Another round of male laughter echoed up from the dining room, and Viola rose to her feet. “I cannot stand it,” she said. “My curiosity is eating away at me. I have to find out what they are laughing about down there. Come on.”
The other two women willingly accompanied her out of the drawing room and down the stairs. They huddled together outside the dining room and listened. It only took a moment to discover what all the laughing was about. The three men were composing limericks. Naughty ones.
“There once was a bawd from Cheshire,” Dylan began as Viola peeked around the edge of the door to have a look at them.
“There once was a bawd from Cheshire,” Dylan said again, then stopped. “What rhymes with Cheshire?” he asked as he poured himself a brandy from the half-empty bottle in front of him.
“Stupid question, Moore,” John said at once, and took a sip of his port. “Pleasure, of course. What else?”
“Measure,” Anthony suggested, and uttered a cry of triumph. “I’ve got it,” he said, and leaned forward in his chair, lifting his glass of port. “There once was a bawd from Cheshire, with talents well beyond measure. A face like a lime, pickled with time, but God, could she give a man pleasure.”
The other two men burst out laughing, and Viola shook her head in amazement. Her brother was composing naughty limericks with John and Dylan.
“Deuce take it, Tremore,” John said, “you’ve a talent for this. We must do another one. There once was a girl from Norfolk…”
Viola pulled back from the doorway and whispered, “And to think men are the ones who rule the world.”
“Frightening, isn’t it?” Grace whispered back.
The three women nodded agreement on that point and tiptoed back up the stairs. Once they were back in the drawing room, Daphne fell into a chair, laughing merrily, and said, “Viola, I think we can be sure of two things. First, that my husband and yours are going to get along much better in future. And second, when they wake up tomorrow, all three of them will be very cranky.”
Viola smiled, thinking that a very small price to pay for domestic peace.
Though Daphne’s prediction about how the men would feel the following morning came true, the outcome of that evening was a successful one. By the time her guests had been at Hammond Park a little over a week, John and Anthony were discussing business ventures together, fishing for trout, and agreeing on some issues of politics. Dylan, Viola noticed, often took an outrageously opposing view, and she realized it was deliberate, for it always forced Anthony and John to stand together against him on a topic. Dylan had always been a devilishly clever fellow.
On the eighth day of the visit, they took tea at the home of Lord and Lady Steyne, and this further cemented good relations, for Earl Steyne was good friends with John and was well-respected by Anthony.
The following morning, all six of them went riding before breakfast, and Anthony was so impressed with his sister’s beautiful mare, he insisted that if they bred her, he wanted a foal. Yes, Viola thought watching her brother and her husband discussing horses as they walked back to the house, the visit was going famously.
“Hammond, your gardens are lovely,” Daphne commented as the six of them mounted the wide front steps and crossed the portico toward the front doors of the house. “I now have many new ideas for our gardens at Tremore Hall,” she told her husband.
“My wife has become quite passionate about English gardens,” Anthony told the men. “And why? She likes to walk in them in the rain. She says an English garden in the rain smells like heaven.”
Before anyone could comment about that, the sound of carriage wheels crunching on the gravel was heard, and all of them paused on the portico, turning as an unmarked carriage pulled into the drive and came to a stop.
The footman jumped off the dummy board. He opened the door, unfolded the steps, and a slender woman in green descended from the vehicle. She lifted her head and saw them.
It was Emma Rawlins.
Viola could scarcely believe it. The woman glanced at her, and though her eyes widened in surprise, she turned her attention to John at once.
“My lord,” she said, halting at the bottom of the steps, “you and I have business to discuss.”
Business? It was brass indeed for a former mistress to come to a man’s home. And to speak thus, in front of his wife and his guests was unthinkable, but Emma did not seem to care about the propriety of it.
“We’ve no business, madam,” John said evenly, his face expressionless. “I thought I had made that clear.”
“Clear?” Her voice rose shrilly. “How could you make anything clear when you have not written to me? Nor have you answered my letters.”
“I answered the first three. After that I saw no point.”
“You did not even read them. You sent them back.” She reached into the pockets of her skirt and pulled out handfuls of paper–folded pink sheets just like those Viola had seen that day at Enderby. She threw them in his face. “You are the cruelest man I have ever known!”
“Control yourself, Mrs. Rawlins,” he said in a low voice as letters fluttered all around him to the ground. “We are not alone.”
“Control myself?” she cried. “Why should I?” She cast a glance in Viola’s direction. “Because your wife is here? Because you have guests? Because it might humiliate you?” Her face twisted with terrible pain and she began to weep. “It is I who have been humiliated, my lord. Not you!”
As if her strength had suddenly given way, she fell into a heap at his feet. “I loved you,” she said, sagging against the stone steps. “God, how I loved you. I gave you everything, John. Everything. How could you do this to me?”
Viola stared at the woman in horror, watching Emma’s shoulders shake with the force of her crying, watching her fingers curling in spasms against the cool gray flagstones near his boots.
She glanced around, but all the people on the portico, including the servants who had come out of the house at the sound of the carriage, were watching the woman as if paralyzed, staring at Emma as if they were witnessing some horrible accident. No one moved.
