Free Black Silk by Judith Ivory Page B

noticed, a smaller jaw—two top front teeth overlapped in order to make room for the rest. Oddly, this parting and showing of teeth was so strongly feminine that he was brought up short. A knowing smile peered through a diffident complexion. Nothing totaled. The sum of her parts should have been unremarkable, vulnerable, almost childlike. Yet she demonstrated an elemental duplicity, the way street children can seem canny. Then another wrong adjective came to mind in describing her. Nubile. And Henry, old Henry, was not dismissed. Graham found himself trying to tally her approximate age twelve years ago. Fourteen? Fifteen? Sixteen at the outside. Henry would have been fifty-nine. Graham’s skin prickled.
    The widow let go of his arm as she picked up the conversation again with some stiff, conventional nonsense. But he was just as glad to let her talk; he didn’t know what to say, what to think.
    The dead guardian seemed to be lurking. Graham started to feel old sensations. His childhood and adolescence clung to the widow in wisps, as if she’d just climbed through an old trunk of his youth. Cobwebs seemed to dangle from her, more vital than the memory of specific events. She triggered the reliving with just a word, an intonation, of inchoate emotions he knew were familiar but couldn’t identify. He began to realize Henry Channing-Downes was in every sentence she uttered. Out of context. Out of time. Out of the grave. She had his vocabulary, his inflection, his favorite idioms. Only the peculiar femininity was hers, unshadowed. The shy, imbricate smile—no more than a social mechanism, but ticklishly pleasing, as if it ran lightly over his skin. Then gone.
    It dawned on him suddenly that he was staring. He quickly looked away. There was a sense of nothing being where he’d put it. He was lost in the conversation. It would have been difficult to explain that he was bored with it on one level and incapacitated by it on another.
    There was an intrusion of noise and rain and wind. Half a dozen people came in the front door, shaking, stomping, dripping. A nervous laugh echoed from their midst, more chatter of weather, exclamations of relief to be out of it. Servants came. The routine of arrival broke into the private conversation. The little catch of tension was allowed to dissipate into the noise of the others. With merry murmurs the newcomers shed their wet clothes and warmed to the atmosphere of the dry, bright house.
    Graham lowered his voice and came inches closer to her. “William and I speak regularly,” he said. “One hardly knows what to believe of all he says these days, but I know his suit was intended to put you out of a house.” He was so puzzled by this woman. He meant to make amends. “If you’re in need of a place to stay, I have a flat on Haymoore Street.”
    Her shoulders, face, and eyes all raised together a fraction, suggesting mild surprise.
    He pressed the matter. “If you’re in dire straits—”
    “Thank you, but I couldn’t even consider such an offer.”
    “I hope you are not refusing for fear of imposing—” It occurred to Graham to add, “I assure you I am not making a suggestive proposition.”
    He got a faint smile from her. A member of the other party had begun to sing a pub song. “The mucking rain, We may as well drink.” Trying to be serious in the midst of this was beginning to take on a furtive quality, becoming a collusion between himself and the widow.
    “I’d never think that.” Her voice was hushed.
    Except that was exactly what she was thinking, he was sure; that he wouldn’t offer a woman help honestly. He brushed the palm of his hand down his ornate vest. “You shouldn’t believe everything William tells you,” he said.
    Her smile broadened, as if she were easily smart enough to know this, and to know why he would suggest it. “He has a great deal of specific criticism for you, doesn’t he?”
    “You should hear what he calls you.”
    She paused to put the