by Mary Balogh
“That man would not have enjoyed having his little game exposed,” Harriet said bitterly.
“Perhaps not,” Clara said sadly. “But it was the way I said it that ruined everything. I was irritated because we were in the summerhouse sheltering from the rain and it was so lovely and so comfortable just being together there. But he kept saying those foolish things and spoiling everything. I was not able to talk sensibly to him, as I had planned. I was angry and spoke unwisely.”
“Just being together,” Harriet said, looking at her closely. “Why were you angry, Clara? Because he was continuing to lie to you when it was unnecessary? Or because you were hurt?”
“Hurt?” Clara looked blankly at her friend. She wanted to put her hands up defensively before her face. She knew what Harriet was going to say, but she did not want to hear it.
“Because he did not mean the words,” Harriet said. “Were you hurt because he did not love you but said he did?”
Clara drew a slow breath. “I did not marry him for love,” she said. “You know that, Harriet. I have had everything I wanted from the marriage. Respectability and... Respectability.”
But she continued to cry when alone. She could not seem to stop doing so or to pull herself together to resume a life with which she was long familiar. A life that had been interrupted for only a brief spell. She had known, after all, that the honeymoon could not last. She had not even expected a honeymoon when she had agreed to the marriage. She had not expected even that much.
She blamed herself for everything. For even if his words had been lies, he had been good to her. And life for those two weeks had become almost unbearably alive. She ached for the sound of his voice and his laughter, for the sight of his eyes. She ached at night for the touch of his body, for the warmth of his mouth on hers.
She had humiliated him. She knew that. Her anger had made her lash out to hurt as she had been hurt. Oh, yes, Harriet had been right, she thought in some despair. She had been hurt by his words, which had been lies. And so she had hurt him. Not only had she told him that she knew the truth, but she had even specifically mentioned his debts and asked him if her dowry had been sufficient to pay them off.
How could she have done that to him? She had seen shame in his eyes and then a blank mask. A blank, impenetrable mask that had stayed for the rest of the day and had still been there after breakfast the next morning when he came to take his leave of her. He had not used her name after what she had said, or any of the endearments he had used in the previous two weeks. He had addressed her formally as “ma’am,” He had not slept with her during what had turned out to be his last night at home, although she had lain awake through most of the night, expecting him and knowing he would not come.
Clara cried for what she had done to him and for what had happened to her. For of course it had been foolish to think she could marry a man for his beauty and strength and virility and be satisfied with those things. She had been as dishonest with herself as Freddie had been with her. She surely must have known that she was incapable of possessing and enjoying those things without wanting more.
She wanted more. She wanted Freddie. Oh, not to love, perhaps. They were too different from each other ever to love. But there had been something between them during those brief days of their marriage. There had been, She was sure of it. Some friendship. More than that. Some tenderness.
Yes, tenderness, even if not love. There had been that. And it might have remained if she had not been so unutterably foolish and thrown it all away in a matter of moments.
A letter came from him after a week, a short, formal little note that she opened with trembling fingers and read with anxious eyes while Harriet looked gravely on.
He hoped she was in good health. He was going to stay in town for a while. He had business to conduct there. She paused over the second and last paragraph and read it twice.
“An open barouche is to be delivered here within the next day or two,” she told Harriet. “I am to ride in it every day, weather permitting. I am to have you push me out on the terrace every day when it does not rain. I am to have at least half an hour of fresh air and sunshine each day.”
“Well, that at least is sensible,” Harriet said grudgingly. “With all due respect, Clara, I always thought that your father protected you too much and perhaps undermined the very health he thought to preserve. Are you going to follow Mr. Sullivan’s advice?”
“Yes,” Clara said, folding her letter and keeping it clasped in her hands. “Starting now. I have been missing the fresh air. I have not been outside for a week. Not since. . . .Not since the day I was caught out in the rain.”
She did not tell Harriet what Freddie had written in the last two sentences. There was no question of following his advice, good or otherwise. “And yes, ma’am,” he had written, “this is a command. I expect to be obeyed.”
She would obey him as she had always obeyed her father. She had obeyed her father because she had loved him and respected him and wanted to please him. She would obey Freddie because—because he was her husband.
The tears dried up in the coming weeks and life continued more or less as it had always been with a few changes. There were the outings, some of which she timed conscientiously so that they would not fall short of half an hour. Most of the time, though, except on especially raw autumn days, she stayed out a good deal longer than the prescribed time, from personal inclination. Once she had Robin carry her all the way to the summerhouse, and Harriet sat with her there for an hour. But she did not repeat the experiment. The tears returned when she was back at the house and alone.
She began to visit almost as much as she was visited and even went to a few evening parties and one assembly. She watched the charades and the dancing with some wonder and a little wistfulness.
Her appetite continued to improve after a lapse of a couple of weeks following her husband’s departure. She looked at herself critically in the looking glass one night and concluded that it was no longer her imagination. Her face was definitely fuller and far less pale than it always had been. She looked almost passably plain instead of ugly-plain, she thought with a private smile for the glass.
