by Meghan Sloan
Alice turned to the gentleman. “You have made her cry,” she scolded, her heart beating madly. “For shame, Nicholas. This is not gentlemanly behaviour.”
Nicholas sighed heavily. “Perhaps not, but it is necessary,” he said in a clipped tone. “Lucy? Will you do the right thing, at long last, and tell them?”
Lucy wept pitifully into the handkerchief for a moment. Alice looked up, meeting Silas’s eye. He was standing near the mantelpiece, watching them. He looked as bewildered as she felt. What was all of this about?
But suddenly Lucy stood up, walking away from them all. She stared at the wall, her back to all of them for a long moment. Then she turned around, a look of grim determination on her face.
“You are right, Nicholas,” she said slowly. “This has gone on long enough. And I must tell you all what has gone on so that at least my conscience is clear at long last.”
They all stared at her, spellbound. It was so silent in the room that Alice swore they would have heard a pin drop. And then Lucy started speaking, telling a story in a low measured voice.
***
It started a year ago, she said. Maybe more than a year. She could not quite remember.
Marina and Silas were engaged and deliriously happy. But Lucy said that she started to notice changes in her friend. An air of dissatisfaction that life was passing her by. Lucy tried to talk to her about it. Marina claimed that she felt like she was being rushed to the altar, that she still had so much more life to live. She grew ever more restless, going out to wild parties in dubious areas of town.
And it was at one of those soirees, at the top of a disreputable musical hall, where the cast were gathered after a show with a selection of rowdy revellers, that she met Felton Wilson for the very first time.
Marina told Lucy all about it the next day. Lucy could still remember her almost manically shining eyes. Felton was tall and handsome with a powerful physique. Commanding. He didn’t treat her like a lady, but rather delightfully as he would one of the musical hall singers, who he knew quite well. He challenged her in a way that she had never experienced before. An edge of danger that Marina found quite intoxicating.
Lucy claimed she begged her not to risk her reputation or her engagement, but Marina refused to listen. She started to meet Felton secretly. She enlisted Lucy’s help to distract her parents and provide an alibi when she met him. She paid off servants, and if they refused to comply, she found a way to get them fired. All of this was done behind Silas’s back. She still played the loving fiancée at the same time.
Lucy grew more worried as it continued, the weeks slipping into months. She knew Felton Wilson’s reputation. The only son of a wealthy landowner, he had turned dissolute many years earlier. He had a fearsome reputation as a heavy drinker and a gambler. He was also known to break the heart of many ladies and women who could not claim the title. His family had virtually disowned him, but still provided money from time-to-time, out of misguided loyalty.
Lucy tried to tell Marina that he was bad news in so many ways, but Marina brushed it all off, claiming that she simply didn’t care. Felton made her feel like a real woman, in a way that no respectable gentleman ever could. She liked that he treated her roughly from time-to-time. She claimed that it gave a spark of excitement to their relationship that was sorely lacking, in her engagement.
She grew worse, more reckless. She started to smoke opium with Felton, saying that he had insisted, claiming it would intensify their lovemaking. She stayed out to all hours of the night with him, creeping home at dawn, climbing through her bedroom window. Lucy noticed that she had small bruises on her arms. Marina claimed they were merely marks of passion, that Felton was a commanding and rough lover, a fact that seemed to excite her.
Lucy was desperately worried, but nothing she said would dissuade her friend from spiralling down a seeming course of destruction.
And then one day Marina sat her down and told her that it could not go on. But not in the way that Lucy had hoped. She was not willing to give up Felton.
Rather, she was willing to give up her entire life to be with him. Her home, her family, her friends…and the fiancé who deeply loved her and had no idea that she had been cuckolding him for months.
***
Alice glanced at Silas fearfully as Lucy softly told her shocking tale.
He was so pale that he resembled marble, and his green eyes, usually the colour of moss, glittered like bright emeralds. But he didn’t utter a sound. Not a word, or a moan, or even a sigh. He simply stared at Lucy, seemingly bewitched by her tale. As rivetted as if she were relaying a grand Greek epic that had nothing at all to do with him.
Charlotte looked slightly queasy. Nicholas had quietly prepared more drinks as Lucy spoke. He handed a whiskey to Silas, who took it without a word, downing it in one gulp. Nicholas gazed at his friend with a face full of sorrow.
Lucy’s voice faltered for a moment.
“Please, go on,” said Nicholas, staring at her. “What did she do to get the life that she so desperately craved?”
