Sat, May 19 2012
Phileas had heard her coming. Sensed her approach, her fragrance going on before her, but Rebecca didn't wear a fragrance — it wasn't something that field agents did — and it was the soap and skin of her that he sensed, too subtle to be called a scent. Maybe he was just imagining it.
But not Verne's sudden yawn and stretch.
"It's gotten late," Verne said. "I'm sorry, Fogg, I'd love to spend all night explaining just how wrong you are about the house of Lords. But I've got to get to bed. Will you excuse me? Oh, hullo, Rebecca."
Verne was smooth and Verne was subtle, but he was transparently so. Phileas stood as Verne rose, as Rebecca entered the room, turning slowly and carefully to look at her.
"Quite all right, Verne, thoughtless of me to have let things drag out as it is. Thank you, very stimulating discussion. You're wrong, of course. Good-night. Good-evening, Rebecca."
With an apologetic smile for Rebecca Verne took himself away, and left Phileas alone in the great dining room with Rebecca.
All of the lamps were lit. It was as bright in the dining room as it ever was for a festive occasions, and the windows stood open in the night air to temper the heat of fire against glass. Cook's very generous buffet lay still on the sideboard, dishes lidded, trays prudently covered over with linen napkins; his plate, Verne's plate, sat casually on the table, crumbs and all.
There was no understanding the look on Rebecca's face, but she came into the room and down the length of the great table to where he stood with a calm and deliberate step, and she neither frowned nor wept.
He thought her eyes were smiling, though her face was serene.
Half-a-pace removed from him she stopped and stood, and Phileas saw his chance.
She waited.
It was his moment.
He had set aside his neck-cloth and his suit-coat hours ago and turned back his cuffs, but he was not going to make Rebecca wait while he went to change his dress.
Phileas looked into Rebecca's face, into her eyes, and for this once he did not mask his pain or damp his longing; but stared at her with all of the passionate desire and regard that he had for her, free now at last to look at her with an open heart.
He had wanted this for years and years and years.
He could afford to take his time, and savor it.
Sinking down slowly to the carpeted floor Phileas knelt on the rug at Rebecca's feet, drinking in the calm serenity of her face as she watched him. Looking neither surprised nor troubled. She had decided. Surely she would make him a happy man, but this was Rebecca, and he wanted this moment to be as right as he could make it.
So he knelt, and reached up slowly for her two hands, which she held out to him very willingly.
"Rebecca." He had so long dreamt of such a moment that now that it was here he almost forgot what he was supposed to say. "I have loved you almost since I can remember, and cherish for you in my heart the most profound respect and honor. If you would consent to be my bride it would be my life's work to make you happy. Will you marry me?"
There was a moment of panic in her heart, he saw it in her face, but that in itself was an encouragement. She showed him her own open heart; her face reflected her every thought.
"Phileas, I shall," she said. "And very gladly. I love you, my dear, more than I can say. I think I always have."
She had said yes.
He heard nothing more for a long moment, the time it took to draw a breath. She would be his. And if she were killed in the line of duty tomorrow morning, at least for one time in his life he would hold her to himself and call her his —
"But there is something." Rebecca's voice was warm and loving; what was she saying to him? Rising slowly to his feet, her hands still clasped in his, Phileas watched her face with absolute attention, seeing the love she showed him in her eyes. His. Her love for him. She had so hidden it for years that he had tortured himself that it was not even there, or that it had vanished if it had once ever been. She looked at him with so much love; how could she say "but"?
She moved closer, still with her eyes fixed on his face as though it was a target of some sort. He felt the force of her absolute concentration, and it was almost frightening.
She lifted up her hands away from his. And put them up to his neck, touching her fingers to the back of his head and petting him so lightly that he had to bend his neck or lose his composure.
"One must know, Phileas," Rebecca said, as if insisting on a point of moderate contention. "I have loved you for so long. Resigned myself to your displayed indifference. Schooled myself to not desire you, not that it ever really worked, but there is — the question — that must be resolved, before we can go on — "
He understood.
Putting his hands around her waist, he met her mouth half-way.
Rebecca.
