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There was a great hubbub and to-do, once Talboys was fit for true human habitation, about what should go to the country and what should stay in town. Items were unearthed which had not seen the light of day in months. Harriet oversaw the disposition of her own possessions with a keen interest she feared was not entirely fitting for a newly elevated Lady, but there were some things she still preferred to deal with privately.
Her office at Mecklenburg Square was one such thing, for her sins: as with many writers, she was fiercely protective of the odds and ends that stacked up in the process of midwifing a story. The place was lined nearly floor to ceiling with tidily kept boxes that held research and correspondence. It was the latter she preferred to sort through by herself, especially the personal and legal letters. Perhaps she ought to have burned them--maybe she would yet. She set some aside to consider next time she was in proximity to an ashcan, in possession of reasonable privacy.
Dusty and beginning to want her tea, she reached for another box--the last, she promised herself, before she took a well-deserved rest. It was heavier than the others, or at least its weight was distributed more oddly. Something inside slid from one end to the other when she lifted it, sounding rather more solid than a sheaf of paper.
Before she lifted the lid, some instinct guided her eyes to the door, which was firmly shut. She hadn’t the faintest idea what it could be; only that it was stacked with some of her first research on Lefanu. Which seemed to indicate some association with Shrewsbury, or Oxford more broadly. What could it be?
A wide leather dog collar, as it turned out, studded with brass knobs.
Harriet shut the box quickly, then opened it again as if the collar might jump out and bite her if startled. It did not. With the tips of her fingers, she lifted it up into the late afternoon sunlight. The brass gleamed, and warmed quickly where she touched it.
She could remember very well the weight of the thing around her neck, the difficulty of swallowing past it. The dizziness and the tingling of her skin, the shortness of breath that had nothing to do with the strap around her neck. Or everything, perhaps. At the time she had put it firmly down to fear. But her heart had pounded when he fastened the thing around her throat the first time, and she knew it was not apprehension over confronting a madwoman that made her blood so wild in her veins.
My bull-terrier bitch, he had said, that day outside the tack shop, the marks of his thumbs still on her throat. She pretended to herself she was offended, that her flush was one of pique. Extremely plucky animal, but a reckless and obstinate fighter.
And she had been. So obstinate. She had hated him, as she put the collar on that night—hated the easiness, the assuredness of him, the ceaseless proposals, the grind of standing firm against this modern incarnation of droit du seigneur. But the collar had saved her life, just as Peter had saved her life, and with the gift of every new day she shouldn’t have had she began to realize that what she hated was not Peter, but everything else in the world that put her hackles up. And also, perhaps, herself.
She had thought of Philip, looking at her own face in the mirror, the heavy black band of the collar around her neck: the strangulation of his embrace, the shackle of his affection. And she had chosen that willingly—given herself to it. Let her desires drive her into shame and scandal. After, she had promised herself she would never choose it again. And she hadn’t, and she hadn’t, and even now, perhaps she was afraid.
Turning the collar slowly in her hands, she found Peter’s name embossed between the studs, as he had promised. She assumed, at first, that it had been a joke. That after her tangle with Annie in the dark, the collar had been dispatched somewhere she would never see it again. Then, shortly after their engagement was announced, Peter had made her a present of it, wrapped in foil. Whatever look was on her face when she received it inspired profuse apologies and an attempt on Peter’s part to take it back. She had not let him. He seemed bemused, but in his Peter-ish way he had indulged her, which made her blush.
Just as she was blushing now, at the memory of her own fumbling insistence, her failures to explain. She still couldn’t quite articulate what the collar made her feel. She wondered if Peter understood. If, perhaps, his gift of the collar had been something more than humorous. Had it been an offering, a suggestion? And she had gawped and blushed and not given him much hope at all. Well, he was used to it, poor soul. And used to her catching up, a bit late.
She checked the time. He would have to put up with her running late for meals at this rate, too. Without giving herself much time to think, she put the collar back in its box and tucked the box under her arm, an unexpected guest for dinner. At least it wouldn’t need a setting or a partner; it was early days yet and Harriet didn’t like to tax Bunter’s patience too sorely.
She still managed to raise his eyebrows, when she insisted on keeping the box when he took her coat.
“Just some things I’d like to discuss with Peter,” she said.
“Very well, ma’am,” he said, and gracefully made himself scarce until dinner.
In the drawing room, Peter poured her sherry and eyeballed the box. “Fixin’ to get academical over dinner?”
“Well no,” she said, “not exactly.” She put the box on the settee between them but didn’t remove the lid. “I found this while I was going through my old office. It is from Oxford, certainly, but…” She twisted her hands in her lap for a moment before she saw Peter watching them with interest and concern.