“You loved me, too,” Emma moaned. “I know you did. You must have. The things you said. All the special things you did because I liked them. The yellow roses you sent because you knew they were my favorites, and the tea from Ceylon you gave me because I once said I liked it. You did love me. You did.”
Viola looked into her husband’s face. He was staring down at the woman sprawled at his feet, hands behind his back, tight-lipped and silent. His face was white, his body utterly still. His countenance was blank, with no emotion in it, no affection, no compassion, nothing.
“What did I do to drive you away?” Emma lifted her face, looking at him in bewilderment, tears streaking her cheeks. “What did I do wrong?”
John made a wordless sound, and reached out a hand toward the bent head in front of him as if in pity, then changed his mind and pressed his fist to his mouth.
“I wrote you,” she went on, heedless of all the other people watching, “sheets and sheets. And your secretary sent them back to me with a letter from him to never write you again.” She let out a faint, bitter wail, so like a wounded animal that Viola was startled. The woman’s body slumped forward, red curls falling over her face. “Your secretary. After everything we had, what we once meant to each other, you couldn’t even be bothered to write such a letter to me in your own hand?”
Viola stared down at the weeping woman on the stone steps. She pressed her fingers to her mouth, her heart aching with pity, and she could not bear it. She started forward, then stopped, knowing that as John’s wife it would be cruel beyond belief for her to attempt to give comfort or assistance to this woman. She turned to Daphne and Grace.
Daphne caught her pleading glance. As if coming out of a daze, she moved, turning to touch Grace’s shoulder. The two of them stepped forward in unison, descending the steps on either side of the wretched woman. Together, they made an attempt to
lift her to her feet.
Emma’s head snapped up, the bright red lights in her hair glinting like fire in the morning sun. She slapped away the hands that tried to assist her and jumped up on her own. She stumbled backward down the steps but stayed on her feet, staring at John. “I hate you!” she cried, hands balling into fists. “I loved you, and all my love was wasted. And for what? I’ll show you the results of loving you.”
Whirling around, she ran for her coach as if to depart. Flinging open the door, she reached inside and pulled a bundle from the coach. It was only when she turned around again that Viola could see what it was. It was a baby.
“Look at him!” Emma demanded, holding the child with its face toward John. “Look at your son. What do you think I wrote in all those letters I sent you? The letters you couldn’t even be bothered to read. I told you that I was with child. And yes, he is yours, John. You shall pay the support for him, per the terms of our contract.”
She gave the tiny baby a shake as if it were a lifeless doll, and that snapped Viola out of shock and into action. She walked down the steps and over to the woman. As gently as she could, she took the baby from her. Emma, green eyes glittering with tears of pain and devastation, barely noticed. Her gaze was fixed on John, demanding he do right by her.
The baby was crying. Viola cradled him in her arms, patting his bottom and making little soothing sounds. She turned to look at her husband again and found he was not looking at Emma. Instead, he was looking at her. His face might have been carved out of stone.
Viola felt cold suddenly, cold in the sultry August air, and she wondered how any man could be the cause of such a heartbreaking display, watch it play out before him, and say nothing to the miserable woman, not even a kind word. She stared back at her husband, waiting in expectation for him to do something.
A muscle worked in his jaw, his lips parted, but he did not speak. Instead, he turned on his heel and strode toward the house.
“I hate you, John!” Emma shouted after him. “I hate you, and I will hate you until the day I die!” She turned, grabbed a leather traveling case from the carriage and turned, throwing it at Viola’s feet. Then, without retrieving the baby, she climbed up into her carriage, slammed the door, and thumped sharply on the roof with her fist. The footman jumped on the back of the carriage, and her driver pulled away. The carriage rolled out of the graveled drive and down the lane toward Falstone.
Daphne, Grace, Dylan, and Anthony all went into the house, but Viola did not follow them. Instead, she turned and walked in the opposite direction. She circled around the side of the house, spied a stone bench by kitchen gardens, and sat down. She held the tiny baby close and kissed his cheek, listening to his heart-wrenching sobs and feeling his tears on her face. “Hell,” she said, and started crying herself.
John strode straight through the house and out the back. He walked through the gardens, past the stables and into the woods. He had no conscious direction, no conscious thought. Outrage smothered him, but it could not smother the sound of Emma Rawlins’s wrenching sobs. They seemed to reverberate all around him—from the trees and the sky and the ground beneath his feet as he walked.
He tried to tell himself that his outrage was justified for Emma’s gall in coming to his house and for the horrible scene to which she had subjected Viola. Outrage at fate for giving him a son who could never be the heir he needed. Outrage at the whole baffling idea that a mistress would fall in love. The tea, the roses, harmless things, so innocuous. How could any woman think that those things and cold, hard sterling for bedroom services amounted to love?
Viola’s voice echoed through his mind, overtaking Emma’s wretched sobbing.
Oh, John, do you not see? Women fall in love with you. It’s in the way you smile and the things you say. The way you pay attention to what we tell you and how you remember what we like.
