Her mother was concerned for her ability to play the part, even now. And the fact that, after trying so hard for so long, Thea was on some level a disappointment, added yet another sting to the wound on her heart. ‘I will manage,’ she said, feeling the tears gathering behind her eyes, even if there was no real reason for them. ‘What is your news?’
‘We have had a letter from Grandfather. After all this time, he has relented. And it was all because of you, my darling. He heard of your marriage to Kenton and was so impressed by the worth of the match and the tragedy of its sudden end, that he has acknowledged the union of your parents and freed your father’s portion of the money. Do not think, should you choose to marry again, that you need to concern yourself with our welfare.’
‘I have no intention of marrying again,’ Thea said flatly. It was, perhaps, the last full truth she could ever speak.
‘Come now, darling,’ her mother said with a worried frown. ‘You are young yet. It is too soon to think of shutting yourself away.’
Perhaps not the last truth. ‘Jack is lost to me,’ she added. ‘And I miss him terribly.’ While her mother wept, her own eyes were still unfortunately dry. She should be able to produce at least one tear from them. What was it Jack had said about acting? Think of something sad. The prospect of never seeing him again was quite sad enough to act convincingly, she was sure. She felt the stuffiness of the head and the prickling of the lashes that indicated a proper widow’s grief. It was a pity that he could not be here to admire her newfound skill.
‘Yes, my dear.’ Her mother stroked her hands, then thought the better of it and gathered her close in for a hug. ‘You will go on without him. Wait and see. You mustn’t be angry with him for leaving you, for he has finally made you a success.’
‘Now that I do not need Grandfather’s help, he wishes to know me?’ Her own efforts had been for nothing after all.
‘You married well, bagged a title and now you are a rich widow.’
‘I did none of those things.’ She had trapped herself in a lie so perfect that no amount of protesting would make people believe the truth.
‘It is the appearance that matters, not the truth.’
‘You are very wise,’ Thea said, surprised that she had not noticed it before. ‘Grandfather was wrong to not have acknowledged you from the first. From what Jack told me, you could have had more money than Grandfather might offer had you kept to the stage.’
‘But then I would not have had your father,’ her mother said. ‘The choice was quite simple, really.’
She gave her mother a worried look. ‘I was wrong to disapprove. I have not treated you as I should, Mother. You have been good to me. And I have been nothing but false.’
Her mother gathered her close and kissed her upon both cheeks. At one time Thea might have scolded her about the continual display of excess emotion where anyone might see, but today it felt good to know that she was loved. ‘You have been my daughter. And I am proud of you.’
‘But I should have been proud of you as well. People are such hypocrites.’ She stared out at the crowded pews. ‘They claim to be better than others, but they do it with a smile on their face and a lie on their lips.’ Her mother had left her old life behind and chosen to live amongst people who would never accept her. She claimed the choice had been easy.
But it was one that Jack had refused to make.
Thea wiped away her first tear.
‘Truth is like staring into the sun, my dear,’ her mother said. ‘Just as blinding as a lie might be, but far more damaging. It changes you.’
Thea wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. Her widow’s weeds were not red, as she had threatened. They were subdued, tasteful and dark as jet, just as Jack had predicted. And the black-edged handkerchief that she held to her face was becoming quite damp.
They should be tears of relief. The charade was finally over. She had justice for her parents and could go on about her life just as planned, alone.
Without warning, a sob erupted from her and she crammed her knuckles into her mouth, trying to stop another. Damn the man. He had made her care for him. Then he had left before she’d admitted the truth.
And the worst of it was she could not be absolutely sure that he hadn’t died when the boat had sunk. Suppose he’d drowned when his shirt caught on the rough boards of the hull, and the battering of the waves and the heaviness of his lifeless corpse had dragged him away from the boat? She would never know. Even if he was alive and healthy, there was no way to reach him. He would stay far, far away from her, never writing, never visiting, giving no sign. She might spend the rest of her life haunting the theatres of England, looking for some out-of-the-way performance where a handsome blond man with a majestic profile declaimed Hamlet or wept over the body of his Juliet.