Deliberately, she laid her palms flat on her knees. She could feel their warmth and a trace of damp, even through her sensible tweed skirt. She looked down at her knuckles and saw brown dust ground into the creases. She should have had a bath before she came. And then she remembered: this was her home. She could bathe here. She would, and dress for dinner, in her clothes, hung in her own dressing room. She was Peter’s wife. There on her left hand, the heavy solitaire ruby stacked with a plain gold band. She touched the hard edges of the stone and thought of leather and brass.
The ring and the collar both said “mine.” The women of the staff common room would be appalled to hear it put that way, but it gave her a profound comfort that Philip’s free love never had. She had a place. Peter had a claim on her, but she had a claim on him as well. She was his, he was hers. There was surety in their arrangement; the surety of God and the law and tradition. She was not at all sure how she felt about such things taken separately, at face value, but the weight of them at the foundation of her unlikely marriage gave her a profound, if guilty, comfort. Here, at last, she was safe. And perhaps, in that safety, she could trust herself. Or, at least, trust Peter.
“Sweetheart,” said Peter. “You are thinking very hard. I can nearly see the steam.”
Where to begin? How to explain so many things for which she had no words? And she had the temerity to call herself an author.
“When I was…with Philip,” she said, and waited for his disgust, his discomfort. Instead he only watched her, waiting. She gathered her courage. “When we were together, I often…” Her throat closed and she had to swallow down the lump. “It felt good. Physically.” How excruciating, this attempt! “But I hated myself, after. During, even.”
He put one of his hands over hers, so they lay folded on her knee. “You’ve never felt like that with me, I hope.”
“Oh no, Peter. Never.” She curled her fingers under so he wouldn’t see the black crescent of grime under her nails. As if she could hide the shame of Philip from him too. She wasn’t ashamed of what she’d done; only who she’d done it with, and that she’d let him treat her the way he did. “I don’t think I ever could feel the same way with you. And so I don’t want you to think you must be delicate with me.”
“Must? No, of course not. I know you too well. But what if I want to be? Delicate, I mean.”
She watched him carefully when she asked her next question, wondering if he would lie to her. If he could. “Do you?”
He swallowed, expression blank.
“The box, Peter. Open the box.”
He gave her one last searching look, then set aside his sherry. When he plucked the lid away, she saw surprise, then the fast-moving shadow of apprehension, before he reassembled himself. She wished he wouldn’t--he didn’t need to, not with her.
“Hullo old thing,” he said, with just a little too much jocularity. He lifted the collar and held it so its fittings shone in the lamplight. “Shall we hang you in the hall at Talboys? Place of honor, what?”
“Peter,” she said, quelling. She was not afraid to call his bluff. She rather thought he wanted her to.
He let the collar fall across his knees. Harshly, he asked: “Was he that sort of fellow? Mr. Boyes?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think he had the imagination for it.”
This didn’t appear to soothe him. The opposite, if anything. “The way you looked when you opened it,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “After that, I couldn’t bring myself to ask if you would...” He pressed the pad of one long finger to a hard brass rivet, chasing the blood from his skin. “And anyway, It’s not the sort of thing a gentleman asks of a lady, is it?”
“No,” she said slowly, ashamed of herself now for making him feel so, and ashamed of the blazing jealousy that had struck like lightning from some roiling, dark part of her: that he might have asked other women, none of them ladies, for this sort of thing. That they almost certainly gave it to him. That he thought she was a lady, unfit to be asked, when he had only made her one by marrying her.
“No,” she said again, “I suppose it isn’t. But Peter–” she put her hand over his, on the hard, heavy crescent of leather that lay across his knee. “Might it be the sort of thing a husband asks of his wife?”
She watched the emotions play across his face like a film reel, the changes between them too quick to catch. In the end, his expression crumpled into pain. “I couldn’t,” he said. “Harriet, I wouldn’t make you do such a thing.”
Oh, and yet…he wished he could. He wanted her, that way. She could see it in the high color across his bony cheeks, his beaky nose. She had felt it in that field in Oxfordshire, as he held her throat in his hands and pretended he was teaching her to survive an attempt on her life. Did I let my animal nature get the better of me? he asked, and of course he hadn’t. Now she was beginning to wonder what might have happened if he had. Perhaps she had even wondered on that day, his thumb against the big vein in her neck, her vision red with mist and starred with black. There were things she would do for him–wanted to do with him–that her spirit would never have allowed with anyone else.
“Coward,” she said. She saw the flash of anger that ran before his surprise, his hurt, and chased it. “How many times did you propose to me? How many times did I refuse?”