The touch of her cool lip was almost frightening, he had wanted her for so long; and she flinched away from him as well, but only by reflex, as though the spark that leapt from lip to lip had been the bite of static electricity. She reached up for him again immediately after, but carefully, as though his mouth were too cold a pond or too warm a bath and had to be tested out, by slow degrees.
Small kisses, from Rebecca's mouth that could speak so much pain when she was angry with him. It was as warm and welcoming as midsummer to him now.
Little touches, and with a tender mouth that held only comfort for him; petting his mouth with her lips. Phileas stood with his eyes closed as the astonishing sweetness of her caress flooded into his heart to warm the long cold aching grief that had been there, and drive it off. Like the sun on the river-bank driving off the mist on a spring morning, warming the earth.
She seemed to feel a little drunk herself, and swayed against his body so that he had to wrap his arms around her to keep her standing. He wanted to keep her standing. She was tasting his mouth like something very rare and exotic whose flavor both confused and entranced her. He wanted this to go on forever.
She sighed against his face, a deep and satisfied sigh of contentment and desire; he drank the perfume of her breath between his parted lips, and she put her mouth to his once more, but with a relaxed mouth so that when he kissed her lip he could kiss each separately, upper lip and lower lip, rather than her mouth all together.
He wanted —
And so did she.
She kissed him mouth to mouth, and let the tip of her cunning tongue show between her gently parted lips, gazing up into his eyes with love and inquiry, waiting.
He was almost afraid.
But he desired her much more than he was afraid.
He opened his mouth to Rebecca and touched his tongue to hers, pressed the tip of his tongue to the tip of her tongue and froze in the bliss of the moment.
Rebecca cried out, surging into the kiss as though into a far more intimate embrace as her body trembled with sudden fierce need. She fell upon his mouth like a starving woman on a feast of bread and olives, her breath coming ragged in her throat.
He could feel the heat of her body. She was burning, in his arms, setting fire to his clothing, fire to the table that she stood near, fire to the carpet and the curtains and the paintings on the wall.
Phileas knew the sound of it in a woman's voice, even if he had never heard it from Rebecca; a hoarse and inarticulate sort of sobbing that communicated much more convincingly than words, that reached into his body to set fire to his flesh and madden him with the taste of her mouth. The pressure of her tongue. The shuddering passion of her body in his arms —
He held her and he kissed her, and she half-sobbed against him helplessly, hopelessly consumed by the long-wished for privilege of lovers with one another.
He had to.
Had to.
Had to stop.
Rebecca.
Rebecca in his arms, he in Rebecca's arms, and she was wanting him as much as though there was no clothing between them, and he wanted her. Flesh called to flesh. Had he ever been so moved to erotic passion by a simple kiss?
He was so almost-lost already.
He tried to raise his head, but Rebecca clung to him, and he could not deny her, not when he desired her so much —
Her hands at his neck and at the back of his head fluttered and trembled as she fought with her own passion in turn. But she was too far gone. Had she in truth desired him so much as that, and he had wasted all this time, wasted all the years when the treasure of her body might have been his all along?
She cried for him with an animal sort of sound that was longing and demanding, terrified and triumphant, clinging to him as though her life should depend on it.
Dying.
Only a little way, perhaps, but dying all the same, and he dared not kiss her open mouth again — not now — not for a moment yet — or he would die as well. And then they might both fall, because he held her weight as she was dying, and she lay her head against his chest and groaned into his neck while her body quieted slowly by degrees.
It was so good.
Rebecca in his arms, completely his, soon to be lawfully and sacredly his.
"Oh God," Rebecca said. "I should be afraid, Phileas. I never."
He knew exactly what she meant.
He nuzzled at her temple, because he dared not kiss her again, not just now. Not just this moment. "Twice two is four," he agreed. "Twice four is eight. Twice eight sixteen, and twice sixteen makes thirty-two, twice that is sixty-four, God help me, Rebecca, I want you."
"Ch-chatsworth." She almost stuttered over the name, her eyes half- closed, rolling her head against the touch of his lips across her temple. "Sir Jonathan. Chatsworth. Flitcraft. The Exchange. Speculation in the price of sugar. Um — oh — the semi-annual — ah — report on political stability in Macedonia — Phileas — "
"I believe that I have always loved you." If he was talking he would not kiss her mouth, he would not seek her tongue with his, he would not drink her breath from her own lips and die of it. If he was talking. So he had to talk. "Life is short and mortality inescapable, let us be married, Rebecca, let us be married soon."
