’t follow me back to my room.

  It was a reprieve, then. It gave me the time to think over what exactly it was I thought I was doing and what I’d already done to Hal.

  I felt charged with an overabundance of nervous energy. I picked up the book we’d been reading for two nights now, but the text assumed a certain mutability. It danced and skittered across the page so that I quite lost my temper with it, and hurled the book to the floor.

  Frustration roiled in my veins as I thought of Hal and what his reaction would have been if he saw me now, throwing one of the books; and then I thought again of Hal, and what would doubtless prove the irrevocable destruction of something I’d not allowed myself to name or label.

  I sat on my bed, facing the empty chair. As it almost always was when I’d been too self-centered to see the truth of the matter, I felt impossibly foolish. I couldn’t even blame Hal’s feelings on something I’d done, not entirely, as—he was fond of reminding me—he was quite old enough to be capable of understanding his own emotions. Though inexperienced in many ways, Hal was not a child and hardly needed me to tell him what it was he felt or thought. He was clever enough that to think otherwise would be to do him a dishonor, and I had no great wish to lump myself among the other residents of my brother’s house who no more recognized his intellect than they would have recognized a dragon come to roost in the trees.

  Finally, to pretend that Hal did not understand the gravity of what he’d done would be an insult to both of us.

  He had meant it, then. I knew it was childish—and acknowledging that I could still be the child in a relationship with a boy a full fifteen summers younger than myself was humbling fare—but more so than that, it had been a coward’s province to flee from someone brave enough to declare his feelings by acting without thought. I was not a complete coward, that at least I knew, but the idea of having to scramble for a reply in the faint cobwebbed light of the pantry had ignited in me a desperate, throttling urgency to be somewhere, anywhere, other than where I was.

  It wasn’t my finest of moments. And it wasn’t fair to Hal—especially to give him no reply at all—to protect myself and garner ample time to sort out my own emotions, leaving him with nothing but silence and doubt.

  What, then, did I have to sort out? Staring at the empty chair didn’t help me any, as all around it hovered the specter of Hal, smiling and freckled about the nose and shoulders. I stood up again, paced the length of my small room, as though an excess of bloodflow would help me to think better.

  Instead, I could think only of Hal.

  He was a creature entirely lovable, and I feared that in allowing myself to love him, I would somehow extinguish the intrinsic optimism he held in his heart.

  For the fact of the matter was that Hal was someone made entirely to be honest, in an environment that would not allow him to be so. I couldn’t ask him to become entangled ever further into this mess I’d—we’d—created. He was to be a tutor come the summer, and the children’s attentions would become far more important than my own. I had no wish to upset Hal’s standing in the house any more than I already had, and by allowing things to continue along their progressive course, I knew that I would.

  My time in my brother’s country house was an exile of indeterminate length, and pretending otherwise was what would sink us.

  In this I was quite resolved until I heard the knock at my door, twice, as was our signal. It was very late. I felt my determination struggle to be set free like a stubborn bird and I held it in place even as I held still in the center of my room.

  “Please,” said Hal, quiet, but not quiet enough should anyone have been passing through the hall, which I sincerely hoped they were not.

  The door was locked, which I realized too late was a clear sign that I was indeed within. Too late, and always too slow. I cursed myself but crossed the room to unlock the door and pull it open.

  Hal had a wild look about his eyes, anxious and desperate in one, and I knew that I’d been right to leave the pantry.

  “Hal,” I said unsteadily, drawing him in after a perfunctory check up and down the hallway for curious young eyes. Then I closed the door.

  He stared up at me, misery radiating from every small motion, worrying his lower lip in a way that I was often quite fond of, but not now. Not when I knew I’d been the cause.

  I sought for the proper words, some fitting apology that I could make, and found that there were none. “I’m sorry,” I said instead. It was no more than a fraction of the true apology I wanted to make. “I should not have left,” I added, and hesitantly touched his face.

  This seemed to be the signal he’d been waiting for, as he all but threw himself into my arms. I held him tight; it was all I could think of doing.

  “Please,” he said, close against my neck. “I didn’t mean—” He stopped then, as though he couldn’t even pretend to take it back.

  The rules of the game hadn’t been so clear when I’d set them, and once again the fault was all my own.

  With Hal caught close in my arms, I found that my words had deserted me. It was an unsettling realization, as I depended on words more often than I would have liked to admit. They were my citadel and stronghold; they kept me afloat when everything else was a swirling, cooking stew of what I knew and what I felt.

  There were no words that would set this right save those that couldn’t be unsaid.

  “Can we just—Can we pretend that never happened?”

  “I can’t,” I said, honest as I only ever could be when it was completely inconvenient to be so. Hal’s fingers tightened so fiercely in my shirt that I was sure for a moment it would rip. “And, even if I could, Hal, I wouldn’t.”


  “Oh,” he said, and slumped a little as he exhaled. I put an arm around his waist, as much to hold him up as to keep him close. “I was afraid of that.”

  “It isn’t—It’s not something I would ever want to pretend hadn’t . . . happened,” I said clumsily. “If I teach you at least one thing during my time here, then let it be this: There is no kiss we can undo, nor any word we can unsay.”

  I felt him nod. Then he lifted his head to look at me, visibly struggling with something he wanted to say. “Is that why you left, then?”

  “Likewise, I can make no excuse for my actions,” I said, helplessly aware that an apology wasn’t what he wanted. “They were inexcusable. I am sorry, Hal.”

  I found I had no way of explaining it to him. But I had faith that his intrinsic intelligence and empathy would guide him to discern my true emotions and to understand why they could not be expressed.

  I was afraid, but I was also certain of what we needed. I would endeavor to avoid such situations again.

  “We should perhaps,” I said haltingly, then tried again. “We should perhaps . . . meet with less frequency.”

  I could at least teach him, however, though I knew what a poor compensation it was. But I could hope that he might soon be able to see that my rejection was not born out of a lack of affection. There were things I could say without speaking, and I hoped only that Hal would understand them.

  “Would you care to finish that passage on the laws of the bastion?” I asked lightly, still holding him foolishly close. Despite all my fine words and upright sentiments, I could not release him until I heard his reply. If he refused, I knew I would be bound to do something even more foolish, and my beseeching must have been evident in my expression, for he hesitated only a moment.

  “I’d like that,” he said, seemingly relieved, though there was a shadow of disappointment that hung far off in the back of his gaze.

  I held him for a while longer, and in the bright moonlight that streamed through my unshuttered windows, it was almost easy to believe we were not so trapped.