Forever and Ever (18 page)

She laughed weakly, sitting back.

“Do you think I’m flattering you? It’s the truth. I bought it imagining both of us riding in it, Sophie. As man and wife.”

“Oh, Robert.”

“It’s all right, you don’t have to say anything. That wasn’t a new proposal, merely an extension of the old one.” His tight-lipped smile came and went, intending to set her at ease. She was touched by his gentleness, his unwonted delicacy. He began to tell her about his new chaise, the status of his candidacy for Parliament, what her uncle had said about his chances. She couldn’t follow any of it; her mind was traveling a different path, racing down it like a thing being chased. Her skin felt prickly, and her hands were damp with sudden perspiration. She stood up all at once, in the middle of his sentence, something about a constituency party association, and writs being cried. “Sophie?” He got to his feet, too. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” She forced a smile. Her heart was pounding in her ears—was she going to faint again? She walked away from him, went to the garden house and leaned her back against the warm, chalky bricks. He came toward her slowly, and his body seemed to get bigger and bigger, filling her vision, blocking out everything else. The concern in his face steadied her and brought her back to herself. “Robert,” she said, so quietly he came even closer. “Do you . . .” No, she couldn’t ask him if he loved her. She didn’t believe it, and she didn’t want to hear him say it again; it would have embarrassed her. “Do you really want to marry me?” she asked instead.

His fleshy features stiffened in surprise. “Sophie,” was all he could say.

“Do you?”

“My dear girl.” He’d have taken her hand again, but she had both of them clasped behind her back. “You know I do.”

She wet her dry lips with her tongue. How could she tell him? What were the words? She almost balked then. She saw herself breaking away from him and streaking across the lawn into the house, the orchard, anywhere. She braced her knees, which were trembling—and then she saw her resemblance to a soldier, back to the wall, face to the firing squad. A laugh came out of her mouth, a giddy, scary sound that had Robert frowning at her in concern. “I’ll marry you if you still want me after I tell you something,” she said in a staccato rush.

“You’ll—what? You’ll marry me?”

“I have to tell you something first.”

“What?”

She stared at him, poised on the brink, teetering; this awful risk terrified her, but if she succeeded the nightmare would go away. She didn’t look any further than that.

“What?”

She opened her mouth—but the flat truth wouldn’t come out. Not head-on; she needed to approach it sideways.

“If you knew I had done something wrong. Something you couldn’t approve of. Something you despised. Do you think you could forgive me?”

He couldn’t answer—of course he couldn’t. He just stood there, blinking at her.

“Robert, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve shamed myself, and I’ve shamed my family. But I promise I would be a good wife to you if you would forgive me, if you could take me anyway. And—no one would ever know but you. And me.”

He looked frightened. “What is it you’ve done?”

Too late to stop, but a premonition of disaster made her blood run cold. “I’m pregnant. It’s Connor Pendarvis’s child. We were together only once. I thought I loved him.”

There. Even if he spurned her now, the part of her that hated lies and deception was eased by the confession. She’d suffered from the need to lie almost as much as from the thing she’d needed to hide.

She could see the blood drain from his face. Then she could see it return, more of it than before, turning his thick-skinned cheeks a ruddy bronze. The possibility of violence occurred to her for the first time; she looked past his broad, strong shoulder at the empty garden, the house so far away. There was a faint white line around his upper lip. Hardly moving his mouth, he said, “Connor Pendarvis? Are you talking about that miner? That
miner
? Are you talking about that man who worked in your mine?”

She bowed her head. She could taste defeat on the back of her tongue; it tasted like salt. “He wasn’t a miner. He was . . .” A thief. “He wasn’t a miner.”

“You were intimate with him?”

He didn’t shout the words, but they struck her like stones all the same, forcing her back against the brick wall. “I’ve told you. Only once. And now I’m with child. Robert.” She held her hand out to him, not to beg him, but to offer a truce. “Will you have me anyway? I’d make you happy—try to. Will you?”

He whispered, “My God,” and turned his back on her.

