“What about your father?”
“My father didn’t expect anything of me. We weren’t very close.”
“And now they’re both dead?”
“They died when I was in gaol, within months of each other.”
“It must have been painful,” he said, conscious of the inadequacy of the word. “And your brother?”
“Tom. He lives in Canada now with his own family. We don’t correspond anymore.”
“Why not?”
She lifted a hand and let it drop. “We did for a while; but letters in prison are so thoroughly censored, it’s almost better not to have any.”
“You could write to him now.”
“Yes. But he has a new life. He went to Canada to get away from what happened. I don’t think he would welcome being reminded of it now.”
He thought of her grief when she’d told him her family believed she was guilty of murdering Wade. Of all the heartaches and indignities, that must have been the hardest one to bear. He imagined her as a child, shy, obedient, anxious to please a mother with “high hopes” and a father who ignored her. “How did you meet Wade?” He had to know it all now, but he was beginning to wonder about the wisdom of opening this sorrowful subject.
“Lydia and I—My parents sent me—My father was—” She stopped, blowing a frustrated puff of air. “I keep having to start further back.”
“Start anywhere. Tell it any way you like.”
“I want you to understand, though. I want . . . I need to justify myself.”
“Not to me.”
Her hands went still and she looked at him for a moment, her eyes arrested, face alert. “To myself, then. In some ways, I ruined my own life. I try to forget it, but the truth always comes back.”
He couldn’t believe it; some too-fine sensibility was at work here, he was certain. If anything good could come from making her tell the story, maybe it would be that she could see she was blameless.
“My father was a schoolmaster,” she began again. “He had his own boys’ school in Exeter until his health began to fail. Then he moved the family to Ottery St. Mary and did private tutoring, preparing students for university. I was about twelve at the time. It was a comedown in the world, but I wouldn’t have minded it, none of us would, I don’t think, if my mother hadn’t taken on so about it. She missed the city, despised village life, hated what we’d ‘come to,’ as she always put it. My brother’s future was secure by then—he was reading law with a judge in Torbay. He would be solid and steady, we all knew, even if his career would never be spectacular.”
“And your mother,” Sebastian guessed, his mind slapping ahead, “wanted one of you to be spectacular.”
“Yes.”
“And that left you. And you were beautiful.” Already he could see where the story was heading.
“I wasn’t,” she denied, smiling—and he could tell she believed it. “But I was all right, not ugly. Tall for my age. I had pretty . . .” She touched the side of her head, then gave an impatient shrug and dropped the subject. “Anyway, as you’ve guessed, my mother had marriage plans for me. I didn’t understand it until much later. I knew they couldn’t afford it, but when they sent me to an expensive girls’ school in Exeter when I was fifteen, I honestly thought they wanted me to go there for an education. Not so I could become some wealthy family’s governess, either, but so I could be a scholar. Like my father. I really believed it.” She shook her head, and beyond the amused self-mockery he could see the remnants of a still-deep personal hurt.
“I had underestimated my mother’s ambition, but eventually I understood. A coming-out in London was out of the question for me, but she was working early on the next best thing—cultivating friends of the right sort who would come out. And these friends would have beaus, or brothers or cousins or friends, one of whom I—I—”
“Would snag.”
She nodded. “Once I understood the conspiracy, I entered into it willingly enough. You see, I was a shallow thing after all. I wanted to please my parents. I wanted them to be proud of me.”
“That’s not such a sin.”
“Isn’t it? I think it depends on the consequences. In this case, I think you’ll agree that a sin of sorts was committed.”
“No,” he said, “I won’t. But even if you’re right, I think you’ll agree that the sinner has paid a penance far out of proportion to her sin.”
“I won’t—”
“Let’s argue the fine moral points later,” he suggested. “What happened next? You met Lydia, I suppose.”
“Yes. Under . . . memorable circumstances. I walked into the lavatory one night and found her trying to cut her wrists with a letter opener.”
“Good God.”
“She hadn’t really been in my set before, my circle of friends, but after that night I felt responsible for her, I suppose. She was so very unhappy.”
“Why?”
“Oh . . .” She lifted her shoulders, as if the task of explaining that was beyond her. “She was troubled, she had changeable moods, highs and lows one could never anticipate. A mercurial temperament, I suppose it’s called.”
He could think of other things to call it. “Yes, but why?”
“Why was she unhappy? Her mother had died when she was eleven. She—oh, Sebastian, I don’t know. Why, under the same circumstances, are some people all right and some people completely destroyed? Lydia wasn’t a strong person. She hated herself, she was morbidly sensitive, couldn’t keep friends, she was rude to everyone, nobody liked her.” She gave a short laugh. “How could I not be her friend?
“But she was loyal and she could be very kind, and funny in a dark way that I found interesting. And I didn’t for a moment believe she’d truly meant to kill herself. She swore me to secrecy that night, and I never felt the least temptation to betray her. She was showing off, trying to get somebody’s attention.”
