Now he was more like his brother Alan. There was a basic seriousness written on his handsome face, and also something wary, which was coupled with a fundamental sternness which he had never shown before. He shared something with Avory in that. This new Jack surprised her a little since he was not quite as she remembered him. From looking younger than his years he now appeared to be older than them.
‘Aunt Percival has already told me that you twice arrived at my Washington home wishing to see me,’ she said calmly.
Oh, dear, how banal her words were, how unwelcoming. Like Jack, Marietta was fearful that the two lost years, coupled with their lost letters, might have changed his feelings for her: that he might now no longer love her as he had once done. Aunt Percival had said that Jack’s distress on being reproached and turned away had been very evident. Perhaps that simply meant no more than that he was upset at being misjudged.
To soften her words she added with a slight smile, ‘And here I am.’
Jack swallowed. He had thought so much of what to say to Marietta when he saw her again, but to no avail. He only knew that, as she stood there before him in all her new-found loveliness, his own feelings for her had not changed. No, that was wrong; they had become intensified—if that were possible.
Her face was so serene. The Sophies of this world would be eclipsed by it, since Marietta’s beauty was that of character which was bred in the bone and not in the flesh which cruel time would ravage and destroy. Sophie had been right to fear her, for how in the world could she ever rival this?
Marietta’s smile was tender and slightly mocking.
‘So silent, Jack,’ she said. ‘Not like you at all.’
He found his tongue at last. He would have liked to fall before her, to kiss the hem of her garment as the Bible had it, but that would be theatrical, considered, not at all the fashion in which he wished to speak to her again.
Nor did he wish to woo her with words, or deeds, even though his body was telling him that she had lost none of her attraction for him, and so he found talking to her strangely difficult. All his fine speeches, composed in his head on the journey to Bethesda, had flown away, scattered by the mere sight of her, radiant in her new-found serenity.
‘You think me a traitor,’ he said at last, for she was waiting for him to answer her, her expression slightly quizzical, because she, too, was finding speech difficult. Later, each was to think that it would have been simpler if they could have fallen into one another’s arms and continued where they had left off on that day when they had celebrated their love in his rooms.
‘A cur who betrayed you,’ he continued, ‘and then, mouthing false promises, deserted you, after destroying your virtue.’
‘Yes,’ she told him gravely. ‘That is true. I felt all of those things when I never heard from you. I could not sleep for thinking of them. But I never stopped loving you, Jack, even when I married Avory, and so I told him. You see how much I cared, and thus how gravely I was wounded.’
She said nothing of her and Aunt Percival’s suspicions of Sophie’s guilt. That was to come. She must know whether he still felt anything for her before she assumed that he might still feel the same as she did.
‘Is there any way,’ Jack said, ‘that I can convince you that I never stopped loving you, that I wrote and wrote to tell you so, to speak of the future which I hoped to share with you? It was only after months of silence that, with all hope gone, I finally surrendered to what I supposed were your wishes, and stopped beseeching you to write to me. Oh, Marietta, I never deserted you, either in mind, or body. And then I heard that you had married Avory Grant.’
He stopped, unable to speak further for memory of the pain he had then experienced.
Marietta put out a hand to touch his, murmuring softly, ‘So, in the end, you supposed that I had abandoned you. But, Jack, I too wrote, and received no answer from you. What was I to think but that you had taken your pleasure and gone?’
‘No,’ he said, and she saw that his face was full of an old pain. ‘And then I came to Washington, because my duty required it, and tried to speak to you, to find out what had gone wrong, why you had deserted me, and then, last night I discovered what had happened to our letters, that Sophie…Sophie…’ and he choked on the name.
Marietta took his hand and stroked it, trying not to let her tears fall.
‘That Sophie burned them,’ she finished for him. ‘That she destroyed the future that we might have had, and in the doing I fear that she may have indirectly killed my father.’
‘You know?’ exclaimed Jack, lifting his ravaged face. ‘How can you know? She only confessed it to me last night at a White House Reception, when by accident she said something to me which betrayed that she knew that we had each written to the other. I nearly wrung her neck before I wrung the truth out of her.’
