Part Four

*****

It was so easy to forget himself, to lose himself in her when he was loving her, when she was sighing in his arms and he could know, for those precious minutes, that she belonged to him alone.

"I love you, I love you, I love you," he whispered. He nipped at her earlobe and she sighed again. Lying on their sides, her body curved into his, perfectly fitting, like a pair of spoons nested together, and yet he would hold her even closer, if only he could. His leg rested between her thighs and he was deep inside her, barely moving. He covered her breasts with his hands, holding them lightly, possessively, his fingertips brushing over the delicate skin that was softer than silk velvet.

"Do you love me?" he demanded softly.

"Yes!" she whispered in response. "Yes!" as he rewarded her with another slow, deep thrust and then for a moment was still again, savoring the feel of her skin on his, the delicious press of her bottom snugged into his hips, the deep throbbing of his flesh against her womb. His hand moved slowly down her front, leisurely caressing the taut, satiny skin of her belly and stroking lower, letting his fingers play idly in the feathery soft hair of her sex. She lay immobile, barely breathing as he gently probed her hidden folds, slick and swollen with moist heat, until he found the exquisitely sensitive pearl within. The heady scent of passion, of sweet femininity filled his nostrils and his mouth, and her pliant, open body became his whole world as he stroked and stroked her in the way he knew would bring her to bliss, his own pleasure mounting as he worked himself slowly, gently, in and out of her from behind.

"Ah!" she cried softly, and she went rigid at last. "Ahh...love...you..."she sighed, relaxing, all a-quiver in his arms. Her ultimate surrender was like the iron to the match for him, always his final undoing, and though he would stay forever in the heaven of her body, despairing ever to leave her, always, somehow, he would summon the will to withdraw.

"Fancy! Oh, my sweet love!" his cry was like an anguished sob, and he buried his face in the tangle of her black hair, letting the life flow from him to spill down the insides of her thighs.

***

Even with the one small window opened as wide as it would go, it was almost stiflingly hot in their trysting place, a tiny, disused maid's room high in the attics of the little house in Norris Street that had been let by Mr. Conyngham for the maestro and his daughter. The vaguely discordant, disembodied sounds of musicians tuning their instruments, and small snatches of rehearsal music drifted in through the opening, betraying their close proximity to the opera house. The sliver of summer sky that was visible from the window was perfectly clear and blue.

"No." he drawled lazily, reaching for her as she started to rise, and pulling her back down to lie along side him on the narrow little bed.

"I must go," she whispered. "I have work, and so do you." She smiled sweetly, tracing the line of his top lip with her forefinger. "I wish you could come and play for me."

He reached for her hand and kissed the finger. "I wish it too," he said, frowning to think of the piles of bookwork that awaited him in St. Martin's Lane. Mr. Thom Conyngham's secretary, Bilbury, a septuagenarian who had also served Mr. Thom's father, had fallen ill some months ago, and even though it was the considered opinion of so indisputable a medical authority as Mrs. Threale that the poor old man had gone into his final decline, Mr. Thom, loyal to a fault, would not be seen to put another in his place. So long as Bilbury breathed, Mr. Conyngham insisted, his position should be kept open, awaiting his full recovery and imminent return. In the meantime, Adam, with his good head for figures, had been employed temporarily, and it would seem indefinitely, to take up the slack.

"Is it an awful bore?" she asked sympathetically.

He shook his head. "It isn't the work I mind. Only the time it takes away from other things. From you."

He tried to close her in his arms again, only to have her slip away and out of bed once more.

"I have to go, Adam!" she said with a little laugh, bending to pick up her shift and stockings from the piles of clothing that littered the bare floorboards. "Papa will be home very soon as well." She looked up at him suddenly as she said it, as if anticipating what he was about to say next, and warning him silently against it.

"Fancy," he said anyway.

"Adam..." she pulled the shift on over her head.

"Let me speak to him, Fancy."

She said nothing, carrying on with her hurried dressing. He sat up on the bed and watched her. She wriggled awkwardly into her half-laced stays and hastily did them up the front. Her dress was a simple white muslin frock, tied at the waist with a wide sash. It made her look virginal, unsophisticated, and somehow especially desirable; he wanted to take it right off her again and bring her back to bed, where everything was only ever perfect and simple between them.

He bent down and reached for his own shirt. It was still slightly damp with sweat as he pulled it over his head. He found one stocking and searched around for the other, locating it at last under the edge of the bed. He dressed himself in silence while his request went still unanswered.