And she lived for the weekly letters that came from Freddie. Notes more than letters, all of them mere inquiries after her health and reminders of the one command he had seen fit to give her. She always answered the letters, as formally, almost as briefly, assuring him that she was in the best of health, hoping that he was too, and listing for him all the outings she had had in the previous week. Her barouche, she told him, was one of the most wonderful gifts she had ever been given. She felt a twinge of guilt, thinking of all the costly jewels her father had showered on her. But what she told Freddie was true.
Almost two months after he had left, the usual letter arrived. Clara read it with the usual eagerness, and then reread it, and read it again. She waited for Harriet to return from a short ride.
“We are going to London,” Clara said when her friend came into the drawing room.
Harriet raised her eyebrows.
“Freddie is coming home next week,” she said. “For one night only. He is taking us back to town with him the next day.”
“To London?” Harriet’s eyes lit up for a moment. Then she sobered and sat down. “You go, Clara. If you are to be with Mr. Sullivan, I will be in the way. I shall stay here, or go on a visit to my mother if you would prefer.”
“No,” Clara said. “You must come too, Harriet. Please? I don’t want to be alone. And I probably will be alone even more there than I am here. I don’t know anyone in London. Except Freddie, of course. But he will have his own interests to pursue.”
“Very well, then,” Harriet said quietly. She was excited by the news, Clara thought. Poor Harriet. So young and so pretty, and caught in a life of dreariness and poverty. Perhaps. . . She wished. . . But she had no way of bringing her friend to anyone’s attention. She knew no one.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling at Harriet.
She lay in bed later that night, staring upward, her letter held flat against her bosom. She did not want him to come home. She did not want to go to London. If he was coming home, he would go away again. If she was taken to London, she would be brought home again. She had not been made for excitement and novelty, she thought belatedly. She was made for dull monotony.
She did not want her emotions all churned up again.
She did not want to see Freddie again. And she would not cry, she told herself as she felt the ache in her throat and the sting in her eyes. She was not going to cry.
Why was she crying? She despised herself heartily.
Chapter 8
Frederick immersed himself in the pleasures of town as soon as he arrived there, picked up his old life exactly where he had left it. Except that it had lost some of its luster. There was something missing but he did not know what. It was the rather grand town house, he thought, instead of the usual cramped bachelor rooms. And yet the house only added to his comfort. It was the fact that it was late summer and not the fashionable time to be in town. But he had always spent most of his time in London, regardless of the season. It had never made any difference to him before.
He became an enthusiastic contributor to the betting books at the clubs, as he had always been. He found out all the more interesting card games—at the clubs and in private homes. An interesting card game to Frederick meant that the stakes were high. And he bedded a few willing women of ton and a far larger number of willing courtesans. He even took to frequenting a brothel of high repute once or twice a week. He discarded the idea of employing a regular mistress after spending a second night with one particularly luscious courtesan only to find that she wanted to talk. As if her second time with him gave her the right to probe his soul. The last thing he wanted to do with women was talk.
The magic was no longer there. It was eluding him, no matter how frantically he tried to pile one pleasure on another. And he was losing at the tables and in the books. Not drastically so. Sometimes he won and sometimes he lost, as one expected when one was an experienced gamer. But the losses were always higher and a little more frequent than the gains. After a few weeks he became uneasily aware that he owed a substantial sum.
Nothing he could not handle. His income was quite sufficient to cover his losses.
He began to drink in order to counter the flat feeling his days and his nights were bringing him. Never too much. He knew his limits and had always worked sensibly within them. He had done so ever since a drunken orgy when he was eighteen had left him sick for days and wishing he were dead. He had learned a lesson then. Never again would he drink more than two drinks on one occasion, he had resolved. Surprisingly, considering his other excesses, he had kept the resolve—until now. He started taking three and four drinks each night, just enough to brighten his mood but not enough to make him drunk. But he began to wake in the mornings, as often as not in a strange bed with the nauseating smell of some perfume in his nostrils, with a headache and a foul taste in his mouth.
He thought of Clara almost constantly. He had done a shameful thing and she had known about it and confronted him with it just at a time when he was making an ass of himself, telling her that he loved her, almost meaning it. He hated her. He wished in his heart that he had not taken the mad step of marrying her. Debtors’ prison would have been better. Not that his father would have allowed him to languish long there. Debtors’ prison would have been better than his father’s sorrow too.
He never wanted to see his wife again. He would avoid doing so if he possibly could. He would have to think of some excuse to give his mother about Christmas. He did not need to look into Clara’s eyes and see the contempt there. He had a looking glass that served the same purpose quite adequately.
And yet he worried about her. He had felt the essential tedium and loneliness of her life, and felt almost vicious with anger against a father who had smothered her with love and made her life almost unbearably dull. She had enjoyed their short rides more than another woman would have enjoyed a tour of the gayest European capitals. She had been happier sitting and lying on the grass outside the summerhouse than she would have been if he had presented her with a bed of priceless jewels and laid her down on it. Her open barouche, she had written to tell him, was the most wonderful gift she had ever been given.