Marietta kissed the hand she had been stroking, the hand which had written to her of love and the future.
‘How strange life can be, for Aunt Percival told me only last night that she saw your face yesterday after she had confronted you with our belief that you had cruelly abandoned me. She thought, for the first time, that you were not lying when you tried to tell her that you had written to me constantly. And when you claimed that you had never received any letters from me, she came here, post haste, to tell me of her sudden dreadful suspicion that Sophie, who had been caring for my father’s mail because of my illness, had intercepted them and destroyed them…and destroyed us.’
It was Marietta’s turn to drop Jack’s hand, to put her own up to cover her face as her tears began to choke her.
‘Marietta,’ said Jack hoarsely. ‘She destroyed nothing but paper. I still care for you and always have done, even when I believed that you had betrayed me. I will not lie to you. After I had been told that you had married Avory I met another woman whom I wished to marry, although I never loved her as I had loved you. Thank God, she refused me, although I was sorry at the time. She said that she did so because it was quite clear to her that I was still grieving for you and could not give her my wholehearted love. It was she who made me understand that loving and losing you had destroyed other women for me.
‘Aunt Percival told me, when she was reproaching me, that you had married a good man, and I know that you must have hated me for what you thought I had done. Is there anything left for me in your heart—or do you simply pity me? Is there a possibility that if I asked you to marry me you could bring yourself to do so?’
‘Oh,’ she said, the tears running down her face. ‘Can you doubt it? You did not listen to me when I told you that I never stopped loving you, and that I didn’t cheat Avory. I told him of you, of our love for one another, and he accepted it and me, and adopted Cobie. If I stayed faithful to you in my heart when I thought that you were a traitor, you may judge of my feelings towards you now that I know that you were not. Of course I will marry you.’
The mention of Cobie passed Jack by because he had heard that Marietta Grant had two children, one of them Avory’s by his first wife. Perhaps, Marietta later thought, she had purposely not dwelt upon him. She did not wish to use Cobie’s existence to blackmail Jack into marriage.
It was Jack’s duty to kiss her tears away, which merely resulted in his mingling with hers. But now they were tears of joy which they shared together. Presently he raised his head and said, brokenly, for the enormity of what had happened was still with him, ‘Shall we marry as soon as possible so that we may make up for the lost years? You had better know that I am more of a savage than I thought I was. I could have killed Sophie last night for what she has done to us. When I think of all those loving words I wrote to you which she turned into so much ash… I said that she had only destroyed paper—but what paper—’
Marietta put her hand upon his mouth. ‘Shush, my darling,’ she said gently. ‘If Aunt Percival is right, her worst crime was to my father. But that is past, and it is useless for us to repine. Let us forget her, and think of our future together.’
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He took her into his arms again and kissed her gently on the cheek. ‘I almost fear to touch you, my darling. Two years ago I was too daring, too sure of myself, and of our future happiness. I tempted the gods and was taught a bitter lesson: that we may not have all we want by right, as and when we wish it. I was too greedy, and so we were both punished.’
‘You were not the only one, Jack,’ she said softly into his chest. ‘I had to learn a bitter lesson, too. That I could not take what I wanted, as I did that last afternoon, and forget all else. I did not remember that time and chance will deal with all of us, and sometimes harshly.’
‘Sophie, too, then,’ he said, bitterly.
‘Sophie, too,’ she agreed. ‘What she did to us was dreadful—what she has done to herself is worse.’
Jack thought for a moment of Sophie as he had seen her last night with her vulgar escort, and remembered the dazzling young beauty of his first encounter with her. He did not reject Marietta’s judgement. Of course, Marietta was right; they must secure their future by forgetting the past.
‘Come, my love,’ he said tenderly, sinking on to the settle and laying her head on his chest. ‘Let us try to make up for the lost years while I tell you that this time I shall not leave you until the knot is safely tied and we are man and wife.’