It was not fair. Not at all. How could he be allowed to go back to his old life after changing everything about hers? How could she marry again, knowing that it was Jack she loved, Jack she’d wed and Jack she wanted? How could he leave her alone like this?
And now she was weeping like a widow. All the world would see her for what she was, a woman who had been young and happy and in love, and who had lost it all. But not in the blink of an eye with one hapless wave. From almost the first moment of her marriage, her love had been dying and she had ignored it. She had told herself that it would not matter. She had let him die when she could have stopped it.
She could feel Spayne’s hand, heavy on her shoulder, as he took her mother’s place and drew her away from the other mourners so that she might compose herself.
She leaned upon him, letting him be strong for her and taking comfort in knowing that he was the better for what they had done. ‘I cannot believe he’s really gone,’ she admitted.
‘Yes,’ the earl whispered back. ‘It was a surprise to me as well. I had hoped, once he’d got used to the life I offered, that he would carry it through.’
‘It was your decision to keep him or send him away,’ she reminded him. ‘It was not as if he was actually your son.’
There was a long, awkward pause from Spayne.
‘He was not your son,’ Thea insisted, glancing around to be sure they were alone. ‘Your heir died in Italy years ago.’
And still Spayne was silent. At last, he said, ‘Long ago, over thirty years, when I was barely engaged to my Catherine, and sewing wild oats, there was a certain golden-haired beauty who acted the breeches parts in Shakespeare as well as any boy.’
‘You are not implying...’ Cynthia said with a raised eyebrow.
‘Certain promises might have been made,’ the earl said with a vague wave of the hand. ‘I knew a Fleet marriage was as no marriage at all. But if the vows were said in earnest?’ He looked embarrassed. ‘I was given to understand that there were consequences to our time together. And I paid her to be gone. By then, I had a wife and was starting a family of my own. The woman might have been lying, of course. She did not ask for as much as she could have. And the child might not have been mine. She was not ungenerous with her favours.’ He shrugged again. ‘But after that, if I chose to follow the career of a certain young actor with more than unusual interest, I could hardly be blamed. And he did grow to look rather like me.’
‘If you had told him...’ Then perhaps he would have stayed. It was as grossly unfair and misguided as anything the earl had come up with.
He surprised her by drawing himself up stern and powerful. ‘I found the man on the gallows, my dear. It may not seem so, but even I take more care with my title than to give it to a common criminal. He might not have been the man I wanted and needed him to be. For all I knew, he was not even my natural son. I’d put nothing into his education or welfare for half a lifetime. He could just as easily have grown into the sort of rogue who deserved a quick end at the end of a long rope. Better that he think it all a ruse and easy to part from, than a truth that could be worked to his advantage.’
The earl looked sadly back at the casket. ‘He f
ulfilled all of my hopes. He was Kenton and my true son in all ways that mattered. But in the end, he left because he did not wish to stay. No amount of hoping will bring him back.’
‘But I do want him back,’ she said, embarrassed at the tears, the wateriness of her voice and the display of emotion that would have horrified the instructors at Miss Pennyworth’s school. ‘I love him.’
‘Did you tell him so?’
That was the most damning question the earl could have asked, for it proved that she was as much at fault as anyone for Kenton’s departure. She had not tried hard enough. She had not given him a reason to remain.
‘No,’ she said with a sob. ‘For all my talk, I was not honest in the one moment of my life that demanded full truth. I should have begged him to stay. And I let him go.’
She turned back to the church and took her place beside the coffin, leaning against it, pressing her face to the wood, letting the tears flow freely.
‘It is most flattering to see such a generous display of affection.’ She looked up at the familiar voice to see her wayward husband framed in the doorway at the end of the aisle, looking not the least bit the worse for wear.
