by Mia Vincy
She studied his dark shape. “You visit another woman.”
“Her name is Mrs. O’Dea. She has nothing to do with me. She was…” He leaped to his feet, but even though he roamed restlessly about the room, she sensed a flatness about him, a reflection of the odd bleakness she had noticed earlier in his eyes. It made her want to comfort him and she hated them both for that.
He stopped at the foot of the bed, like a visiting angel of doom.
“She was the mistress of…” He paused and continued hesitantly. “A friend of mine…He…It turns out that he…ah…he gave her my details before he died, and last month, she wrote to say she was unwell and needed money. So I called on her.”
He had hesitated. Joshua never hesitated.
“He must have been a very good friend,” she ventured.
His only response was to resume his pacing.
“You’re not telling me the full story.” She hauled herself up against the pillows. “There’s more. Who is she? Who was the man?”
With her eyes, she followed his prowling shadow. The silence grew and grew; it grew so thick that it squeezed her shoulders and choked up her throat and ate up all her air.
“No,” she whispered. “You’re lying.”
In two strides he was back on the bed. She curled into the pillows and realized he could not have lied when he had not spoken.
But she had heard him say it all the same. Papa.
Mama and Papa, flirting with each other on the night of Charlie’s twenty-first birthday, joking about how Charlie was “born early,” only eight months after their wedding, getting so bawdy that Miranda and Charlie fell to their knees and begged them to stop, but Mama and Papa only laughed and waltzed around the room.
Mama and Papa, the one sure thing in her world. They were so solid, so strong. Their family was built around them, and that’s why her family was strong. Why it would always endure. Why it was worth fighting for.
“No,” she said again. “Papa never had a mistress. Other men do, but not Papa. He was faithful to Mama. Always. They were devoted to each other. Why are you lying? You’re trying to cover for yourself, aren’t you? That’s why you’re lying.”
“It’s the truth, Cassandra.”
“I don’t care what you do.” How shrill she sounded! She hated that, hated him, hated them all. “But how dare you tell lies about my father. Our family…He would never…” Her breath failed her, taking her words along with it. “He would never.”
She fell back against the pillows, lips trembling. Briefly, he loomed over her, as if he might hold her; she hated him and longed for him to hold her close.
But he sat back and did not touch her at all.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant to tell you.”
How he had scoffed, when she first boasted about her parents’ fidelity and devotion. He had already known then. Perhaps she had known too, and pretended to herself that she did not.
She hugged herself, as if that might hold her world together, but it had already fallen apart.
And it was still falling apart, faster and faster, Papa with his mistress, and Mama with her cordial, and Miranda with her silence, and Lucy with their grandmother, and Emily with her theater, and Joshua with his work, unraveling, unwinding, all of them spinning further and further away from each other, and in the end there would be nobody left, just silly, naive Cassandra, sitting alone in the dark.
What a fool she had been, trying to hold them together. It had been futile from the start.
“I want to meet her,” she said. “Will you take me to her?”
He would leave her, but not yet, not today. She wanted his weight on her, to keep her from floating away.
“If that’s what you want,” he said.
“It is.”
“Very well.”
“No, not really.”
“Very well.”
“No. Yes. I do. Really.”
“Very well.”
Another silence. This one grew too, expanding between them and pushing them apart. Even while he sat there, he was getting further and further away.
“Are you…are you coming to bed?” she asked.
He stood. “You should sleep.”
Yet again, he was running from her. Yet again, she did not know why or how to stop him. A week of weaving their secret world of two and it needed only an hour to crumble.
Holding them together would prove futile too.
“There’s something else,” she said. “You are not yourself tonight.”
“I’m tired.”
He was never tired. She searched for something to say.
“Did you see Martin? You said you would see him today.”
“He’s dead.”
His flat tone sent a chill rippling to her bones. A bright life gone, the little boy who careened into the office, appalled that they might be kissing. And Joshua on the dock, laughing with that boy, giving him his time and insisting he did not care. Oh, the darling fool.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “What happened?”
“Sickness. It doesn’t matter. London is full of children. What do six more or less matter?”
“It’s all right to say you loved him.”
“There you go again,” he snapped, catching the door with one hand. “I’m going to bed.”
She fought with her clothing to clamber to her knees. “You have so much love to give. You ought not deny it. Love always comes with the risk of loss, but we must love all the same.”
“For mercy’s sake, Cassandra. You speak of yourself, not me.”
“If we have…”
The words withered in her throat, but he heard them anyway.
“If we have a child, it is your child, not mine,” he said, hard, distant, chilling. “I want nothing to do with any of it. That part of my life is finished.”
And this time he truly was walking away.
Again.
“You will not leave,” she ordered, scrambling out of the bed. He ignored her. “Do not leave again, Joshua. Not again, not this time.”
The door slammed in her face. The grind of the key, the click of the lock.
Curse him.
She ran out into the hallway, to his other door—only to hear him turn the key in that one too. She hammered on the wood, yelled his name, not caring if she woke the family or the servants or all the demons in hell. Then—the sound of the connecting door opening. She dashed back into her room in time to see Mr. Twit come hurtling through the slit before the door was closed and locked again.
