by Forever Wild
She almost laughed aloud. If he’d talked this way a month ago, she would have leaped at the chance. “I don’t want it, Father,” she said coolly. “Not any part of it.”
“Are you daft? What do you mean, you don’t want it?”
She sighed. “Tell me, Daddy. How soon would your daughter have been the currency for the next business deal?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“When you sent me to Nat…what did you think he wanted?”
He thought about it, then frowned. “Why, that son of a bitch! I didn’t think he was that kind of lowlife.”
She felt a surge of fresh anger. “You helped Arthur blackball him. Without a twinge of conscience! And didn’t bother asking me about it. Under the circumstances, don’t you think Nat was entitled to his revenge?”
“Willough. Lass. If I’d known…”
“Would it have mattered? I begged you not to send me to him. That should have been enough.”
“It was just that I was so worried. With the business and all…”
“And I was your daughter. Oh God, Daddy, did you ever really see me?” Her bitterness was choking her. “I spent half my life trying to please you, and feeling guilty because I wasn’t the son you wanted. Drew was smarter than I was. He ran as far away from you as he could.”
“Damn Drew,” he muttered.
“He’s your son. You could have helped him. He’s struggling now. He needs your encouragement more than ever. But all you ever cared about was your business. Your money.” She took a deep breath, picked up her hat and gloves. She was suffocating in this house. “Good-bye, Daddy,” she said softly.
His eyes were filled with terror. “You can’t leave me, Willough! I’m a sick man! The doctor said…”
She blinked back her tears. “I’m sorry for you, Father. I spent too many years caring about you more than I should have. You’ll have to forgive me if I care less now than I should. Please have Martha pack my things and send them on to New. York City. I’ll not be returning to this house.”
“Your coffee, ma’am.” The porter bent above her.
“Thank you.” Poor Daddy. She didn’t hate him. No. The only hatred in her heart was for Arthur. For all the misery he’d brought her, for his unforgivable cruelty to Nat. But she’d deal with him, by God! And then? She wasn’t sure what she’d do with her life after that. She only knew she felt a sense of freedom, thinking about the future.
Her confidence wavered on the carriage ride up Fifth Avenue. What would she do if Arthur was at home? She took a deep breath. She held all the cards…why should she be afraid of him?
Brigid met her at the door. She put a comforting hand on the maid’s shoulder. “I was so sorry to be called away the day your brother died. Is your family managing?”
The soft brogue was filled with grief. “Thank you, ma’am, yes. Me other brothers are all workin’. It’s just that… Kevin was special to me, I guess. And the TB is a terrible way to go.”
“If you want a few days’ holiday, I’ll see that you get paid.”
“No, ma’am. I reckon keeping busy is the best way.”
She handed her gloves and hat to Brigid. “Is…is Mr. Arthur at home?”
Brigid’s eyes opened wide. “No, ma’am! He came flyin’ in here yesterday like a bat out o’ hell, if you’ll forgive my sayin’. Tore up your sitting room something fierce, then packed a bag and said he’d be at his club. Lillie and me, we cleaned up the room the best we could, but there’s still a lot of papers we didn’t want to put away.”
“I’ll take care of them, Brigid.” Thank God she’d had the sense to put all the incriminating notes and papers in the bottom of her sewing box! It had always given her a perverse pleasure to know that while she sat with her needlepoint—Arthur smiling nearby in smug domesticity—she had his ruination at hand. Absentmindedly, she rubbed at her chin, still tender from his assault the other day. And the sooner the better, she thought. “I’ll just go up to my room for a little while. It’s been an exhausting trip.”
Brigid bobbed politely. “Yes’m. Oh, Mrs. Gray. I hate to tell you this right now, you being so tired and all…”
“What is it?”
“Well, maybe you don’t have to take care of it right away… I can say I forgot to tell you…”
“Brigid!”
