“I ought not to have burdened you with that revelation,” he said. “It was not important.”
“I will certainly respect your right not to talk about it,” she said. “But I will not allow you to get away with telling me it was unimportant, Matthew. Our friendship was always based upon truth telling.”
He looked at the other half of his tart but put it back on his plate rather than into his mouth. He took another sip of his lemonade.
“Since Tuesday I have been feeling like the boy I was when we were friends,” he said. “And somehow last evening I found myself reverting to that time and blurting out to you the depths of my guilt and misery. I ought not to have done so. It was grossly unfair to you. And it was not…who I am now. I am not that boy any longer. I have managed my own life and affairs and problems quite successfully for more than thirty years. I will continue to do so. I am sorry about last night. Truly sorry.”
“Matthew,” she said softly. “Tell me about Poppy.”
He was certainly not expecting that. She had known Poppy, of course. Everyone had. She had been the daughter of a ne’er-do-well drunkard of a small landowner and his slattern of a wife, who had given up early the struggle to keep a tidy home and raise a decent family. Poppy, pretty and spirited and sharp-tongued, had worked at a tavern and had inevitably acquired a reputation for being unchaste. Whether the reputation was justified or not had been questionable.
“You will have heard all the rumors,” he said. “She was increasing with…Helena when I married her. I had lain with her and took the consequences. She was not a bad person. She was human. She was my wife.”
He thought of picking up his glass and sipping his lemonade again during the silence that followed. But he was not sure his hand would remain steady.
“Did you…lie with her while you and I were still friends?” she asked.
“No,” he said sharply. “No. I did not.”
“Was it because I was going to marry Caleb?” she asked.
He set his elbows on his knees, bowed his head, and pressed his two bent forefingers against his eyes.
“I will not answer that,” he said. “I lay with her, I married her, and I cared for her. She died, and I buried her with our daughter. That is all.”
Except for a terrible ache about his heart. Poppy might have lived all these years if he had not lain with her. And he had not done so out of love or even any real desire. He had done so in an effort to forget another pain, another woman. He had cared for her and he would have continued to do so. But he knew he would never have loved her, not in the way a woman has a right to be loved by her husband.
And if he had not lain with her, of course, and she had already been with child by another man, she might have lived the last months of her life with a reputation shattered beyond repair.
“She seemed happy enough. She had a good home, where she was safe and well fed and cared for. My grandmother, though appalled with me, treated her with surprising kindness. Poppy,impertinent though she often was with everyone else, behaved toward my grandmother with a sort of awed respect.”
He realized he had spoken aloud.
“And you would have continued to care for her if she had lived,” Clarissa said. “You would have seen it as your duty. And through her you would have found your way through, Matthew, to the person you could be. Not quite as you found it when you went away after her death. In a different way. But you would have done it. You would not have neglected or abandoned her. Or mistreated her.”
“Even given the person I was then?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Even given that.”
He was amazed by her words. He would have assumed she had despised him for marrying Poppy, that she might have seen it as some sort of revenge against his father or perhaps against her for so abruptly marrying the Earl of Stratton. But no. Somehow, despite the odds, Clarissa had always believed in him. She believed he would have stepped up to take responsibility for what he had done so impulsively out of the depths of his misery. Was she right? He would never know.
“But she died,” he said.
“Yes.”
He picked up the other half of the jam tart again and looked at it before returning it to his plate. He could not finish it or eat anything else.
“I am sorry,” he said, getting to his feet. “I am not hungry. I hope I will not offend your cook.”
“Don’t go home yet,” she said. “You are feeling too miserable. Take a walk with me. In silence if you wish. You have reminded melately that we were always as good at that as we were at talking. And every relationship should consist of both.”
“I will not be good company,” he said before smiling despite himself. “But I rarely was, was I?”
“You were company I always liked,” she said, setting her glass upon the tray and standing up. “I still do. I will walk with you as far as the bridge at least.”
“Very well,” he said.
Chapter Sixteen
