Jason, Veronica

by Never Call It Love

  "Aren't you going to answer me?"

  She forced the words out. "I am reasonably content." Then, swiftly: "You must not ask such questions. You know you must not. Let me... let me just enjoy being with you for these few hours. Otherwise I shall be sorry I asked you to come here."

  After a while he said quietly, "Very well." For a minute or so they looked at the patrolling warships. On a different tack now, the vessels were veering westward toward the Atlantic. Then he said, "I must leave by ten tomorrow."

  "I know. If... if it is possible, I would like to accompany you in the cart for a mile or so."

  "I hope you can."

  He did not ask what might keep her from doing so. Apparently he realized that such a plan would become impossible if Patrick Stanford chose to be present to speed the parting guest.

  "We must go back now," Elizabeth said.

  He sat motionless for several seconds. Then he backed the cart and turned it toward Stanford Hall.

  Patrick was absent from the supper table that night, but Colin was there. Apparently he regretted his strange outburst of hostility the previous evening, because his manner no longer was challenging. The three of them talked easily about Dr. Johnson's dictionary, and Sheridan's play, The School for Scandal, a performance of which Donald had seen in Dublin. After the meal they moved into the library for port and coffee and more talk. Elizabeth took an almost feverish pleasure in every moment. And yet, despite her enjoyment, the words "the last time" kept sounding in her mind like a dirge. Probably this was the last time she would see firelight playing over Donald's light brown hair and sensitive face, the last time she would hear his warm voice speaking.

  She lay awake for hours that night. Thus she was still asleep when Rose came in with morning tea. Hearing the rattle of the cup in its saucer, Elizabeth came instantly awake. She sat up in bed.

  "Has Mr. Weymouth had breakfast?"

  Rose settled the tray across Elizabeth's lap. "He is having it now, milady. I took a tray to his room ten minutes ago."

  "And Sir Patrick? Did he return last night?"

  Elizabeth's question had not specified where her husband might have returned from. But Rose knew that her mistress must realize that probably he was at Wetherly. And a crying shame it was, too, that he should be spending his nights with that highborn trollop. "No, milady. Sir Patrick is not here."

  "Will you have someone tell Joseph that I would like to have him hitch up the cart for me?"

  Voice expressionless, Rose said, "Yes, milady." Like the other servants, Rose did not enjoy seeing her beautiful ladyship drive around in that old cart like some tenant farmer's wife. But then, everyone knew that women in the family way often took strange notions.

  Shortly after ten, with Donald keeping his mount reined to a walk beside her, Elizabeth drove the cart through the courtyard gates, across the field, and along the narrow lane that led through oaks and alders. When they emerged from the grove, they turned onto the road leading to Waterford. Overhead, sullen gray clouds promised rain before long.

  They spoke little. Once Elizabeth said, "Be sure to tell my mother you found me well," and Donald answered, "I will." After that, they moved in silence down the road, past isolated cottages, past fields where men and women dug the now ripe potatoes with long-handled forks. When they had gone a hundred yards or so beyond a gap in the low line of hills, Elizabeth drew on the reins and brought the dapple gray to a halt.

  "I had best turn back now."

  They looked at each other through the gray light. "Elizabeth..." he said in a harsh, shaken voice. "Elizabeth."

  "Please! Just go." Then, to her horror, she began to cry.

  Swiftly he dismounted. He tied his horse's rein to one of the cart's corner posts. Then, reaching up, he aided her clumsy, tear-blinded descent to the road. He took her face in his hands and kissed her lips with desperate hunger.

  "Don't go back there. Come with me. There's a fairly large town ten miles ahead. Maybe I can hire a hackney coach for the rest of the way to Waterford."

  "Donald, Donald! You know I can't."

  After a moment he said in a flat voice, "Yes, I know." She was another man's wife. In less than three months she would bear that man's child. "I know," he repeated. He tried to smile. "But you see, my darling, I love you so very much."