She let her hand fall to her side. It was finished.

“God,” she thought he muttered again. Suddenly he whipped around again.
“Whore,”
he said wonderingly. “He was a miner, and you let him fuck you.” She recoiled, hunching her shoulders. “You’re a
whore
, aren’t you? You’re nothing but a
whore.
”

“Don’t. Robert. Go. I shouldn’t—” Her throat closed up.

“To think I wanted you to be the one. You to be my wife. I thought—” He looked up at the sky and laughed. “Perfect, I thought. She’s perfect.”

“Go away. This is—so hurtful. Go away now, I’m begging you.”

The meanness in his ginger-colored eyes was unfamiliar to her, and yet somehow it didn’t really surprise her. “So that’s what you’ve wanted. All along. Now I get it. How stupid I’ve been.” He took a step toward her.

Pure, uncluttered instinct had her yelling, “Thomas! Come out here, please!”

Robert stopped, and after a second his clenched hands softened. He looked stunned, as if he’d shocked himself. “You don’t need help,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t touch you now if you asked for it.”

He looked stiff and jerky and oddly dignified as he stalked off toward the terrace and the path that led around the house to the drive.
I should have married him
, she thought, watching his broad back recede, the expensive tweed of his coat, the resolute swing of his sturdy arms.
Should have chased him years ago and caught him. Then I’d be safe.

The awful present came back in a wave. “Robert!”

He halted, and turned around with glacial slowness—laughable slowness, she’d have thought at any time but now. His cocked sandy eyebrow asked what she wanted now.

She stumbled toward him a few steps, wringing her hands—partly an act to win him over, part true, sheer terror. “Despite— Even though you— May I—” His dignity might be intact, but hers was in tatters. She swallowed hard and steeled herself. “I have always believed you to be a gentleman. You’re angry, with every right. May I have your assurance that when you are calm again, the things that have passed between us today, the—confidences I have given to you in good faith, will remain a secret between us alone?” A stiff speech, practically medieval; it made her blush. But she was in an old-fashioned situation, and formal words came most naturally.

He sneered at her. To think she’d ever liked him—ever even been civil to him! “Don’t distress yourself. Your sordid ‘confidences’ are so distasteful to me, Miss Deene, I assure you I won’t be repeating them to anyone. They make me ashamed of the hopes I once entertained. They make me feel like a fool.” He bowed to her slowly and ironically. She couldn’t deny that his exit was effective.

“Good riddance,” she muttered shakily, collapsing in her chair. She’d rather be chained up in the stocks and pelted with stones for adultery than bound for life to such a man.

Oh, but everything was worse now, a state of affairs she wouldn’t have thought possible. Was he a gentleman?
Could
she rely on him to be discreet? The bottom was dropping out of her life. Through the thickening fog of fear and desperation she could see one last rope dangling, barely within her reach. If she grabbed for it and missed, all would be lost. But if she caught it and it held, the price of her salvation might be more than she could pay.

XIV

“Huh-huh here’s the ruh rest o’ the fuh-fuh forty-fourth. Ye’ll hah-hah have it cah-cah copied oot by muh-muh-muh-muh—”

“Morning.”

The white beetling brows of Angus McDougal, Q.C., drew together over his thin blade of a nose. People who finished his stammering, incomprehensible, infuriating sentences earned his ire, not his gratitude. Connor knew that, from a dozen personal experiences over the last few weeks, but he simply could not help himself. His employer was driving him wild.

“Aye, muh-muh-muh mornin’,” the Scotsman confirmed deliberately. To pay Connor back, he decided to say more. “I wuh-wuh wasn’t puh pleased wi’ yer last truh-truh trans scruh-scruh scription, Mr. Puh-Puh Pendarvis. Chuh chapter fuh-fuh forty-three had ink bluh-bluh blots in the margins, and some of it wuh was illeg-leg-legible.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’ll try to do better with forty-four.”