***
Her plan was simple, Lucy said. Marina would walk out of the house one day, claiming that she was going shopping, and simply never return.
Felton had agreed to the plan. They would leave England behind, for good. They would travel the continent together, living a thrilling life. He promised her Paris in the spring, and Venice, where they would traverse the canals on gondolas. They would rent a house in the Swiss Alps, and travel to Spain, to watch flamenco, drinking sangria into the late hours of the night.
Lucy begged her not to go, of course. But Marina was adamant. Silas could not give her the life that she wanted. She didn’t want to be a boring, respectable wife in a straitlaced community anymore. She wanted to be free and wild. She wanted to taste all the delights that life offered, and Felton was the only one who could provide that.
She confessed that she had never genuinely loved Silas, Lucy said. The only reason that she had agreed to the engagement was because she saw it as an escape from the stifling rules of her conventional family home. She had believed that Silas’s open adoration of her was useful. She could twist him around her little finger.
He would let her do anything that she wanted, once they were man and wife. But the attraction of having a lapdog who would eagerly do her every bidding had paled in comparison to the excitement that Felton offered.
It was the life that she wanted, and she was determined. She did not care who she hurt, in the process. Not even Lucy, who had aided and abetted her for months and could barely look her fiancé in the eye anymore.
They left Bath separately. Felton said it was necessary – they did not want her disappearance to be linked to him in any way. Marina made her way to London, where she was to meet him in a seedy area of the city where she would not be recognised, at an agreed place and time. From there, they would board a ship for France and sail away into the sunset.
But apparently it had not been the lovers’ idyll that Marina had been hoping for.
Lucy had only discovered what had since happened to her friend after her return. For more than six long months she had kept her secret, watching Marina’s family and Silas fall to pieces. She had kept her word and said nothing, even when Mr. St. George had hired a private investigator to try to find her. Even when she had seen how devastated Silas was. It was the reason she had avoided him. The guilt had been too great.
Lucy had been as shocked as everyone else when she had learnt of the sudden re-appearance of her friend, claiming that she had lost her memory and could not remember a single thing of what had happened to her.
Marina had sent for her almost immediately, of course. When they had been alone in Marina’s bedchamber, she had confessed to Lucy that it was all a lie. She had come up with the idea to claim memory loss when it had become obvious that it wasn’t working with Felton on the continent. It was the only way that she could come back into her old life without recrimination and ruining her reputation
. The only way that she could pick it all up again exactly as she had left it.
The lovers had been happy for a while, Marina had claimed, her eyes growing misty with nostalgia as she talked. They had travelled and indulged all their wildest desires. It had been a tumultuous whirlwind of wonderful sights and new faces, of drinking and gambling, of smoking opium, and making passionate love into the small hours of the morning.
But then the money started to dry up. Felton had extracted a small fortune from his father, just before they had left, but they hadn’t been careful with it. With all the partying, and gambling, the expensive new clothes that they both insisted they needed for their new life, it had run out within a matter of three months.
Things had started to get tense, after that.
They were holed-up in rented rooms for days on end. They started to bicker. Felton wrote to his father requesting more funds, but the old man only sent him a little, telling him that if he wanted to travel, he needed to find his own way of doing it. Sometimes, they were forced to flee in the night, to avoid paying the rent.
Marina had grown bored very quickly. Her exciting life of instant pleasure and gratification was seemingly over. What was the point of being in the South of France if there was no money to enjoy its pleasures? She might as well be back in England. At least there her father had paid for her way. And if she married Silas, he would fund her life handsomely. It would not be as exciting as being with Felton on the continent, but a girl had to make some tough choices sometimes, didn’t she?
She limped on with Felton for a few more months, but the party was well and truly over. He started to leave her alone, in their rooms, stumbling in late, smelling of whiskey and cheap perfume. She had become the wife, the albatross around his neck, weighing him down. He grew cruel and was rough with her, throwing her around the room in fits of rage. Where once the dissolute side of him had excited her, it now repelled her.
The thought of respectable Silas Wilmington, with his healthy bank balance, grew ever more appealing.
In the end, she simply did the same thing as she had when she had left England. She stole out of their drab rooms in Paris while Felton was asleep, snoring off the effects of a night out in Montmartre. They had passed a pawn shop when they had first got to Paris. She still wore her expensive rings. She would pawn one, for a decent price. It would pay for the fare on the ship back to England, and the carriage ride to Bath.
Lucy’s voice had lowered to a whisper. She looked as weary as if she had just walked miles uphill, in torrential rain.