She needed air and sunshine and company. She had Harriet Pope for company and a good number of attentive neighbors. He took to writing to her, commanding her to take the air and the sunshine. And he read her weekly letters and noted with satisfaction that she was obeying him. Obeying him! Someone like Clara was obeying someone like him? Because he was her husband. She had always obeyed her father too, and the man had let her live in a hothouse atmosphere. Her letters were always short and formal. He looked for something even remotely personal in them but found nothing, except that remark she had made about the barouche.
He tried not to think about her. They had their separate lives to lead, happily apart. He had got the money he had so desperately needed while she had got the respectability she had wanted. They owed each other nothing now.
Lord Archibald Vinney returned to London at the end of September and called on his friend the day after his return.
“Come up in the world, haven’t you, Freddie, my boy?” he said in the languid voice he liked sometimes to affect. He looked about the salon, his quizzing glass to his eye. “It pays to marry a rich wife, I see.”
“The house is a wedding present from my father,” Frederick said.
Lord Archibald chuckled and lowered himself gracefully into a chair. “And how is the blissful bridegroom?” he asked. “Living apart from the bonnie bride? Marital bliss was too sweet, Freddie?”
“I had business in town,” Frederick said, “and Clara is more comfortable in the country.”
His friend threw back his head and laughed. “Business!” he said. “Making money, old chap? Are you?”
“I have had some luck,” Frederick said.
He found Lord Archibald’s quizzing glass trained on him. “Those words always mean that there has also been a great deal of bad luck,” he said. “Another occasion when a rich wife comes in handy, Freddie. I envy you.” Lord Archibald was as rich as Croesus and the heir to a dukedom to boot. Rumor had it that his grandfather had been teetering on the brink of death for a year or more.
Frederick poured his friend a brandy and himself a glass of water.
“Ah, silence,” Lord Archibald said, raising his brandy glass to his eye before sipping from it. “Are my remarks tasteless, Freddie, my boy? Do you consider yourself a married man?”
“I am a married man,” Frederick said.
“Then my lips are forever sealed on the subject,” his friend said. “Have you had at the delectable companion at all?”
“Had? Miss Pope?” Frederick frowned. “Of course I have not, Archie. What do you think I am?”
The quizzing glass was directed his way again. “Don’t tell me,” Lord Archibald said. “A married man. Never tell me you have been celibate since returning to London, Freddie. The very thought is excruciatingly horrible.” He shuddered.
Frederick grinned for the first time. “Not exactly,” he said. “Have you tried the girls at Annette’s, Archie? They are something superior.”
“You must recommend the loveliest and liveliest,” his friend said, “and I shall sample her charms and see if I agree.”
They resumed their friendship and Lord Archibald was as good as his word. He did not refer to the marriage again. But Frederick had been annoyed. His friend had seemed to take for granted the fact that there was nothing in the marriage to hold Frederick at home. It was a veiled and perhaps quite unintentional insult to Clara.
He did not like her to be insulted, indirectly or not. She deserved better than she had got. Ten times better.
He got drunk one night when luck was with him but even the pleasure of winning a small fortune could bring with it no great exhilar
ation. He got rowdily and finally morosely drunk and had to be carried home. He did not even know until well into the next day that he had lost the fortune and more besides. He felt so vilely sick all day that he got drunk again during the evening. And the next. He found that the only way to keep feeling marginally well was to continue drinking. Finally he drank himself into total oblivion.
Three days of hell followed, and then a depression so deep that it seemed pointless to drag himself from bed in the morning. The thought of liquor or cards—or women—nauseated him. There seemed no pleasure in life worth going after any longer.
Lord Archibald dragged him out for a ride in the park one raw and gray day that perfectly matched Frederick’s mood. There was almost no one else in sight.
“Everyone else is wise enough to stay indoors by a fire,” he grumbled.
“Trouble with the marriage, Freddie?” his friend asked after a minute or two of silence, a note of unusual sympathy in his voice. “You are regretting it?”
Frederick laughed shortly.
“You cannot just pretend it does not exist?” his friend asked.
“It exists,” Frederick said. “Be warned, Archie. Not one word about my wife. I am not in the mood to answer in any other way than with my fists.”
“Hm,” his friend said. “It exists, but it does not exist. If it cannot be ignored, Freddie, my boy, perhaps it should be confronted. That is the only alternative, is it not?”
“Since when have you turned wise man and counselor?” Frederick asked.
His friend lifted his quizzing glass to his eye and watched a shapely and self-conscious maid walking a dog as she passed close to them. He pursed his lips with appreciation and touched his hat to her though she peeped up only once, briefly. “Since feeling a hankering to see a certain little blond companion again,” he said. “If you decide to make a visit into Kent, Freddie, I will come with you. As moral support.”
“All I would need,” Frederick said, “is to have a lecherous aristocrat seducing my wife’s companion under my very nose. She is a virtuous woman, if you had not noticed, Archie, and does not have the highest of opinions of our class.”