“It’s only that your mother, Mrs. Bradford, sent a message round last night. She said she had to see you. The moment you came in. But she doesn’t have to know that you…”
Willough smiled at the girl’s thoughtfulness. “Thank you. But I suppose I ought to see her if it’s important. Come up to my room with me. I’ll just freshen up a bit. You can help me change. This suit smells of smoke.”
“From the train, ma’am?”
“Yes.” She thought of the flaming furnace at MacCurdyville, the life that she and Nat might have shared, had he stayed. “And from my past.”
She was at her mother’s within the half hour. Isobel Bradford reclined on her chaise in the parlor. She hasn’t even bothered to dress! thought Willough. Indeed, the disorder of her mother’s toilette was shocking. Her wrapper was tied together in a careless fashion, and the graying hair was straggly and unkempt. Her face was flushed; her hands twitched constantly. Nat had said once that she was addicted to her tonic, and Willough had scoffed at him. But if the tonic contained opium, then perhaps he’d been right. She’d been too young and stupid last year to realize that, either!
“You wanted to see me, Mother?”
“Yes.” Her mother’s eyes were dark and accusing. “Arthur was here yesterday. He told me that you had made up terrible lies and stories about him. And that you intended to go to the newspapers with your scurrilous charges!”
“Yes.”
“He assured me there was nothing to them, but that you could ruin him in any event. Is that true, Willough?”
“He’ll be fortunate if he doesn’t go to jail.”
“Oh!” Isobel patted her brow with a linen handkerchief. “That you could so brazenly admit it to me! You surely don’t intend to go through with it. Think of the shame to the Carruth name!”
“The only shame I feel is in being foolish enough to marry him in the first place.”
“But why are you doing this?”
She thought of Gramps, dying alone in his little cabin. Of Nat, crippled. Of her own happiness so cruelly destroyed. “To settle old scores,” she said wearily.
Isobel’s eyes filled with tears. “Willough, I implore you! Don’t do it.”
“Are you asking for yourself? Or for Arthur?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did Arthur come here yesterday and ask you to make this plea to me?”
“Why shouldn’t he, the dear boy? He’s too ashamed and hurt by his own wife’s treachery to face you directly.”
She laughed sharply. “What nonsense!” She thought, He used you, Mother. All those years that he came to call. And went away again with what he most craved. Influence. Respectability. And you thought he loved you, Mother. Poor, snobbish Isobel Carruth Bradford. What would she think if she knew that the love of her life had once been a street arab? Artie Flanagan from Broome Street.
Isobel pressed her lips together, drew herself up in her most imperious pose. “You can’t do it, Willough. I won’t have a scandal!”
“He tried to kill me, Mother. And Nat. Up in MacCurdyville.”
“There’s nothing I can do to talk you out of it? You ungrateful daughter!”
“He tried to kill me! He’s no good!”
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”
The absurdity of it made Willough laugh. If Isobel wasn’t quoting Grandma Carruth, she was quoting Shakespeare. She stood up abruptly. “If you have nothing more to say to me, Mother…”
Isobel’s voice had become shrill. “You’re not my daughter!”
Willough shrugged. “I never was.” She turned toward the door.
Willough frowned. What was it Daddy had said about Drew? She turned. “What do you mean, he doesn’t belong to Daddy now?”
“He was going to go into the business with him.”
“Yes. Daddy said he changed his mind.” Something in Isobel’s tone made her uneasy. She walked back to the chaise, leaned over her mother. “Why did he change his mind?”
Isobel’s hands had begun to flutter helplessly. “Because he wanted to continue painting.”
“But he didn’t change his mind until Marcy went away. That’s what Daddy said.”
“Well, when he didn’t have the burden of a wife to support, he was able to stay with his painting.”
That didn’t sound like Drew, thinking of Marcy as a burden. Willough sat down on the chair beside Isobel. She gripped her mother’s hand. “What happened to Marcy?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“I’m sure you do.” Willough’s voice was like steel.
Isobel fidgeted in her chaise, shook her hand free from Willough’s grip. “Well, if you must know… Drew found her with another man.”
