Forever and Ever (17 page)

He moved closer, lowered his voice. “What I’ve told you is in confidence, Sophie. Only a few people know that Knowlton means to resign. As of now, the field is empty, and I intend to take advantage of that.”

“Ah. Well, I wish you luck, of course.”

“Your uncle is backing me.”

“Is he?” That made sense. Uncle Eustace voted the Whig party because in this district it was politically expedient to do so, but he was a Tory in his heart of hearts, or so Sophie had always assumed. “Then I expect you’ll have a very good chance, indeed.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well,” she said when he didn’t speak for a moment but made no move to leave. “Thank you for bringing me home. Will I be seeing you . . .” She trailed off. He’d put his hand on her shoulder. He’d never touched her before. With a start, she realized he was about to kiss her. “Robert—” His lips found hers after a fumbling second; she stood still, not pulling away. It was a dry, firm, businesslike kiss, not altogether unpleasant. When it was over, she didn’t feel anything. Nothing at all.

Robert felt something. “Marry me, Sophie.”

“Oh,”
she said, shocked into near speechlessness.
“Oh.”

“You won’t regret it. My father’s business will come to me in the course of things, and then I mean to become a man of
real
substance. Knowlton’s seat only ensures it. I’ll sell the brewery and make respectable investments, a gentleman’s investments. I’m on the rise, Sophie. Marry me and I’ll make you proud of me.”

She knew he was in earnest because he’d slipped and called his father’s business “the brewery”; always before it was “the firm,” or sometimes “the family concern.”

“Robert,” she stuttered, “I—I don’t know what to say.”

“Say yes.”

“No—no. This is—” So sudden, she almost said. But there was no point in giving him false hope or pretending time might change her mind. She pulled herself together. “I’m extremely flattered by your proposal, and touched that you would think of me in that way. But . . .”

“Don’t say ‘but,’ Sophie. Marry me. I do love you.”

Could it possibly be true? In her distress she studied him, his powerful body and tense posture, his bland, familiar face creased with an emotion that
seemed
to be no stronger than concern. No, no, it couldn’t be true. What a relief; refusing him wouldn’t break his heart, then.

“You do me a great honor,” she said gently, laying her hand on the sleeve of his coat. “Please understand, it’s not you—I’m so fond of you, Robert. I have the highest regard for you, of course, and our friendship means a great deal to me.” She was overstating the case, but it seemed a time for exaggeration. “I don’t think I will ever marry, though. I’m already set in my ways, and I should make a most unsatisfactory wife. Especially for you.”

“Why? Why especially for me?”

Because he would expect too much of her—he would want her life to be subordinate to his. Alternatives would never occur to him. How she knew this she wasn’t sure, but she knew it. “Because you deserve better. I feel it strongly, that you would regret it if we married. I haven’t a doubt that you would try your best to make me happy, Robert, but I’m just as sure that I would make you miserable. Please let me say no without spoiling our friendship.”

His ginger eyes narrowed on her, and she thought he was angry. But he was only pondering. “All right,” he said almost cheerfully, certainly without any evidence of heartache. “We’ll leave it for now, if that’s what you want.”

“No, what I—”

“But I’ll ask you again, and then again if that’s what it takes. You’re what I want, Sophie. And you’re wrong about us. I’m exactly what you need. But if you can’t see it now, that’s all right. I can wait.”

She smiled and shook her head, but said no more, on the grounds that it would be unkind to contradict him. They bade each other good night with more affection than she would have thought possible, considering the circumstances, and she went up to her room to think it all over.

She could have said yes. Would it have been so terrible? Perhaps he was right, perhaps they were made for each other. What difference did it make that they didn’t love each other? Love only got in the way. A messy, irrelevant bother. A crimp.

She had never been cynical about love before. It was another part of Connor’s legacy, something else to despise him for. The fact that she could think about him now, think of him at all, must mean she was healing. Numbness had helped see her through the last weeks, that and the long, hard hours at Guelder. Robert’s proposal—somehow it had opened the locked door between her and memories of Connor. Tonight she believed she could bear them.