“Oh, should I have stopped at one, like a sensible chap?” Then, a flash of sudden fear: “Harriet, I didn’t bully you into it, did I? This wasn’t just surrender to a siege?”
And what a silly man, to think that he had made her marry him. A silly man, and brave, to ask again and again in the face of her refusals. A man who could ask that question so many times, but could not even ask this question once.
“Of course it was,” she said, and she was so glad her fortress had fallen. She had never wanted it; Philip had made her build it. Every day behind those walls reminded her of him. Long dead, he had still kept her trapped.
But at her answer, Peter’s fear became anguish, swiftly stifled. “Forgive me then,” he said. “I was selfish.”
“‘Love is always selfish,” she said, for wasn’t the box labeled Lefanu? “‘The more ardent the more selfish.’”
He swallowed against the high white line of his collar, so the lamplight shivered on his tie. His pale eyes jumped unseeing from the ashtray to the pictures to the wainscoting, refusing to light on her face.
“Peter,” she said, and the timbre of her own voice surprised her: it was brought low with desire. “I love you most ardently. And I am selfish. So however much it pains you, I would ask you to make me, as you have made me before.”
He had looked up before she finished, his attention caught perhaps by the sound of her words, the heat in them.
“I have learnt,” she said, “to distrust my own desires. Like a beaten dog learns to shy away from its master’s hand.” She smoothed her own hand over the brass plate, feeling the edges of his name where the engraving cut through the metal. “But I…” The lump was back. Her words died in her throat.
Peter’s cool fingertips lifted her chin, so they were eye to eye. There was a question, a scientific curiosity in his gaze when he said, “Only monsters treat their dogs so cruelly.”
Whatever his words did to her—and certainly they had an effect—he saw the evidence as surely as she saw his question answered. The black of his pupils spread like ink, leaving an icy corona of blue. His nostrils flared and his grip on her chin grew firm.
“Harriet,” he said, very grave. “I would never seek to truly master you.”
She smiled, feeling the press of his thumb below her mouth. “No man could.”
He gave her chin a little shake. “Too true.”
“But Peter,” she said, already beginning to smile. “Perhaps you’d like master me…recreationally?”
A shocked moment of silence, and he burst into gales of relieved laughter. The collar slid to the floor in a jangle of buckles and rivets, forgotten in the joyful clutch of their hands.
“Domina,” he said, kissing her dirty knuckles. “There is none to equal you in all the world. Truly, your price is above rubies.”
The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her. “There is,” she said. “And even stubborner, to boot.”
There was a knock at the door, discreet and professional.
“Come,” said Peter, and kicked the collar underneath the settee.
“My lady,” said Bunter, “I took the liberty of drawing you a bath.”
“I amend my statement,” said Harriet. “There are two. And Bunter may be worth both of us put together.”
#
Harriet waited up after she went to bed, listening for his knock. It came much later than she expected, so that she was first disappointed, then piqued, then finally dozing, almost asleep.
“Dearest,” he said, putting his head round the edge of the door. “Are you awake?”
“I thought you had gone to bed.” She sat up, yawning, and patted the sheets. “Where have you been? Come here.”
He crossed the floor on pale, bare feet and sat at the edge of the bed. It was then she saw he had brought the collar; he carefully set it on the sheets between them. The corners of his eyes were pinched with worry. “I’m very sorry to have kept you waiting.”
“What’s the matter, Peter?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing should be the matter. I’ve been…trying to bring myself around to it. I spent so long, after the war, afraid to tell anyone what to do. You say that you don’t trust yourself. That you have learned to fear your own desires. So have I. I didn’t like it when you said I’d besieged you. I don’t like to think of forcing anything on you. On anyone... Not anymore.”
“But once?”
A brief flash of merriment in his pale eyes, a proud clasp of her hand. “There’s no slipping these things past you, is there?”
“Your Viennese singer,” she said, struggling for an even tone. “What about her?”
“Harriet,” he said, “Not with anyone. Not since the war.”
“Before?” she asked, steeling herself to the answer.
He dipped his head. “A little.”
The steeling didn’t help. She had never thought herself a jealous person but oh, it stung. “That day, outside of Elsfield,” she asked, fishing for proof of her own appeal. “When you tried to teach me how to defend myself, in the event of an attack.”
“I was in earnest,” he said. “I swear.”
“Only in earnest?”
Peter closed his eyes, lashes lain against his cheeks like white gold pins. A shell pink blush stained the bridge of his nose.
“I thought at the time it would make a good scene for a book,” she said. “A seduction.”
