At last she said helplessly, “I’m sorry, Graham, but I don’t understand.”
“I’m sure you don’t. Few people know the story.” Gently he guided Jessica away from the door. “Come, my dear, let us talk some more,” he urged as he settled her back into the puffy armchair. “There’s chocolate remaining in the pot that will go to waste if you don’t drink it…and I think it is time I trusted you with some of the family secrets.”
Jessica sipped her chocolate and waited with anxious expectation for Raeburn to begin his narrative. She was aware that he had decided to “trust” her with his confidence in the hope that she in turn would show a little faith in him, but her irritation at the obvious ploy seemed minor compared to her curiosity about what he intended to tell her. Silence stretched between them. Just when she thought Raeburn had changed his mind about confiding in her, he asked suddenly, his deep voice unnaturally resonant in the charged silence of the study, “Jess, just how much do you know about Andrew and Claire’s mother?”
The question startled her, for her mind had been intent on her husband’s father; she had assumed that when Raeburn said the man pursued “unsuitable” women, he had meant to imply that his predecessor had fallen victim to some avaricious lightskirt. Considering what Jessica knew of Raeburn’s own inclinations—and apart from the things Andrew had told her, during her year away from Renard Chase she had followed the earl’s adventures avidly in the society columns of the London gazettes—she could not help reflecting cynically that he showed no particular moral objection to the muslin company, only to those members of its dubious sisterhood who…aspired too high.
But what had all this to do with the late Countess of Raeburn?
Seeing that Raeburn awaited a response to his question, Jessica said, “I know almost nothing about your father’s second wife. I’ve never even seen a portrait of the woman. Claire did tell me, however, that her mother died when she was born.”
Raeburn’s eyes were dark gray and impenetrable, reminding Jessica of fog banks on the Channel, such as she had seen during her time in Brighton. When those cloudy masses appeared thick and threatening on the horizon, fisherfolk and landsmen alike scrambled for the safety of home and hearth, anxious to be indoors when the fog rolled through the deserted streets…. Raeburn said baldly, “Claire is mistaken. Her mother died when the daughter was six months old. She ingested a substantial quantity of the white lead that she had formerly used to paint her face.”
Jessica blinked, stunned. “A…an accident, you mean?”
“No, my dear,” Raeburn said quietly, shaking his head. “It was deliberate suicide, of a most excruciatingly slow and painful sort. The wretched woman would have done better to find some Prussian blue….”
Shuddering, Jessica set down her cup with trembling hands. “Graham, I don’t understand.”
“Neither did we, until after her funeral, when the moneylenders came forth like vermin from under a rock, demanding payment for her many debts.” He saw the confusion sitting awkwardly on Jessica’s lovely features, and he said, “Perhaps I ought to start at the beginning.”
He gulped down the dregs of his coffee and grimaced, the sour taste a feeble echo of the bitterness of his memories. As he forced his tongue to shape the words smoothly, it occurred to him that he was confiding in Jessica with a frankness he had never before used with any woman, except possibly his old nanny, long since gathered to the bosom of her ancestors. The women in his life had not been chosen for their talents at conversation; even glorious Lucinda, the opera singer, with her magnificent voice, had been little used for talking…. When Raeburn tried to imagine telling his stepmother’s unsavory tale to Daphne, he knew that his fiancée would refuse to listen, chiding him primly with the admonition that some secrets were better off buried with the dead. But now Jessica watched him patiently, attentively, the intelligence in her eyes belying the demureness of hands folded in her lap as she waited for him to begin.
With an effort Raeburn said, “My own mother did die in childbed when I was but a toddler. I don’t remember her at all, although in the London house there is a Gainsborough portrait painted at the time of her marriage. She was my father’s second cousin, blond and pretty, a most…appropriate bride, and although the match was arranged by my grandparents, by all accounts my parents dealt quite amicably together, until she died. After that I was raised by my nanny until I was of an age to be sent away to Eton. My father was not an especially affectionate father, and I saw him rarely, although he made a point of calling on me whenever he was in the vicinity, and he never forgot my birthday or Christmas. I’m not sure just what he did the rest of the time. I think he took his seat in Parliament now and then, no doubt because it was expected of him, but I don’t know that he ever spoke on any issue. In short, he was stolid, undemonstrative, and very, very correct…and no one could have been more stunned than I was when, just after my eleventh birthday, he called me home from school to introduce me to my new stepmother, the beautiful teenage daughter of a Gloucester innkeeper.”
“Good God,” Jessica said inadequately.
Raeburn looked skeptical. “Indeed? If there is a good God, I fear He sadly neglected that poor woman….”
He braided his long fingers together, absently toying with his signet ring as he said ruefully, “Looking back over a distance of more than two decades, I realize that the person most blameworthy in that debacle was my father, a man of some forty years lusting after a girl less than half his age. Apparently he had been touring the Cotswolds, and he suddenly took a fancy to look at Gloucester Cathedral; when he stopped at an inn just outside town and saw the host’s radiantly beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter…. He was so besotted that he offered marriage, and I suppose the girl’s parents can be excused for thinking they were doing well by her, forcing her to accept him, but surely someone ought to have realized how very…cruel it was. She looked like a countess, tall and slim and lovely, with vibrant red hair, but whenever she opened her mouth, her West Country accent betrayed her, and she had neither education nor native wit to help her cope with the vast changes in her station, her life. She tried hard enough—at first, but she was always making mistakes. The servants used to laugh at her behind her back.” Raeburn paused, grimacing. “God help me, so did I.”