The trick was to look back on her time with him as just another life experience and try to learn something from it. Turn it from a painful, degrading episode into something positive. She had lived through it. She had kept her reputation intact—miraculously; when she remembered the risks she’d taken, she thought she must have been mad. She regarded it now as a fever, a time of insanity that had blinded her to the dangers of exposure—and all for a man who wasn’t worthy of her anyway.

She, of course, had plenty of flaws, and under Connor’s tutelage she had become intimately familiar with a number of new ones. But he was worse. He’d lied to her from the first day they’d met. In fairness, she couldn’t claim that he’d seduced her, but he had certainly betrayed her. Even allowing for his impersonation, even granting him the
possibility
that that masquerade was morally defensible—a questionable grant, she would go to her grave thinking—he had still committed an egregious sin when he’d deliberately begun a personal relationship with her. She may have committed one, too, when she’d allowed it, but at least her transgression had come out of true affection and healthy desire. She had sacrificed everything, including her virtue and her respectability, because she’d thought she loved him. He had no such excuse. There was nothing in his heart except lust and deceit, and she could never forgive him. She would try not to think of him again, except as an object lesson: don’t trust men, and don’t give yourself to them in any setting other than marriage. If she’d had a mother or a father, perhaps she would have known that already. She was twenty-three years old; she
ought
to have known it. She knew it now.

She lay in bed for a long time, dry-eyed but full of sorrow, watching shadows move across the ceiling. Maybe Robert’s proposal could be a turning point for her. It was time to try to be happy again. But how? She was no longer lighthearted, no longer a girl. Connor Pendarvis had stolen her youth and made her a wary and suspicious woman. A sad woman, although she constantly beat back the sadness as well as she could. She felt old and tired, dried up inside, and she had to be on guard against flashes of memory that blotted out the here and now and flung her into the past. She would see him in the rose garden with Dash on his lap, remember how his hands had looked stroking the cat’s inky fur. Or how his sideways smile lit up his face when she said something funny. Once he’d told her a silly joke about a Cornishman, a Welshman, and a Scotsman, and they had both laughed until the tears came. Those were the treacherous memories; they broke her heart and made her cry.

How could she get out from under this weight of sorrow and regret? When would the pain fade and give her her life back? Hating him helped; she clung to her conviction that he was a monster like a lifeline, hostile to the smallest impulse to see anything mitigating in what he’d done. That was the way. Absolute truth didn’t matter; survival mattered. For now, she was surviving by making Connor her bitterest enemy. Demonizing him. It didn’t work, not really, but it was the only weapon he’d left her.

The next day was Sunday. She was late to church, so she sat in the back, not in her customary pew in front by the window. The late August day was stifling hot; Christy’s sermon was fine, but long. Afterward, she understood that there had been clues before, signs she ought to have recognized. But she had ignored them, been too listless or distracted to notice.

Fainting in church could not be ignored.

She was pregnant.

***

Nightmare. Fear was like a cold drug in her veins, freezing her, making it impossible to think or plan, even move. After the service, after she recovered from her most public swoon, she found herself in the churchyard, kneeling on the moss beside her father’s tombstone. She put her hands on the cool grass over his grave, instinctively seeking his comfort, desperate for him to save her. If only he could! She didn’t know she was weeping until she felt Anne Morrell’s arm around her shoulders. “Forgive me, Sophie—you don’t have to tell me—but is it that man, that Mr. Pendarvis, who’s making you so unhappy?” She denied it violently, again and again, and Anne stopped asking. “I’ll go and get Christy,” she said, rising, but Sophie pulled her back down. “Please don’t. Just stay with me.” She couldn’t speak to either of them. They were her best friends, and she couldn’t speak to them. Her shame was grievous and absolute.

She went to the mine the next day, and she was soothed a little by the familiar routine, as well as her own pretense that nothing was amiss. But with everyone to whom she spoke—Jenks, Dickon Penney, her blacksmith, everyone—she found herself wondering,
What will he think when he finds out? Will this one revile me? Will this one stand by me?
On the following day she nearly fainted again; luckily she was alone, and recovered quickly by putting her head down on her desk. But it dawned on her that she wasn’t eating, nothing at all, and in fact the thought of food revolted her. Was that normal? She couldn’t ask anyone, not even Dr. Hesselius. Not yet. She was too frightened. Panic ruled her; she couldn’t see into the future past the hellish minute she was in. The next day she couldn’t go to the mine at all.

