“Frances and I are to call at Lady Berry’s this afternoon,” she said. “We are going to Vauxhall tonight.”
“Vauxhall?” he said. “It is beautiful during the evening, Arabella. Also potentially dangerous. You will need to be careful.”
“We are to be of Lord Farraday’s party,” she said. “Mr. Hubbard is to be there. Sir John Charlton. Theodore. Others. I shall be quite safe, thank you.”
She had not once looked at him. Her voice was coldly polite. Lord Astor dropped his eyes to the paragraph he had been reading but found after two minutes that he no longer remembered even so much as the topic of the article. He closed the paper, folded it, and set it beside his empty cup.
“If you are not planning to be busy during the next hour, Arabella,” he said, “I would like to talk with you in the library.”
“After breakfast I always consult with the cook and the housekeeper,” she said. “But my first duty is to you, of course, my lord. Are you leaving me now? Will you give me ten minutes?”
“At your convenience, Arabella,” he said, rising to his feet, bowing to her, and walking from the room.
Arabella would not let her shoulders sag. The butler was still standing at the sideboard. And she would not leave half the muffin on her plate. She ate it in small mouthfuls, chewing tediously what felt like straw in her mouth. She would not show by even the smallest sign that she suffered. This day was to begin the pattern of all the rest of her days. She would approach it with dignity. She would not become a weepy, vaporish female.
There was still something very unreal about the whole situation. Soon she must wake up to find it all some dreadful nightmare. But she knew that there was no waking up to do. It was all true. She had married a man without any sense of honor or decency.
Whenever she allowed herself to think about the last three weeks—and just as much when she did not allow it—she felt nauseated again. And panic constantly threatened to grab her by the stomach. She had known all along that her husband could not care for her deeply, that she was not the type of lady to attract the very handsome Lord Astor. She had been beset by a strong sense of her own inferiority all through her acquaintance with him.
But she had never dreamed that he would be unfaithful to her. She must be very naive, she supposed. She knew that men kept mistresses. She knew there were such creatures as courtesans—she had seen some of them in the streets close to the theater and the opera house. But she had never thought that any of the fashionable gentlemen of her acquaintance would associate with such females. Perhaps some of the noisy, foppish young men who crowded the floor of the theater and ogled one with such impertinence might do so, but not the more respectable married men. And certainly not her husband.
She thought in great agony of the nights when he had come to her and she had been so scrupulous about giving herself completely to the man she had freely agreed to marry. Even when she had been afraid on the first two occasions. Even when she had been shy at the beginning. Mama had told her that men derived pleasure from the marriage act—it was not just for the creation of children. And she had wanted her husband to have pleasure even from her less-than-desirable person. She had wanted to be a good wife.
Yet he could have had no pleasure with her at all. All those nights in the past week and more when she had looked forward to his coming with some eagerness and had enjoyed his touch when he came, he had come only in order to create children in her. He would not have kept Miss Cox if he had had pleasure with his wife. He went to Miss Cox for pleasure. The beautiful, voluptuous Miss Cox. He did with Miss Cox the same things that had become so precious to her.
That terrible dull ache that was in her stomach, in her throat, in her nostrils threatened yet again to turn to panic. Arabella picked up her cup, held it with both hands in order to steady it, and sipped the strong, tepid coffee. He wanted to talk to her. Her husband had summoned her. She would obey.
“Thank you,” she said, pushing back her chair even as the butler came to assist her. “You may clear away now.”
She walked along the hallway to the library, nodded to a footman, who rushed to open the door for her, and stepped inside.
Lord Astor closed a leather-bound volume with a snap and got to his feet.
“Come in, Arabella,” he said, “and have a seat.”
She perched stiffly on the edge of the chair across from the one he had just vacated. He did not sit down again.
“I see that your purpose has not cooled since yesterday,” he said, pausing and looking down at her.
She was regarding the hands that were clasped in her lap. “No,” she said. “I did not speak impulsively.”
“We must talk this out,” he said. “Otherwise our life together will become intolerable.”
She looked up at him slowly, her eyes stony. She said nothing.
“Arabella,” he said, “when I met you and married you, Ginny was my mistress. During the weeks when you have been growing to like me and become proud of me, as you put it yesterday, Ginny has been my mistress. I am not a different person suddenly because you have discovered the truth. I am not a monster.”
“You are a liar,” she said. “You lied to me on our wedding day, and—worse—you lied to God.”
“I am sorry,” he said. “You cannot know how sorry I am that you have discovered the truth. Not because I enjoy deceiving you. And not because I am ashamed. But because you have been hurt. But you need not be, Arabella. I respect you. I have grown fond of you. I hoped—and I still hope—that we can develop a friendship and an affection for each other.”
“May I ask you something?” Arabella asked, looking steadily at him. “If you were to discover that I had been ... had been ... that I was Mr. Hubbard’s mistress or Lord Farraday’s or someone else’s, would you be satisfied with my explanation that I still respected you, that I was still fond of you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Arabella,” he said impatiently. “That is an entirely different matter.”
“Is it?” she said. “In what way?”
“You are a woman and will bear children,” he said. “Besides, this is just the way our society works. Most ladies of any maturity accept the situation and would think it ill-bred to seem to know the truth.”
