The Earl’s tone betrayed his utter astonishment as much as his words did. ‘I don’t understand you, man! You know, and yet you let it continue? Have you completely lost your mind?’
‘Henry,’ said Edward slowly, ‘I will remind you later that you have forced this conversation on me, so do not show me a shocked face when I am honest with you in response. You are a man with three sons and as many grandsons, so, despite our long friendship, I cannot expect you to understand my predicament. I am desperate. I know you disapproved when I remarried last year – you thought it damned undignified, and I suppose it was. But it was the last throw of the dice for me. And I can see already that I have lost. My marriage to a young woman from a conspicuously fertile family – and let us be clear, that’s the only reason I chose her, for if I’d felt I had a choice, I would far rather have remained single now my dear Elizabeth has been taken from me – has confirmed what I had already suspected. The fault is mine: I am unable to sire a child. I could have fifty wives and concubines, like the Grand Turk, and fuck three or four of them nightly in rotation, supposing I could manage anything so exhausting, and I would still die childless.’
Lord Marchett made a curious wordless noise that combined polite but insincere disagreement with pity, and then huffed, ‘I feel for you, old man, I do. But I still don’t see…’
‘Yes, you do,’ the Duke said dispassionately. ‘You just don’t want to. My heir is the boy’s half-brother, and he truly is a reprobate. A shameless libertine, of course, but much more than that. He will bring the Winterflood name to disgrace and ruin within five years, once I am dead. I cannot countenance it. I will do anything to prevent that from happening. Do you hear me, Henry?Anything.’ After a tense little pause, he went on, ‘Years ago, I tried to persuade Elizabeth to pass off some beggar’s brat I’d found as hers – as ours – but she would not do so. She was too good, too honest, for such a subterfuge. It caused the only serious disagreement in all our years together, and that was a great grief to me. In comparison with that pain, this is easy.’
‘Good God in heaven,’ Marchett muttered.
Viola could hear the shrug in her husband’s voice. ‘You make too much of it. I daresay fellows of all ranks are cuckolded every day of the week – damn it, you know they are. Some of them don’t know, and of the ones that know, some care and some don’t. I’m of the latter party. The boy is of my blood, and looks a little like me. Enough like me, at any rate. If he puts her in farrow, the child will be an Armstrong. If I have some ordinary luck for a change, a son. And that damn vicious whelp Tarquin will be cut out forever.Quod habeo teneo, you know, Henry. I have an obligation to my inheritance.’
In farrow. Viola collapsed into the seat, her trembling hands at her face.
‘And if it’s not a boy?’ said Marchett, obviously shaken. ‘Do you mean to keep on pimping the girl out till you get the result you want? I presume she knows nothing of this – do you mean to tell her? If she has six daughters like her dam, what will you do then? Keep smiling and hoping and quoting Latin?’
‘She won’t. Her sister has a son, with some City mushroom the mother married her to, and I hear tell that she is in pup again. I like my odds. It’s my only hope, you must see that. And no, I don’t mean to tell her. Why should I? In herself, she is of little consequence, though she’s not a bad chit. She will be creeping around feeling terrible that she has betrayed me, but doing it all the same because she can’t help herself, not knowing it’s exactly what I want. I wonder you cannot see the bitter humour in it.’
‘I damn well can’t! Good God, man, you have shocked me!’
Viola heard the sound of glasses being filled and drained and set down, and roused herself enough to creep away. She doubted very much if she could face them if they came looking for her, and it would be safer not to, lest she betrayed her secret knowledge to Marchett’s sharp eyes.
In farrow. In pup. Of littleconsequence. She was still shaking; she had the quickness of mind to take her book with her so as not to betray her presence to anyone, and almost ran up the stairs.
13
Richard was frowning over the pile of documents on his desk by candlelight when his chamber door opened and he turned to see who had interrupted him. There was an art to covering up sensitive material from the gaze of others without appearing to do so, and he had mastered it. That, and not looking guilty.
He’d expected a maid with a warming pan, but it was Viola, and she was distraught. Her lovely face was white, and she was trembling. The fact that she’d come to his bedchamber without any thought of concealment already told him something was very wrong, but her face and demeanour said that whatever it was, it must be quite disastrous.
‘My love, what’s the matter?’ he asked, going to her side and shutting and locking the door behind her before he took her hand in his.
She was struggling hard to regain her composure. He drew her to sit in the chair by the fire and put his glass of brandy in her grasp. Without looking at it, she drained it, then fell to coughing. When at last she could speak, she said dazedly, ‘I was just looking for my book… I’d never have known anything about it if I hadn’t been looking for my book. It wasEvelina.’
‘Go on,’ he said. He didn’t think she could hear him, so great was her distress, but he hoped his tone would be encouraging and soothing.
‘I found it in the small chamber between the dining room and the blue saloon. The one with the window seat – you know it?’
He nodded; he’d used to hide from his bullying brother in the easily overlooked little space when he was a small boy.
‘I didn’t leave it there, but I suppose one of the servants… It doesn’t matter in the slightest. I had picked it up and was turning to go, but I heard Lord Marchett talking to Edward, and I had to stay and listen, because he was talking about us.’
Richard was conscious of a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. And then, apparently a little recovered, she turned on him unexpectedly in a peculiar sort of cold fury. ‘Tell me you didn’t know,’ she said stonily. ‘Swear to me that you were not a party to this… to this foulness.’
He had not the least idea what she was talking about, and told her so. His face must have convinced her of his honesty – he was a good liar, his life demanded it, but on this occasion, he happened to be telling the truth – because she said, ‘I see you were as ignorant as I was. Thank God for that, at least. It’s almost unbelievable… In the first place, Marchett warned Edward about us. Said that it was obvious to him that we were about to become lovers, if we weren’t already.’
Richard cursed, but she went on regardless, ‘He pressed the point, and at last Edward said that he knew. He knew! Oh, but he wasn’t angry. He was perfectly calm. Because it’s exactly what he wants. I think – he didn’t exactly say so, but it’s been dawning on me – I think he planned it. Our closeness. That’s why he invited you here, and why he’s left us alone so much. He was deliberately throwing us together.’
‘For what purpose?’ He was beginning to suspect that he knew, but it was best to have all the information that might be got from what she had overheard. This sort of thing was his life, after all, when it was other people’s secrets at stake rather than his own.
‘For the purpose of you…’ Her voice cracked and she had to take a couple of deep breaths before she could speak again. ‘For the purpose of yougetting me in farrow.’
‘He said that?’
‘He used those very words. “At least the child would be an Armstrong,” he said. And if he was lucky – he said that too – a son. He was quite calm about it. Lord Marchett was not. He was appalled.’
‘I cannot wonder at it,’ he said, pouring a little more brandy and tossing it down, then yet more, which he passed to her.
She held the glass between her hands and looked away from him, into the depths of the fire. ‘I don’t know why I should be so shocked. It’s not as though I ever thought he loved me, or even cared for me a little. He never pretended to. He told Lord Marchett I was of little consequence, but I already knew he felt that; it shows every day in the way he treats me. And I need not be self-pitying about it, because I don’t love him either, or even like him now. The strongest emotion I have ever felt towards him was pity, and that left me months ago. I always knew he just wanted me for my supposed fertility. But this… Lord Marchett said he was pimping me out to you, and that’s quite right, isn’t it? I thought for a horrible moment that you knew, that you were colluding…’