Willough rocked back in her chair. “I don’t believe you! What man?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What man? They’d just come home from a year in France. Who would Marcy know in the city?” Isobel’s eyes had begun to dart nervously about the room. It was clear that she knew more. “Tell me, Mother!”
Isobel smiled, her mouth curled in a vindictive sneer. “It was Arthur.” The words were clearly meant to hurt her.
“Good God, Mother. He was unfaithful to me five minutes after we were married. I don’t give a damn about him.” But Marcy? Willough frowned. That made no sense. There hadn’t been many letters from Drew in Paris, but his love for Marcy was in every line. Unless big brother is a fool, Willough thought, his wife couldn’t have deceived him. Particularly not with Arthur. Arthur wasn’t that smooth a rake. He’d only duped her—Willough—that time in the boathouse because she’d been so innocent. A man can only seduce a woman, she thought, if she doesn’t know what’s about to happen. Or if she wants to be seduced. Neither of which would seem to apply to Marcy. “How did he manage to seduce her? I thought she was in love with Drew.”
Isobel was beginning to shake. “You know these fortune-hunting women. They’ll run after any man! Now fetch me my tonic. I’m feeling poorly.”
Her mother was lying; she was sure of it. “There’ll be no tonic, Mother. I’ll smash the bottle right this instant unless you tell me everything!”
Isobel tried to rise from her chaise. “How dare you! Ring for my maid!”
“No! There’ll be no maid! And no tonic! How did Arthur manage to seduce Marcy?”
Isobel began to cry. “I didn’t want him to give up his painting,” she whined. “He was going to. Just for that woman!”
“And so you sent Arthur to seduce her.” Willough felt sick. “And how did Arthur manage it?”
Isobel held out a trembling hand. “For pity’s sake, Willough, give me my tonic.”
“How?”
“I…sent him a sleeping draught to use on her. I only did it for Drew. She was so common! She would have left him sooner or later.”
Willough crossed to a table and picked up the bottle of tonic. She handed it to her mother. In a frenzy, Isobel gulped it down, closed her eyes, leaned back against her chaise. “You horrible old woman.” Willough’s voice was filled with sadness, not anger.
Isobel’s eyes blinked open. “You’re mean, Willough. Mean and cruel!”
“Why do you hate me so, Mother?”
“Why shouldn’t I? You stole Arthur from me.”
A bitter laugh. “I give him back. But…no. It isn’t Arthur. For as long as I can remember—your face changed every time you looked from Drew to me.”
“That’s not so.”
“If we didn’t look so alike—Drew and me—I would have thought that”—she hesitated, then shrugged off the old restraints—“that we’d had different fathers.”
Isobel gasped. “Willough! Please!”
“Oh, God, Mother! Don’t you ever get tired of prudery? Of pretending such things don’t exist? I do! Why can’t we talk openly for a change? Who was my father? Some black-hearted gypsy who talked his way into your drawers and left you with bitter memories and a daughter you despise?”
“Your father was an animal.”
Willough recoiled at the loathing in her mother’s voice. “And Drew’s father?” she asked softly.
Isobel sighed. “I suppose I owe you an explanation,” she said at last. “The Carruths were a fine family. The finest in the city. But there’d been business reverses. Your Grandma Carruth wanted to arrange a good match for me. She was always telling me what was ‘proper.’ When Brian MacCurdy came along, I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. I found his earthiness exciting after the rich mamma’s boys my mother had tried to marry me to. A big, strapping man with the roughness of Scotland. But with a hunger to improve himself. My mother hated him, of course.”
“And so you married him.”
“Well, he was rich. And I thought it was romantic and generous that he was willing to change his name to please me.” Isobel stood up and began to pace the floor. “I was drunk on our wedding night. And of course Grandma Carruth had given me no warning of what to expect. I don’t remember much, except that it was…unpleasant.” She wet her lips nervously. “It happened a few more times. I still found it unpleasant, but Brian was impatient, so mercifully it never lasted long. Then I found out I was carrying Drew. On my doctor’s advice, I locked my door to your father.” Her tense expression softened. “Then Drew was born. The sweetest child a mother could want. I gave him Carruth for his middle name, of course, though your father was angry about it. But oh! that child was a treasure. I devoted all my time to him.”
