by BJ Hoff
Suddenly, something stopped him, riveting him as he stood staring at her. He remembered the night he had seen Terese Sheridan for the first time, how it had affected him. He had nearly gone weak at the excruciating memories she had evoked in him with her critical illness, her weakness, the seeming hopelessness of her situation.
That night there had been no sign of the dauntless will, the inner strength, the fiery spirit that by now he had come to recognize in the girl. He had not yet encountered the brashness that dared to challenge him, the stubbornness that, at least in one more mature and more experienced, might well have presented a fair match for his own bullheaded resolve. He had not yet caught a glimpse of her fundamental toughness. But he saw it now, and he thought he saw something else as well, something that didn’t quite add up: This girl was no ordinary victim. He had known his share of victims—those who had suffered bitter, sometimes devastating abuse or trauma. And while many eventually overcame the worst of the effects, it had been Jack’s experience that it almost always took years—as was most definitely the case with Samantha, who still showed evidence of her ill treatment. And in some cases, like his own mother’s, healing never came at all.
When his mother was brutalized, it had destroyed her health—and nearly her mind as well. Jack had been old enough at the time to be only too aware of her suffering; she had never been the same after her agonizing experience. Ever after, she had lived in a kind of invisible cage, frightened of living, often uncertain, and always watching…watching everyone and everything. Jack was fairly certain that she never again experienced so much as one night of unbroken sleep. In her nightmares, she suffered the attack over and over again until the day she died giving birth to Brady.
The girl who sat glaring up at him was no doubt frightened, but her fear seemed more to fuel her determination than to cower her. She feared, not him, exactly, but more the threat he represented. And she was willing to fight him. This girl was not weak, not fainthearted, in mind or in spirit. In short, she simply gave little sign—other than the pregnancy itself—that she had been beaten or violated. Terese Sheridan, he sensed, was not so much a victim as a survivor.
His every instinct suddenly engaged and went on the alert. What if she hadn’t been assaulted at all? What if she were lying about some clandestine affair, using the Vanguard’s resettlement program to flee her past and improve her circumstances? Or what if she had been promiscuous and gotten herself trapped by her own indiscretion? She didn’t seem the type, but then there was often no telling the “type.”
At the back of Jack’s mind, he recognized that his present line of thinking might be nothing more than an attempt to rationalize his own heartless behavior, and again he felt an uncomfortable dart of self-disgust. Nevertheless, he decided to test his suspicions.
“Forgive my bluntness, Terese,” he said. “But I confess I might have made the assumption that you wouldn’t mind giving up the child all that much, considering the experience that brought about your condition in the first place. Perhaps I even thought you’d be relieved.” He paused, ignoring her attempted protest. “It isn’t such a rare thing, after all, for an unwanted infant to be put up for adoption.”
“But my child is not unwanted!” she shot back at him, half rising from the chair. “And you’re not talking about adoption. You’re trying to buy my baby!”
Jack took his time in answering, raking her with a speculative gaze. He deliberately remained standing, keeping the advantage. “I suppose you might see it that way,” he finally said. “But I tend to think of it more as giving you your freedom.”
“I don’t want to be free of my own child!”
Jack continued to feel his way. “Yes, I’m beginning to understand that. And I must say that while your…commitment to your attacker’s child might be admirable, it’s also passing strange. I should think you’d find it very difficult, if not impossible, to feel any sort of affection for a child that was forced upon you through such a heinous experience—and one over which you had no control.”
He waited, watching her closely. For the first time he thought he detected some confusion in her and perhaps a measure of uncertainty.
He saw her swallow with noticeable effort. “ ’Tis not the child’s fault, what was done to me,” she said, her eyes averted.
“Of course it wasn’t,” Jack agreed amicably. “But the fault was not yours, either. And yet you seem to feel obligated.”
He let the words hang, unfinished, not quite a question, yet not quite a statement either.
“ ’Tis not obligated I feel,” she said after a noticeable hesitation. “The child is a part of me, after all.”
“How did it happen, Terese?” he said quietly.
She looked up at him, her eyes slightly wild. “Please don’t—ask me to talk about it,” she stammered out, quickly lowering her gaze to her lap. “I can’t possibly.”
“I see. Because it’s still too painful?”
“Yes, of course it’s painful!” she said, her words shooting out like bullets. “Besides,” she added, her voice lower and slightly unsteady, “it’s not—seemly, to speak of such things with you, a man I scarcely know. I—don’t want to speak of it at all, not ever again!”
Jack said nothing, deliberately waiting. When she refused to look at him, he stepped a little closer to her. “This…unspeakable act that was perpetrated on you—where did it happen?”
She looked up. “What?”
“Where did the attack occur? Where were you?”
“I—in Galway,” she stammered. “Galway City.”
She was rattled, Jack could tell. He sensed it was time to press. Hard.
“At night?”
“Night—yes, it was at night.” She frowned at him. “Didn’t I say I don’t want to speak of it?”
“What were you doing alone in the city at night?”