“Aye, suh-suh see that ye do.” He put a white envelope on the corner of Connor’s desk. “I fuh-fuh-fuh forgot t’ gie ye this luh-luh letter. Came in yeh-yeh yesterday’s puh-puh-puh—”

“Post.” He bowed his head in contrition, at the same time he bit down hard on the knuckle of his right index finger. He felt like screaming.

“Post,” McDougal said coldly. From the pocket of his seedy, pipe ash–littered waistcoat he took out a key. “Ye’ll lah-lah-lah-lah lock up at six, will ye?”

“Yes, sir.” He did it every night, and every morning McDougal asked for the key back.

“No’ a minute sooner,” he warned, sticking a bony finger in Connor’s face. He wasn’t by nature a mean man, but he seemed compelled to act out his own Dickensian fantasy of the irascible, eccentric lawyer, full of maggoty habits and exasperating mannerisms. His stuttering brogue was intensely annoying, but it was only one of his quirks; he had a hundred others.

Like forgetting what day was payday. His Scottish frugality was the real article, no affectation. Through the opaque glass of the half window, Connor watched his thin, black-coated form slip through the street door and recede into the rainy evening, but he didn’t call out a reminder. The day had been long and unusually tedious. He would rather be broke, he decided, than endure another minute of his employer’s conversation.

The letter in the envelope was nothing more than a scrawl on a half sheet of cheap vellum. “A quick note, probably illegible because I am on a train, to say again that Mr. Thacker and I enjoyed our dinner with you on Thursday evening. Please be assured that I’ll be in touch with you in the quite near future. Yrs., etc., Ian Braithwaite.”

Cryptic, to say the least. So had his visit been, sudden and out of the blue, last week. Braithwaite was a party agent for one of the liberal arms of the Whigs. He and Thacker, his associate, had read Connor’s piece in the Rhadamanthus Society’s quarterly and been impressed by it, they claimed. They’d come up from Plymouth, apparently for the sole purpose of taking him out for a meal. They’d had a long, wide-ranging conversation about politics and reform, and when it over Connor had no idea why they’d gone to the trouble. “Have you ever thought of standing for public office yourself, Mr. Pendarvis?” Braithwaite had wondered once over the cigars and port. But the subject lapsed after Connor denied ever considering any such thing. If there had been a point to Braithwaite’s visit, he’d never come to it, and Connor had put the incident out of his mind.

At least he’d gotten a free dinner—no trifling matter these days. And at least one good thing had come out of the debacle in Wyckerley. What an unpleasant irony: at a time when his personal life was in fragments, his professional reputation, such as it was, at least in the small reformist circles in which he was known at all, had never been worth more.

“I’m clerking for a solicitor here in Exeter,” he’d told Braithwaite. “It’s temporary, just until I make up my mind about a number of options I’m weighing.” Vague; not an absolute lie, although close to it. And it sounded so much better than, “I’m transcribing the mad, illegible notes of a has-been attorney on the
Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum
for room, board, and eleven shillings a week while I try to put my life back together.”

He rubbed his tired eyes, flexed his aching shoulders. The light in the small office was fading; it would be six soon. Even if he’d wanted to work late, which of course he didn’t, McDougal didn’t permit it: he was too stingy to pay for lamp oil to light the room after dark.

A knock at the door made him jump. McDougal had no appointments today, none at all, and walk-in clients were all but unheard of. Who could it be? A woman; he could see that from her outline in the murky glass. He grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair and went to answer the door.

He recognized her at once. They’d met two days ago, when she’d engaged McDougal to probate her late husband’s will. “Good evening, Mrs.—” His mind went blank.

She had a slow, foxy smile, small teeth, suggestive eyes. “Irene Wayburn. Good evening, Mr. Pendarvis.” She enunciated his name carefully, a gentle reproach because he hadn’t remembered hers. Slipping off her glove, she gave him her bare hand. “May I come in?”

He blinked. “Yes, of course. Mr. McDougal’s not in, though. You’ve just missed him.”

“Oh, what a pity.”

Connor widened the door, and she brushed his arm as she passed through.

