“We have no choice—I will not sit back and let you destroy your career, your very dreams. Our future.”
Her voice grew dangerously steady. “And I will not let you destroy ourchild.”
“It’s not a child, it’s a leech. A problem. You’ll not be able to dance when it grows bigger—why, you’ll barely be able to walk!”
“A leech?”
He was silent. There was pacing. “Listen, Vi—”
“No,youlisten, Marcus. You may be my husband, but you have no right, under God, to force me to end a life that the Almighty has created.” A soft rustling as she moved close. “Created between us, out of our love. Don’t you see how precious it is?”
“If it came in another five years, yes. I could see the beauty in it. But now, when everything is just beginning for us? I’m sorry, but it simply isn’t possible. Nor will you convince me to want it. I’ll send a surgeon by your rooms and we’ll speak no more of this.”
“Marcus!” Her voice was frantic.
“That’s my final word, Vi. As your husband. As head of this family. I will not accept any refusal from you. I give into your whims whenever I can, but on this,I will not be moved.”
Something slammed, then the footsteps stalked away, and it was over.
I clutched the arm of that couch so hard my fingers ached.
So that was the big secret. That was the reason for the end of their epic love story—the end of Mama’s stage career. He’d been the love of her life, she his prop. And I—an unwanted mistake. I could barely breathe around the shattered pieces of my heart. Never before had I felt the intense burden of my existence, and such a disconnect from humanity and purpose. I had ruined everything—simply by existing.
I climbed to my bedchamber and stared at my face in the mirror, the plain features offset by vivid eyes—the eyes of my father who wasn’t truly a father at all. He was merely a manaccidentally saddled with a child. I took that hurt to bed with me, huddled up around it, and tried to sleep before the big performance.
When I woke in the morning, the sense of loss felt heavier. There was only one thing I could do with myself, one place I could take all my thoughts.
35
Jack had followed her out of habit. He’d been watching over her for so long that he couldn’t seem to cut himself off. He’d spotted Ella Blythe striding across the market square in Covent Garden, obviously on a mission, so he’d followed her all the way to a little church just off Cheapside.
She stood now with another woman—her sister, most likely—huddled together in the hilly cemetery before a new stone that had been placed on a grave that had already been patted firm with time. He sensed that the stone, that neatly carved slab, bore the nameViola de Silva, and that knowledge made him ache for poor Ella in spite of everything. At last she had a real name to put on it—and closure. He’d done that much for her, even if he couldn’t see his way clear to doing more.
The taller woman leaned onto Ella, wrapping her arms around her. How interesting that it was Ella’s true mother lying there, yet Ella was the one holding up her rather distraught sister. But then again, her sister was the one completely alone in the world.
Well, almost alone.
Did Lily have any notion of it? Any idea of the precious child somewhere out in the world who belonged to her, was a part of her being—but now lived with strangers? No, of course not. Ella had chosen to purge her sister’s life of that “troublesome complication” so that her sister might appear righteous. Enough for a respectable husband, at least. In reality, though, how could any sort of moral purity be achieved by removing the purest being to exist in that house?
Then she had gone home and lied about it—lied to her mother and sister, breaking their hearts with the news that the baby had died on the way to the free hospital. Even with the deception, she seemed to think now that her choice was not so very terrible—she’d been young, acting out of love, making what she could of a terrible situation—but that only made it more repugnant.
Hands buried deep in his pockets, he slipped up the stone steps and into the modest little Methodist church to offer them privacy—and to escape. He paused just inside the entrance, enveloped in silence, standing small and still at the back of the empty nave lit by high windows and glowing candles above. He hadn’t been inside one of these in many years, and the solemn atmosphere invaded his calm.
It was a simple church erected in a poorer parish, a stone structure with a wood-beamed ceiling and unadorned stone pulpit up front, but the magnitude of the place, the vast openness above, the pillars along the aisle all the way to the chancel, culled an inescapable sense of awe.
He didn’t like being overwhelmed in this way. It unsettled him. Especially when he was aware of his own smallness. Jackie Dorian, the circus monkey. The adapter of other people’s creativity. The disposable plaything of his mother.
He walked up the aisle, the sunlit stained-glass windows casting colorful shadows over his clothing as he passed each biblical scene, and he was a boy of seven again, staring high up into the rafters beside his reluctant guardian, fully aware of the great God whose silent presence seemed to occupy this space so completely.
There was a permanency to the great stone structure, a place strong enough to weather any storm without and shelter the most vile of wretches within, all their scars, their mountains of doubt and cynicism.
Ella Blythe always did this to him—throwing him accidentally into the presence of the Divine and forcing him to face that which had always been so easy to ignore. He’d known a great many churchgoers in his life, those people who made him ever aware of his gross inadequacies before they even spoke a word, but Ella ... well, Ella had scars of her own. Deep ones, with a surprising wretchedness that still disturbed him.
Heshouldforgive her, overlook the decision she likely made with good intentions, but he could not. Another man, perhaps, but not him. As far as he was concerned, the cracks she’d covered up for so long reached down to the foundation, and she was irreparably broken.
Yet God was with her. It was undeniable. Pervasive, reaching into every part of life and weaving evenly through the good and the bad, carried about like a mantle with every step and breath and pulsing heartbeat. It made no sense.
It isn’t supposed to.The notion whispered through his heart, clear as day, awakening his mind.