  Since the chances were overwhelming that they would never see each other again, she let herself say it. "And I love you. I'll love you until the day I die. Help me back into the cart now. And then go. Don't look back at me. Just go."

  Face very white, he kissed her again. Then he helped her onto the high wooden seat. He untied his mount's reins, swung into the saddle. As she had asked, he rode away without looking back.

  She watched him until he disappeared around a bend in the road. She backed the cart, turned it. Then her hands, jerking the reins spasmodically, brought Toby to a halt.

  On the hillside about a hundred yards ahead, Patrick sat astride his rangy black hunter. His very immobility told her that he had been there for at least several minutes. There was no chance in the world that he had not seen her in Donald's arms. For several seconds she and Patrick stared across the distance that separated them. Then he whirled the hunter and disappeared over the crest of the hill.

  She sat there for several more seconds, heart thudding with dread, before she started driving through the gray light toward Stanford Hall and the infuriated man she would find awaiting her there.

  CHAPTER 22

  As she drove through the courtyard gates, young Joseph came hurrying around the corner of the house to take charge of the dapple gray. Then the massive front doors opened, and Clarence came down the steps and helped her to the cobblestones. Heart pounding now with not only dread but also a growing defiance, she went into the house.

  As she had expected to, she saw Patrick standing just beyond the library's doorway. Without waiting for him to speak, she swept past him into the room, head held high. He closed the doors and then turned toward her. For several seconds his infuriated gaze locked with her defiant one. Then he said, "Well, madam?"

  She didn't answer.

  His rage fueled by her silence, he said, "Is this the way you repay trust and generosity? I let you ask that parson fellow here, even though I knew you might be making sheep's eyes at each other. I welcomed him as best I knew how." His voice gathered fury. "And then today I see you making a public spectacle of yourselves—"

  "Scarcely a spectacle, since there was no one to see us."

  "I saw you! And others may have, too. I warned you, Elizabeth. I warned you that I would not let you make a fool of me."

  She could no longer keep her bitterness in check. "Whereas you are free to behave just as you please with Moira Ashley."

  His voice turned cold. "You were the one who set forth the terms upon which we were married. You wrote that you would have no objection if—"

  "Yes! I wrote that because I was desperate. And I was desperate because you had—"

  "Stop that! God knows that whatever I did, I had provocation for it. Besides, that is all in the past."

  "Is it?" she said furiously. "Is it? You dare to tell me it is all in the past, when I stand here carrying the child you..."

  Rage closed her throat. Trembling all over, she moved toward the doors and then spun around to face him again. "But there is one thing you cannot do to me. I love Donald. And the only way you can stop my loving him is to kill me."

  Blood rushed to his face, making it even darker. "By God, madam, if you don't watch both your behavior and your tongue, I may take up that challenge."

  She wrenched the doors open and at an awkward run moved through the gloomy light toward the stairs. Blinded by tears, she started to climb. Halfway up, her toe caught on the rounded edge of a riser, and she fell heavily forward.

  For a moment she just lay there, half-stunned. Then pain seized her like a giant hand. Dimly aware of what was happening, she screamed, not only from the pain but a foreknowledge of loss and
sorrow. The giant hand relaxed, then squeezed again.

  Patrick was beside her now. She heard him say, "Oh, my God, my God!" Then: "Colin! Tell Padric to ride to the village as fast as he can and bring back the midwife."

  He lifted her in his arms and carried her on up the stairs.

  CHAPTER 23

  She came awake, to see afternoon sunlight lying on the beautiful old carpet. What day was it? The same day that she had fallen on the stairs? No, there had been an interval of blazing candlelight. Faces had looked down at her through that light as she lay racked with pain. Patrick's face, and Mrs. Corcoran's, and the face of a middle-aged woman who must have been the village midwife.

  Weakly she raised her head and looked down at her body, lying flat beneath the coverlet. So that was how it had ended. That new life, conceived in violence, had been snuffed out in a welter of blood and futile suffering.

  "Milady!"