Ludicrous, he’d thought at the time. Viola being overly sentimental and kindhearted about a woman she should by all rights despise. Emma Rawlins in love with him was silly, absurd. Yet, only moments ago, Emma Rawlins had debased herself at his feet.
Not so silly after all.
He hadn’t known, he told himself. He’d never dreamt the woman had such passionate feelings for him. And a baby with her had never entered his head. Why should it have? He had used the proper protections. Could he be sure the child was his? What business did a mistress have falling in love with a man anyway?
Even as he heard his own attempts at self-defense and justification, they nauseated him. Loathing followed on nausea’s heels, loathing for himself and his thoughtless, callous behavior.
That was really the cause of his anger. Not poor Emma, who had been pregnant and hiding from the shame of it in France, writing him all those letters, no doubt terribly frightened at what would happen to her if he continued to ignore her. Nor was he angry at fate. Whether it was fornication or lovemaking, whether it was with or without the protection of French letters, children were the eventual, inevitable result, as hard as that was for a man to remember when a woman was in his arms and his wits were slipping. No, all his outrage was directed at himself.
John stopped walking and leaned his back against a tree. Nothing has changed, he realized with despair. After all that he had done these past nine years to become a responsible man, to do his duty by his estates and his family name, to be a good caretaker of his wife’s income and his own, yet in his private life, he was still as careless and thoughtless of the feelings of others as he had been as a youth. And as heedless of the consequences of his actions.
He sank down to the ground and put his head in his hands, Emma’s pathetic wail of sorrow ringing in his ears. Her emotional display might have been pitiful, but it was he who deserved the blame for it. He and he alone.
No, mistresses were not supposed to fall in love, but it was clear that sometimes they did. Viola had tried to tell him, had tried to explain, had tried to make him understand. He had refused to listen, refused to believe it. But he was now faced with the undeniable truth and the wretched results. He was now face-to-face with something he’d been running from his whole life: the weaknesses in his own character.
Viola had married him because she had loved him, she had trusted him, and he had lied to her. It had seemed harmless enough at the time, even kind. He hadn’t realized just what a deep and lasting wound he would inflict with something he’d thought so innocuous.
Do you love me? she’d asked him, her beautiful hazel eyes wide, so hopeful, so painfully vulnerable.
Of course I do, he’d answered, lightly, laughing, giving her a kiss and a careless smile and the answer she wanted because it had been the easy thing to do. The convenient thing. The only thing that would get him what he needed. Had his father been in his place, his father would have lied just as he had done. Without blinking an eye.
For the first time, John understood what he was. A heartbreaker. He’d held Viola’s heart in his hands nine years ago, and with thoughtless disregard, he had broken it. He hadn’t known what he’d been toying with.
Peggy Darwin had loved him, too. She’d said it once, laughing, with a pain in her eyes when he hadn’t said it back. Yes, she’d been married, but to a man who did not love her. She’d been starved for affection, and he’d willingly provided it. And he had ended it without a second thought.
Four years had passed since then, but that day in the draper’s shop a few months back, Peggy had still looked at him with a hint of what had been in her eyes when she’d said she loved him, a hint of what was in Emma’s face today, a hint of what Viola had felt for him when she had married him.
Viola. That hurt most of all. No bandages for her wounds, no way to mend her heart or laugh it all away. She would hate him now as much as she ever had, loathing him as much as he loathed himself. How could she not?
John rubbed his hands over his face. He couldn’t bear to think about Viola right now. One thing at a time. He had a baby son, and he had to figure out what to do about
that first.
There’d be no walking away. He knew that much. He’d told Viola that: no more walking away. He’d meant it about her and their marriage, but he knew it applied to every single thing in his life.
John stood up and went back toward the house, making for the stables. He had a groom saddle his horse, and he rode to Falstone.
Her tears were dry by the time Anthony found her in the garden. He sat down beside her on the stone bench. He studied her and the baby in her arms for a long moment, then said, “I could kill him, but somehow, I don’t think you want me to do that, do you?”
“No.” Viola smiled a little and looked at him. “But thank you for offering. Very noble and brotherly of you.”
“If it’s any comfort to you, he did break with the Rawlins woman before the season even began. I know that much.”
“I know it, too.” She paused. “I love him, you know. I have always loved him. Even when I hated him.”
Anthony put an arm around her shoulders. “Would you like me to take you away from here?”
Viola had been contemplating that very thing for over an hour. She thought of her husband, the charming man who could make everyday life such a delight, and she tried to reconcile that man with the one who had stood stone-faced a few moments ago while a heartbroken woman lay sobbing at his feet. With sudden clarity, she understood what it meant when her husband bore that hard, implacable expression. It was the face of a man in agony who wanted to make everything right and did not know how.
Viola stood up. “No, Anthony,” she answered her brother’s question, “I am not going anywhere. What I would like is for everyone to go home. Hammond and I need to work this out ourselves.”
He rose to his feet. “Are you sure?”
Viola looked down at the baby in her arms. This was her husband’s son. His affair with Emma Rawlins was in the past, ended before he had ever come back to her, and she was not going to condemn him for things in the past. The past could never be undone, and it was the future that mattered.
Guilty Series Page 80