Understood? Understanding shouldn’t have meant condoning. The wrong of it affronted Avery, hurt him. He would never have made Lily’s father’s choice. And Lily knew it.
He paced restlessly about the room, the candles guttering silently with his passage. “She tried to find her children?” he asked.
Lily’s combative posture eased, leaving evidence of weariness in the bow of her head. He wanted to reach across and smooth the lines from her brow, but he couldn’t. She was marked too deeply and the distance was far greater than a span of mahogany.
“She did what she could,” Lily said. “My father sent out agents looking for the children. But my father was never wealthy and he was only a younger son, and his inquiries met with no success.”
“He must have loved your mother very much.”
“Yes.”
He studied her bowed head, the deep shadows beneath her jaw and cheeks, her black, glossy hair rippling like silk, and he wanted more than anything in the world to protect her. The need overwhelmed him, confounding him and filling him with rage that no man had done so before, that her own father had failed in this most basic of principles. He did not doubt for a minute that Lily’s father had loved her mother and that her mother had never ceased grieving for her two children but where had Lily fit into this quagmire of pain and loss? Who’d loved her best?
“He should have loved you more,” he muttered roughly.
“Don’t judge him. Don’t judge either of them.” The warning was harsh.
He ignored it. “He should have made certain that you were afforded all the rights and privileges, the property and the respect, that his name alone could have guaranteed. Instead, he allowed you to be an outsider, without legal recourse for your birthright. He should have married your mother. “
“As you would have done?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you understand?” Her words, beginning angrily, became entreating. “She couldn’t risk having her heart broken again. She wouldn’t have survived it. She couldn’t marry.” Her voice trembled, dropped to no more than a whisper. “Any more than I could.”
Why should he care? Why should it feel as though she’d just reached into his soul and torn out its center? It wasn’t as though he’d entertained the slightest hope … he hadn’t imagined any sort of future….
“You will never marry, Lily?”
“No.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “Not until the laws are changed. Not until a woman’s safety and health and future are deemed as important as a man’s. Not until she has the same rights regarding her children that her husband has.”
“And if you should fall in love, couldn’t you trust your future to your husband’s care?” he asked. “Isn’t that love?”
“Would you entrust your future to a wife?” she answered bitterly.
“It’s not the same thing.”
“No. It’s not,” she agreed with cold deliberation. “You’d only need to demonstrate your ‘trust’ until a time it’s proven unjustified. Then the law grants you the means to rid yourself of your wife while keeping that part of the union you still value, your heirs. Of course, whether those children are better left in their mother’s care than in yours is a matter never considered, much less addressed.”
“And you think it better for them to live with the stigma of illegitimacy?” he asked incredulously. “To have doors shut in their faces? Their futures left to uncertainty? To be deemed unworthy because of their birth?”
“Is …” She lifted her chin. “Is that how you see me?”
“Damn it to hell, Lily,” he said harshly. “It doesn’t matter how I see you. It matters how society sees your children. I would never allow my child to suffer like that.”
“I assure you I have not suffered. I have enjoyed a liberal, interesting, no, a fascinating upbringing,” she said. “I had loving parents to shelter me from bigotry. I have had an education most men would envy and enjoy a position of respect amongst my sister—”
“You don’t have any sisters, Lily. You have an organization,” Avery cut in, “your causes, your education, but as for family, you have no more of a family than I. Less.” He saw her flinch and felt as if he’d slapped her. Yet, he went on, desperately seeking to force her to reexamine her beliefs.
“Even your presence here,” he said, “in this house, is conditional. As little as I have, I can legitimately claim Mill House. In spite of what Horatio did, in spite of his will, I can claim it with a right that you will never be able to claim because your father never gave you his name.”
She was breathing heavily, and for a minute he thought she would raise her hand and strike him. He would have welcomed it, seen it as a sign that on some level she agreed with him and must do him violence as a denial.
