It was all too much to take in! Every idea of her life was being overturned, and she didn’t quite know what to make of it. Etienne had not spoken of love, but then he had told her once that he did not believe in love. For some reason, that memory filled her with overwhelming sadness.
With a little shock she realized that she had not done what she went there for! Distracted, she hadn’t told Etienne that there was a distinct possibility, despite her orders, that her grounds would be searched. Her stomach clenched. If they should come upon him unprepared she would never forgive herself! They wouldn’t do it before tomorrow, though; she would ride out first thing in the morning and warn him.
She led Cassie into the stable, and Zach ran out to take the reins.
“Give her an extra portion of mash tonight,” May said, stroking the honey-colored nose of her sweet mare. “I’ve been working her hard lately, and she seems a bit peaked.” Not to mention far too interested in a certain coal-black stallion. She had come out of the folly to find the two together, as they often were. Théron had whickered gently, nuzzled Cassie, and then disappeared back into the forest.
May frowned as she noticed a couple of strange horses in the stable and an old carriage parked near the back. Maybe Dodo had company, though who would come all the way down to Kent unannounced?
She strolled up to the house, but before she could go in the back way, her usual entry when she was in breeches, she heard her name called out. She glanced around. Standing in the garden, dressed modestly in a day gown of deep green, was her mother!
Her mother. Here, at Lark House.
She stood and stared at her, and Maisie van Hoffen walked toward her with a fearful look on her face. The older woman stopped about three feet from her daughter and gazed at her as if she could not get enough of the sight.
“Oh, May,” she said at last. “How wonderful you look! Even in breeches!” She laughed, but there were tears in her voice.
“M-mother . . . I . . .”
“I know I should not have come before you gave me permission.”
“No. You should have waited,” May said baldly. She gazed at her mother, trying to hold on to the coldness she had come to feel toward her. But there was something different here. From the modesty of her gown to the lack of paint on her face, and even to the way Maisie was letting the natural color of her hair come in, the faded auburn more like her daughter’s rather than the bright henna of bygone days: she was wholly different.
Hesitantly, Maisie took another step forward. “To be honest,” she said, “if I waited for you to write me, I was afraid you would tell me I was not welcome. And I knew you would have every right.”
May was silent. She tapped her crop against her boot and chewed her bottom lip.
“But I had to come,” Maisie continued. “I had news that I had to tell you in person. May, I am getting married.”
Chapter Eleven
Adorned in the gown that Etienne had approved—it gave her a warm feeling to wear it now—May came down to tea. Dodo had gone into the village to consult, she said, with Isabel Naunce about the coming festival. May had a feeling that the vinegary spinster had chosen that excuse rather than take tea with May’s mother, whom she could not abide.
Maisie was already in the drawing room, and the tea tray had arrived. May stood at the door for a moment, observing her mother before she moved into the room. The older woman’s expression was pensive as she gazed out the window toward the greenhouses that supplied Lark House with out-of-season produce and cut flowers. She was still wearing the dark green gown. It was very flattering to her lush figure, but not immodestly so. Maisie van Hoffen had been wont, in previous times, to wear unsuitably low-cut day gowns, gaudy jewels, no petticoats . . . anything to gain male attention.
Was she playing a game this time? Was she trying to get her daughter to loosen the purse strings? For that had been another condition after the disaster the previous spring. Though May did not legally come into her inheritance until she turned twenty-five or she married, Maisie had signed over her control of her daughter’s money to their family solicitor in return for no further action in the terrible case of her daughter’s kidnapping.
So was she putting a modest face on to try to convince her daughter that she was a reformed character? May walked slowly into the room and stood before her mother. Maisie turned, suddenly aware of her daughter’s presence. There was a trickle of tears down one cheek, but she hastily wiped it away with one quick movement. She made no comment, nor did she draw attention to her display of emotion. Again, that was unlike Maisie van Hoffen, who had a dramatic way of expressing her emotions and used them to draw attention to herself on every possible occasion.
She stood and gazed at her daughter. “May, you look so lovely! I like that shade on you. Gold suits your coloring beautifully, much better than gray.”
May had always worn the most severe of dresses and the drabbest of coloring. It had helped her evade the amorous attentions of her mother’s male admirers if she faded into the background, and she had come to think of herself as colorless, too, as well as her clothing. They both sat down, the silence between them awkward.
“I shouldn’t have blurted out my news in such a bald way earlier. I apologize.”
May nodded. Unable to assimilate what her mother said, she had just said something about going up to her room and changing, and walked away without responding. What did her mother want from her: congratulations? Praise? Money?
“I’m not asking anything from you, May. I swear I just . . .” She made a helpless gesture with her hands, then dropped them on her lap. She busied herself with pouring tea into the delicate Sevres cups, and offered the dish of lemon wedges to her daughter.
They sipped in silence.
“If it is what you want, Mother . . .” May started.