“And Daddy?”
“I kept my door locked. I told him quite plainly I was no longer willing to submit to such filth. I think that’s when he first began to take mistresses, but I didn’t care. I had Drew. I had no room in my heart for a ruttish husband.”
“Is it ruttish to want to make love to your wife?”
Isobel sniffed. “I’m sure I don’t know what was in your father’s heart, but nice girls don’t enjoy that sort of thing!”
Willough thought, If it hadn’t been for Nat, I could have been like her.
“And then…” Isobel wrung her hands, “when Drew was around three, your father…he was very drunk. He burst into my room and started to tear at my clothes. Swearing and shouting in a drunken rage—‘I want a real wife!’ As if I hadn’t kept his home, and raised his son, and done all the things a wife is expected to do!”
Except go to bed with him, thought Willough.
“At one moment, hearing my screams, my maid rushed in. He threatened to beat her if she didn’t get out.” Isobel shuddered. “I still have nightmares about that night. My suffering. And the humiliation—knowing the servants were whispering behind my back.”
“What suffering? Did be rape you?”
“Willough! Merciful heaven! How can you use such words?”
“Oh, Mother, I’m tired of propriety! Sick to death of dancing around things that should be said straight out! Grandma Carruth and all her nice homilies turned you—and me!—into priggish snobs! Damn what ‘nice girls’ would do or say! Did he rape you?”
Isobel nodded wordlessly and sank back into her chaise. “But it was the last time he touched me,” she whispered. “He went to MacCurdyville the next day, and when he came back a month later, I knew I was carrying you. I told him if he ever touched me again, I’d kill myself. When you were born, he named you Willough after his grandfather. Out of spite. Because Drew was mine!”
Willough was trembling. “It wasn’t even me. All those years…I kep
t wondering what I’d done, wondering why you hated me. And hating you back. My God, I think I married Arthur to hurt you as much as anything else. And it had nothing to do with me!”
“Every time I looked at you, I remembered that night.”
“And I thought I was named Willough because Daddy was disappointed that I wasn’t a son! You and Daddy. What a pair. Was I ever really a person to either one of you?” Strangely, she felt no bitterness, only a sense of release.
“Your father was all to blame. When I got tired of his flaunting his women, I insisted he move out. His revenge was to tighten the purse strings. If it hadn’t been for Arthur, I don’t think I could have endured the years of loneliness.”
Willough laughed cynically. “It’s a good thing you didn’t marry Arthur. You might have been surprised. Daddy probably loved you, back then. Before your coldness drove him into the arms of Dame Fortune.” She fought back her tears, remembering her last meeting with Daddy. “He doesn’t have any other lover now. But Arthur? I don’t think he’s capable of love. Or ever was!”
“He loves me!” Isobel glared at her daughter with fevered eyes.
Willough felt a twinge of pity for this pathetic woman, bolstering her faded dreams with opium. “Then you can have him, Mother. I’m not as unforgiving toward my husband as you are to yours. Tell Arthur I won’t do anything to ruin him. I just want a quiet divorce, as quickly as possible. I’ll want custody of Cecily, and enough money to keep her well, but that’s all.” She hesitated, then leaned over and kissed her mother softly on the forehead. “How different things might have been if you and Daddy had tried to be a little kinder to each other.” She smoothed on her gloves and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To salvage Drew’s life, if I can.” At the door, she turned. “Tell me. When Nat was here last year…the way you treated him. Was that on purpose? To humiliate him? No. Don’t answer. I can see it on your face.” Oh, why hadn’t she listened to Nat?
“It was Arthur’s idea!” said Isobel defensively.
“Yes. Of course. The favor you did for him. That he paid back by seducing Marcy.” She sighed and went out into the vestibule.