Decision and Destiny (36 page)

“No, I won’t ask Blackford. He’s a filthy liar who’d say anything to cover up his incompetence—if he told you that at all!”

The logic of John’s assertion took hold, making it difficult to breathe.

When Frederic didn’t respond, John continued, his words low and tight. “I loved her, Father. I loved her because I knew her, knew her to be decent and good. Maybe you can’t comprehend that, and I pity you for it, but I loved her. And unlike you, I doubted her only once. So your newest lie falls upon deaf ears.” He shook his head. “You always believed the worst about her, didn’t you? Even when I first brought her here, you were disdainful of her. She could feel it, she fretted about it. But I told her not to worry, you’d come around. Little did I know. I suppose after she accepted your proposal, it confirmed your opinion of her—that she was out for the Duvoisin money. But she cared about her family—her brother—and that is why she married you. What a fool I was to desert her, not once, but twice, to honor her perverted sense of duty! I should have known you’d destroy her! I should have protected her from that.”

“John, I never meant—”

“If only I could do it over again,” John ranted on, “I would never be so stupid as to leave her here with you. I wouldn’t care if you disowned me. I never gave a damn about your fortune. I’d forfeit every penny of it for just one more second of her time!”

Frederic bowed his head to remorse, the poignant sincerity of his son’s declaration. He was swept back to those last two nights, holding Colette in his arms again, and tears sprang to his eyes. “I know you’ll never believe this, John, but I, too, would forfeit it all.”

“You’re right, I don’t believe you. It sounds good, but it’s just another lie.”

Suddenly, everything made sense to Frederic: that one deception, conceived nearly ten years ago, had led to this. “You’ve only been lied to once, John,” he whispered. “I thought you knew the truth. These last few years, I thought Colette must have told you the truth.”

“Told me what?” John prompted, confused.

Frederic glanced uncomfortably at Charmaine, then pressed on. “I was attracted to Colette when she first came to Charmantes.” John snorted, but Frederic ignored him. “I mistook her coquetry for something else, and late one night, I seduced her.”

“I don’t believe it!” John railed, bombarded by a fleeting glimpse of Colette flirting with his father. The nocuous image sent his innards plummeting. “Seduced or raped?” he demanded venomously.

The chamber fell deadly silent, and in those mounting seconds when no denial came, John’s face drained of color. The memory was gone, replaced by an uglier scenario: the painful truth. “You forced her! Goddamn you to hell, she was pure and innocent, and you forced her!”

He dove at his father, but Charmaine threw herself in his path, grappling for his arms. “No, John! Stop it! You’re not going to change anything this way! Stop!”

The sanity of her petition penetrated, and John faltered. He glanced down at the hands that held him, took in Charmaine’s desperate face. He looked back at his father, but Frederic had collapsed into his armchair, head bowed, by all outward signs a man condemned.

John stepped back, but when Charmaine’s hands dropped away,
he clasped one of them, turned, and pulled her from the iniquitous room. Together they snaked through the crowd loitering in the corridor. There was Agatha, aquiver with anticipation, the worried twins, a concerned Paul, George, even the servants.

The next thing Charmaine knew, they were in her room. Pierre’s body had been removed, the bed made, the furniture dusted, and the French doors thrown wide to catch the soft morning breezes. The tenebrous reminders of those four terrible days were gone. Everything was immaculate, mocking the turmoil that tainted their hearts.

John leaned heavily on the doorframe, head resting against a raised forearm, eyes staring down at the emerald lawns. When it seemed he’d never speak, Charmaine said, “Your father has no intention of sending the girls away. I wasn’t called to his quarters to be dismissed.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “You shouldn’t have been exposed to that.”

“I should have left,” she concurred.

But he wasn’t listening. “Rape,” he muttered in revulsion. “But why? Did he hate me that much? Or is he really that evil? Never once, in all those years, did it occur to me that was the reason she deserted me. My God! I wronged her so many times in my mind, chastised her, and still she loved me. She knew I was consumed with jealousy, yet she never told me the truth. Why did she allow me to believe the worst—that she had chosen my father’s fortune over me—that
she
was to blame?”