  Until Mrs. Corcoran spoke, rising from her chair in one corner, Elizabeth had not known the housekeeper was in the room. The woman hurried over to the bed. Even though she already knew the answer, Elizabeth asked, "Then the child is dead?"

  Mrs. Corcoran compressed her lips to stop their trembling. "Yes, milady. There was no chance of it being otherwise. You were well short of your seventh month, you know."

  "Was it...?"

  "You would have borne a son, milady." The housekeeper's face was swollen from recent tears. Elizabeth thought: I wish I could cry.

  "Is there anything I can get for you?"

  "Not right now, thank you."

  Mrs. Corcoran hesitated, and then burst out, "Please try not to grieve, milady. You will have other children." Perhaps this miscarriage would prove a blessing in disguise, the housekeeper was thinking. Perhaps now Sir Patrick would stay closer to home, instead of chasing after that woman who, for all her lands and grand tide, had always reminded Mrs. Corcoran of a mare in heat. Certainly he had seemed distressed enough last night, although whether it had been because of his wife's suffering or because of losing the child, it would be hard to say.

  "Sir Patrick is downstairs, milady. He told me to tell him as soon as you felt able to see him."

  She might as well get it over with, Elizabeth decided. "He can come up now if he likes."

  Mrs. Corcoran hurried out. Elizabeth stared at the ceiling. Something she once had read flitted through her mind. Anne Boleyn, and the miscarriage she had suffered after a violent scene with her abominable husband, Henry VIII. His majesty had rushed into the room where she lay weeping with pain and terror, and had shouted at her, "Madam, you have killed my son!"

  Would Patrick...?

  Someone knocked. She called, "Come in."

  The door opened. He stood there for a moment, his face well-controlled, and yet holding tired lines that told her he had slept little, if at all, during the last twenty-four hours. He crossed the room and stood beside her bed. "Are you in pain?"

  "No. I am merely... very tired."

  He wondered, looking down at her white, remote face, if she meant that she wanted him to leave her as soon as possible. Probably she did. "Colin set out early this morning for Dublin. He will bring a doctor back with him."

  "A doctor?"

  "Yes. I must know how you are."

  No doubt what he must know, Elizabeth thought, was whether or not Lady Stanford was still capable of providing Sir Patrick Stanford with an heir.

  He saw how her mouth had twisted, as if at the taste of something bitter. He said, "Is there anything I can do for you right now?"

  "No, thank you. I think I would like to sleep." Bruised-looking in her white face, her eyelids closed.

  "Very well. I will be down in the library, in case you need me." When she did not reply, he added in a rapid, almost harsh voice, "I am sorry about the child." He walked out of the room.

  As he moved toward the stairs, he reflected that he should have known there would be no living child. What good could come of a marriage such as theirs?

  If only there was some way of turning time back, some way that he and Elizabeth could become once more the man and woman they had been at first meeting, smiling at each other over punch in a candlelit London ballroom. But of course they could not, any more than a stream could flow uphill to its source. They were what they had become, and that was that.

  In the library he added a small log to the feeble fire in the grate. He would stay at Stanford Hall until he heard the doctor's verdict. After that, it would be high time to set out on the long and crucially important journey he had planned for late September, a journey that would take him as far north as Belfast and as far west as Galway.

  Trying to blot out all thought of his wife and dead child, he stood with palms propped against the mantelpiece and stared into the fire.

  ***

  Three more days passed before Colin returned from Dublin with the doctor. On each of those days Patrick visited Elizabeth in the morning and again in the afternoon. Their brief conversations, concerned with the weather or minor household matters, included no mention of the son they had lost.

  The doctor, a stocky, reserved-looking man of about forty, arrived late in the afternoon. When he had completed his examination, he told Elizabeth that her health had suffered no permanent damage. And there was no reason why she should not have half a dozen children. "You are young and strong," he said, as he prepared to leave. "You should be completely recovered within two or three weeks."

  After Rose had taken her supper tray away that night, Patrick came into the room. "The doctor gave a good report of you."