Her mother gave an undignified shriek and fainted dead away. Although from where Thea stood, it appeared that Antonia made an effort to catch herself and break the fall on her way to the floor.
And Thea could not help herself. She threw the handkerchief aside and lunged at him, pelting down the church and throwing herself into his arms. ‘How dare you! You beast. You horrible, horrible man. How can you come here now? Can you not see how we have suffered, surely you must have known.’ She beat senselessly upon his chest, hoping that he felt some of her fear, her anguish, her worry.
He must have done, for the laugh he gave in response was a trifle weak and not the least bit affected. ‘I know, dearest. I know.’ Then he whispered, ‘Given the opportunity, you must know that I could not resist the dramatic entrance.’ His arms held her tenderly, even as she hit at him, waiting for the anger to work its way out of her.
Eventually, it did. Her blows slowed and then stopped, and she sobbed weakly for a time before settling in his arms, letting him support her as he explained to the mourners about the wreck of the boat, dragging himself to shore far from where he’d set off, the fever which had confined him, insensible, to his bed for a week. And the surprise at reading of his funeral in The Times.
The audience responded with appropriate oohs and ahhs, Jack punctuated the story with murmured endearments and little kisses to the top of her head, pushing her veiled bonnet out of the way and generally treating her as a man might when he’d very nearly lost his life and returned to find his wife weeping over his casket.
Then he pressed his mouth close to her ear and whispered, ‘God knows what Spayne will think of my resurrection, but I could not leave without you. If he will not acknowledge me, then we will take the boat out together, next time.’
She laughed through her tears. ‘How dramatic of you, my dear.’
‘Me?’ He pressed his hand to his breast and gave her a wide-eyed, innocent look. ‘I am the heir to a peer. If that is not serious business, I do not know what might be.’
She slapped his arm. ‘Do not toy with me, Jack. Why have you really returned?’
‘Because I cannot live without you.’ He kissed her. ‘S’truth. I cannot die without you, either. If Romeo and Juliet does not end happily, I can’t be bothered with it.’
‘You know what this means.’
‘Not a clue,’ he admitted and kissed her again.
‘No more Jack Briggs. No more play-acting.’
‘Nothing but play-acting. All the world’s a stage, m’dear. And some of us are more players than others.’ He grinned at her. ‘As for Jack Briggs? I knew him well. But his departure is no great loss to the world. Kenton is the better man. And a happier one.’
‘Because he is rich,’ she said suspiciously.
‘Because he is well married,’ Jack insisted.
‘And the loss of your freedom?’
‘At least I shall not be lonely,’ he said with a satisfied sigh.
‘The responsibilities of a viscount, and some day those of an earl? What will you make of those?’
‘Probably I shall make a great hash of them. But having met the nobility and looked in its collective eye, I doubt I shall do any worse than they do. And I mean to begin by taking an extended vacation to Scotland with my wife. A second honeymoon, perhaps.’
‘We have barely finished our first one,’ she reminded him. ‘And I cannot imagine why you would choose Scotland, in any case.’
‘The marriage laws are less taxing on the other side of the border,’ he reminded her. ‘And if a certain actor named Jack Briggs should choose to marry the exceptionally well-bred girl who has stolen his heart, no one would question them.’
‘Jack Briggs has a desire for a legal wedding,’ she said, trying to hide her smile.
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘I understand he is very much in love.’
‘His wife loves him as well,’ Thea said with a sigh.
‘He is the most fortunate of men,’ Jack said, smiling, and pulled her close and gave her a kiss that was far too passionate for a funeral.
Epilogue
As the months passed, Lord and Lady Kenton were very much in demand by the ton, both as guests and hosts. Lady Kenton combined all the charm and vivacity of her mother with the wealth of her husband the viscount. Her entertainments were extravagant without being tasteless, and always ahead of the current fashion. Since his return from India, her husband had settled easily into his role as heir to the Earl of Spayne, managing the estates and smoothing the feathers of the many families that Spayne had snubbed with his reclusion.