She smelled of rain and perfume. The meanness of his cramped, cluttered office oppressed him as he tried to see it through her eyes. There was only one chair besides the one behind his battered desk. He pulled it away from the wall and asked if she cared to sit down.

“Oh . . .” She put her finger on her cheek and tapped it thoughtfully. “I think not. I doubt that I’ll be staying long.”

“How can I help you, Mrs. Wayburn?”

The foxy smile came again, and this time he had to smile back, because her frankness was irresistible. “I’ve brought some papers Mr. McDougal asked me to hunt up in my husband’s files. Here they are.” She took a thin, light envelope out of her purse and handed it to him.

“I’ll see that he gets them in the morning.”

“Thank you.” She watched him for a moment, appraising him without a trace of embarrassment, her arms folded across her waist. Her features were heavy and a little coarse, but she had beautiful skin, pale and creamy, almost ethereal-looking, like a nun’s skin. Medium height, full-breasted, full-hipped, she wore her sexuality like a pretty new coat she wanted to show off. Had she always been this way, he wondered, or had it taken the demise of Mr. Wayburn to set her free? “A few things have occurred to me since Mr. McDougal and I had our initial consultation,” she said. She had a nice voice, pitched to a low, intimate note. “Things about my husband’s state of mind when he made his last will. I’m not sure if they’re relevant or not, but I feel I ought to confide them to . . . you.”

“To me?”

“Well, to someone. To you, as McDougal’s assistant. I thought perhaps over dinner. They may be important. Time may even be of the essence.” She cocked an arch eyebrow.

Connor rubbed his chin, then his mouth to cover a grin, while he returned her bold, open stare. She was tempting. Very tempting. Why not go with her? There would be no entanglements afterward, and neither of them would indulge in sentimental regrets when it ended. What she was offering would be simple, quick, and basic. Why not?

“I can’t.”

“Oh.” She pouted her lips. “Sure?”

“Yes. I’m very sorry,” he said truthfully. “I have no doubt that it would be . . . most enjoyable. But it’s not possible.”

“Ah, well.
Quel dommage
, as they say.” She was over him already; she heaved a wistful sigh for form’s sake. “Maybe another time.” She closed her reticule with a businesslike snap and moved around him toward the door. “Don’t forget to give Mr. McDougal the papers, will you, Mr. . . .”

“Pendarvis. No, I won’t.”

They smiled at each other one last time, and then she was gone.

Within minutes, he regretted his decision. Why hadn’t he grabbed for the free gift the Widow Wayburn wanted to give him? Who the hell was he saving himself for? It wasn’t as if women were flinging themselves at him every day, it wasn’t as if he had scores to choose from.
Jack
was the ladies’ man in the family. That was the way it had always been, and Connor couldn’t imagine it being any other way. Didn’t even want it any other way.

But Jack was gone, down to Exminster to find work with a gang for the late harvest, so that he wouldn’t be a “burden.” All the talking, cajoling, and finally shouting that Connor had done hadn’t accomplished anything. He wasn’t sick, Jack maintained; he would
get
sick if he kept on as he was, useless and in the way. He needed to work, needed to make some money of his own. It was a matter of pride. Connor understood that, but he’d have kept him here anyway if he could. But with Jack there was never any use arguing. Bullheaded, the family always called him. The last two Pendarvis boys had a lot in common.

Exeter Cathedral’s tower clock struck six. McDougal’s dingy law offices were in a courtyard off the Magdalene New Road, within sight of the beautiful cathedral—but much closer in spirit to the Female Penitentiary and the Unitarian and Jewish Burial Grounds a few blocks to the north. Connor lived in one room over the office, entered from rickety wooden stairs outside at the back. He hated his room. His job. His life. He thought of taking a walk through the city or along the Exe before going upstairs for the night, but the chilly rain and darkening sky dissuaded him, along with a deepening depression that made the least exertion seem onerous and exhausting. Locking the door with McDougal’s key, he went up to his room.