When the quiet room yielded no answers, he looked back at Charmaine.

“I had no idea you knew Colette first,” she said. “Were you truly betrothed?”

He stared outdoors once again, transfixed. Charmaine held silent. When he spoke again, the story unfolded.

The year had been l827 and George, Paul, and he were attending university in France. “We were hell-raisers then, at least I was,” he said, with a sad chuckle, “spending less time at the books and more time carousing. The spring semester was half-spent before I first glimpsed the young lady whom Paul had been squiring from one Paris soirée to another. She was beautiful,” he whispered reverently, “and the moment she wrinkled her fine aristocratic nose at me, I was determined to have her. Such an objective proved more difficult than I had initially imagined, and once I had lured her away from my brother, I found that, although she pretended at being a woman of the world, she was quite proper and innocent. But it was too late for me. I had fallen in love with her, and she, with me, or so I thought. Torture became my reward, and since I’d been unable to seduce her, I realized the only alternative was marriage. True, I was young, but if seventeen was not too young for a woman to marry, then nineteen was not unreasonable for a young man.

“Her mother objected fiercely. The woman did not fancy the likes of me for a son-in-law. But thanks to the gossip of a family friend, she was assured of my family’s wealth and the inheritance that would eventually fall to me, and not Paul, as she had originally believed.

“That same friend suggested the wedding take place on Charmantes so Colette’s mother could meet my father and ascertain my standing as heir to the family’s holdings. I was reluctant to involve him, but Colette persuaded me to return home for the wedding. Her childhood friend would accompany us, along with Paul and George. It would be romantic, she reasoned, and although I didn’t want to wait, I loved her and wanted to please her.

“So, we laughed over the workings of the adult mind and surmised Colette’s mother hoped to snare my widower father. Her husband had lost most of his fortune to the revolution, and after his death, she had to rely on any device, including Colette, to see that she and her son, Pierre, were cared for.

“Such assumptions were close to the truth. As soon as we arrived
on Charmantes, Adèle Delacroix set her sights on my father. He was not interested…not in Colette’s mother, at least.” John snorted in contempt as he contemplated his sire’s true motives.

“Over the years that followed, I wondered if Adèle had taken my father’s snub in stride, then manipulated Colette into his arms in her stead. Had she used her son’s infirmity to convince Colette to forfeit me for the immediate security of his fortune? I had walked in on several conversations that supported that possibility. The woman was intuitive, alert to every word my father and I exchanged. It didn’t take her long to size up our strained relationship. When we argued, it only served to heighten her anxiety. He didn’t think I was prepared to step into marriage and work for a living, an assertion I was determined to prove wrong. I started by lending a hand in the fields…” John’s words dropped off, and Charmaine watched him work through the details, his scowl darkening. “Suffice it to say, Adèle fretted over the inheritance that might be withdrawn if I didn’t behave myself. If nothing else, she burdened Colette with talk of responsibility and family loyalty, exploiting Colette’s love and concern for her younger brother.

“All I knew was, one day we were planning our wedding, and the next, Colette was breaking the banns. She wanted nothing more to do with me. At first, she was diplomatic, telling me she had grown fond of me, that she didn’t want to hurt me, that the charade had gone on for too long. She had been out to catch a rich husband, and when Paul didn’t fit the bill, she had turned to me. She had to think of her family, her crippled brother, in particular. His medical bills were mounting, and she had planned to send her mother home with an allowance to pay them. But when it became clear my father controlled the purse strings, she had turned her sights on him. I begged her not to sacrifice our love. I told her I would work harder; I could provide for all of them. She shook her head and told me it wasn’t enough. She needed the money now. When I asked her how she could throw our love away, she broke down and cried. When I
tried to embrace her, to reason with her, she turned away. She swore she’d never loved me. I became furious, though I knew her words were ludicrous. I threatened to tell my father she was a tramp—a sly, conniving whore. But she only laughed, saying, ‘He knows what I am, and he doesn’t care. He wants me anyway!’