“Curse you, Joshua,” she called through the door. “You cannot keep walking away.”
Silence.
Mr. Twit shook off the indignity of his eviction, plonked himself on the rug, and started cleaning a leg.
“It’s back to you and me, Mr. Twit,” she said.
The cat gave her a dubious look and went back to licking his fur.
And here she was again, alone in the dark. She slid her hand over her belly, closed her eyes, and said a silent prayer.
Chapter 23
It was Mr. Newell who informed Cassandra the following day that Mr. DeWitt had ordered the carriage to be ready in fifteen minutes, if Mrs. DeWitt still wished to call on Mrs. O’Dea. Cassandra sighed and told Mr. Newell to thank Mr. DeWitt and inform him that Mrs. DeWitt did still wish to call on Mrs. O’Dea, and she would be ready.
Joshua seemed to be his normal energetic self, bounding down the steps and leaping into the carriage, the sun glinting on his earring. He was unshaven again, and she wanted to catch that bristly face in her hands and kiss him until he laughed.
Instead, she said, “How is your work today?”
“Must you bore me with your polite small talk?”
“Would you prefer that I bore you with rude, big talk?”
“I would prefer silence.”
At which he leaned back and tipped his hat over his eyes. They did not speak again until the carriage reached their destination an
d they stood side by side at the door of a simple but respectable house.
“This was another of your stupid ideas,” he said, as she knocked. “For a smart woman, you come up with the stupidest ideas.”
“I have to know. You don’t have to come in, if you don’t want.”
“Of course I’m coming in.”
She smiled to hide her relief. He would abandon her, sooner or later, but it would not be today.
The maid who opened the door recognized Joshua and led them to a clean, sparse sitting room, where a woman sat sewing by the window, in which hung a cage with two chattering songbirds. She was perhaps in her mid-thirties and wore a plain brown house dress. Sandy curls poked out from under her lace cap, her face was thin and colorless, and when she put aside her sewing to greet them, she revealed eyes of pale blue.
Cassandra knew a horrid disappointment at Mrs. O’Dea’s appearance. She realized, to her shame, that she had been hoping to meet a painted butterfly, so she could tell herself that Papa had been attracted only by the costume. But Papa’s former mistress was no actress performing a role to entertain a lord’s passing fancy. Somehow, that made Papa’s betrayal worse.
Mrs. O’Dea greeted them both politely, but her inspection of Cassandra was frank.
“Charles spoke of you fondly, Mrs. DeWitt,” she said.
Cassandra’s last, lingering hope dissolved like smoke. But she still had her politeness and a lifetime’s training in hiding her emotions.
“I must own, Mrs. O’Dea, that my father never spoke of you at all.”
“As is right. There are things that children, whatever their age, ought not know about their parents.”
“And yet there is much I feel I need to know.”
Mrs. O’Dea met her eyes steadily. She had a solemn air that was far removed from Mama’s former vivacity. Cassandra could picture her as wife to a vicar, not mistress to a popular lord.
Her father’s mistress! Oh heavens, what was she doing? When had sensible, well-behaved Cassandra become someone who visited her late father’s mistress?
But when Mrs. O’Dea indicated a seat and offered refreshments, Cassandra sat and politely refused tea. Mrs. O’Dea sat too, while Joshua paced to the window and poked his fingers through the cage at the birds. He was a few yards from her and a thousand miles away.
“I fear this conversation is necessarily going to be indelicate,” Cassandra said. “I apologize for the intrusion, but it was a shock to me to learn of your existence. I always believed that Papa was faithful to Mama.”
Mrs. O’Dea’s mouth tightened, but she inclined her head graciously. “He was. Until me. He told me that for more than twenty years, he’d known no woman but his wife.”
“You do not mean to tell me he loved you.”
The words were unkind and Cassandra was immediately ashamed, but Mrs. O’Dea did not seem to mind.
“He needed me,” she said. “We met after your mother left him.”
“She never left him!”
Over by the window, Joshua turned sharply, but she ignored him.
“Charles said that Emmaline left him,” Mrs. O’Dea said, frowning in obvious confusion.
“Why would he say that? She never…Oh. Oh.”
She could feel Joshua’s gaze piercing her, and she stared past Mrs. O’Dea’s questioning look, at the wall. On it hung a framed silhouette portrait of a man who was not Papa.
In a way, Mama had left Papa, hadn’t she? She had left them all. Cassandra had never realized it might have felt like that to her father. A fortnight ago, she would not have understood; she could not have forgiven him.
But now she knew the intense loneliness of having one’s beloved near but impossible to reach.
“After Charlie died,” Cassandra said.
“Yes.” Mrs. O’Dea smoothed her skirt over her knees. “He wanted to talk about Charlie. That’s how it started.”
“You knew Charlie?”
“My husband knew Charlie from Oxford. He was a professor, my husband.” Mrs. O’Dea followed Cassandra’s gaze to the silhouette and nodded. “He used to invite students to our rooms and we’d talk about everything, late into the night. We liked Charlie.”
“Everyone liked Charlie,” Cassandra said.