Jessica heard the pain in his voice. “But you were just a child.”
“So was she,” Raeburn exclaimed impatiently. “When Andrew was born, she couldn’t have been any older than Claire is now. We became friends of a sort after she gave me my little brother, but I soon went back to school and she was left to manage alone.”
“Didn’t your father help her?”
Raeburn shrugged. “I think not, I doubt that he even realized the enormity of her distress. As I said, he was not by nature a demonstrative or insightful man. Once his infatuation with his young bride waned, they continued to cohabit after a fashion, but emotionally he abandoned her to her own devices in much the same way he had abandoned me. Unfortunately, because she was so utterly unsuited to the life and society in which she was compelled to live, she was easily led astray. The friends she made—or rather, people she erroneously thought were her friends—tended to be hangers-on eager to take advantage of her youth and inexperience. Aspiring cicisbeos, ivory turners….”
His gray eyes grew bleak, and when he spoke again he spit out the words as if they had a foul taste. “I remember vividly the last time I saw my stepmother…alive. It was just before I entered Oxford. I had been living in Town for some time, but in most respects I was still grass-green, and some of my cronies decided to drag me off to a gambling hell to…shall we say…further, my education. I was nervous, but eager enough to prove myself a man of the world, but when we stepped inside that…that establishment, the first thing I saw was my stepmother, holding the bank at the faro table. I was incredibly shocked to find her there, for until that moment I had had no idea of her…failing, but her appearance was even more upsetting. I had not seen her since paying
a duty call when Claire was born, and in the intervening months she had aged years. She looked raddled, ill, so ill, in fact, that my friends did not recognize her, I remember with appalling clarity the look in her eyes, that wild, glazed expression you see sometimes in those for whom gaming has become a kind of—of disease. She refused to abandon the cards, even when the proprietor informed her that he could extend no more credit. Only when she saw me did she seem to come out of her spell.”
Raeburn hesitated again. “Somehow I managed to get her out of the hell—although not before my friends had made ribald remarks about my questionable taste in women—and I escorted her back to Raeburn House. There I found that Andy and Claire were safely ensconced in the country, and my father had gone out of London on some pretext or another. I turned my stepmother over to the butler’s care, who seemed unsurprised at her appearance….”
Once more Raeburn paused; then he concluded heavily, “Within a month she was dead, by her own hand.”
He leaned back in his chair, eyes closed as if he were shutting out the memories that assailed him. Jessica watched with compassion, wishing she could find words adequate to comfort him. She remained silent. After a few moments Raeburn straightened up again and opened his eyes. He regarded Jessica sardonically. “Of course,” he drawled, “a poignant but innocuous explanation was found for my stepmother’s ‘tragic accident.’ Never let it be said that the reputation of the Foxe family had been sullied by a rumor of suicide—as if we had any particular claim to morality in the first place.”
“And Andrew and Claire never discovered the truth?” Jessica asked, shaken.
“What is truth?” Raeburn mocked with such irony that Jessica knew he was calling to mind the unanswered question from the Gospel. “Do we say that a weak woman committed the unforgivable sin in order to escape her creditors? Or would it not be more accurate to say that a simple country girl died because my father selfishly dragged her away from all that was familiar and abandoned her to wither in a hostile environment, like a wood violet uprooted and left out in the sun? There is more substance than prejudice in the old saw, ‘Like should marry like.’ In Gloucester, among her own kind, she would have married a young farmer or perhaps a merchant’s clerk with prospects, and her life, while hard, would have been content, possibly even happy, as she lived surrounded by children and grandchildren. Instead, because she was beautiful and an aristocrat desired her, she died in a particularly grisly fashion at the age of twenty-two, leaving behind a baffled husband and two orphaned babies.”
Suddenly he jumped up from the chair, as if his memories would no longer allow him to rest. He stalked over to the frosty window and stared out at the bleak vistas before him. In the empty meadow stretching to the wood beneath iron-colored skies, the narrow tracks left earlier in the afternoon by the dogcart were being dusted away by a light powder of snow, the first of the season. By the time the Templeton party arrived for Christmas, the white marble arcades of Renard Chase would be glittering with snow and ice, like the palace of the Esquimau queen….
Jessica watched him helplessly, even from across the width of his study feeling the tension in him, seeing the powerful muscles of his back knotted beneath the fine fabric of his coat. As the silence in the room thickened and contracted she tried desperately to think of something to say.
