Sweet Agony. Charlotte Stein

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       Chapter Four

      I tell myself that I am not going to react in an inappropriate way to him again. He gives me no reason to, after all. He may be extremely clever and very attractive and always wear ridiculously sexy things like cravats and velvet jackets, but that is no reason to lose my head. I have to be better than that. I am better than that. I am practical and level-headed. I know that life is not a novel by Charlotte Brontë, and even if it was I would probably hate it.

      I bet it was cold all the time back then, and miserable, and when you think about it Rochester seems like a complete arsehole. He abandons his first wife and sluts his way around Europe, then has the nerve to complain about it all as though the world did him wrong. Is that really the kind of man I like?

      Because that is undoubtedly the kind of man Harcroft is. No one could be that gorgeous and not have treated at least one woman really badly. I bet she writes him sad letters all the time and he just laughs and tells his haughty friends at the Smoking-Leather-Whiskey club about it, even though he doesn’t go to a Smoking-Leather-Whiskey club. In truth, I’m starting to suspect he never goes anywhere or does anything. He seems to have no real job, though that could be explained by an enormous inheritance.

      That he never leaves the house, however, is slightly harder to explain.

      And especially when he seems so uncomfortable around me.

      Sometimes he stops in the hall when he sees me coming, then goes in the opposite direction. When he wants to say anything to me he usually writes notes, some of which I suspect come by carrier pigeon. They just appear on my windowsill at the oddest times, on the sort of stationery I feel should be reserved for writing to the Queen. In fact, it’s probably too good for the likes of her.

      He uses tiny envelopes, and writes my name on them in narrow but elegant handwriting – as though there could be anyone else he might want to write to in his own house. And, in case that’s not spectacular enough, he seals the envelopes with wax. Honest to God, that is what he does. Each one has a little red circle of the stuff, with what I assume is his family crest pressed into the centre.

      I have to crack the seals to get at the contents, the way Anne Boleyn probably did when Henry wrote to say he was chopping her head off. In truth, when I open the first one, I almost expect it to say something similar, like ‘Due to the weird moment we had in the hall I expect you to report to the parlour promptly for your beheading,’ and I’m not far wrong. ‘I insist you refrain from making eye contact with me,’ it says, and the second one isn’t much better. That comes after I’ve just finished sweeping the hallway with one of his many brooms – so many, in fact, that I suspect he may be a witch – and it has just three words printed on card that probably cost more than my car, in ink that looks like unicorn blood.

      ‘You swept wrong,’ it says.

      At which point I get a little bit annoyed. Not as annoyed as Anne Boleyn probably was when she realised Henry was a serial killer, but not far off. I start planning what I would say back to him, if only he would stop disappearing behind doors and bookcases and that probably fake wall in the parlour. More than planning really – my mind damn near overflows with clever comebacks and silly leaps in logic. It’s as though our previous conversations turned some faucet on inside me, and now the water is flooding everything. It gets under my guard and makes a mess of my thoughts, until finally I just have to let it out somehow.

      The third note practically forces me. ‘Do you understand what sweeping is?’ it says, and then there is nothing else I can do. ‘It’s the thing I’m going to do to your face if you send me one more note about it,’ I write, in the most careful cursive I’ve ever used. I even fashion an envelope, and blob a little wax on it from the candle in the lamp. Of course I have no family crest, but somehow I feel a swirly M carved into the seal says enough. It certainly gives me a great deal of satisfaction to set my little makeshift letter on the table by his favourite chair – and even more so when he responds.

      Oh, my God, when he responds.

      I think it’s then that I fully understand what we are doing here. It just comes over me the second I see the first words, so willing СКАЧАТЬ