‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘No. I swear on my mother’s grave, I had no idea. You know I tried to talk to him about you, about the way he neglects you. What a fool I was. He must have been laughing at me all the while.’
‘Laughing, mentally rubbing his hands because his plan was working and you were beginning to be interested in me, just as he had hoped. I could hate him now, Richard, now that the shock is wearing off. I think I do hate him.’
‘I cannot wonder at it. I would never have believed such a thing of my cousin if anybody but you had told me. You have not been unfaithful to him, and I have not betrayed his friendship. Kissing is not infidelity, or, if it is, it is a small form of treason, because you have not given away anything he valued or wanted. He has no use for your kisses, or your precious affection, or anything that makes you the person that you are.’
‘No. No, it seems to me that he has betrayed us, if anything,’ she said, looking back at him with dark, tragic eyes. ‘Your friendship, and my wedding vows. I meant them when I said them, for though I did not love him, I earnestly hoped that I could one day; I don’t know whathewas thinking. This, maybe, even then? Which is revolting. Despicable. I was only seventeen, and he stood in a church with me, and lied. He told Lord Marchett a moment ago that you and I were bound to make love sooner or later – though of course, he did not call it that. I don’t know if that’s true, if we would have. I’ll never know now.’
‘What will you do? What shouldwedo?’
She said slowly, ‘Much as I hate to lose you, I must think you should leave. I don’t see how you can stay here, knowing how the cousin you once respected so much has tried to manipulate you and make use of you, for his own selfish purposes.’
He shifted uncomfortably, unable to deny her logic but reluctant to admit it. ‘I don’t want to abandon you to him. You told me you felt as though you were going mad. The situation is worse now, and surely unendurable for you.’
‘Then take me with you.’
14
He looked at her for a moment and she could not tell what he was thinking. ‘I can’t,’ he said heavily at last. ‘I love you – Viola, I do, more than I can adequately express. I could ask for nothing more than to spend my life with you. But I have no money to support a wife, or…’
‘Or a mistress.’ She was surprised at how level her voice sounded in her own ears.
He looked shame-faced, and did not try to deny that that was what she would be. She knew it would be childish for either of them to pretend otherwise. ‘We could say that we were married, and strangers at least would believe it, but I live in a squalid little room when I am not travelling. And I’m away for months at a time. You’d be no better off than you are here, no less alone. It would be so wonderful when we were together, but we so rarely would be. What would you do all day long?’
‘What do I do now? Nothing with any point to it.’ But she didn’t say this with any energy. She knew he was right.
‘But at least you’re safe. You would be all alone in London, in a down-at-heel area, which is all I can afford. Your family might easily cast you off if you left Edward – they would have to, if I understand their situation, because your reputation as a runaway wife, an adulteress…’
‘Would damage that of my sisters, and utterly ruin their chances of making decent marriages. Threaten the whole family’s future, in fact, and fill my poor father’s last years with terrible anxiety. Destroy everything my mother has worked for. Mean that if Laurence did not support them for the rest of their lives, they would all be close to destitute.’ She laid out all the horrors of her situation in quite a matter-of-fact manner, and she was proud of her ability to do it when she felt her heart was breaking apart in her chest. She needed to be strong.
‘It is so wrong,’ he said passionately, ‘that you should have so much pressure placed on you. Your life is pulled out of any natural shape by what your family want from you, and what Edward wants from you. There is no space for whatyouwant, and the damnable fact is, there’s nothing I can do for you. I cannot even ask you to wait, because I have no prospects. Even if I make my way in the world through my own efforts, which I hope to, it may take years till I have any security. There is none at present.’
‘I know. The horrible truth is, however furious I am, however much I hate him now, I am tied to Edward forever. There can be no escape for me save through his death, or mine. Even if it were possible for me to free myself through divorce, my family situation, my concern for my sisters’ futures, means I could never contemplate such a scandalous course of action. It would ruin them as well as me. That would still be a fact even if I could afford the enormous cost, which of course, I cannot. It was a foolish, selfish thing to say – forget it, if you can.’