While she struggled to find the words, Raeburn spoke again. Still staring out the window, he said quietly, his deep voice low and clear, “I wronged you, Jess. When Andrew told me that he wanted to marry a…to marry you, all I could think was that the troubles were about to begin again, that my little brother was intent on repeating the disastrous mistakes of his parents. And believing that, I…reacted too harshly. I railed at Andrew, played the autocratic big brother, and when he would not be swayed, I attacked you instead, never dreaming that you were different from my poor stepmother, that you were something…quite out of the ordinary. For that I am truly sorry, Jessica. My actions were unforgivable, I know. My only excuse is that…that I thought I was protecting my family.” His pain reached out to her from across the room, and without hesitation she rose and went to stand beside him at the window, her slender, graceful figure dwarfed by the tall bulk of him. He did not look at her immediately; rather he stood with his hands rammed deep into his pockets, spoiling the cut of his superbly tailored coat, as he squinted out at the stark landscape. His wide forehead was furrowed above fair brows and ice-gray eyes, and his mouth was compressed into a thin, inflexible line. As Jessica gazed up at him, noting the austerity of his expression, she remembered with a pang all the times she had sketched those handsome features in an attitude of grinning, unrepentant debauchery, all the times she had made him the target of her most vicious satire. During her year in Brighton, it had been easy for her to imagine Raeburn as her bete noire, the occasion of all her trials, the source of all her woes. In her troubled mind—and now she realized with painful clarity that during those agonizing months she had indeed been profoundly depressed—the Earl of Raeburn’s image had grown and distorted until she saw him as some kind of mocking devil, the epitome of all the worst faults of his class, bent on tormenting her for her insolence in daring to love his brother. Whenever “Erinys” dipped her pen into the inkwell and began a visual attack on some evil of the society, whether it be brutal treatment of horses or the Prince of Wales’s unseemly capers, somehow the chief villain in the sketch had always looked like Raeburn….
Jessica cringed inwardly. For every sin that the earl had confessed against her, she had wronged him a hundred times over.
Her fingers worked nervously at the knot of her shawl as she struggled against the impulse to unburden her soul, reveal her identity as the anonymous cartoonist. She knew she dared not. Despite his frequent forays into the fleshpots of London, the governing passion of Raeburn’s life was the maintenance of his family’s welfare. If he found out that Jessica had held the Foxes up to public ridicule, he would never forgive her.
His disgust might even prove to be so great that in retaliation he would carry out his threats to take Lottie from her. She could not risk that. No matter how much she longed to ease her guilt by speaking frankly, she must remain silent.
Suddenly Raeburn turned away from the window. The sleeve of his coat brushed against Jessica’s hands clasped over her breast, and his eyes darkened as he gazed at her. Her heart racing, Jessica smiled uncomfortably and quickly looked down, closing her eyes against the compelling sight of him, annoyed with herself for reacting to his nearness. She was a widow, for God’s sake, she reminded herself irritably; not some schoolroom miss giggling over the dancing master…. But despite her efforts to remain in control, a faint blush appeared on her cheeks, deepening when Raeburn caught her chin in his large hand and gently tilted her head upward so that her slanting green eyes stared back at him from behind starred lashes.
He watched the color flowing just under the surface of her ivory skin, tinting her complexion with a delicacy made even more subtle against her jewel-like eyes, the blue-black luster of her hair. When he saw her pink tongue flick nervously across her lips, he felt a wave of desire, startling in its intensity, wash over him. “Beautiful Jessica,” he murmured huskily, “at least my poor brother had you….”
Jessica trembled at his touch, the male scent of him heavy in her nostrils, the warmth of his fingers on her face somehow radiating to her extremities. She was woman enough to know that he would like to kiss her, to make love to her, and despite his claims to the contrary, she did not think he respected her position enough to draw back if she encouraged him, as he would have done as a matter of course with his highborn fiancée. To Raeburn she would always be the upstart drawing teacher…. Because she knew that if his mouth touched hers, she would be lost utterly, unable to deny him anything, seduced by her own hunger into an act of sheer madness, she could not allow that to happen. Drawing back as far as his hold on her would allow, Jessica said brightly, “Thank you for confiding in me, Graham. Now I understand why you wi
sh to marry Lady Daphne. With her breeding and background, she will make a most suitable bride for you.”
At the mention of his betrothed, he forced his hand to fall away from Jessica’s face, wondering why he found it so difficult to conjure up the features of the woman he had chosen out of duty. Blinking hard, he drew himself up to his most imposing height and noted briskly, “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you approve my choice, my dear. I too am sure that Daphne and I will deal excellently together.” He paused momentarily, and when he spoke again, his tone had grown sharper. “I have enjoyed our conversation, Jess, but you and I do seem to have strayed rather far from the subject which I wished to discuss with you. So I must ask you again; with whom do you correspond in London?”
Jessica’s face grew pale. For a moment she had been lulled by the soft enchantment of Raeburn’s deep voice, and she had forgotten that he was a man who never abandoned any chase before its conclusion. This Foxe was a hunter, and now she—or rather, her secret—was his prey. Taking a deep breath, Jessica said, “Although I value the confidence you placed in me, Graham, I fear I cannot return the favor, not—not in this matter. It is private, concerning no one but myself, and I have no intention of telling you about it. After your many kindnesses, I dislike having to refuse you, so I must request that you do not question me again.”
The Clergyman's Daughter Page 10