Well, Sarah was better. And he was halfway home to Penrose, with no idea of what he was going to do. “Don’t play the hypocrite with me.” Arabella’s voice now. Arabella—Kate. Kate—Arabella. He was not thinking now but feeling, and it hurt. “Don’t play the hypocrite with me...” Just what game of deception had he been playing with himself? He—Jonathan Penrose, the married man, the father? It was as neither of these that he had been enraged by the story of Kate’s past.
So far, he had been pushing his horse unmercifully along the quiet road. Now, hardly noticing, he slackened speed. What was there to go home for but misery? It was all hopeless, horrible, no matter how you looked at it. Except—there was Sarah. Think, he told himself, simply of her: work out what’s best for her; forget the rest.
Forget it? Absurd. His hands, still holding the reins, were limp now on his horse’s neck. Somewhere, in a remote corner of his mind, he remembered that he had eaten nothing all day. It did not matter, only—he was so tired; tired deep down through mind and bones. It was a relief to give way to exhaustion: to stop thinking, and sit inert, a thing, while the horse plodded along the familiar road to the stable.
It was late when he got to Penrose at last. Old Job, taking the horse, looked at him anxiously but merely said, “Miss Sarah’s been in the garden all day, Master Jonathan. She’s much better.”
“Good.” Listlessly. He went in the back way and encountered Mrs. Peters in the kitchen.
“There you are, Mr. Jonathan. I’d quite given you up for tonight. Shall I have Prue get you something to eat?”
“No, thank you.” He was beyond food. It would choke him.
She, too, looked concerned. “But you’ll take something after your ride? Some hot punch, perhaps, to warm you? I’ll bring it you in the study.”
He looked chilled to the bone, she told Prue. “I hope he’s not sickening for something.” And in her anxiety, she mixed the punch much stronger than usual.
“Here, drink this; it will do you good.” She had found him, most unusually, sitting in the half dark of his study, doing nothing. While he took his first warming sips, she bustled about, lighting lamp’s, drawing curtains, and apologizing the while for not having had things ready. “We never thought you’d come so late, Mrs. Croston and I.”
“Where is Mrs. Croston?”
“In her room, I think. It’s late, Mr. Jonathan.”
“Yes. Yes: I suppose it is. But I must speak to her just the same. Ask her to come down, would you, Mrs. Peters?”
“Of course. But Sarah’s wonderfully better. I reckon we can just about quit worrying over her.”
“Oh, yes ... yes, Job told me. But just the same...”
“Of course. I’ll fetch Her right away.”
The warm, fierce liquid was having a wonderfully clarifying effect on his mind. What had seemed impossible was now, miraculously, quite simple. Everything fitted into place. It was not—of course it was not—at all what he had expected, had intended for himself. But then, neither had Arabella been. Nothing, he told himself gravely, is what you expect: the secret is to compromise. Compromise. That was what he had been saying all day to his Federalist friends. Compromise ... make the best of things ... he moved tiredly across the room to the punch bowl and ladled himself another generous helping. Lord, what a long day. And not over yet.
“You wanted me?” She stood in the doorway, quiet as a shadow.
“Yes. Come in. Close the door. We have to talk, you and I.” In his exhausted state, words were tricky things, to be summoned with difficulty, pronounced with care.
“Tonight? So late?” But she shut the door behind her and moved forward into the lamplight. There were dark circles under her eyes, and shadows along her cheekbones he had never noticed before. If he was exhausted, she looked it.
But he was on fire now to have it over with, settled. “Yes, tonight. Sarah’s much better, they tell me. Well enough to travel?”
“I don’t see why not. It might even do her good.”
“Admirable.” That was a long, hard word. Better keep to short ones. “I’ve worked it all out, Kate. I know what to do.”
“Oh?” Was she looking at him with the same kind of irritating anxiety he had noticed in Job and Mrs. Peters?
“Yes. Now we know where we stand, we can think what to do.” But he must go further back: must explain. “Arabella asked me to give her money today,” he said. “A great deal of money. So she could run away with your Charles Manningham. Comic, is it not?”
“My?” It was the merest breath and he went on as if he had not heard her.