Finally she came and sat down beside him, dropping down rather heavily on the lumpy mattress and letting out a sigh. "Give me that," she said, taking the ribbon he held in his hands and setting to work, combing through his fair hair with her fingers to gather it into a neat queue at the back of his neck.

"I just don't want..." she began, and then stopped and let out another small, slightly impatient sigh. "Why can we not just go on as we are a little longer? I am happy. So very much is changing, and so very quickly, too. Why cannot we, at least, simply remain the same for a time, Adam? Why must you speak to my father now?"

"Because I want you, Fancy!"

She put her arms around him and squeezed him, laughing.

"Greedy! To have any more of me you shall have to cook me and eat me!"  She laughed, and he really wished she would not. It made him almost angry with her, the way she pretended not to understand him. He wondered if she really did understand him and the truth was that a part of him prayed she could not know the anxiety, the jealousy and fear that gripped his heart.

On their first night together, she had said that nothing would ever after be the same, and that prophecy was proving startlingly true. Since her debut in the Haymarket, "La Gabrieli" had become something of a novel sensation, and it seemed all London was abuzz with talk of this remarkable young singer, a rare coloratura who sang acuto sfogato----"in the extreme, without restraints". To the unabashed delight of Mr. Conyngham, she had been almost immediately engaged to sing at the Pantheon, contracted by Mr. Thomas Harris himself at a price previously unheard of for an unknown and her performances were drawing an elegant crowd, even at the height of a London Season when theatre attendance would normally have fallen by the wayside in favor of other fashionable entertainments.

Adam knew, too, that although she encouraged none of them, Fancy was flattered by the attentions of a number of gentleman admirers, a few of whom were very wealthy and well-connected, whose expensively engraved calling cards filled a little silver bowl in the front hall downstairs, and whose gifts of flowers filled her dressing rooms on performance nights. Still more intimate and extravagant gifts had been refused. Signor Gabrieli's stricture would have insured it in any case, if Fancy herself had not insisted upon it. Still, it was unnerving for Adam to see the evidence of other men's desire for the woman he loved, and what was worse, he had no power, and no real right to protest it.

Her arms were close around him, and she rubbed her cheek on his shoulder.

"You have me, Adam. You have my heart," she said softly, and kissed the back of his neck, "My body..." She slid her hand inside his shirt. "What more is there than what we have together?"

"Damn it, you know!" he cried, pushing her arms away and getting to his feet. "This---this is not honorable! I don't like this sneaking about!"

He paced to the window and back. "God knows, I haven't the honor or the strength to keep myself from you, but neither can I bear this---deception! I cannot bear the thought of your father, or of Mr. Thom discovering this! I want them to know that I love you, that I can care for you---"

She shook her head. "But you mustn't worry about that, my love!  It isn't necessary that you should care for me!"

He knew she could not mean it to be cruel, but it hurt him to the quick to hear her say it. Not for the first time he realized the irony of his situation. He had been given an opportunity to live the life his father had always dreamed of. The twist was that without his father's gifts, he was better suited to the life for which the elder Clayton had settled. He might have been completely contented and fulfilled living out his days as a church organist in some genteel but provincial backwater, teaching the rich men's daughters and raising a family of his own in dull but sweet tranquility. He knew that with his abilities he could make a living almost anywhere and he would gladly work his fingers to the bone if that was what it took to keep her happy and well, but however much he might wish to protect and care for her, it counted for little, because it was true--- Fancy did not need him.

"It isn't just that," he said flatly. "What if an accident were to happen, Fancy, and you were to get with child?"

"But that won't happen, will it? You always take such care."

He wondered if she truly understood what it meant to him to take such care, what an agony it was to wrench himself from her just at that moment when his entire being was crying for consummation. He fought the same war with his body every time they made love and every time he was almost certain he must lose, but he could not tell her that; he wanted her to trust him. It seemed a hideous and vulgar thought, besides, that he should in anyway suggest that he wanted to marry her so that he could come inside her.

He sighed. "I do take care, Fancy, and you know that I always will. But I am not certain it will always be enough."

She shrugged. "Well, if it isn't enough, there are other things we can do, Adam. Even in the worst of circumstances." She looked at him significantly. "Signora Colla says that no woman need become a mother if she doesn't wish it---and you know how many husbands and lovers she has had. She has her very own doctor---"

"God, Fancy!" he exclaimed, unable to conceal his shock as he took her meaning. "Please tell me you would never think---!"

