Free Green Darkness by Anya Seton Page B

was sitting at her dressing table, brushing green iridescent eye shadow on her lids, brown mascara on her already thick lashes. “Nothing special happened,” she said with a cool smile. Far away and closed off by an iron door, something stirred. Hostility to Richard. She still had no memory of Ightham Mote, and very little of the ride home; but she was aware of a shift in feeling.
    Richard stared. That chill remoteness, instead of her usual eager warmth. “Well, I’m glad you’re all right again,” he said uncertainly. “You didn’t look it when you got back. I was worried.”
    She turned around on the stool. Her gray eyes, now made much longer by the make-up, examined him quietly. “Were you, Richard? Were you really?” She rouged her lips a deep cherry red, which further astonished him. She had always worn the fashionably pale lipsticks. She stood up in her brief lacy slip, went to her closet and took out a simple tangerine chiffon sheath. She dropped it over her head.
    “Zip me up, please!” He obeyed clumsily, and when his fingers touched her soft tanned back, she shuddered and drew away.
    She brushed her curly dark hair into a high pile on her head, clipped on earrings as big as golf balls, made of masses of crystal chunks. There was a matching heavy crystal bracelet. The crystals had a grayish sparkle, like dull diamonds, and gave her a strange, exotic look.
    “I thought you didn’t like wearing heavy stuff like that,” he said frowning.
    “Not my ‘image’?” asked Celia sweetly. “Igor brought them as a guest gift. He says they represent a ‘mass of petrified tears.’ I think that rather suits me.”
    “Good God, Celia. What a bloody morbid remark! What
is
the matter with you?”
    “Nothing at all,” she said, opening a sealed bottle of Shalimar and rubbing some on her wrists and neck. The perfume had been an untouched Christmas present, for she used only the lightest floral scents. “I think,” she added, “that I’ll seduce Harry, be fun to take him from Myra.”
    If she had suddenly hit him in the face he could not have been more shocked. Flippancy, though unlike her, might be understood. So might teasing, which had once been part of their love-making when they were close.
Had
been close. His face darkened. Mrs. Taylor had thought Celia pregnant. But he hadn’t touched her in—well—a long time. Why not? Because he hadn’t wanted to. Because sex had suddenly grown repugnant.
You should not have married!
He heard the words in his head.
    “The seating arrangements tonight,” said Celia, pulling a stack of gold-rimmed cards towards her on the desk. “I’ll write them fast. Twelve is a nuisance since it won’t come out even. Ah . . .” she added, seeing his face, “you thought I’d forgotten this little detail, didn’t you? Despite my lowly American background I do occasionally remember my social duties. I shall put Harry beside me, and remove Myra.”
    Richard swallowed. “If you’re being so childish as to try and make me jealous, the effort’s wasted.”
    “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. Their eyes met for a moment in anger. That behind the anger was fear they neither of them perceived.
     
    They all sat down to dinner at nine. Medfield’s great dining room was always gloomy, the Victorian baronet had papered it with purple brocade, and painted the original oak woodwork a mud brown. He had also put in floral carpeting, snaky tendrils and blossoms of what might have been water lilies once but now also merged into mottled mud brown. It had worn all too well, and Richard did not want it replaced.
    Fringed purple plush curtains shut out the evening sunlight. The light of thirty candles on the mahogany table and in sconces wavered over ten ancestral portraits, nine of them garish and ugly. The tenth had been painted by a pupil of Holbein’s in the reign of Queen Elizabeth and represented a Thomas Marsdon, Esquire, in doublet and hose. A dark lean young man, whose