“It’s a house,” she said, tasting the betrayal in the words. “A thing. A possession. I don’t need stone walls and wood floors to know who and what I am.”
“The hell you say,” he ground out. “It’s not just a house. It is a bell jar keeping a family’s history, their lives and stories.”
“It’s a house, not a cathedral,” she insisted but her cheeks were ruddied in the dim light. “Do you think if you have Mill House you’ll somehow acquire the family you never owned? Well, a family doesn’t come with the deed, Avery.”
Her words cut with the fine incisive pain of truth, but then, she knew they would. She’d counted on it stopping his tongue. Not so easily done.
“Family, Lil?” He leaned far over the desk, his lips curling in derision. “You wish to speak about families? Why not? We’ll be rather like the blind men describing an elephant, won’t we?”
He frightened her. “No, I—”
“Yes,” he insisted. “Perhaps between the two of us, we might be able to piece together something of a notion. You, after all, had the adoring parents—or were they? Never matter, parents nonetheless. I, lacking the parents, had the trappings, the name, the house, the auxiliary relatives—”
“I don’t want to speak about this,” she said, panic touching her voice.
“Damn it, Lily. Can’t you see what you’re doing here?” he asked. “You’ve adopted my family, mine, as well as these suffragists, these servants, all these people who want something from you, whose fealty you secure with jobs and sanctuary and bribes. Fealty isn’t love, Lily. These people aren’t your family.”
“They are.”
“No.” He shook his head and at that moment she hated him. He looked big and hard and commanding and what little nature had not equipped him with the ability to take, English law did.
But most of all she hated him for making her question her parents. How much had her father’s family’s refusal to have anything to do with them been their choice and how much her father’s? She would have suffered much to belong somewhere, anywhere, in some capacity.
Hostility snaked within her, anger that her mother’s life had so unalterably affected—no, damaged her. With anger came guilt. She knew the torment her mother’s choice had caused her. She knew her decision not to marry had not been made lightly and still she could not help her anger.
“You have no right to stand above me and tell me what my father should have done and what my mother should have been willing to sacrifice,” she said in a fierce, low voice. “You’ve never had a child taken from you, as good as murdered—no, worse than murdered! My mother died not even knowing if her children were still alive. I saw what it did to her. I heard her at night, torturing herself with questions she could never answer.”
He remained silent.
“Can you imagine? She fretted over wounds she should have been there to prevent, the comforting hugs she could not give. Each morning and every night she pantomimed the kisses she could not bestow. She imagined them asking for her and wondered what their father answered, if he told them she was dead or simply hadn’t cared enough one day to come back.”
His mouth was set with resolve, shadows hid his eyes. “And wh
at about you, Lily?”
“Me?” She carefully unwove her fingers. “I wonder if they even know I exist.”
“Lily—” He reached out and touched the back of his fingers to her cheek. She didn’t even notice. She simply gazed up at him with stark and empty eyes.
“If the laws had been different …” she mused. “If she had had the right to her own children … but they aren’t. Nothing protected her.” Her voice hardened.
He could think of nothing to say. Bitterness pulsed through him, for Mr. Benton and Lily’s cowardly mother and spineless father and yet he could not hate them.
“You have to admit, Avery, I have every reason to distrust marriage. Any woman does. Only a fool would enter into it when the laws that govern that union see a woman’s children as ‘products’ of her body which her husband owns.”
“But if there were love on both sides. If a couple respected and trusted—”
“Ephemeral feelings,” she said. “Hardly worth risking one’s children for. It’s a matter of logic, Avery. I thought men appreciated logic. A woman cannot afford labile emotions.”
She was tearing him apart and like any wounded animal he reacted savagely, instinctively striking back.
“Logic? Labile emotions?” His laughter was mocking. “You’re a coldhearted creature, Lily Bede. You would have made a successful general with willingness to sacrifice all for your ‘principles.’ I salute you. I’m just damn glad I don’t have to bed you lest I get chilblains.”