  "Yes. Is he still here?"

  "No, he decided to start back to Dublin tonight." He paused. "I came to tell you that I too am leaving on a journey."

  "When?"

  "Early tomorrow morning."

  As a matter of fact, he intended to leave Stanford Hall within the half-hour, ride over to Wetherly, and in the morning set out from there. He could no longer put off seeing Moira. News of Elizabeth's miscarriage must have traveled to Wetherly within an hour or two after it happened. Ever since then, Moira had been sending messages demanding that he come to see her.

  Elizabeth said, in a tone of polite interest, "How long will you be gone?"

  "Perhaps a month. You see, I am thinking of leasing additional farmlands and then subleasing them, not only here in the south but in other parts of Ireland."

  Was he telling the truth? If so, it was the first time he had revealed any of his financial dealings to her. And if he was not telling the truth...

  She looked up into his dark face, realizing that she still knew very little about him. What was he really like? And his frequent absences from Stanford Hall. Could visits to Moira and to his tenants account for all of them? Or were there times when he was doing... something else? She felt a stir of a new kind of uneasiness, so vague that she could not identify it.

  He said, "You look tired. I had best say good night."

  She answered, still in that polite voice, "Good night. I wish you a pleasant journey."

  As the doctor had predicted, her health mended rapidly. In another two days she was sitting at her desk, writing to her mother about the miscarriage, but going into no details. A little more than a week after that, she was once more consulting with Mrs. Corcoran and Gertrude about menus, and even moving out of her room for brief inspection tours of the rest of the house.

  Now that Patrick was away, Colin spent more time at Stanford Hall. He not only took supper with Elizabeth each night. Often he was there all day. With the potato and grain harvests in, he explained, there was no need for him to visit tenant farms, either those of Patrick or his own. Several mornings after Elizabeth was fully recovered, they went for horseback rides, moving with Gypsy past fields where grain had been gathered into shocks, and past apple orchards where the trees stood bare of both fruit and leaves. One such morning, hoarfrost covered the ground. Turning in the saddle, Elizabeth saw the hoofprints her mount and Colin's left on the gray-white rime, print
s that disappeared so rapidly that they might have been made by ghosts.

  In mid-October she received a letter from Madame Leclerc in Dublin. The Frenchwoman begged to inform Lady Stanford that her gowns were now finished, and could be fitted at any time after Lady Stanford's accouchement. Elizabeth folded the letter quickly after reading it. As much as possible she avoided thinking of the child she had lost.

  As for the gowns, perhaps when Patrick returned he would suggest that they go to Dublin to get them.

  The next night, she was in her room, changing, with Rose's help, before going down to supper, when she heard a clatter of hooves in the forecourt. Quickly she slipped into a robe and then went to the window. By the light streaming through the front doorway she saw Patrick hand his mount's reins to young Joseph and then turn toward the steps. Heartbeat strangely rapid, she turned back to Rose. "Please help me into my gown. Then I won't need you any longer."

  She was alone in the room, pulling the stray tendril of hair into place before the mirror, when someone knocked. "Come in."

  He entered the room, looking rumpled and with dust on his boots. "Colin tells me you have quite recovered," he said, "but I wanted to see for myself." He looked at her face in its frame of chestnut curls. "Yes, I see that he is right."

  Elizabeth felt faint color in her cheeks. "And your journey?"

  "It went well enough." He turned toward the door. "I must try to tidy myself before I go down to the supper table."

  "Just a moment." Then, as he turned back to her: "Madame Leclerc has written that my gowns are ready. I was wondering if we might go to Dublin within the next few days."

  "I am sorry. But I will be busy here for at least a week."

  Busy doing what? Having a prolonged reunion with Moira Ashley?

  Until now, when she felt a sharp pang of disappointment, she had not realized that she had very much wanted that trip to Dublin with Patrick. She was not sure why. Perhaps over the past weeks she had begun to hope, not for a happy marriage—that was quite impossible— but at least for a certain companionship with her husband.