It was obvious that the pair were enamoured with each other by the way Lady Kenton would swat her husband playfully with a closed fan and murmur, ‘You odious man,’ breaking into even his most entertaining stories and pulling him away to the floor whenever the musicians played a waltz. When they danced, the couple was so arresting that those who had not seen them before sometimes stopped and stared in amazement. They moved together as though they were a single body, seldom speaking, but so close that, should they choose, their words could be exchanged in passionate whispers.
Opinions were divided as to whether their behaviour was actually shocking or merely seemed so. There hung around them a palpable cloud of passion, like a musk or incense, that made matrons smile knowingly, innocent maids blush and young men stumble over their own feet in their eagerness to partner with the ginger-haired beauty.
She accepted each offer graciously, turning away those who were too late with such gentle apologies that they were quite smitten, but she would allow no one but her husband to share the waltzes.
There was no dancing at all on the evening that set half the tongues in London to wagging. That night, they attended a salon were Lord Byron was reading from his latest poem. The hostess had warned the company that the man was rather scandalous. But his presence would make for a memorable evening, as long as he could be kept from excessive drink and Caro Lamb did not arrive to spoil things.
And so it proved, for at his introduction to Viscount Kenton, the poet quite embarrassed himself by being over-familiar. He stared and asked, ‘You, sir. Do I know you?’
The normally good-humoured Kenton seemed to flinch at the rudeness of it. Then he turned and faced the playwright, looking down his famously aristocratic profile. ‘I’d hardly call it an acquaintance, Byron. All of London knows you. And much of it knows me.’
‘That is not what I mean,’ the poet said, snapping his long white fingers. ‘Have we met at some other time? In the theatre, perhaps?’
‘I do not frequent plays,’ Kenton replied.
‘Are you sure?’ Byron examined him more closely. ‘For I could swear that you’d sought a part in a planned production of Manfred.’
Kenton reached for the quizzing glass that hung from a ribbon besi
de his fob and examined the man closely. ‘What the devil are you talking about?’
‘My allegory, Manfred. The performance never occurred. The story was too expansive to be contained by a mere stage.’
‘Bloated, you mean?’ Kenton pressed.
‘Grand in scope,’ Byron said haughtily. ‘It is set in the Alps. No painted scenery can do it justice.’
‘Very interesting, to some, I’m sure,’ Kenton said dismissively. ‘But I fail to see what this has to do with me.’
‘I could swear that you, sir, before you became the toast of London society, were an actor called Jack Briggs.’
All the room hung in awkward silence, waiting to see what would happen next.
Then, from across the room, came a laugh so full of mirth that it that bordered on the unladylike. ‘Kenton, an actor?’ Lady Kenton appeared at his side with a graceful sway of her hips, twining her arm in his. ‘Oh, do tell, my lord. I must hear of this exciting previous life of Kenton’s. Was he a good actor?’ She leaned close, as though to whisper a confidence. ‘When he thinks to woo me with poetry, he cannot seem to keep two lines of it straight in his head.’
‘You do me an injustice, darling,’ he said. ‘I am distracted by your beauty. And I have no trouble, as long as I keep the book to hand.’
‘But perhaps I should like to meet this actor Briggs,’ she said with a smile. ‘He could pretend to be you and woo me properly. I would quite fancy a man who could quote Shakespeare.’
This brought a deep and horsey guffaw from the Regent himself. ‘Lud, Lady Kenton, but you are diverting. Kenton an actor? What will Spayne say to that?’
‘I expect he shall ship me back to India,’ Kenton answered with a chuckle. ‘Or Italy, perhaps. I hear that is an excellent choice for scapegrace sons with an air for the dramatic.’
Two Wrongs Make a Marriage Page 21