She was clearly confounded by the way he was baiting her. “I—I had an errand. I was doing an errand for Jane Connolly. My employer.”
“An errand you couldn’t attend to during the day?”
“If I could have seen to it by day, wouldn’t I have done so?”
“Did you know the man?”
She stared at him, not answering.
“The man who assaulted you,” Jack said roughly. “Did you know him?”
“N-no, I did not know him! And I will not discuss this any further with you! It—shames me!”
Jack jumped on that. “But why should it shame you, when you were entirely innocent? You were innocent,” Jack said, pausing. “Weren’t you?”
She glared at him with all the scalding hostility he suspected she was capable of and something else, something Jack had seen in the eyes of other adversaries whom he had outmaneuvered: the quick fury at being found out, followed by panic and a desperate attempt to maintain the lie.
“What are you saying?” Her words were little more than a harsh whisper, and Jack suspected that the insolence in her tone was nothing more than an attempt to shield herself.
Jack no longer gambled, not at the gaming table. But the old instincts that had once made him such a formidable opponent remained keen. He was responding to those instincts now, convinced that Terese Sheridan’s anger and indignation rang patently false.
The girl was lying through her teeth or he would be a salmon marching.
As Samantha approached Grace Mission, she saw the newspaper wagon parked in front of David Leslie’s chaise and drew a sigh of relief.
She tried to walk faster, but the depth of the snow made if virtually impossible to hurry. She hadn’t thought of Jack stopping by to visit Terese on a day like this, but she was grateful he had. Apparently he had decided the newspaper wagon would be more sensible than a carriage. A wise decision, she thought, considering her experience with the cab.
His being here meant that she would almost certainly have a ride back to her apartment. And the thought of driving through a snowstorm in an open wagon was still more appealing than being str
anded away from home overnight.
The heavy snow sucked at her feet, rendering her boots nearly useless as she trudged the rest of the way up the street. In her haste, she stumbled and nearly fell when she turned onto the walk leading to the mission building. Righting herself, she conceded that at one time she might have tried to pretend that her eagerness had nothing to do with seeing Jack, that she was simply anxious to get out of the storm. But in truth she was eager to see him; these days, that seemed to be the case more often than not.
She was also exceedingly pleased that he had ventured out in the middle of a snowstorm to visit Terese Sheridan. No doubt he would minimize any mention of it, but to Samantha it was one more example of the kindness she knew to be a part—albeit a well-concealed part, much of the time—of his nature.
She was almost at the front door before she realized she was smiling like a schoolgirl.
Jack was angry now, too, his temper suddenly stoked by the thought that he had, for a time, almost fallen for her scheme. But now that he knew she was no different from any of the others—most of them far older and a great deal more shrewd—who at one time or another had tried to dupe him, the last shred of sympathy for the girl drained away and he dropped all pretense of consideration for her feelings.
“You know exactly what I’m saying.” He slung the words at her with blistering contempt. “You had yourself a tawdry little affair and then didn’t quite know how to deal with the consequences, wasn’t that it? You’ve been lying all along, haven’t you? You thought you’d play me for the great fool: wangling free passage to the States for yourself, taking advantage of a program meant for those genuinely deserving of it—and then what would it have been, eh? Living on the Vanguard’s dole as long as you could pull it off, you and your—”
She hauled herself to her feet, the chair scraping the floor with a loud screech. Her eyes blazed with a poisonous rage, and she actually raised a hand as if to strike him.
But Jack merely gave her a cold look and launched his final volley with deliberate scorn. “No doubt it was easy enough to hoodwink my brother into buying your story. It never did take much for one like you to wrap Brady around her little finger. He always was a fool for a cheap skirt, especially if she could work him for a bit of sympathy in the process.”
A sound like that of an animal in torment ripped from her throat. The cords in her neck stood out as if she were strangling, and her features, admittedly striking even in the advanced stages of her pregnancy, now contorted with hatred, taking on a dark, ugly flush of crimson.
She raised both arms as if to dive at him, and for a moment Jack thought she actually would attack him.
“ ’Twas your good-for-nothing, deceitful brother who got me into this fix, I’ll have you know!”
35
TRUTH AND BETRAYAL
And I hardened my heart
For fear of my ruin…
I hardened my heart,
And my love I quenched.
PADRAIC PEARSE
Jack reared back as if she had struck him. Indeed, she did lunge for him, but he caught her wrists between his big hands, easily trapping her.
A thunderous pounding worked its way up his skull as he stared down at her, holding her captive. “What are you talking about?”
She twisted and bent backwards, trying to loosen his hold on her, but Jack had her in a merciless grip, and she couldn’t shake him. Shock mingled with fright in her eyes, and he saw that she was as appalled by her outburst as he was. The look of utter horror on her face sent a cold blade of dread twisting through him, a warning that what was to come would be nothing he wanted to hear.
But surely this was more of her lies!
“Tell me!” Jack shouted at her. “And I’ll have the truth this time, you little slut!”