“I ran from the house, and I didn’t stop. I stumbled over my own two feet with that last vision of Colette, her eyes swollen from crying, swearing she didn’t love me, had never loved me. I boarded the ship that was in port and awaited its departure. Even then, a part of me wanted to go back, to hold her and shake the lies from her, certain she wouldn’t have cried if the lies were true! But another part of me was crushed, so I didn’t go back, and I swore I’d never return to Charmantes. I’d forget her as easily as she could me.

“I went to Virginia and took to running my father’s business there, determined to gain independence from the damned fortune that had always kept me under his thumb and had now ruined my life. But in the months I was there, I was consumed with anger and hatred. I hated her mother, even her brother. I hated my father for interfering, even though I concluded he’d married her to save me from the mistake he had maintained I was making—saddling myself with a money-grubbing wife. But mostly, I hated myself for still wanting her, loving her, my self-loathing paramount only to my hatred for her. I was not very different from my father at that time. Many nights, I raped her in my dreams, driven by one single desire: to inflict pain on those who had hurt me, pain upon Colette, and pain upon my father. So, I broke my vow and returned.

“He and Colette had been married less than a year, and she was heavy with child, close to delivering. She greeted me cordially, as if I were a long-lost brother, as if nothing had ever happened, as if we were one big, happy family—my father included. I wanted to vomit. But they dropped that charade once they realized I wasn’t about to accept the cozy life they were now living. For a week, not one word
passed between us, but my hatred continued to fester. Then, one night, I cornered her in the drawing room, and we had it out. I enjoyed making her cry, was even more satisfied when my father barged in. We would have come to blows, but Colette collapsed onto the sofa, and he ran to her. She was in labor.

“I left for Virginia right away, unaware she had delivered twins, and didn’t go back for four years. When I did, it was obvious something had changed between them. My father’s foul moods were worse, and Colette rarely smiled. At first I gloated over her sadness; she was getting what she deserved. I decided to spend time with the twins. They were sweet and innocent, and winning them over was easy. More important, here was an opportunity to be cruel to their mother. I’d ignore her completely, exclude her from excursions I planned with the girls, and when my father put a stop to that, I convinced Yvette and Jeannette their mother was responsible. Colette knew what I was doing, but she never turned them against me. It made me angrier. I wanted her to regret she had chosen my father’s fortune. I invited women to the house and openly flirted with them. She disapproved, but never said a word. After a time, I grew disgusted with the game. Then, one morning—” he inhaled deeply, held the breath for a moment, released it “—I left. A little distance and time, and I’d get on with my life. I was wrong. When I got back to the States, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I realized she was more miserable than I was. I remembered our happy times in France, her radiant smile that could light up a room. My father had robbed her of that, and it wasn’t fair. And so, I went back again.

“My father had begun developing Espoir. He was seldom on Charmantes that summer. The girls’ enthusiasm threw us together, and it was easy to pretend he didn’t exist. I fell in love again, this time with a very different woman. As the weeks went by, instinct told me she loved me still. Her misplaced sense of responsibility had gotten us into this mess, and although she tried time and again to
shift any blame away from my father, how I hated him for it. I knew he could have helped her family
without
demanding payment in return. If he loved me, that’s what he would have done. But no, he didn’t want
me
to benefit from his charity. Instead,
he
greedily enjoyed the pleasures his money could buy, making Colette his whore as easily as he set me aside. Their marriage was a sham.

“When Colette told me she was carrying my child, I pleaded with her to leave him. I’d acquired my own fortune. We could go to New York, where nobody would know about the past. But my father denied her custody of the girls, and she refused to desert them. That led to a vicious row. My father and I said things to each other that can never be forgiven. I vaguely remember him collapsing, and still, I shouted at him. Then Colette was screaming at me, demanding I leave, and Paul was there, pulling me out of the room…

“I loved her, Charmaine, will always love her. Now, after all these years, I know the truth: Colette wasn’t a mercenary, and she wasn’t a saint. She married my father because she was humiliated, and she stayed with him because of the girls and her guilt. He exploited those emotions, but she never loved him.”