“And it happened to be yours.” What a ludicrous, circumstantial mash life could be. If someone else had walked into the lavatory that night at her fancy boarding school, Rachel might never have befriended the friendless Lydia Wade, never met or married her father, never stood trial for his murder. How often must she have had the same futile thought? How could she be anything but bitter? “What do you hope for?” he’d asked her once, and he understood her answer perfectly now: “I hope to be able to bear it.”
She stood up. The sky had turned opal-white overhead, coral in the west. The cows were gone; he hadn’t noticed their silent decampment. The dog got up from beside the log, waddled over to Rachel, and flopped down at her feet. She knelt, and while she petted him she said, “In my last year at school, Lydia invited me to her home in Tavistock for the spring holiday. I didn’t particularly want to go, but my mother was set on it—time was running out, you see. And the Wades were wealthy, definitely the ‘right sort.’ Who knew what might come of it?” She shook her head at the unpleasant irony.
“You’d never met Wade before?”
“No, but I’d heard about him from Lydia, what a wonderful man he was, the world’s best father. I was prepared to like him.”
“And you did.”
She looked up. “No. Actually, I didn’t. Not at first.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t know then, either. Something about him made me uncomfortable, something more than the fact that he was interested in me as a woman, not as his daughter’s school chum. He made that clear almost from the beginning, and that was unsettling enough—but there was something more. I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then it went away.”
“What do you mean, it went away?”
“He became charming. Perfectly agreeable, attentive to me in a kind, flattering way. I forgot my first impression, or convinced myself I’d been mistaken.”
“And then?”
“And
then . . . I knew he liked me, but I was flabbergasted when he wrote to my father and asked if he could court me. Permission was granted, you may be sure, and that summer he visited us in Otter on three occasions. Then he proposed—through my father again—and eventually I was persuaded to accept.”
“Persuaded to accept.”
They had come to the heart of it. She kept her gaze on her hands as she played with the dog’s ears, scratched his neck, ruffled his coat. “I capitulated. In spite of all my girlish ideas about love and romance, and in spite of the reservations I’d forgotten or hidden from myself, I accepted a man I didn’t love or completely trust. I let other people decide my life. In other words, I sold myself.”
“Oh, come now.” He got up and went to her, squatted down beside her, the dog between them. “How old were you?”
“I’d just turned eighteen.”
“You were a child.”
“No, I wasn’t a child.”
“Was Wade ugly?”
“What? No, he was really quite handsome, he—”
“Was he old?”
“I thought so then. Now, of course—”
“How old? Forty, fifty?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Young, then. Young, handsome, rich, charming, and the world’s best father. And you say you ‘sold’ yourself to him.”
“I—”
“If he’d turned out to be a model husband, would you still use that term?”
“No, perhaps not, but . . .”
“What were your parents’ arguments? How did they persuade you to accept him?”
“They said . . . I’d be happy, that he was a perfect catch. My father’s eyes had been deteriorating; they said he could retire and maybe not lose his sight, or not as quickly. I wouldn’t be that far from home, we would still see one another often. My mother could have a few comforts in her old age. I’d have servants, beautiful clothes, I could travel . . .”
“So,” Sebastian said softly. “Let’s see. You would be wealthy, you’d live with a paragon who adored you, and you’d save your father from blindness. Sounds like pure selfishness to me.”
“But I didn’t love him,” she countered heatedly. “And if I’d refused, they would never have forced me. It was my choice, I’ve never blamed them for it.”
“You should have.”
“No. No, you don’t understand. If I’d said no, I could have saved myself. I should have listened to the instinct that told me all along to stay away from him. Instead I let some mistaken notion of duty and—and—”
“Kindheartedness.”
“Weakheartedness. And guilt, stupidity—”
“Gentleness. A sweet nature.”
“Insipidity, spinelessness—”
He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. He had to step over the dog to embrace her. Foolish to think he could erase her guilty conscience by holding her, but he needed to give her comfort somehow, and words weren’t working. “Shut up for a minute,” he said gruffly, and wrapped her up in his arms. They stood still, and after a while her stiff body began to soften. “I never thought I’d ever have to tell you to stop talking,” he mused.
“I’m all right. Really. It’s not easy to tell you these things, but it’s—not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. And I never thought it would be you . . .”
“No,” he agreed, rueful. But he was all she had, even though he’d abused that power more times than either of them could count. He supposed it was a measure of her aloneness that he was still the one in whom she confided.
“What did Lydia think of the marriage?” he asked presently.
“What you would expect her to think. She was appalled. She didn’t fancy me as a stepmother, and I couldn’t blame her. But she made the best of it, no scene at the wedding or anything like that. She was stone-faced and speechless, obviously suffering, but she never said anything harsh to me.
“We were married in Wyckerley by the old vicar, Reverend Morrell’s father. That’s where I met your friend, Sully. And Mayor Vanstone, although he wasn’t the mayor then. There was a reception at Randolph’s house afterward. A modest affair. My mother wanted something bigger, showier, a more public exhibition of this social coup she believed she’d pulled off, but Randolph wanted it small, in deference to Lydia’s feelings. Or so he said. And so we were married. A week later he was dead.”