‘We are agreed on that,’ she said, reaching up to kiss his cheek. ‘The waiting will be as short as I can make it.’
Holding her, Jack thought, was almost the same as it had been before, but not quite. If they had both suffered and learned patience, they had also learned something more—to savour each moment as though it were the last without wrenching at it. Their new happiness would have a depth which the old one had not possessed. They had had to lose one another in order to learn how truly deep their love was.
Marietta slipped from his arms to look earnestly at him. ‘You are still the Jack I remember, even if you resemble your brother Alan more and your old self less. I think that we have both finally grown up.’
‘Which I needed to do more than you,’ Jack admitted gravely. ‘My father was right there: I took all my good fortune in life as my due—now I know better.’
He then told her something which Avory had said to her in almost the same words before he had returned to the Army for the last time.
‘I have seen war, Marietta, and it changes a man. What was a game for me, a thing of abstract shapes on maps and plans and tables, disappeared when I encountered the realities of battle. As a consequence the bloodless shapes became men who suffered, bled and died, because Charles and I wrote and drew on paper. It was why, after I had sailed on the Monitor, I asked to go South, to join in the river war: I couldn’t remain behind the lines and play God there. I can’t forget that.’
‘Nor would I ask you to,’ she said gently, ‘but for a little you must enjoy the calm of peace here, still far from the conflict, because I want you to meet the children for whom you will be responsible when we are married. The sooner they get to know you, the better. Come.’
Jack was greatly moved by the expression on her face when she spoke of the children. It was half-teasing, half-loving, so he immediately did as he was bid. He assumed that these were Avory’s children from his first marriage, and he followed her when she led him on to the big enclosed veranda at the back of the house.
There were chairs and tables there, and another settle. A pretty, raven-haired little girl, wearing a white dress and a black sash, sat at a table writing carefully, her tongue protruding between her lips. Beside her, on a rug, a blond baby boy who was hanging on to the table leg was busy hauling himself upright to stand for a moment on sturdy legs before launching himself across the room to greet Marietta and the strange man.
He was so excited that he lost his balance, sat down and, nothing daunted, began to pull himself up again, turning his bright blue eyes on them, and offering them—and the world—a friendly grin. If Cobie had a fault, it was that he loved all the world, indiscriminately.
The little girl stood up and curtsied when she saw the stranger.
‘Susanna,’ said Marietta, ‘this is Mr Jack Dilhorne. Jack, this is Miss Susanna Grant, Avory’s daughter.’
Susanna gave him another small curtsy, and said, ‘How do you do, sir? I trust I see you well.’ She then turned to Marietta and asked her, still grave, ‘Pardon me, Mama, but is he an uncle?’
‘Yes,’ said Marietta, as serious as the child. ‘Yes, I think that you can safely say that he is an uncle.’
‘Welcome, Uncle Jack, then,’ said Susanna, bobbing yet again before she resumed her work at the table.
‘And this,’ said Marietta, picking up the little boy who was now hanging on to her skirts, ‘is Cobie, and he is mine.’
Her face was alight with mischief when she came out with this while turning to face Jack, his child in her arms. The mischief on her face matched Cobie’s, who was putting out his arms, mutely asking to be allowed to go to his new friend.
‘Yours?’ said Jack bewildered. ‘How can that be? Any child which you and Avory had could not possibly be as old as Cobie.’
‘Oh, Jack, you goose,’ said Marietta, laughing at him over the top of his son’s fair head. ‘Look at him. He’s yours. With that hair and those eyes, and his charm, who else but you could possibly be his father?’
‘Mine!’ Jack was thunderstruck. He did mental arithmetic rapidly in his head. ‘Of course, that afternoon! No!’
His face twisted with grief—and then he put his arms around them both. ‘Oh, my darling Marietta, you mean…that on top of my apparent desertion you had to face this alone. And when I think of how I would have cherished you both…’
He fell silent and Marietta felt his hot tears on her cheek.