Yet someone had shoved a knife between his ribs, and so Papa, like Joshua, lost a son. But unlike Joshua, Papa had not raged or locked his doors against the world. No: Papa had smiled. Smiled and smiled and kept on smiling.
Much like Cassandra did.
“Your father wanted to talk about Charlie, so he came looking for Charlie’s friends,” Mrs. O’Dea went on. “He said no one would talk about him. His friends would change the subject and avoid him. So we talked. At first, it was only talking. But I was newly a widow then, and I missed my husband too.”
The small room filled with the echoes of a hundred thousand heartaches. How did they do it, these frail, proud humans? How did they get up, day after day? By thinking about other things, and lying to themselves, and finding love and joy and comfort where they could.
To her surprise, Mrs. O’Dea smiled at her. “He spoke of you too, Mrs. DeWitt. His Cassandra. He said you were his rock. But you were too young and had borne too much, and he didn’t want to burden you anymore.”
Tears pricked at her eyes. “But it wasn’t enough, was it? It was never enough to save him.”
Then Joshua somehow was right behind her, hands on her shoulders, giving to her what he would not let her give to him.
“‘Save him’? It was an accident.” But Mrs. O’Dea sounded unsure. Perhaps she already knew the truth, somewhere deep inside. Perhaps she held the key to why Papa had done what he’d done.
And so Cassandra said, “He shot himself.”
The words were hardly out of her mouth when Joshua said, “Cassandra, no!” His hands were firm and sure on her shoulders, but his tone was unusually menacing when he added, to Mrs. O’Dea, “You will tell no one that. No one must know.”
Mrs. O’Dea nodded, but her mind was elsewhere, her eyes focused on some place that she alone could see.
“Have you ever experienced a London fog?” she asked. “That’s what Charles said it was like in his head. A thick, cold, soupy fog filling his head and choking his heart and his stomach. He said he felt as though he would never see through it or feel sunlight again.”
That, then, was the answer. Cassandra still did not fully understand, but it was probably the best answer she would ever get.
Charlie had died, and both Papa and Mama fell apart, each in their own way, and their family fell apart too. There never was anything she could have done.
Joshua had tried to warn her, in his way. He had had two families and they both fell apart, which was why he did not want a third. He cared for her, but he would leave her too, and even a child would not hold them together. Brilliant, efficient Joshua: He knew that nothing would ever hold together, and it was a waste of time to even try.
It was hopeless and futile, and it always had been. She would return to her life and be right back where she started.
Cassandra stood. Joshua’s hands slipped away. She wrapped politeness around her like a cloak. “I apologize for this interruption, Mrs. O’Dea. I thank you for your kindness, both to myself and to my father. If ever you have need of anything, please do not hesitate to contact my husband or me.”
Mrs. O’Dea stood too and looked from one to the other. “At the very least, it is wonderful to see you two together. Your match was the one thing that made Charles happy.” Cassandra did not dare look at Joshua. She could feel him not looking at her. Oblivious, Mrs. O’Dea smiled. “He said you would make each other happy and give each other what you truly need. He would be pleased to see that that, at least, has come to pass.”
Another way Cassandra had been in error. When Papa asked her to marry Joshua, he had meant it not as a burden, but as a gift. Papa never intended for Cassandra to sacrifice happiness for her family, but rather to find happiness for hersel
f.
Oh, Papa, she thought. Dear, dear Papa. You were so very right, and you were so very wrong.
Lord Charles’s misguided matchmaking hopes were still bouncing around Joshua’s mind when their carriage trundled back into the traffic. For the first time since Mrs. O’Dea had exploded that particular powder keg, he looked at Cassandra, who finished arranging herself and offered a wan smile.
He should tell her how he could look at her all day. That she did bring him happiness. That she made him stronger and calmer and he was every kind of fool.
Lord Charles had meant well, the poor, broken man, lost in a fog and smiling all the while.
“Don’t smile at me if you don’t mean it,” he snapped. “You don’t have to hide everything under a bloody smile.”
The smile disappeared. “I smiled at you because looking at you makes me smile. Except when it makes me want to throttle you or slap you or kiss you or all of those at once. I can smile at you and still be upset at others, because I am capable of feeling more than one thing at a time, and if that is too much for you to comprehend, let me tell you I jolly well don’t care.” Like a soldier, she straightened her gloves and her shoulders and tormented him with her politest face. “It seems I shall have time to help Lady Morecambe pick out some new china after all. She is wavering between the Delft and the Wedgwood. If you would be so kind as to let me down at Bond Street.”
Polite small talk. That was cruel and unusual punishment, and she knew it. What was the alternative? Rude big talk. Very well then.
“Tell me about your mother,” he said. “She left, she didn’t leave, she’s unwell, she’s not unwell. Do you have a mother or not?”
“I do and I don’t.” Her look seemed to challenge him to argue, so he stayed quiet. “When Charlie was dying, the doctor gave Mama something to help her sleep. She’s been taking it ever since. She is not always sure what is real.”
She lifted her chin and stared out the window, but not before he saw the shine in her eyes. Finally, he understood: Lady Charles was an opium eater and had retreated into her own world.
“All this time?” he said.