The idea of a baby, unthinkable at first, began to tap at the corners of her mind, a shy, tentative visitor unsure of its welcome. She had always loved children, always wanted them—someday. But oh, God, not like this! There should be joy, ecstatic anticipation, the humbling certainty that one had been blessed—but all Sophie could feel was stark terror. Because she was ruined.

Connor’s cruel jibe, that she cared for nothing except being the belle of her “backward, small-minded village,” haunted her. It wasn’t fair, but there was truth in it, and she was too demoralized to deny it or try to justify herself. “Lady Bountiful,” he’d called her. Yes, she’d felt like that sometimes. And she’d liked being liked; sometimes she’d even enjoyed being envied. But had she sinned so terribly that the devastation of her whole life had to be the price for her pride and folly? She knew the rules, had understood since childhood, as every girl did, what penalty a woman paid when she “fell.” Of course it wasn’t fair; she knew that, too—as every girl did—but what did it matter? Social morality was like a great, impersonal machine, grinding up all transgressors whether penitent or defiant, naive or cunning, punishing them all with exactly the same efficiency and indifference. So how did she feel about her “backward village” now? The perspective from the bottom was nothing like the one from the top. Whom could she trust not to trample her? How could she stay here? What would become of her?

She was exhausted, ill. She lay on her bed until Maris came in to cluck and fret over her, then she went outside to escape her.

Summer was ending. The climbing tea roses still bloomed, and the bourbons, too, and would until the frost, but most of the others were gone. Thomas had been dutifully cutting off the dead blossoms, but not raking them up and taking them away; the wilted heads lay in brown heaps along the path sides, dreary and dismal-looking, portending autumn. Sophie sat in a chair and contemplated her house, her derelict orchard, her mother’s lovely old garden. She thought of the night she’d taken Connor on a tour, showing him her father’s study, her old nursery, confessing to him how much she loved her “creaky old house.” “It suits you,” he’d said. Yes. It did. If only she could turn back time, be that carefree girl again. How innocent she had been, and how complacent. She hadn’t known what she had until she lost it.

Crying again. Self-pity could easily become a habit. She wiped her cheeks with her handkerchief—and turned her face away from the house when she heard footsteps on the terrace. If Maris saw her in tears again, she’d—

“Sophie!”

Not Maris. Robert Croddy.

She jumped up, shaking out her skirts, imagining what she must look like. She sent him a gay wave, and he walked down the steps toward her. He didn’t much resemble her idea of a Member of Parliament, at least not an elegant one; too stocky and short. He looked more like a sheriff, one you wouldn’t want to cross.

Her bright, pasted-on smile was a failure: the first words from his mouth were, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing! I’m taking the day off, that’s all. This morning I felt a little tired, so I decided to indulge myself.”

“They told me at the mine you were sick.”

“You went to Guelder? Why?”

“To invite you out to lunch in my new curricle. Come and see it, it’s in your drive.” Her face must have fallen. “I’m sorry; never mind, you can see it another time. Come and sit down.”

“Really, I’m fine.”

“Sit.” He had taken her arm, and he was pressing her back into her chair firmly, solicitously. He drew another chair close and sat beside her. “It’s that fall you took from your gig; you’ve never fully recovered from it. You didn’t give yourself time to heal, and now it’s caught up with you.”

An interesting diagnosis. Untrue, but sweet. She was surprised when he reached for her hand, but it was the genuine sympathy in his face that was almost her undoing. She swallowed the tightness in her throat and said in a low voice, “Robert, truly I’m all right. And I’m glad you came—I needed the company.” It was almost true; she needed another person’s voice, the business of another person’s life temporarily eclipsing hers. “Tell me about your new curricle. Did you buy it in Devonport?”

“No, in Plymouth. It’s bright blue. I bought it to match your eyes.”