The tears fell from her beautiful eyes so gently that it was as though she was not even aware of the fact that she was weeping. They came from an over-full heart, not from agony; there was no pain in them. "I love you, Phileas, but you know — we both know — they can take you away from me — "
Her from him as well. Yes. They both knew. And he didn't care. "If Shillingworth Magna itself should fall into the sea, Rebecca." Which would be unusual, they were miles inland. Miles. "If the world should end. Tomorrow. I have at least once held you in my arms. And called you my beloved, Rebecca."
She was beginning to recover.
But gave no sign of straightening away. She held to him; he was hers, after all. It was so good a feeling that the pain of years past almost seemed not part of him at all. A play. A novel. A story that he'd read. Because this was Rebecca, this was now, and this was real.
"Her Majesty?" she asked, as though she had only now started to think about what he had had to tell her earlier today. "You do fear nothing, Phileas. I never heard a breath from anyone."
"My sovereign, Queen, and liege lady," Phileas agreed. "I don't even know if she ever told Father. I don't think I want to know. I don't care any more. I have her royal wish to make myself agreeable to you, Rebecca, the Queen wishes you to be happy, and at the same time suggests that we wed. It makes no sense at all. I mean. Really."
There was his Rebecca, showing her teeth in her fierce and feral smile, and laughing with that deep and considered growl that sounded so oddly from a lady's throat. "Oh, but she is Queen, Phileas, and we must not defy her. When? Tomorrow? Tuesday? And shouldn't one get a bit of practice in, beforehand, just to make sure that one is fully aware of precisely what one is getting oneself in to?"
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
And no.
"It is too late for me to bring a pure gift to your bed, Rebecca." He was not a virgin. Nor was she. It wasn't any of his business, but he had known. "No use wishing the past away, it's gone, after all. But let's make the best present."
She was already sacred to him. The Church could not make her body more hallowed than it already was. But he could still approach her as an ordained bride-groom if he could defer the defining intimacy of married life until he had declared himself her husband before the altar, until she had put her hand into his hand in front of God and the assembled congregation of the faithful.
She was not dishonored in what lovers she had had. But he would honor her. He would not be her lover until he was her husband. He wanted too much to be husband to her.
"What, Phileas, with the banns, and everything?"
The prospect seemed to appeal to Rebecca's sense of the ridiculous.
Maybe she understood.
He wanted to marry her as thoroughly as possible.
She liked thorough.
She was a thorough woman.
"I shall set Passepartout in the choir-loft. So if anyone dare raise an objection he can shoot them. It will not be easy, Rebecca. But it will be for the better, in the end."
"I fear the vengeance of the Misses Osborne." Twins. Halfway-cousin- like children of an old friend of Uncle Strengfelaw. They were much more threat to one another than ever to Rebecca, harmless girls, good- natured, but susceptible. "We shouldn't be alone, then, for a while. Should we. Phileas."
"Nobody knows that but you and me." He couldn't help the hopeful note in his voice, regardless of his stern intention. "At least for now. By morning we shall be quite safe from each other, I should imagine, Rebecca. So. Perhaps I might have another kiss, while there is still time."
Smiling and shaking her head Rebecca straightened and stood away from him at last. "Too late, Phileas, Passepartout has I hope gone to make some tea. We are, in the jargon of the trade, discovered, or I am very much mistaken."
Someone knocked into the cupboards that stood in the serving-kitchen, as if on cue. Phileas had to smile. Passepartout would not have actually been listening. He had been there all this time, no doubt, carefully not-listening to anything that was not his business, waiting to hear that it was not wrong for him to happen to overhear them talking any more.
"Passepartout discovered us long ago. Or at least I am convinced he has discovered me, all along, a man has no secrets from his valet. And some tea would be very welcome." It had been a long day. It had been a long day since two days before yesterday, around tea-time, when Chatsworth had come to tell him that he was summoned to see the Queen.