“It is what I need! A woman like me needs to be married,” Maisie said, agitation in her voice. She took a deep shuddering breath. “I don’t expect you to understand, May, you have always been so cool, so collected. Very much like your father,” she said with a wistful smile. “But some women should be married, and I am one of them.”
May looked away. She was more like her mother than she would ever let that woman know. With her new understanding of relations between men and women she thought that her mother was probably right, that Maisie needed to be married for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the outlet for her physical passion it would have given her. How much different would May’s life have been if her mother had married a suitable gentleman, giving her a stepfather? “Why did you not marry long ago?”
Maisie put down her teacup and pushed it to the center of the small, low mahogany table in front of the settee she occupied. She glanced around the drawing room, calm and decorous in greens and grays with a huge painting of a hunt scene over the fireplace. Then her gaze returned to her daughter. “By your father’s will if I remarry I lose the very generous allowance I receive from the van Hoffen estate. I would have no money, no dowry, nothing, not even the jewels I wear, since they are a part of the estate.”
For the first time, May realized that her mother was wearing no jewelry at all, save a pretty garnet ring on the third finger of her left hand.
“I was afraid to marry under those circumstances, afraid of what would happen if I could not stand being married again. My first time was not . . . your father was . . .” She shook her head and stopped. “If it went badly I would never be able to leave, because I would have no money to live on.” She made a helpless gesture with her hands, and then touched the garnet ring. Like a talisman, it seemed to reassure her, and she folded her hands together in her lap.
It was a day of firsts for May. For the first time she wondered what her mother’s brief marriage to the elderly Gerhard van Hoffen had been like. She would have been a thoughtless and flighty chit, barely eighteen, when she married. Her marriage lasted almost three years before Lord van Hoffen succumbed to a putrid lung infection. What h
ad those three years been like?
“But if you remarried you would still have had me, and the money that stayed with me as long as you cared for me,” May said. “Would that not have been enough to live on? Even if your husband was . . . was unkind?”
Maisie’s expression softened. She reached out and almost touched May’s hand, but then drew back. “I would not live off your money, my dear. I make no excuses. I had a few chances, but I had sworn only fools married a second time. The money was only a part of it, the justification I used to myself to refuse offers. In truth, I did not want to remarry. I enjoyed my life, every debauched minute of it. Or at least . . .”
She shook her head and looked out the window with a sigh, before returning her gaze to her daughter. “I do not expect you to understand what I do not even understand myself. I told myself I was gloriously happy during those long years, and I had myself fooled, but I don’t think it was real happiness.”
May was silent for a moment, not quite knowing what to say. Curiosity got the better of her finally, and she said, “And now? What has changed?”
“I’ve met a man I can trust and love,” she said simply.
A ray of sun touched her face as it sank in the west, and May could see the fine net of lines around her eyes and mouth. There was lingering sadness in her mother’s eyes, but there was also something different about her, a calmness she had never had before. But May would not be convinced so easily of her mother’s transformation. Her hands clenched.
“That . . . that animal you took into your bed last spring . . . he said he hurt you, and that you liked it! Is that what this man is like? Does he do those things to you?”
Maisie was hurt and it showed on her face and in her eyes. In the past she would have let forth a stream of invective, attacking like a cornered badger, but she swallowed once and said, chin up, “Mr. Banks is not like that!” Tears glistened in her eyes.
She faced May directly. “I do not expect you to understand the past. I hardly understand myself!” She frowned, looking down at her hands and touching the single ring. “Captain Dempster led me down that road gradually. At first he was gentle. He told me I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, a goddess, that he worshipped me. I thrived on his words. I needed to believe him. When he first started the other, it was just pinching and r-rough . . . er, rough play.” She flushed red.
But May was not going to let her avoid the issue. “And then?” she said, not even recognizing the hard note in her own voice. She had not realized how hurt she had been by her mother’s betrayal until now.
“And then he went further,” she whispered. “I thought I was in love with him. He interspersed the pain with . . . with gratification. I thought I deserved pain. I thought I was being punished for years of . . . of . . .” She covered her face with her hands and wept.
May sat and waited, waited for her mother to blame her, or disparage her, or something. Instead, Maisie dried her eyes with a lace handkerchief and composed herself, swallowing several times and staring fiercely at a gold and green urn holding tall rushes in the corner of the room. Her voice when she spoke was still thick with tears, but was controlled and even, trembling only slightly.
“I had been a despicable mother. Worse than that! And I knew it. Captain Dempster was my punishment. I didn’t understand that then, but I have had a lot of time to think these last few months. I was a horrible mother, and placed you in danger.”
Her mother was taking responsibility for her actions? Unheard of, May thought. But still, a hard core of suspicion had not melted.
“And what about Mr. Banks? Is he even more ‘inventive’ in bed than Captain Dempster?”