“Poor Arabella,” he said: “No money, no elopement, of course. She’ll know in the morning, when he leaves for Washington without her. He’s got to go, thank God. So— there it is. She’ll want to come here. Away from her kind friends and their sym-sympathy. If I know anything about her. Which I should. And—can’t have the two of you under the same roof. Not after what she said today. Not anyway, come to that. Besides, there’s Sarah.” He took another long drink to clear his head. “I wish you’d sit down.”
“No.” It was oddly flat.
“I wish you would.” But he struggled to his feet, put his glass on the chimney piece, and leaned against it for support. “I’ve got a house,” he said. “A cottage, rather. Out in the hills near Northampton. It’s empty, right now. You’ll find it snug enough, you and Sarah. And—it’s not too far. I’ll visit you whenever I can.”
“Oh.” A long breath of exquisite relief. “Mr. Penrose! Jonathan! You’re not going to send me away.”
“Send you away? I should rather think not. That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s all easy now, don’t you see? Now I know what you are. It solves everything. Arabella can come home. To her empty house. I’ll come to Northampton whenever I can. Say that’s what you want, Kate. Darling, ex-... exquisite Kate, tell me that’s what you want.” He was all fire now. “Kate!” He let go of the chimney piece and took one long step across the room toward her, only to find that somehow she was not there. “What’s the matter?” He turned to face her where she now stood, halfway to the door of the room. “You care for me—I feel it, felt it the other night. No use denying it. Besides: why should you? Only be true to me, Kate, and I’ll be as good as a husband to you, I promise it.”
“As good?” She stood very still, very straight, her eyes huge in the tired face. “Mr. Penrose, are you by any chance suggesting that I become your mistress?”
“Exactly.” He was delighted that she had taken his point so fast. “What a splendid girl you are, Kate, for calling a spade a spade. I think it’s what I first began to love about you. You know—” blessed relief to talk to her at last freely, like this. “I didn’t understand what was happening to me. Not until Arabella told me about you and Manningham. I just thought—how pleasant the house was these days, how happy to come home to. And then, when she told me, I thought, for a while, I’d go mad. I never want to go through that again. But it made no difference to my loving you. It just made me understand that I did. What you did, years ago, in England, that’s all over. You’re different now, aren’t you, Kate? Your past shall be your own affair. It’s you, now, I care about. And now you must be all mine, mine for always. There’ll be talk of course, bound to be, but you won’t mind that: why should you? What do we care for the Boston gossips, you and I, if we’re happy at Northampton?”
“You’re serious?” Her face was in shadow, but her tone should have warned him.
“Never more so.” He was impervious, just now, to tones of voice. “Oh—I know, it must come strangely from me. I’ve always had something of a name in Boston for— call it Puritanism. Well: women! Who’s to understand them? Look at Arabella, so mad for that lady’s darling that she’d throw away everything she’s ever wanted. And I don’t mean me, Kate, she never cared for me; I mean my money, that she married me for. That’s why, don’t you see, I’ve no debt to her, none I can’t pay with money. So, we’re free, you and I; the past shall
be nothing—forgotten: I promise you I’ll never so much as think of it; the future is ours: As for the world, for Boston and my friends there, let them ruin themselves as they please; we’ll make our own world, you and I.”
“And Sarah?” Once again, the ice in her voice should have warned him.
“Of course. It was for your kindness to her that I first loved you, Kate, loved you before I had any idea, before I understood...”
“And what do you understand now? You’re offering me”—she boggled briefly for a phrase—“a love nest, a courtesan’s paradise! And proposing that I share it with your daughter. It’s beyond belief. And you ... you would visit us, honor us with your company when you could get away from your wife. The world well lost for love. Mr. Penrose, you make me sick.”
“But, Kate—” he was shocked almost into sobriety. “I don’t understand—”
“You don’t, do you? You make a boast of not understanding women. Well, Mr. Penrose, let me tell you this: even if I was for one minute fool enough to consider accepting your insulting proposition, I’d not have it for Sarah. Brought up by your mistress! You must be mad.” At all costs she must preserve this warming flame of anger, must not let herself think of the other side of the picture, of all he was ready to sacrifice for her sake. His world, his Boston; she knew what they meant to him. She would not think of that. Instead: “Tell me, Mr. Penrose; I think I have to know. What exactly has Charles Manningham told you about me?”