He took the little boy from her and hugged and kissed him—something which Cobie took entirely as his due.
‘Cobie—for Jacobus, I suppose?’
‘Yes—for my father—and for you. Even with you apparently gone for ever I wanted him to have at least a part of your name.’
‘I cannot speak,’ exclaimed Jack, who knew that he usually had a ready tongue, but the enormity of what he was hearing had silenced him.
Susanna had lifted her head from her work, and was regarding him approvingly.
‘He knows how to hold a baby properly,’ she said. ‘I suppose that now poor Papa has gone we need a man about the house, and it would be useful to have one who is good with baby boys.’
This old-fashioned piece of wisdom, garnered from Susanna having heard Aunt Percival and Aunt Lucy Grant talking, nearly overcame both her hearers.
Marietta, realising that there was still much that she and Jack had to say which was best done out of Susanna’s hearing, undid the veranda door and beckoned Jack to a long wooden seat overlooking the meadows and the distant forest. Jack followed her, still carrying an interested Cobie who was busy inspecting his new playmate—he seemed to be a fearless child.
They sat down together, Jack looking around him at the kind of view which American landscape painters loved to celebrate. Even Cobie was quiet, as though he sensed that his mama and this new uncle needed a moment or two to digest the enormity of what had happened to them.
Finally Jack said suddenly, after kissing Cobie’s warm cheek, ‘It is not every day that one discovers that one has a family. I still feel that I would like to strangle Sophie for what she did to us both in depriving me of the first years of my son’s life. How you must have suffered when you knew that he was coming, and I had apparently abandoned you to ruin, and left Cobie fatherless into the bargain. Oh, I am doubly shamed. One afternoon’s heedless pleasure, for I must take the blame for that, condemned you to a living hell.’
Marietta looked at his handsome face, for his new sternness had made him even more attractive to her, and said gently, ‘Oh, Jack, do not reproach yourself overmuch. I was your willing partner and must take my share of the blame, if blame there is. We could not have known that Sophie would be so cruel. Remember, I wa
s not alone in my grief, for I had Aunt Percival to help and comfort me. She was a better liar than I could have been, and as a result of her scheming no one knows that I am Cobie’s mother.
‘Not even Sophie has guessed that, and I pray God that she never will. The only thing, Jack, is that he’s so like you, and will be more so, I fear—no, I mean hope—when he is older.
‘Before it became apparent that I was breeding, I had a convenient breakdown and Aunt Percival took me deep into the country to have my baby at the farm of a distant cousin who asked no questions of us. We pretended that I was the grieving widow of a dead war hero. Besides, I passionately wanted my coming child, for it was all I had left of you. After he was born Aunt Percival and I went back with him to Washington, saying that he was an orphan relative of hers whose mother had died at his birth after asking her to adopt him—which she legally did.
‘Avory guessed that he was mine. I could not help loving him from the very moment he was born, for he is a lovable child, as you are already finding out.’
She paused to laugh at the sight of Cobie rearing up to pat his new friend’s face.
‘You see, Avory not only married me, but he adopted Cobie, too, and gave him his name, saying that he liked the idea of having a ready-made son—even if I were to give him sons of my own later. You must not be jealous of Avory, my darling. He was a good man, and Cobie and I helped to make what were to become the last months of his life happy.’
‘No,’ said Jack soberly, ‘I’m not jealous of him, although how I would have felt if I had returned to find him alive, and you happily married to him, is something I am relieved not to have had to endure.
‘In any case, when I thought that I had lost you for ever I tried to console myself with another woman—as I have already told you. But I ought, in fairness to her, to tell you more. She is one of the new breed of Yankee women who are making careers for themselves, like men. She was a journalist, and had decided that marriage was not for her. She and I became lovers—I tried to persuade her otherwise, and proposed to her. I even told her a little about you, for she had sensed that I had had an unhappy experience with a woman before I met her. Later, as I’ve already told you, she said that the real reason she refused me was because I was still in thrall to that other woman, and she would not be content to be second-best in my life.
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