Part 8 -The Moment
Featherington glances once up the backstreet and then once down the backstreet, not really caring if anyone sees him standing at one of Madame's discrete doors or not. He has more tortured things on his mind. If the doorman notices my lord baron's bleak expression, he says nothing. It's not his job. The man nods, allows the 'regular' in and resumes his chair by the portal. Lord F knows the routine.
Archie wanders his way up various passages to the ornate front hall and the foot of the grand stair. If anyone else is walking Madame's famed halls, he does not notice them. He mounts the stairs automatically, his mind swaying between the shambles his home life has become and the fact that he has nowhere to go other than forward with the task he'd agreed to do.
And Catia is part of that.
He knocks on the door (he always has since she first escorted him through it), opens it and she is there, sweeping forward to meet him in an at-home gown, pastel peach in color with a high lace-smothered neckline, her little nothing kid slippers peeping teasingly out at him as she advances all aglow. Her thick dark curls are pulled into a tail and hang over one shoulder.
She waves a bit of paper as if attempting to banish all his cares by magic. "M'lord Cidade de Penas!" she trills, her latest little joke, "I have a name. Two of my porco feio thugs have –"
And she stops. Featherington rallies himself to look interested and pleased but his I-and-P reservoir is very low and apparently Catia, the frivolous foreign stranger of quick and easy gratification, sees what Portia, the virtuous and devoted wife, has not cared to notice for a decade. He is very unhappy.
Catia lets the scrap of paper drift from her fingers to find its own way to the card table and steps up to him. "Meu pobre Archie," she murmurs, and takes his hat, his coat, draping them over the rack there. "How unhappy you look, docinho. Sit. Drink. I will order food from Madame's kitchen. You will tell me your troubles. We will vaneesh them like smoke."
Catia twists a knob hidden near the door which sounds a bell in some distant part of Madame's house and, taking Featherington's arm, guides him slowly over to the lounge, listening as he blusters denials that anything is wrong, then backpedals, then finally falls mute and collapses onto the cushions, putting his head in his hands and simply grieves.
She leaves him to give hushed orders for dainties to the maid at the door, then returns to perch beside her guest, taking his cold hands in hers to warm them, urging him in soft gentle words to talk, to sip wine, to shed tears if he wills. She leaves him once again to receive the tray of comfort foods and returns to listen as the dam gives way and he spills out the story of his bleak despair. She does nothing more than listen with sympathy in her dark eyes, eyes that he can no longer ignore.
Outside, the evening closes down, the one streetlamp is lit and late revelers wander home. When it gets dark enough, Catia floats silently about the chamber, lighting candles as Archie struggles to regain control of himself, to find some sane reason for carrying on.
Sometime after that, Featherington's boots come off and slippers miraculously take their place, the better to relax him. Then the tailcoat comes away so as not to impede his comfort as he leans on the elegant back of the lounge, sipping wine and trying to pretend his life isn't coming apart at the seams. He even removes his stock to laugh more heartily at her impressions of the pompous Portuguese Regency Council. He wonders briefly if there is some sort of comedic training course for courtesans or if this is a special effort she is making, just for him? It is enchanting and she is so beautiful...
Later, as she feeds him tidbits from the tray, a momentary warning flickers in his mind that he is being seduced. Catia has been sitting upright and queenly on the other end of the lounge but now she is closer, more intimate, as he talks about his early life at sea, meeting his wife, his infant daughters, and the sudden elevation to the barony and the beginning of the end. Suddenly she is closer, whispering how sorry she is for his great misery, and dimly, falteringly, Featherington begins to feel the life he is so lamenting is not so much to lose after all.
Then somehow they are kissing and Catia murmurs against his lips, his jaw, and then his throat that there is still happiness and beauty in the world, were he to only look for it. And Archie discovers, as she takes his hands and draws him up from the lounge, that there is no more beautiful sight than a peach-colored robe slipping from bare dark shoulders as she leads him to her patiently waiting bed.
END – part 8
*S/P notes: Cidade de Penas = City of Feathers, porco feio = ugly pig, docinho = sweetie.*