“Yes”—her head jerked up and her gaze was like polished ebony—“count yourself fortunate.”
She would not be provoked and he needed—God how he needed—to find some answering heat to match the fire raging within him.
The sound of running footsteps sounded above the pelting rain. The library door crashed open.
“Mother of God! Help!” Merry shrieked.
Chapter Nineteen
“Teresa’s having her babies!” Merry said breathlessly. Outside a peal of lightning struck close to the house. As if on cue the rain began a torrential downpour. The oil lantern she held in her hand knocked against her skirts, sending her shadow capering across the wall.
“Where’s Mrs. Kettle?” Lily asked, rising and moving past the distraught girl. Mrs. Kettle had played midwife before to women whose birthing had come early.
“At her daughter’s in the village.”
“Drat.” With Francesca fast asleep down the hall that left Merry, Kathy, Miss Makepeace, Evelyn, and herself.
Miss Makepeace was bound by her wheelchair and Evelyn fainted at the sight of blood. Merry kept crossing herself and muttering prayers.
“For heaven’s sake, Merry,” Lily snapped. “She’s having a baby, not a demon.”
“I can’t help it, ma’am,” Merry mewled. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I can’t bear to see her what with my time’s comin’ so soon. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen! I’ll be where she is soon enough and oh, miss, she’s screaming out like she’s being ripped apart! Don’t make me go in there, miss! Please!”
“Quiet, Merry,” Avery commanded. “No one’s going to make you do a bloody thing. Just do as Miss Bede says. Without the noise.”
His implacable tones had the desired effect. Merry dabbed at her eyes and sniffed loudly but nodded and turned to Lily for instruction.
“Where’s Teresa?” Lily asked.
“In her room.”
“And Kathy?”
“Last time I seen her she was, ah, heading for the stables, miss,” Merry said.
“In the middle of the night, in a storm?” Lily asked.
Merry nodded meekly. “She, ah, she”—she swallowed—“she frets after the horses.”
“It’s Billy Johnston, isn’t it? And last month it was that wainwright in town,” Lily said, already striding through the door toward the servant’s staircase. “It’s not enough that she’s already pregnant. What sort of idiot flits from one failed relationship to another? What can the girl be thinking?”
She was all too aware of Avery following silently behind her, like some paladin guarding her. In front of them Merry silently held the lantern aloft to light their way. Silently. Merry. Incompatible terms.
“Merry?”
“Not much thinking going on, I ’spect,” Merry offered sheepishly. “That what starts up between a man and a woman is a powerful thing.”
Lily paused and stared at the little maid in dismay. “Not you, too, Merry! Has every woman in this household taken leave of her senses?”
“Well, Todd Cleary down to town says he wouldn’t mind having a baby in his house if it come with me as its mum….” She trailed off into a blushing, head-ducking, spasm of giggling delight.
“ ‘Wouldn’t mind?’ I can see it would be difficult to refuse such a marvelous offer,” Lily spat out sarcastically. Only the loud, angry wail echoing down the narrow servant’s stairs saved Merry from further scurrilous remarks.
“Be off to the kitchen with you,” Lily said. “There’s enough light to find your way.” She took the lantern from Merry’s hand. “I want hot water and soap. Clean linens, lots of them, the sharpest knife you can find, and a brazier full of hot coals.”
“Yes, ma’am!” As soon as Merry disappeared down the hall Lily began climbing the steep stairs. She’d gone halfway up when Avery bumped into her.
“Where do you think you are going?” she demanded.
“You seem a bit shorthanded. I can help. I’ve …” For some reason he stopped and when he spoke again his voice sounded odd, doubtless from the acoustics of the narrow stairwell. “I’ve been present at childbirths before. I may be able to assist.”
“That won’t be necessary. I can handle it,” she said.