And so, that was how Marina St. George had returned, hoping to resume her life in Bath, pick up the pieces as if she had never been away. She had never thought for an instant that life might have moved in a different direction while she was gone.
She had been shocked when she had learnt that Silas had a new fiancée. But she had never considered it a great obstacle. She was tenacious and she was patient. Eventually, she would win him back over. It was only a matter of time. And then she would have the life that she now decided she wanted. A man who adored her and would do anything for her, who she could twist around her little finger and who, more importantly, was stable and financially solvent.
No, it wasn’t as exciting as Felton and the continent. But then, look how that had turned out in the end. Marina was willing to compromise. But she still intended for life to go exactly as she planned, down to the most minute detail.
***
Alice closed her eyes for a second. The tale had been so shocking she didn’t even know what to think.
Her first thought, strangely enough, was to wonder what had gone so wrong with Marina St. George. She was so incredibly beautiful and clever, with the world seemingly at her feet. She had lived a charmed life, with loving parents, in a good home. She had been adored by the man she was going to marry. Why hadn’t any of it been enough for her?
It was all so beyond her experience, it was like a fantastic tale. A sordid tale of terrible lies and debauchery, like one she might read in a Gothic novel. But this had actually happened. It was real, and it had impacted on the man she loved with all her heart. He had been at the very centre of it, through no fault of his own. And he still was.
She opened her eyes, staring at him. How was he going to take this?
He refused to look at her. He refused to look at any of them now that Lucy had finally finished speaking. His face was deathly white, almost like a mask.
Her heart lurched, almost bleeding for him. To hear the extent of Marina’s betrayal…well, it would be a bitter pill to swallow, indeed. Blow after blow, delivered one after the other.
Marina didn’t love him. She had never loved him. And she had no qualms about cheating on him with a man not fit to wipe his boots. She thought she could still manipulate him, to get the life of luxury and freedom that she wanted.
Her whole life was just one huge lie, and Silas was just hanging on the coat-tails of it.
Suddenly, he cursed violently. Without another word he strode to the door.
“Where are you going?” asked Nicholas quickly, looking a little panicked.
Silas stopped, turning around. Alice gasped. His face was like thunder. She had never seen him so angry.
“I am going to tell Miss St. George exactly what I think of her,” he barked.
And then he was gone. They heard the front door slam as he exited the house.
Lucy started to tremble, quite violently.
“I am sorry,” she whispered, over and over. “So sorry…”
Alice put her arm around the girl. But her heart felt as heavy as a stone. She just hoped that Silas would not let his rage get the better of him when he finally confronted Marina, with all that she had done.
Chapter 26
Silas gripped the seat of the carriage as it hurtled through the dark streets of Bath en route to the St. George family townhouse. Streetlamps sputtered to life as he passed by, shedding pools of wan light onto the deserted streets. But he barely noticed anything as he stared out of the carriage window.
He didn’t care about the lateness of the hour, or the fact that Mr. and Mrs. St. George would be shocked to see him knocking on their door at such a time. He didn’t care about any of it anymore. The desire to confront Marina, with all that she had done, was overwhelming. And long overdue.
He didn’t doubt Lucy’s testimony at all. The lady was clearly genuinely distressed and suffering an enormous amount of guilt for her role in the whole affair. Lucy was a loyal friend and hadn’t wanted to betray Marina’s confidence in her. But she also had a conscience. It had obviously been tearing her apart. Marina roping her into it all again, since her return, had clearly been the last straw for poor Lucy.
As the carriage turned down a narrow street, Silas pondered the whole sordid saga. All of it made sense now, in hindsight. He had noticed little signs that Marina was distracted in those last few months before she had vanished. She was often weary, with dark circles under her eyes, which he knew now was because of her late nights of debauchery with Felton Wilson.
He had also noticed the small bruises on her arms that Lucy had talked about. Marina had brushed aside his questions about them, telling him that her maid was heavy handed when dressing her.
He seethed for a moment. Felton Wilson. She had thrown her whole life to the wind for that rake.
Silas knew him vaguely. He had always been trouble, even as a boy. He had attended school with him, although Wilson was a few years older, and they had not had classes together, or socialised. Wilson’s reputation preceded him. He had always had a taste for dissolute pursuits. He was an avid gambler, always losing vast sums of coin at the card table, and there were rumours he frequented brothels and music halls. He was also a bully and a cad.
His hand tightened on the seat just thinking about the man with Marina. What had she ever seen in him? How could she have deserted her whole life for a man who was clearly trouble?