"You'd better have your tea and get to bed. You have to ride to the parish church tomorrow, Phileas, it will be all over Shillingworth by suppertime."
He was going to have to talk to the vicar.
Oh, God.
"If I have to talk to Bodkin I get to tell Chatsworth, Rebecca. You can tell Verne. Wait, that's not fair, I've all but told Verne already, well, that I hoped, anyway. But it's owed nonetheless, Verne should hear it from you, Rebecca."
Now the door to the serving-kitchen was opening and Passepartout came through with a tea-tray in his hands and one of his patented and idiotic grins on his face.
"No, I should get to tell Sir Jonathan, Phileas, he's going to be so irritated at you — "
Passepartout put the tea-tray down and the dining room table, behind Rebecca, and poured a cup.
Phileas touched Passepartout's shoulder, and Passepartout looked up, his face alive with unexpressed elation.
"Give me your hand, good friend," Phileas suggested. "Rebecca and I are going to be married."
Soberly and solemnly, Passepartout clasped Phileas' hand, man to man, with reserved and restrained emotion.
Then he all but squealed, and threw his arms around Phileas where he stood, and kissed him. Kissed him. Three times. One cheek, and then the other, and then the first, again.
"You are not so stupid as you are seeming after all, Master," Passepartout said, with so much pure affectionate pleasure in his voice that Phileas could not really take offense. "This is so very glad. Miss Rebecca. You are making me very happy man."
=Wait, Phileas thought. That's my line.=
"Thank you, Jean," Rebecca said, and kissed Passepartout, but only once. "Phileas and I have both been a little backward. Perhaps. But we'll make up for it now. I promise."
God, it was two o'clock in the morning.
They had to get to bed.
"You are speaking to Master Jules?" Passepartout asked — asked him, the traitor. "Because I think he is up-sitting. Is whole house awake. Not very much work getting done tomorrow, Master, I am sorry."
This was intolerable.
Rebecca had finished her tea.
Passepartout would tidy up his suit-coat, his cravat; let the world think what it would about his rolled-up sleeves.
Phileas held out his hand. "Rebecca?"
As formal as the Queen with her prince consort, Phileas and Rebecca crossed the dining room and came out into the great hall of Shillingworth Magna.
McIver, in his dressing-gown and cap.
Cook in her duster, with her hair done up under a mob-cap of her own.
Shellington, Dobbs, and Harper, and behind Cook in the dim recesses of the hallway that led back to the back stairs up to the maid's quarters Phileas could see the anxious white faces of the serving- maids, Phoebe and Abigail, Chloe and Sarah and Jewel.
"Yes, thank you all," Phileas said, loudly enough for his voice to carry all the way up the stairs to where Verne skulked upon the landing. "Miss Rebecca has consented to do me the very great honor of becoming my bride. Our sovereign Queen, Victoria Regina, has further honored us by blessing the match. We shall all be very busy in the coming weeks, I'm sorry to say, so perhaps we can all just get to sleep now, because morning still comes early in this time of year."
And didn't he sound like Sir Boniface Holderness Fogg.
Why shouldn't he?
He was Sir Boniface's son. He, and not his dead father, was the master of Shillingworth Magna now. And Rebecca would be his despite Father's opposition. It had taken years, it had taken Father's death, it had cost almost everything he had, but Rebecca would be his bride. He had won.
For such a prize as that no cost was over-dear.
She smiled at him, but she did not speak; hand in hand they went up the stairs together, and Passepartout followed behind to assure the household staff that they would go into their own rooms. By themselves.
Verne stood waiting on the landing for his embrace in turn, but Verne said nothing. He needed to say nothing. Verne had already offered his heart-felt congratulations, after all.
How could he sleep, after a day so full of grief and joy and wonder?
He wouldn't be able to so much as close his eyes. Phileas knew it.
Resigned to waiting the short summer's night out and greeting the sunrise as a betrothed man Phileas suffered Passepartout to help him undress, and lay down in his bed, and was asleep before Passepartout so much as drew the covers up over his shoulders.
+ + + +
It was late in the year for a wedding. But the weather was spectacular, the sky clear as a mountain lake and blue as sapphires, the sun resplendent in the heavens great and golden and gracious, the air still and warm.