He fell to his knees at her feet, taking her cold hands in his and kissing them fervently. ‘It was not foolish. Don’t say that, or even think it. I would wish for nothing better in the world than that we could be together always, and as happy and secure as we deserve. Both of us. But the forces that seek to keep us apart are so powerful – it’s not even the people, it’s not even your mother and your sisters and bloody Edward, or my employers; it’s great impersonal forces of circumstance.’
‘They can’t keep us apart tonight, however powerful they are,’ she told him with sudden heat. ‘I absolutely refuse to go back to my room and wait meekly for Edward to come to me again, or not to come, if he has stayed up drinking too late with Marchett and feels himself to be incapable. He knows he is infertile, he says – well then, he might as well leave me alone. I am sorry if he needs the pretence – no, I am not. I don’t know if I want to lie with you tonight, Richard, as a woman does with a man – I feel cold and sick and used. And I don’t want to think, or for you to think, that if I give myself to you fully, it might be out of shock or even some perverse desire for revenge on Edward. We both deserve better than that. But I would like to sleep in your bed, in your arms. If you will have me.’
‘Come, my love,’ he said, rising and taking her in his arms. ‘At least we can give each other comfort.’
With great tenderness, he helped her undress down to her shift, and in a little while, they were embracing. She lay close against him with her head on his chest, and he stroked her dark hair and held her, and after a while, she cried silently at the hopelessness of it all, and he wiped her wet cheeks, and kissed them. But he did no more than that, and she did not want him to.
Perhaps the Duke went to her chamber to seek her out and found her absent, or perhaps that night he did not – they had no means of knowing. At last, they fell asleep and lay curled together until early morning, when Richard woke her and she left him wordlessly. She went creeping along the silent corridors with her gown bundled in her arms, realising as he had that it really would be folly to allow the servants to know that she had not slept in her own bed. Her situation was quite complicated enough without that fresh danger.
15
Viola remained in her chamber the next morning, and Richard could not blame her for it. He sat down to breakfast with his cousin and Lord Marchett, and he hoped his face did not betray any of the turmoil he was feeling, and especially his burning anger with Winterflood. He could not detect any difference in Edward’s manner towards him, and so was still unsure whether the Duke had attempted to visit his wife last night or not; if he had, and found her absent, he was concealing his feelings about the matter exceedingly well. Richard would not have suspected him capable of such subterfuge, such ruthlessness, but then, perhaps he’d never really known him. He should have realised that everyone had secrets – not just him.
The butler came in to tell his master that the estate steward Thompson would be grateful for a word as a matter of some urgency, and Edward excused himself, leaving his friend and his young cousin alone in uneasy silence. Richard drank coffee with a show of unconcern and waited for what he had a shrewd idea was coming. Marchett struck him as the interfering type. ‘Mean to make a long visit here, do you, Armstrong?’ the older man said with no marked degree of friendliness.
Here it comes,Richard thought resignedly.
‘Edward has been good enough to tell me he is happy to host me for as long as I am able to stay,’ he responded with a show of calmness. ‘But the necessity of earning a living will take me away soon enough, I am sorry to say. This has been a brief holiday for me.’Not that it’s any of your affair, you nosey old toast,he wanted to add.
‘You’re employed in some capacity in the City, I understand.’ The man’s tone suggested he might as well have asked if Richard emptied privies for a living. And perhaps he did, in a sense – after all, someone had to.
Richard met the Earl’s gaze steadily. The old man was something high up in the Foreign Office, he knew, and therefore could not be a complete fool. ‘I am, sir. My cousin paid for my education and offered to make me an allowance when I was grown, but I did not think it right to take him up on it, not least because he has made no such offer to my brother, his heir, saying with justice that he would only squander it. And – unlike my brother – I am not one for sitting idle when I can be filling my time more usefully.’
‘I can see that,’ Marchett said drily. ‘Very busy, active sort of a fellow, it’s quite plain. I’m sure your business in London – and elsewhere – must be pressing. Best you go back to it, don’t you think?’