The fear in her eyes suddenly faded, and she was now one furious pyre of hatred. She bared her teeth like a wildcat and screamed at him. “I’m no slut, but if I am, ’tis your brother you can thank for it! He sired the child I carry!”
“I don’t believe you!”
“Believe me or don’t believe me, but it’s the truth I’m telling you! That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? The truth?”
“You were attacked—raped! Brady told me the whole ugly story in his letter.”
“Brady made up the whole ugly story, man, don’t you see? He got me with child by leading me to believe I meant something to him, playing me for the foolish green girl I was, and then after using me, he sent me packing. To you! But not until after he put up the lie he knew would get me here!”
She disgorged the words as if she were spewing poison at him, her face a crimson, enraged mask of pure fury. “ ’Twas your precious brother who gave the lie, not me! I only did what he told me to do, in order to keep my child! Your darling Brady would have had the babe cut from my womb entirely, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it! I could not do away with my own child even if its father is a worthless dog!”
A murderous, black rage rose up in Jack. His ears roared with it, his head swam with it. He began to shake, violently, like a man with the palsy. Fury possessed him, like a great dark beast unleashed from a pit somewhere deep inside him.
He wanted to strike her, to slap her face until her neck snapped, to inflict on her the depth of pain she had settled on him. The same malevolent force that had overtaken him so completely in the past that had almost driven him to violence now surfaced in him again, and he knew that the last shred of self-control was all but lost to him.
He looked at her, then grasped her shoulders and gave her a vicious shove, tossing her away from him with a force that knocked her backwards into the chair. She shrieked at him and would have scrambled to her feet, but Jack raised a warning hand to her, and she sank back against the chair, the anger rapidly fading from her eyes, giving way to a rising fear.
“Don’t…say…another word!” he warned her.
“It’s the truth and I can see you know it!” she countered in an unexpected blast of defiance.
“Shut up, you little baggage! Shut up!”
The room seemed to echo with their shouting, that and the sound of his own harsh breathing. Jack knotted his fists at his side until pain darted up both arms, but it was nothing compared to the pain of betrayal that threatened to unman him. Brady’s betrayal.
She looked up into his face, and she was as still as death except for the tears beginning to pool in her eyes. And Jack knew, knew beyond all doubting, that the girl had spoken the truth. And yet he could not seem to take it in.
He saw that she was shivering, whether from the cold of the room or fear of him, he didn’t know or care. He had no pity in him for her now, no shame for his treatment of her. He was still caught in the grip of a darkness that felt as if he would explode with it, and there was no room for anything but the wild, savage fury that threatened to take his mind, his sanity.
“Why?” he choked out. “If you’re telling the truth—and mind, I will find out if you’re not—if it’s so, then why the deceit?”
She hugged her arms to herself, rubbing her shoulders as if they ached. “He—Brady—said it was the only way. That you would—disown him and throw me out into the streets if you knew the truth.” She glared at him as if she had no doubt whatsoever that Brady had been right.
Jack studied her, still struggling for some semblance of control. “He refused to marry you? He wanted you to get rid of the child instead?”
“He used me!” she fairly hissed the words at him. “He pretended to care for me, but all the time he was only trifling with me! And myself fool enough to believe I mattered to him!”
Something occurred to Jack, and he hurled the charge at her. “You thought to trap him with the child, didn’t you? You let it happen, thinking to hold him.”
To his surprise, she seemed to falter. As he watched, some of the defiance faded from her eyes. “At first, I may have meant to do just that,” she said, her voice trembling but quieter now. “I wanted to get awa
y so desperately, don’t you see, that I admit I would have done most anything! But later—” She stopped, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. Then she opened them and went on. “Later, I came to care for him, and I truly thought he—”
She broke off, shaking her head as if dazed. Her eyes were dark with despair, and she began to sob, her shoulders heaving. But Jack scarcely saw.
“I will have the child,” he said with a bleak, hard coldness. “You know that, don’t you? Perhaps my spineless brother didn’t want it, and you, my girl, most assuredly cannot afford it. But if you have finally spoken the truth, then the child you carry is of my blood.”
He stopped, yanking the chair in which he had earlier sat roughly off the floor, then slamming it down with a shattering blow. “And make no mistake, I will have it!”
Without another word then, he turned and charged blindly from the room, leaving the sound of her anguished weeping behind him.
Samantha heard the voices the minute she stepped inside. Bewildered at first, she stood in the entryway, looking around.
When she realized where the sound was coming from, she approached the stairway, then hesitated. Her heart seemed to skip a beat when she recognized Jack’s voice, raised in what was plainly a fit of anger.
Then she heard Terese scream. She was screaming at Jack. In that moment, Samantha knew something terrible had happened.
Heart pounding, she grasped the banister and started up the steps, stopping dead when a heavy thud shook the floor above her. Samantha heard Jack shout something, followed by the sound of Terese weeping.
She gathered her skirts and took the steps at a run, halting at the top when she saw Jack come lurching out of Terese’s room, his dark features distorted and forbidding with unmistakable rage.