Rebecca Fogg saw none of it.
There was only her husband.
Things had been so very busy over the four months past that she had despaired on more than one occasion of the entire enterprise.
The parish church of Shillingworth Magna was too small to host the wedding of a Fogg of Shillingworth Magna, and they had had to compromise between Shillingworth Magna and London by going to the very respectable and adequately larger church in Barnett's Angle.
Marriage being a matter of such concern to the Holy and Episcopal Church, there had been pastoral interviews to ascertain the state of her faith and that of Phileas, to test the nature of their commitment and assure the church authorities that this was not a match proposed for the purposes of venery but a sacred contract between two souls and God.
She was an agent of the British Secret Service.
Phileas had been one as well.
There were matters pertaining to her soul and her spiritual life that she dared share with nobody but God, but that had not proved to be so much a problem as her inherent lechery. Now that she was to have Phileas she wanted him, wanted him, more and more day by day, hour by hour, and seemed to be incapable of concealing her desire to the degree that would assure the Church that she fully accepted her responsibility for the nurture of Phileas' immortal soul in relationship with God — rather than the thorough and repeated exploitation of his body.
There had been some memorable outbursts.
She had quoted from the song of Solomon and destroyed two priests at once, and a promising young student of divinity, before Father Gerard had taken her in hand and revealed the secret to her, encouraging her to interpret her heart's desire for Phileas as the yearning of her soul towards God and heaven — at least in front of clergy.
There had been letters, packages, parcels, gifts, from all over Europe and the Americas. The wedding had been announced, not advertised, but it had turned out to be a useful bit of play within the intelligence community. We know what you're doing. We know who you are.=
And once one nation's secret service had made its gesture — and proved the thoroughness and efficiency of its intelligence agency by sending a very handsome gift of porcelain, from Herr General Baron Wilhelm Marie Ernst Hohenbergen von Kessler, with most sincere regards and best wishes for the future happiness of Mr. and the future Mrs. Phileas Fogg, of Shillingworth Magna in Marlinshire in England — everybody else had to follow suit or be embarrassed in the international scene.
The loot had been astounding.
And some of it had even seemed sincerely motivated. They would do their utmost to confound each other in the service of not always friendly states, they would kill each other if they had to, and as they had done; but for one summer space of time they were all members of one same community taking a moment to wish each other well and remind themselves that they all wanted the same things out of life. Happiness. A husband or a wife. Children, perhaps, but love and companionship, above it all, and just perhaps a set of sterling poached-fish forks with an enameled device on the tongue of them that identified a ducal house so old that it went back to Roman times.
And through it all.
The constant thread that ran throughout all of the madness of mounting a successful wedding, announcements, arrangements, logistics, lines of transport and retreat, intelligence estimates, policy reversals, warning orders, siege lines, the caissons and the mules and the ammunition and the men to man the field artillery, the maps, the geographers, the reconnaissance balloons, the executive decisions —
Phileas.
Standing always near to her, not so near as to touch except with great care and in safe circumstances, always always always in her range of vision. Phileas. Who was to be her husband. It was so new to look at him and not be obliged to try to ignore how beautiful he was to her, to be able to look at him without having to halt her happy smile at some check-point between her heart and her face to ensure that it did not reach her lips until correctly masked and divested of any hints of her heart's desire, to be able to drink him in — the habit of his body and the sound of his voice, the elegant disposition of his beautiful hands and the mercurial expressions of his now so much more open face — and know that it was finally permitted to her that she loved him.
She stood with him for a moment on the shallow steps of the great old church at Barnett's Angle and stared at him with frank adoration, wanting to keep the moment forever in her heart. He was so good to look upon, pearl-gray formal gear, a toilette dazzling in its perfection, blood and bone and flesh and muscle in disguise as a country gentleman when what he was beneath was her true lover and her husband and it was hours yet till it would be time to go to bed.
Jules Verne was there. He was beautiful too. The whole world was beautiful. Even Chatsworth was beautiful in his own ugly supercilious way. The Queen had sent one of the officers of her household to convey her personal respects, and to emphasize to all and sundry that it was the wish of Victoria Regina that Phileas and Rebecca Fogg be married and be happy. Passepartout was exhausted, as well he might be, but he was so full of quiet joy and satisfaction that Rebecca scarcely saw his feet move when he walked. Floating on air. Poor Passepartout. He needed to get some sleep. About a week's worth.