He didn’t argue. He simply scowled fiercely as though engaged in some internal argument and finally said, “I’ll wait outside her door. If you should require any assistance, anything at all, a strong arm, more water, a sharper blade, you’ll ask.”
She met his level gaze with her own. “I’ll ask,” she answered and climbed the rest of the stairs.
Another loud, unhappy wail shook the walls as Lily pushed open the door to Teresa’s room. The poor woman lay atop a sodden mattress propped up on her elbows, the mound of her belly so high it nearly obscured her face, her hair sticking straight out from her head like the braids of a rag doll.
“Where the hell has everyone been?” she demanded.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve been up here bellowing my head off for an hour,” Teresa announced testily. “Am I supposed to have this baby all by my—” Her words dissolved into an angry howl as she doubled up, clutching her stomach.
“Good God!” Lily heard Avery gasp from the open door behind her. “Is she dying? Should I get a doctor?”
“No!” she said impatiently, snatching a washcloth from the rail at the foot of the bed and wiping the writhing woman’s brow, “and no. The nearest doctor is in Cleave Cross twenty miles away and she’s not dying, she’s having a baby.”
“I am so dying!” Teresa howled in protest. Lily ignored her. She’d been present at quite a few births in the last five years, enough to know that feebleness was far more worrisome than wrath.
“I thought you said you’d been present during childbirth before,” Lily said, looking over her shoulder at Avery.
“I was.” He shuffled in the doorway, his big, broad frame bright against the back hall. His shirttails were still outside his pants. “I did. But she was … she was a great deal quieter than her.” He pointed at Teresa.
“Could we possibly have a bit less chatter,” Teresa panted. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m trying to have a baby here! And what the hell is he doing here anyway? He’s nothing but a filthy, slimy man!” She snatched the damp cloth away from Lily and hurled it at Avery. He ducked. With a splat it hit the wall behind him.
Avery stared at the maid in shocked offense. He’d always thought Teresa rather liked him. He’d carried
her up and down stairs, he always asked after her health and greeted her pleasantly and here she was, wriggling her way back up on her pillow and glaring at him as though he were personally responsible for her current distress.
“He’ll stay in the hall,” Lily assured her soothingly.
“No,” Avery said with a little less assurance than he would have liked. He retrieved the wet towel, edged into the room, dropped it into Lily’s extended hand and backed out again. “I’m staying here. At least until you have Merry here should you need any help.”
Teresa let out another howl of pain.
Lily glanced at Avery whose face had turned ashen. So much for the intrepid explorer’s much vaunted courage, Lily thought unable to hide a grin. She left Teresa, vowing gruesome mass retribution on certain parts of men’s anatomy, and shoved a wooden chair across the floor in Avery’s direction.
“You might as well sit before you faint,” she said.
“I’m not going to faint,” he said, sounding as though he was trying to convince himself rather than assure her. “I have never fainted in my life. I will not faint now.”
“Hey!” Teresa had rallied once more. “You said he has to stay in the hall.”
“Gladly,” Avery responded, kicking the chair back into the black hallway and sinking down on it. In the gloom of the hall he looked like some giant, sullen gargoyle.
“Hush there,” Lily crooned, returning to mop Teresa’s brow. “You’re doing a splendid job, darling. Splendid. You are so wonderfully brave.”
“Like I have a bloody choice!”
Heels beating a rapid rhythm on the stairs announced Merry. She shoved her way past Avery into the room, water sloshing from the copper kettle in one hand, a small, closed brazier swinging in the other, and linens draping her upper body like a fresh mummy. A hunter’s skinning knife hung from the belt at her waist.
“I got everything, Miss Bede,” she said breathlessly. “Everything.”
She unloaded the brazier and kettle at her feet, tossed the sheathed knife on the foot of the bed and shrugged out from under the winding length of what looked like fresh bed sheets. She took one glance at Teresa, who’d begun moaning again and asked, “Can I go now?”
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