“Were you seduced?” he asked, ironical, without lifting his gaze.
She kissed his palm. “In spite of myself, I believe I was.”
“It could have been none but you.” He slipped his hand from hers and put it to her cheek. “I could not have asked anyone else. I would not have trusted them to say no.”
“You couldn’t even ask me,” she said.
He winced, and she was filled with tender pity. She didn’t want him cringing or afraid. She wanted what he wanted. She searched for the words that would convince him, and they came to her like an echo.
“Peter. You said the only sin passion can commit is joylessness. That it must lay down with laughter or in hell. So tell me now: placetne, magister?”
His breath came quickly and seemed to lift him all at once: chin up, shoulders back. As if to call him master made him one. As if her expectations lifted him to meet them. His hand on her cheek slid into her hair, cupped the back of her head, drew her face to his.
“Placet,” he said, already beginning to kiss her, so that when he bit down on the T he caught her lip between his teeth.
The pain made her flinch, but he read her body like a book and loosened his bite so that he held her but lightly. In the aftermath of pain, a glow of pleasure and the first hot crackle of need. She had told Ms. de Vine that if she once gave way to Peter she would go up like straw. By some miracle, she kept on burning, fresh kindling roaring to life each time she surrendered. And so she wanted to surrender, and surrender again, more fully.
Peter’s kisses were plush, encompassing things, well-practiced, at odds with his angular appearance and diffident manner. She sank into this one, his hands cradling her head behind the ears, sliding down until his thumbs rested in the hollows beneath her jaw, fit into the long grooves of her throat.
“I think,’ he said, already breathless, “that I should like to strangle you rather less scientifically some day. If you’ll allow it.”
“I would grant quite a lot of license to your roving hands,” she said, mangling the quote, not caring. Peter’s grip on her neck felt not like a threat but somehow like shelter, and like trust. Protection. Exactly as it had the day he invited her to step into a field, to let him play at killing her so she would know how to defend herself when the true attack came. Because he loved her.
“Peter,” she said, between his lingering kisses. She searched through the sheets blindly until she found the thing she was looking for. She lifted the collar and held it out to him, a strip of dark leather and gleaming brass with his name standing out in adamant copperplate.
He hesitated, hands half lifted, and she saw in the lamplight that he was trembling. And so, she met him halfway, laying the collar across his palms and saying: “How blest am I in this discovering thee! To enter in these bonds, is to be free.”
He closed his grip on the leather fast and hard, nearly gasping. Then her hands were over his, clasping them, and she was raining kisses across his face. “Te amo, magister, te adoro. Lux meā, vitā meā, animae meae dimidium.”
“Harriet,” he said, robbed of eloquence. “Oh, Harriet.”
“Cupio te,,” she insisted. “Cupio te tantum.” And he bore her down to the linen with the force of his full weight.
For a while she lost all sense of things. There was only Peter, and his attentions, and the answers her own body gave. And then, there was the chime of brass and buckle, and she saw the collar wrapped around his fist.
“Give me leave,” he said, forehead pressed to hers. “Otherwise I will not have the strength.”
Rather than answer in words, she lifted her chin and showed him her throat.
At the first press of the leather her pulse began to flutter; a transposition of fear, a new mode of desire. When the buckle pinched the thin skin of her neck, she cried out and Peter paused, then pressed a kiss to the warm metal and the tender bruise.
“Hush now,” he murmured, in a voice she hardly recognized. “Hush, meī canicula.”
The pitch of her own breathless whine shocked her, but Peter drank it from her mouth. Each time she swallowed, each time she moved her head, she felt the edge of the collar bite into her skin. A nip, a pinch, a reminder. Peter’s touch, even as his hands strayed elsewhere. One delved into the source of her pleasure, and the other snatched a fistful of her hair. Knuckles hard against her scalp, he spoke into her ear so his teeth grazed the skin: “‘You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.’”
And in spite of the studded collar, the heat of his breath, the gravity of the moment, laughter bubbled up in Harriet. Joyous, liquid laughter like champagne overflowing from a sabered bottle. It lit her body, lifted her into his embrace so that her merriment shook them both, her chest pressed to his.
“Domina?” he asked, half exiting his trance. His eyes were vague, black with desire.
She kissed his temple where the fair hair was damp with sweat and, to show she hadn’t lost the plot, tweaked him in a tender spot to make him yelp. “I just can’t believe you’ve read Carmilla.”
His own laughter cleared his expression so he was, for the moment, her old familiar Peter again. Curling his fingers beneath the edge of the collar, he gave her head a rough but loving shake. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, my lady, but I’m simply filled with surprises.”