"Well, that's done it for good and all, Fogg," Chatsworth said, his voice a curious composition of disgust and good-will. "Congratulations, Fogg, you don't deserve her, goes without saying." Holding out his hand. And Phileas shook it very cordially. He was in a daze, Rebecca thought, happily. They were both half drunk on the fact of it. "Do try to avoid any ill-considered ideas, Fogg, Miss Fogg is still an agent. Rebecca. My very best wishes. And I hope to see you back on duty very soon, wedding or no wedding, you have a job to do."
Rebecca could only smile at him, leaning her head against Phileas' shoulder with a chaste public distance between the rest of her body and his. "You'll be among the first to know, Sir Jonathan. I promise." Children. That was what Chatsworth was talking about. She would decide later whether he was being practical or unspeakably rude to mention it, later. Right now the very idea of children led back to the act of generation, and that led to the blissful contemplation of Phileas in his bed, and that led to too much joyful hunger in her heart too fast to bother with Chatsworth's infelicitous remarks.
Passepartout's whole body was incandescent with delight as he came bustling up to the church steps. "Your carriage, Master. Madame Rebecca. It is here waiting for you to run away."
Yes, they needed to get away.
The Aurora was waiting for them on the grounds of Fairmont Castle, several miles out of town. It was so silly to have to change to drive five miles, but it was late in the summer, and dust was unkind to white clothing.
Phileas walked her to the carriage and helped her in, handling her train very carefully; but whatever he was thinking of, she did not have her train in mind. But the Aurora. They did not mean to break their fast at long last on the Aurora herself; Passepartout and Jules Verne would be there, after all. But the Aurora was their means of escape.
It was so hard to wait.
It was just past noon.
The sun would not be going down for six hours yet and more.
Why, oh, why had they not married in the winter, when people could go to bed so much the sooner?
Because they would have had to wait for months longer. That was why. Yes. She remembered now.
The carriage bore them away to the Earl's town-house to change, where they would be surrounded by all of these people, kept apart. A species of joke, of genial humor; nobody spoke of desire between man and wife, but that put no obstacle to countless affectionate little jokes at the expense of that desire, and having to change into travelling-costume in the same rooms in which they'd spent the night last night — well separated from each other — was just one of them.
A farewell luncheon, small but very gay, and how could she really grudge the Earl and his good lady the pleasure, after all that they had done for her and Phileas? They were going away, after all. It was understood. No one would see them in society for three good weeks. In five weeks they would give a reception at Shillingworth Magna and rejoin the world.
Time and again her eyes met Phileas'.
He was worn out as she was worn out, but the joy that suffused his entire body seemed to strengthen him.
He was her husband now.
That long lean body, it was hers, those beautiful hands, that elegant rump, those glittering eyes and ears that had no lobes to speak of. Hers. All hers.
Two hours past noon, now, and the party rose to make for the Aurora, escorted out of town by friends and well-wishers. Chatsworth was not there, Rebecca was happy to see. There were limits to how far Phileas' tolerance would extend, even under these truly exceptional circumstances. Phileas was beginning to think too much about some things. She could all but smell the rising musk that began to fill the air, Phileas, a twelve-point stag in rut. It was not wise to stand between a stag and his doe when it was the season. Chatsworth was no match for Phileas head-to-head.
Waving and calling last good-byes from the rail Rebecca stood with Phileas at the prow of the Aurora's observation deck as the dirigible rose into the air and set her course.
Away.
Away from anything that could intrude upon or trouble them, away for three whole weeks before they would have to come back to the world. They had agreed. There was only one place.
In four weeks Phileas would go to London and be formally introduced to his new office in the diplomatic corps. He would need a whole new ward-robe. The Prime Minister was particularly eager to take advantage of Phileas' Chinese connections; Rebecca had never been to China. She was looking forward to that. For the future.
Aurora found her destination, and descended.
The one place she and Phileas alike wanted to be tonight, more than anywhere else on earth. In his bedroom. At Shillingworth Magna.