He lit it with tallow candles because that was all he could afford. He hated the smell, and the strain they made on his eyes when he read by them, but at least candlelight softened the room’s ugliness a little. His bed was a lumpy divan wedged under the eaves. A deal table with uneven legs served for his desk, reading area, and eating place. There were no bureaus or chests of drawers; he kept his clothes in a box at the foot of the bed or hung them on a nail behind the door. The one dirty window wouldn’t open, and its view of the other buildings facing the shabby courtyard wasn’t edifying. At least the neighborhood was quiet tonight, no neighbors brawling, no dogs fighting. He rinsed the ink from his hands in the basin on the washstand, took off his coat and tie, and unbuttoned his vest.

For a long time, he stared at his face in the mottled mirror, thinking sullen thoughts. What kind of man was he? He used to know, or think he knew. A serious man, he’d have said, one with principles, strong convictions, goals that meant something to him. He’d been told so often that he was the hope of his family and the pride of his village that he’d eventually come to believe it. A barrister or a journalist: those were the two great professions he had decided would take him closest to his ultimate goal, and his ultimate goal was nothing less than the furtherance of the cause of reform and social justice for all working people. In the mirror, he watched his mouth twist into a thin, ugly smile. What a pathetic joke. If the end justified the means, he could say that he’d succeeded, on a small scale. But it didn’t. Instead of striking a gratifying blow for the cause, he’d committed the worst ethical blunder of his life. He felt
drenched
with guilt, and he was no closer now to justifying what he had done to Sophie than he had been six weeks ago.
It’s over
, he told himself constantly; if he couldn’t forgive himself, at least he could forget the whole sordid incident, just let it go. But it wasn’t possible.

The strange thing was that he was still angry with her. All the blame was his, and yet every time he thought of the things she’d said at their last harrowing meeting, his skin felt hot. Fury and mortification came boiling up in him, as if the encounter had happened yesterday or an hour ago.
You taught me how low I could sink. I’ll spend the rest of my life repenting what I did with you.
Maybe he deserved that—yes, all right, he deserved it—but her absolute disgust still infuriated him. Sophie was a snob, and he believed in his heart that not a single moment had passed during their summer-long acquaintance, not even the night they had made love in her narrow bed, when she didn’t consider him her social inferior. He himself had much to answer for, but he couldn’t forgive her for that.

Dinner was a piece of mutton pie, purchased two nights ago from a cookshop in the next alley. He ate it cold because there was no stove in his room, and if there had been he couldn’t have afforded the coal to heat it. Afterward, he stared at the pages he’d been trying to write for the last six nights; it was a paper on the child labor law, and he was writing it for publication in the journal of the Liverpool Workingmen’s Association. But almost immediately the words blurred in front of his eyes. He was tired, his eyes hurt, his head ached—but that wasn’t it. He’d lost his edge, that angry energy that had gotten him through university and then law studies, and the dreary, grinding poverty of them both. The Rhadamanthus report ought to have buoyed him. He’d heard from several sources that it had hit its target; if Shavers’ bill passed next term, he could truthfully say that he had helped get it through. Helped to save lives. Yet that gave him only a chilly, abstract kind of pleasure. He saw himself as pitiful in his bare cell of a room, a hypocritical monk with no life, pretending he was biding his time until something meaningful came along, saving his pennies for an elusive dream of one day returning to studying the law. He disgusted himself. He should have gone with the gay widow, Irene whatever her name was. Better to drink and womanize, go on a tear, pretend he still had an existence—
anything
was better than this pathetic, mean, embarrassing excuse for a life.

He took up his pen, pulled his one candle closer to the sheets of paper on his desk. Old habits die hard.

He must have dozed off. He awoke from a dream in which Irene was knocking at his door again, and this time he kissed her in the threshold and picked her up. In the dream she weighed a ton; the staggering load of her helped jolt him into wakefulness. Disoriented, it took him a few seconds to realize that that intermittent tapping sound really was a knock at his door. Well, well, he thought. It could be no one but the widow. And this time he would agree to anything she wanted, anything at all. His chair scraped on the bare floor in his haste; he rushed to open the door before she could get away, grabbed the knob, flung it open.