"I'm sorry!" she said. "Of course I would not---Oh, I don't know what I think!" She cast her eyes down to her lap, where her fingers toyed with the ends of her sash. "I mean I don't know what I think about...ever having babies. My own mother died the day I was born, Adam."

"I know, sweetheart, you told me." He sat back down beside her on the poor little maid's bed with its sheets still damp with the sweat of their bodies and smelling of her perfume and their love. Somewhere, someone was tuning a violin.

"She was a singer, like me, better than me, I think, to hear Papa tell it. Her name was Frances Lully, and he met her in Turin, at Carnivale, when she sang for the Duke of Parma. He fell in love with her the first time he heard her sing."

"Your father, or the Duke?" he teased.

"Papa, you idiot! But very likely the Duke as well," she smiled, and his heart lifted a little, thinking the worst might have passed. "She was very beautiful."

"I can imagine." He reached out and caught a lock of her hair in his fingers, letting the silky, living strands wind themselves around his hand.

'"They married in Italy, but they came to London because she wanted me to be born in her own country. All she had ever wanted was to sing, but she had me, and she died, and she never sang again. And Papa never went home because she was buried here."

"I know," he said again. He did know what women endured. Still, his own mother had recently given birth to her thirteenth child, and not long before that, she had buried her fifth---and yet in twenty some years of childbearing, she herself had not suffered so much as a lost tooth. He could not say as much to Fancy---in fact, there was nothing he could think of to say that would not sound crass, or trite and meaningless, but he felt he must try, if only because he wanted what he did, and he could not help himself.

"Sweetheart, no one knows what will happen in the future. Surely we can only do what we think will make us happy. That is all that I want---for you, for us, to be happy." He stroked the hair back from her face, with his fingers brushing the smooth curve of her cheek. The tenderness he felt for her brought a lump to his throat. He swallowed hard and said, "Please let me speak to him, Fancy."

"What have I done with my shoes, Adam?" she asked suddenly, looking about the room, and spying the sought-after objects in the corner by the window, rose from the bed and went to retrieve them.

"Damn it, Fancy!"

"What?" she asked innocently, looking up at him as she bent to her buckles. "Oh, forgive me for changing the tedious subject...again!"

"It isn't tedious to me, Fancy! And I do not understand why you will not simply give me your answer! I only want you. I only want to do what is right! If you love me then why must I wait?

"And I do not see how it is that you cannot understand! You know me! You know that this---that what is happening now is what I have wanted since I was a little girl! You give me the headache when you talk like this, Adam! Why must you be so...persistent? I do love you! I do want you, but you mustn't rush me!

Dark eyes flashing, the color rising in her cheeks, she twisted away from him when he got up from the bed and came towards her.

"If every time we are together we must have an argument because you must have an answer and I am not set to give one, than an answer you shall have, and my answer shall be "no"!

"Fancy..."

"No! I won't marry you! Does that please you? Now you have an answer."

She swept past him, and before he had a moment to think, she was through the door and he could hear her footsteps as she ran down the steep, narrow stair. He started to follow, but remembered he should not. He considered the possibility of running after her anyway, of causing a commotion that would expose them both. He could confess the truth to Signor Gabrieli and force her to decide.

But no. She had already said no.

Angrily he turned and punched his fist violently into the wall.

The pain of it nearly brought him to his knees. Gasping, he stared at the bloodied knuckles, and with a sudden horror realized that it was his left, his fingerboard hand, and if he'd broken it, he'd likely never play again. A moment later he realized he didn't even care.

Dejectedly, he slumped back against the wall. The rough, naked plaster was cool against his sweating back.

How could he love her so much and understand her so little? And how could she love him and not want the same as he wanted, simply to belong to each other? He was utterly at a loss. He would give her all he had, and yet it seemed she needed none of it, and there was simply nothing else. It made him so afraid, and that he could never tell her...

How could he tell her that as he saw her world expanding, it was as if he stood on the outside edge of the ever widening circle as the center filled and filled, pushing him ever further and further away until he imagined himself disappearing into insignificance, exactly like a ripple on the surface of a pool? And what could he say to her that was not the secret truth that gnawed at him, the frightful sense that if could not possess her, there was nothing left for him to do but die?

Go to Part Five