Where he had lain in years gone past and dreamed of her, across the hall. Where she had longed to cross the hall and be with him. After the honeymoon was over she supposed it might be either of their bedrooms, when intimacy was desired, but for now there was only one place she wanted to go, and that was to Phileas' bed in Phileas' room in the house where she and Phileas had grown up and learned to love each other.
Passepartout had moorage for Aurora on the great green in front of the manor house, and all of the household were lined up and waiting for Phileas to lead their Miss Rebecca past the line and show her off as Missus. She could not think of any better place to be. These people knew her, and they shared her joy; no foreign location, howsoever luxurious, could hope to match this place, where she was home and loved by people that she knew and loved.
At the open doorway into the front hall Phileas paused and looked back over his shoulder at the sun.
It was still there.
"Shall we keep Berlin time tonight, Rebecca?"
Because the sun had set over Berlin an hour ago.
"Why not, Phileas," she agreed, because there was no sense in controlling her desire for him for a moment longer. He had what he had wanted; she was his sanctified bride, the delight her body held in store for him — and his for her — consecrated to God by sacred ordinance. To comfort you with my body. "Just this once. Perhaps."
In one swift movement Phileas had picked her up off of the ground, and carried her in his arms across the threshold. Toward the stairs.
The household broke ranks to crowd into the entry-hall and watch as Phileas carried her up the stairs in her travelling-dress, as lightly as though she was so delicate that she might bruise if he handled her with anything less than the most exquisite care.
What were they waiting for?
At the first landing Phileas paused, and turned toward the next flight, presenting the tableau — husband and new bride — in profile.
Kissed her mouth with sudden passion, very frankly, very openly, and Rebecca wrapped her arms more twiningly around his neck and gave herself to him once and for all. In public. In front of all these people. With absolute abandon.
The crowd of household staff below broke into cheering, clapping, whistling with glee, and as Phileas carried her up the next flight of stairs she could hear Jules Verne's happy voice above the rest. Yelling Vive la reine de nostre coeurs, vive la Reine Victoria, vive la nuit d'amour.=
Oh, very forward.
Phileas' bedroom door stood propped open. Someone had been at it while they'd been away. It was all white, the sheets, the coverlet, more pillows than Phileas ever had had a use for, she was sure — she had peeked in on more than one occasion, after all — and the lamps stood ready, there was a cold supper laid, champagne in its bucket.
Rose-petals.
Rose-petals, on the bed, who could there be in this so-English place who would have thought of such a thing? McIver?
Through the open window Rebecca could hear the fiddler begin to play on the green below in front of the house. They had arranged a party, one at which the master and mistress of the house were graciously excused by the house staff from attending. She could hear Passepartout's glad and encouraging cries of "Dansez! Dansez! Everybody dancing!" and knew that they would have their privacy. In public, as it were, with all of Shillingworth Magna's household staff at play on the lawn outside the window, celebrating the consummation of her wedding day with food and drink and dancing.
No one would hear a thing that might be going on upstairs, with all of that noise.
That was the idea.
Phileas carried her across the room and laid her down in his bed, in his room, and she still in her travelling-dress and all.
She closed her eyes.
Phileas went and closed the door; and came to her.
+ + + +
Verne voice-over
We had all wondered about the League's choice of incidents to use to work on us at Castle Banquo. They seemed too exact, once we had all had a chance to admit facts to each other; and yet how could the League of Darkness have obtained such detailed information about us all — particularly the personal life of Phileas Fogg?
The issue somehow managed to get left behind as we concentrated on more immediate issues. I know I forgot all about it in my excitement over Fogg and Rebecca's wedding. Sir Jonathan Chatsworth didn't forget about it, though. I guess he wasn't quite as excited about Rebecca marrying as the rest of us were.
What he might have lacked in charisma Sir Jonathan made up for in method and tenacity. It took him some time, but he found the answer, and it was a shocking one when it came.
But that's a whole new story.
For right now I'm going to leave this one right here, because if there's anybody who deserves a happy ending for once after everything they've been through it's my dear friends Phileas and Rebecca Fogg.
(Thus Endeth "Jericho.")
Act 4 - Part 1 | Act 4 - Part 2