“What?—But you admitted it!”
“I’m beginning to wonder just what, in fact, I admitted. I should have known Charles Manningham better. Come, Mr. Penrose, things have gone too far between us now for mincing matters. You must see, you have to tell me.”
“Not Manningham,” he managed. “Arabella. He told her.”
“Yes, of course. But told her what?”
“Enough. That you were—oh God! Kate! Don’t make me say it to you.”
“You must.”
“Oh, very well.” He picked up his punch glass and drained it. “Manningham told Arabella—that you were notorious in your father’s parish. That his death, in fact, happened because he found you making”—he stopped for a minute, then took it at a gallop—”scandalous and unwelcome advances to Charles Manningham himself.”
She took a long breath. “And you believed that! And, believing it, have left me with your daughter? And now—now you take it further! Now you pay me the compliment of asking me to be your mistress.” Her voice told him what kind of a compliment she thought it. “I really believe,” she went on, “the kindest thing I can do is to tell you you’ve had too much to drink. Which is the case. And make my arrangements to leave in the morning. I’m sorry about Sarah.”
Too late, he was aware, himself, of his befuddled state. “But Kate—” he had to have it all clear now. “You as good as admitted it.”
“I?” And then she remembered. “Yes, I see. You could have thought that.” She moved toward the door. “Well, it’s all over now. Good night, Mr. Penrose. We will discuss, in the morning, who is to take care of Sarah when I am gone.”
“No!” He moved forward to catch her hand and stop her. “We can’t leave it like this. You must explain. What then, was there between Manningham and you? What did you mean, when you seemed to admit it all?”
She withdrew her hand with a firmness there was no gainsaying. “He raped me,” she said, and left him.
TWELVE
Impossible to imagine sleeping, or even to face the narrow confines of her room. Kate opened the back door to go very quietly, a ghost walking in moonlight, across the lawn and lean her elbows on the wall by the river. Gazing down into the shadowed, hurrying water, she made herself face it all, the bitter past, the intolerable future. What good had ever come of her running away? And yet—must she run away again?
She had been crazy not to realize how Charles Manningham would twist the story to his advantage. After all, she had known Charles Manningham. And yet—hard to remember now—she had been delighted when he first began to visit them. He had come home to their village on leave from his regiment to recover from a wound he had got at Ciudad Rodrigo. Too weak at first to go far for company, he had soon found his way to the vicarage where her father was entering the third lonely year since his wife’s death.
Yes. She bit her lower lip angrily. She had been pleased when Manningham took to coming in every evening, had even—she could hardly bear to think of it now—woven a series of daydreams around his handsome figure. But not for long. And yet—should she blame Manningham entirely? After all, her father had been the older man, the clergyman: why could he not have persuaded Manningham to drink less, instead of drinking glass for glass with him?
Their evenings together had grown longer and longer, and her housekeeping money had dwindled as the empty bottles mounted-up. And again, in fairness, she had to admit that Manningham was only doing to them what he had already done to himself. Everyone in the village knew how he had run through his own fortune. He had even, in his sober moments, given her father good advice, had warned him not to leave his tiny remaining nest egg of capital in the local bank.
Father had taken no notice, had been beyond taking much notice. And that had been what began it all. Manningham had been very drunk already when he arrived that disastrous night. Looking back now, with the bitter wisdom of hindsight, Kate thought he had been nerving himself to break the bad news to his friend. And in a way, everything that had followed had been her fault. Seeing him arrive bright-eyed and flushed of cheek, she had made the earliest possible excuse to leave them. Manningham sober, with his roving restless eye, was painful enough contrast by now to the imagined figure of her dreams, but when he was drunk it was his roving hands she had learned to fear.
That was what had started it. Face it, since after so long, she was making herself face, waking, the nightmare that had haunted her. She had brought her disaster on herself. Almost, she had killed her father. If only she had not made Manningham angry...
