“Your daughter—Helena—would have been Devlin’s age now,” she said quietly, wondering if all her talk about her children had struck a nerve with him.
“Yes,” he said. “Almost exactly.”
Almost exactly. Yet he had married Poppy after she married Caleb. Which must mean…But it was none of her business.
“Did you ever consider remarrying?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
He obviously did not want to talk about what must have beenthe most painful period of his life. They sat in silence for a few minutes—a not uncomfortable silence.
“I was at the ball here during the summer fete ten years ago,” he said. “I did not usually go, you know. I always enjoyed the activities of the day, but I never had energy left to come back here in the evening to trip the light fantastic with all my neighbors. On that occasion, however, Oscar Holland and his wife would not take no for an answer, so I came.”
The culminating event of every fete had always taken place in the ballroom here. The dancing usually spilled out onto the terrace, where she and Matthew had drunk their coffee a short while ago. They had almost always been fortunate enough to have lovely weather. Indeed, she could not remember a year when they had not.
“I was sorry for what happened that evening,” he said.
Caleb had come up here to this very place after supper with one of the guests at the ball—a newcomer to the village, a pretty young woman who had described herself as a widow in search of some peace. In fact, she had been Caleb’s mistress, whom he had brought from London with him after the parliamentary session came to an end. He had crossed an invisible line that year. He had spent a few months of every spring in London, leaving his family here, and of course Clarissa had known he did not remain celibate during those months. But never before had he tried to bring his two worlds together.
Devlin, who had come up to the temple folly with Gwyneth on some sort of romantic tryst of their own, had found the two lovers inside the temple under compromising circumstances. And Devlin had chosen to make a fuss, a very loud and public fuss, which had ended down on the terrace outside the ballroom and put an abruptend to the ball. There had been no way of glossing over what had happened.
“It was one of those catastrophes from which it seems recovery is impossible,” she said. “I believed the world as I knew it had come to an end. I sent Devlin away. He saw it as open rejection on my part, and in some way perhaps he was right—to my shame. But mostly, I believe, I wanted to shield him from the crashing inward of his world. For he had not known. I do not believe any of our children had.”
“But you had?” he said.
“Of course,” she said. “I had been married longer than twenty years at the time, Matthew. It would have been impossible not to know. But no word was ever spoken between us. And, if it is possible to believe, ours was in many ways a good marriage. We were fond of each other, and we both adored our children. He would weep when it was time to return to London and again when he returned for the summer. It was not hypocrisy. He genuinely loved his home and family.”
She knew from his initial silence that he was not convinced.
“I am not sure if you know how you were spoken of in the village and neighborhood after it happened,” he said. “It was never ever with derision or condemnation, Clarissa, though I know women are often blamed when their men go astray, as though there was some deficiency in them that excused the men for seeking comfort elsewhere. You were always spoken of with respect and sympathy and admiration. You were seen as the perfect lady before it happened, and that did not change afterward, though for a long while you became almost a hermit.”
She sighed. “And what did you think of me, Matthew?” she asked before she could stop herself.
He turned to look directly at her, and suddenly she could see the boy he had been in the burning light of his eyes.
“I wanted to kill the bast—. I wanted to kill him with my bare hands,” he said.
“Ah.” She could not think what else to say. She despised herself for the thrill of pleasure his words gave her.
“At this rate,” he said, getting abruptly to his feet, “the Ellis baby is going to be born before I even make a start on his crib. Or hers. And Miss Wexford is going to don full mourning over the absence of her new table. Not to mention all the other jobs that need my attention. I must take my leave, Clarissa.”
She rose too, and they stepped outside the temple into the sunshine. She paused there, and he came to a stop beside her.
“Matthew,” she said, not looking at him. “Has it occurred to you that for the past six years there has been no reason at all why we cannot be friends again?”
“I believe we always have been friends,” he said.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “We have been friendly. It is a different thing. The past hour or two has taken me back to the way it used to be between us. We could always talk of things we did not confide to anyone else.”
“Yes,” he said. “It was usually me, spewing anger and frustration.”
“Not always,” she said. “You shared dreams too, just as I did. We used to find a great deal to laugh over. I want you to know I am going to be here alone at Ravenswood for at least the next couple of months. It was a deliberate choice on my part. I do not feel lonely. But I do feel that with the approach of my fiftieth birthday I need to rethink my life, look to the future more than I do the past. Will you be a part of that future? May we be friends again? May wespend some time together? When you have some to spare from your work, that is. And if it is something you want too. It is altogether possible you do not. Thirty-three years is a long time, after all. There may be nothing left to bring us together again except nostalgia.”
She was embarrassed by her own words and wished with all her heart she had kept her mouth shut.
“You want me to come here and spend time with you?” he asked, frowning. “People would inevitably see us. And people talk.”
“Does it matter?” she asked.
