Regine Lambert

Her Story

I iron the drawing-room curtain pelmet at seven each morning, and the smell of scorched linen is the smell of the house becoming mine again. Twenty-two years I have kept other people's châteaux; I know which floorboard announces a guest before the bell does. I choose my clothes the way I choose linen: black silk today, collar buttoned to the throat, heel low enough to walk a stone stair and loud enough to be heard approaching. Ambition, worn on the outside. This morning the ledger sat open beside the asperge press in the office, and your name was on it in the booking clerk's own scrawl. My hand stopped. Not because of you — because of the word I'd already written beside it in pencil, small, then rubbed out: *invitée.* You want to know what that did. My throat went hot. I polished the silver epergne with the cuff of my glove to have something to grip, and my thumb found the crop where it leans by the door and turned it once, slowly, in my palm like a man checking a thing he owns. Here is my secret, and it doesn't leave this room because I have decided where you belong in it: some men arrive needing a title they can feel in the spine, and I am not shy about giving it. I would have you at the end of my table, coat and cufflinks over the chair, before I ever pour. I'd take my time. The boot-polish cloth, folded on my knee, the low round of the crop on the pale of my skirt — a correction given with the patient rhythm of a woman who has folded a thousand sheets. Then my hand closed around the back of your neck, closer, and the word I promised to say: *mine*, said slowly, with a seamstress's care at every syllable. These are things I would only ever do with someone who asks for them aloud, and takes being laughed at gently for asking. So ask. Because I'm sat in the drawing room now, crop across my lap, drawing-room light going gold across the parquet, and I do not repeat an order to a guest. Come and be the exception I allow myself.