Maisie gazed at her sadly. “I have done this to you, haven’t I? I have made you suspicious of men and what they want. Not all men are like that, you know. No, I have not yet made love with Mr. Banks. Edmund. He knows something of my past, though I am afraid I have not told him everything, but he says that he wishes to start our marriage right. He is what I thought did not exist, a truly good man.” She sighed, shaking her head. “I have promised myself that I will confess my past misdeeds to him before we marry. I am determined to do this right, this marriage, and have what I have never had. I’m afraid it will cost me the marriage, but I mean to start as I intend to go on.”
“But it still follows that you will be cut off from funds if you marry.” What a fiendish thing for her father to do, May thought. She supposed he thought he was protecting his daughter in some strange way, but like so much in life, when one tried to manipulate the outcome of something, it so often turned to the opposite of what you intended. “Will you marry anyway?”
“Edmund knows I will be penniless, and says he will support us. He is an attorney, a friend of your solicitor, Mr. Standish. I met him when Mr. Standish was drawing up the papers last spring. Edmund has been married before—he is a widower of many years—and has a grown son in the navy, and he says the boy is doing well and does not need his father’s support. He has a house in Richmond, a little ways from London; it is a lovely little house!”
“What do you want from me, Mother?” May said, her voice hard with suspicion.
“Nothing. I just wanted you to know.”
“So you have made up your mind?”
She nodded. “I’m getting older, May. Edmund wants me, and he has such plans! He has put some money aside, and he is going to pay for the wedding himself. No elaborate ceremony, just something simple, at the home of friends of his.”
There was silence for a minute. Maisie gazed steadily at her daughter, the expression in her eyes troubled. “May, truly I don’t expect anything from you,” she finally said. “I know I hurt you; I know I put you in unforgivable danger, and I will never forget that. There are no adequate words to say how sorry I am. If I could take it all back I would, but we are not given the opportunity to take back all the vile, vicious things we have done in our lives. All I can do is say that from the core of my heart, I am sorry. I never knew how much I loved you until I realized how horrible I had been to you. Someday, I hope you will be able to forgive me, but I do not expect you to now. It is too soon, and the wound was too deep.”
May felt her heart thawing, forgiveness welling up from some charitable corner of her heart, when she had long thought that she would never be able to forgive her mother. Maisie seemed so different, but how did someone change the habits of a lifetime like that? She needed to know that one last thing.
She looked her in the eye and took a deep breath. “Forgive me, Mother, but I must know. You seem so changed from your former habits. I have never known you to be without a man in your bed. What have you been doing for sex these last months if you have not fornicated with Mr. Banks?”
Maisie gasped, and May could see the shock in her eyes. The woman had drawn herself up and her eyes flashed with momentary anger at the insulting nature of that question and all it implied. But she clenched the handkerchief in her hands, and then calmed. “I think I am not the only one who has changed,” she said wryly, looking at her daughter with what might have been respect. “You were ever forthright, but I never thought to hear you broach such a subject!”
“I have decided not to hide from the raw truth of life.” Her enlightenment had come from Etienne, and how shocked would her mother be to hear that?
“I will match your honesty. You have good reason for asking that question, and I have no right to resent it. Since your father died I have never been without a man for more than a week, and that includes during my mourning!” She composed herself and stared down at her hands. She frowned, wrinkles pursing around her generous mouth. “At first, after the events in . . . in London, I was in shock. Everything that had happened left me profoundly shaken. That I would put you at risk like that, and with knowledge . . .” She broke off, shaking her head, her mouth working.
“And then?” May urged, unwilling to let her mother be overwhelmed by the past and her own misdeeds.
Maisie cleared her throat. “
I didn’t go out at all at first, just sat and thought a lot about what had happened. Mr. Banks came to tea one day, after I met him in Mr. Standish’s office, but he was my only visitor. I refused most of my old acquaintances. One day I realized I had not . . . had not been with a man in . . . in that way for a month, that I could not imagine going back to that way of life. I was proud of myself. I suppose I blamed my sexual appetite for all the ill that befell me, but soon I began to recognize it was not that. The feelings I had, the desires, were not . . . were not bad, just misdirected.
“One of my former lovers tried to reanimate our affair. I realized then that it was just because he was between women that he could care about. I was just . . . just a receptacle in which to pour his lust. He would leave me, as they all did, when someone more to their taste came along. That is why my affairs never lasted long,” she said, her tone lowered to a whisper. “They all went on to some other woman who led them a merry chase before succumbing. I never said no to anyone, I was so desperate. I did things with men for whom I felt nothing, even some for whom I felt an active dislike. It was not passion, it was desperation.” Her voice was bitter with self-recrimination.
May experienced a surge of cynicism. “All of this vast self-knowledge came from calm reflection?”
“I understand your wariness. As I’ve said, you do not need to believe me. I will earn your trust. I know it.”
May was silent.
“Mr. Banks began to call more often. Freed from the sense that I must attract him, must seduce him, or he would tire of me, I found that we talked! We talked for hours. He loves gardening, and you know how I like flowers. His home in Richmond has the sweetest walled garden, and he has such a talent with orchids and roses! He is a genius. And he is so handsome. May, you would like him.”
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