She stepped away and turned her back on him, gazing across the stagnant canal at the empty pasture. He watched her, a tall, straight-bodied woman with silver-streaked hair, somber-looking in her dark dress. “How did it happen?” he asked quietly.
“He was beaten to death with a fireplace poker. In his study. It wasn’t a burglary; nothing was taken. Lydia had been staying with her aunt that week, to give us—” She hugged her arms and looked up at the sky. “To give us privacy. Except for the servants, we were alone.”
“Did you find him?”
She shook her head. “One of the maids, early in the morning. We were to leave for France on our wedding trip that day.”
“Why did they think you’d done it?”
“We’d argued the night before and the servants heard it, heard him shouting, me—weeping. No one had broken in. And then, of course, after he was dead and the police made me tell them what our marriage had been like, they thought I had good reason to kill him. Sometimes . . . sometimes I used to think I did do it. In my sleep, or in some sort of trance. I wanted him dead, and then he was dead.”
“No, you didn’t kill him. You know that.”
She glanced back at him, acknowledged it with a grim smile.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone what was happening? Your parents or—”
“I did. I wrote them a letter. But I was deplorably ignorant about what was normal between husbands and wives and what was not. My mother had told me almost nothing, except that I probably wouldn’t like it. And I had couched the problem in such delicate language that my letter didn’t alarm them.”
Sebastian thought of the time, not very long ago, when he’d wanted to know everything Wade had done to her, all the lurid details, the more shocking the better. There were few things in his sin-ridden life that made him more ashamed than that. Now he wanted to know nothing, wanted the subject closed, off-limits between them, shut away and forbidden. But it was too late. Rachel wasn’t his plaything or his possession anymore, she was his lover. She could tell him anything she liked and he would have to listen, no matter how much it distressed him.
He went to her, put his hands on her shoulders from behind. A strange tenderness welled up in him as soon as he touched her—strange because its gentleness was wedded so evenly with sexual desire. It was an uncommon mingling for him, for he was used to women he wanted only to bed, or to look at because they were beautiful, or to keep around him because their admiration and their easiness flattered his pride. Had he ever been in love, really in love? Had a woman’s needs ever come before his for very long, or for any motive other than seduction? He thought of the handful of lovers who had ever meant anything to him. They were pitifully few, and there had been none at all in a very long time.
Rachel rested her cheek on his hand. “I’m all right,” she said again. “It’s late. Maybe we should start for home.”
“We can do that. Or you can tell me what your marriage was like.” She couldn’t know it, but his atonement for all the injustices he’d done to her began at that moment, with that question. He waited for her decision, patient, open to anything.
She dropped her head. “No,” she said very softly. He had to bend closer to hear her. “Not now.”
“All right.” He said it with cowardly haste.
“Sometime. I want to tell you sometime, but not now, and not all at once. It’s too hurtful, even though I’m sure you—it’s nothing that you—couldn’t—imagine. Maybe nothing you haven�
��t . . .” She came to a full stop.
The implication jarred him. “Nothing what? Nothing I haven’t done?” She didn’t answer. “Rachel, I’ve never hurt a woman with sex in my life unless she wanted it, and even then—”
“Unless she wanted it?” She spun around. Her quicksilver eyes were crackling with ire. “What woman would want a man to hurt her?”
“It doesn’t sound—If you’ve never experienced it, it’s hard to imagine, I’ll grant you. But there are such women. You can take my word for it.”
Apparently she couldn’t. “I don’t believe you. I believe there are cruel, conscienceless men who want to think it’s true, because then they can beat and degrade women and not feel any remorse. But you will never convince me—that a woman—that anyone could derive enjoyment from pain and torture and humiliation. It’s a lie.”
She pushed him away and began to walk off, arms swinging, legs striding. Dandy popped up from a sound sleep and took off after her. She had to slow down when he scampered ahead and turned around, intent on a new game of trying to jump up in her arms. “Down,” she admonished him, as sternly as it was in her to admonish anyone. Her angry but dignified retreat was ruined. Tongue lolling, tail wagging, Dandy wouldn’t let her pass.
Although she’d just called him cruel and conscienceless, Sebastian reveled in her anger and took hope from it. A universe of powerful emotions lay under the hard surface of her reserve, he was sure of it, even though the strongest ones she’d shown him so far were only endurance and resignation. He couldn’t even picture it, but he wanted to see her mad enough to throw things, stamp her feet and shout ladylike swear words at him. It would probably never happen, but he thought the miniature tirade she’d just delivered was an excellent beginning.
“So. You think I’m cruel and conscienceless.” He snatched the puppy up and started to walk backward, talking all the while, until she had no choice but to follow. “I don’t blame you. How could I? I’ll even agree that I’ve treated you as if I have no conscience, but I must take issue with ‘cruel.’ I wasn’t intentionally cruel to you, if that’s worth anything. Selfish, yes—”