When she rose to leave them he had jumped to his feet and caught her hand to stop her. “Best be good to me, Kate, my dear. Now you’re a pauper, I’m about the only friend you have.”
“A pauper?” Father had not been too drunk to take that in.
“You’ve not heard then? This war against the Americans is hitting the banks hard. There have been several failures today. Our local bank among them. I told you Ffynch, it was rash to put all your eggs in that basket. Now, I’m afraid it’s a case of ‘all my pretty ones.’ We must just hope your devoted parishioners will see fit to increase your stipend—such as it is.” His voice was mocking. He knew as well as they how little chance there was of this.
The old man had raised his head to meet that bright and mocking eye, “And you’re glad,” he said. “Why did I never see it before? You’re not my friend. Never have been.” He had risen to an odd, heart-catching moment of dignity. “I think you must be the devil himself. Kate!” And, on the appeal to her, he had fallen forward among the glasses and bottles; dead. Kate shivered, there in the balmy moonlight, reliving the scene. It had been too bad to be true. But it had been true. And so had what followed. No nightmare, though she had often enough waked, sweating, from it since. No servant slept in. She had been alone in the house with her father’s dead body—and Charles Manningham.
And even then, if she had kept her head, she might have avoided the final disaster. Manningham had been sobered a little by the suddenness of it. “He’s dead.” He let the thin wrist fall again to the table. “The poor old fool. Believe me, Kate, I never meant—”
But those words of casual contempt had been too much for her. Forgetting everything else, she turned on him, a fury, and told him what she thought of him. Remembering this shamed her now almost as much as what had followed. She had screamed at him there like a fishwife across her father’s dead body.
Something she said had got him on the raw. She did not remember—did not want to remember what. In fact, she had shoc
ked him, brought herself down to his level. He had taken her hand, to drag her from the room. “Shame on you! In front of that.”
“That! You mean my father. Whom you’ve killed!” She had tried to pull away from him, but he held her with a grip of iron, his eyes bright, dangerous.
“That’s not true. And you know it.” He had her by the shoulders now. “Take it back.” And then, as he looked down at her, struggling under his hands, she had seen anger give way in his face to something infinitely more frightening. One hand still held her shoulder, the other moved slowly, thoughtfully, down across her breast. “Well, Kate?” The drink had him again now; he had forgotten the body in the next room; forgotten everything but her. “Well, my beautiful Kate?”
She had fought; she had bitten him; she had scratched his face. It had merely enraged him. Perhaps he had meant only—as he said afterward—to snatch a couple of kisses: “To make up for all your past disdain.” But when she had fought, he had fought back, not a man, not recognizable any more, but an animal that tore off her clothes and took her savagely, brutally, forced back across the desk where her father used to work.
Afterward, he had cried, and promised to “make it up to her,” and fallen asleep. Now, looking back, she blamed herself bitterly for what she had done next. At the time, she had not thought at all. A warm dress. Ironic, surely, to put on a warm dress to kill oneself? And then the half mile, part running, part walking, sobbing all the way, the pain in her body inextricably confused with that in her heart ... and, at last, the quarry’s edge, dimly seen in the light of a waning moon; the pause to gather strength for the leap; and strong arms around her. “What’s all this?” Sergeant Croston had asked.
He and his men had been camped on the downs, on their way to Portsmouth. He had been kind, wonderfully kind, holding her gently, getting the story out of her, little by little, swearing to himself. Friends? No, she had told him, she had no friends. Nor would she go back to that house for anything. Of course, now, looking back with the harsh wisdom of experience on a seventeen-year-old’s despair, she knew this for lunacy. She should have gone to her mother’s family in Ireland. But at the time, when Sergeant Croston had said, with the dim streaks of dawn like hope on the horizon, “Then marry me, child, and I’ll take care of you,” it had seemed the answer to everything. Brought up on a mixed diet of hell fire and Mrs. Radcliffe, she had known that marriage or death were her alternatives. Well, she had failed to kill herself, and this man had saved her. He was kind; he was old (thirty-five, she had discovered later); surely he would be gentle. What more could she ask?
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