Legacy of Secrets (58 page)

Finn watched her silently. He knew what she was like. Only when he had reduced her to nothing, just the way he had been, would he return to save her. And he had no doubt she would come running back to him. Then he would tell her how much he loved her, that he wanted her, that she was his and always would be. But not yet, because his wounds went deep. She always did exactly what she wanted to do, and she always got what she wanted. But not this time. Now Lily had to learn her lesson.

L
ILY TOLD
C
IEL MANY YEARS LATER
that she didn’t even remember how she got from Finn’s apartment and back to the hotel. She couldn’t even remember the journey back to Boston, only the terrible pain in her heart, and the new baby inside her. “Another bastard,” she said bitterly, only this time she had thought it had been conceived in love.

She went back to her husband, her life reduced to rubble again. But somehow, being Lily, her old instinct for self-preservation asserted itself once more and she figured out a plan. She would tell John she was going to have a baby and he would naturally assume it was his. The only trouble was that since she’d been with Finn she had avoided her husband’s attentions, and there was no way the child
could
be his.

She knew there was only one thing to do if she were to save herself, and she dressed in her prettiest for supper that night. She wore the perfume he liked and the blue dress and the sapphire earrings, and afterward she took him to her bed. A few weeks later she informed him, with an apprehensive little smile, that she was going to have a baby.

John Adams was delighted at the idea of being a father at his time in life—after all he was over sixty now. “They say it’s never too late,” he said jovially to Lily, and he wrapped her in a cocoon of comforts and presents and luxuries. He brought her armloads of flowers and huge boxes of Belgian chocolates and gave her a nightly glass of his best port wine to drink, because it was supposed to be good for the blood. He made her stay in bed late in the mornings and insisted she retire early in the evenings and he planned out her day so it was not too tiring, until she thought she would go mad from it all. And she never heard a word from Finn.

She read jealously about Ned and his new wife in the newspapers: about what a glamorous, sophisticated couple they were, a pair of glittering stars both onstage and off it. She flung the newspaper irritably to the floor. Dammit, she thought, she wished it were her. She should have married
Ned, then she would have been the one basking in his fame, enjoying herself at all the parties and the opening nights. And the baby would have been Ned’s instead of Finn’s.

But she knew it wasn’t true. She wanted Finn O’Keeffe’s baby so badly she would have stayed prone in bed for the whole nine months if necessary. Because once she had her child their old battle for power would reverse itself. With Finn’s son, she would be the one on top again. Burning inside with anger, she settled herself down to wait.

N
ED WAS IN
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
when he married Juliet. The play was a thriller and she played the murderess, stalking her prey clutching a bloodstained knife in her hand, looking like a beautiful Valkyrie with her blond hair flowing down her back. When they were together onstage their combined star-power dazzled the audience, which hung on their every word and applauded every entrance and exit.

Offstage, Juliet was not pretty: she had all the right components, but they were not arranged precisely right for prettiness. Her nose was fractionally too short and her brown eyes were just a little too small. Her mouth, though well shaped, was rather thin, and her chin a touch too pointed. Her marvelous hair was her claim to glory, long and golden and curling, with a dozen different shades in it that gave it a lively glow. When she wore it piled fashionably on top, it gave her extra inches and added a softness to her rather sharp little face.

When the tour ended, Ned took her to the island of Hawaii for their honeymoon. When they weren’t fighting Juliet made him laugh, and he felt better, though he doubted he would ever be a truly happy man again without Lily.

He wasn’t sure he was in love with Juliet, but he did fall in love with Hawaii and its warm tropical climate. Ned wanted to stay in Hawaii forever, but since he could not, he took his new bride home to Nantucket when the theaters
closed for the summer break, and he arranged to build a summer house exactly like the one he had fallen in love with in Hawaii, on a plot of land next to old Sea Mist Cottage at ’Sconset.

He supervised the arrangements himself while Juliet fumed with boredom. She liked the Sheridan family well enough, though she thought their youngest son sulky and impertinent. “Boy” Sheridan had gone unnamed for so long after he was born that even after he was finally christened he continued to be know as “the boy,” and somehow it had just stuck. The Sheridans had waited a long time, hoping for Lily to return, but eventually they had given him the name of a good Christian and the founder of the Methodist Church, John Wesley.

He was a tall, rangy lad of eleven years, with black hair and fleshy features and dark eyes that burned resentfully at the world. He attended the local school, although Alice Sheridan said he was a bad scholar and inattentive.

“Still, he’s a good boy,” she said, though Juliet thought she caught a hint of doubt in her voice. She told Juliet the story of how his own mother had abandoned him and that they had brought him up as their own. “Maybe we indulged him too much, the girls were always fussing over him, and I was no different,” she said wistfully.

Juliet looked at Boy struggling with his homework. She could see it was a mathematical problem and she was good at math herself, so she said, “Let me have a look, Boy. Maybe I can help you.”

He lifted his head from his book and stared at her. “I don’t need your help,” he said in a vicious whisper.

There was a such a strange, cold look in his dark eyes that Juliet hurried, frightened, from the room. Outside in the sunshine she told herself she was crazy to be frightened of an eleven-year-old. But still she shivered when she remembered the viciousness of his voice and the cold look in his eyes.

She and Ned were opening in different plays in October and Ned was in Boston for pre-Broadway tryouts when the
stage manager told him there was a telephone call. He picked up the receiver expecting it to be Juliet, but it was Lily. She told him she was at home, and that she missed him terribly and would he please forgive her and come and have tea with her that afternoon.

He dropped everything, leaving the company limping through rehearsal without him, and rushed to her side. Nothing would have kept him from her, not fire, or war, or his wife, Juliet. Lily had called and so he went.

He felt on top of the world as he rang the doorbell and was ushered inside by a shy little parlormaid. She took him up a grand staircase to “madam’s boudoir.”

Lily was standing by the window. “I saw you coming up the street,” she said, smiling. “You were almost running, as though you couldn’t wait to get here.”

“I couldn’t wait to see you,” he said. He looked at her swollen belly and he groaned.

“It’s not John’s,” she said sadly.

He said, astonished, “Does he know that?”

She shook her head. “He believes it’s his. It’s better that way. It hurts both of us less.”

She told him wearily about Finn and confessed what a fool she had been, and he took her hands and kissed them. He said, “Lily, it should have been our child. You would have made me the happiest man alive.”

“And I would have made myself less of a laughingstock,” she said bitterly. “Oh, Ned, why do I never think first? Why, oh
why,
did I have to fall for Finn? I’m such a fool. I’ll just never understand love. I’ll never get it right.”

She glanced at him under her lashes. “Are you still my friend?” she asked hopefully.

“Forever,” he said, kneeling at her feet.

The little parlormaid tapped on the door and came in carrying a tea tray. She paused, staring uncertainly at the famous actor kneeling at madam’s feet. “It’s all right,” Lily said. “Just put the tray down over there, on the small table.” They laughed as she scurried out to tell the kitchen
staff what she had just seen. “I expect they are all agog to have you here,” Lily said, pouring tea. “And so am I.”

“When is the baby due?” He couldn’t take his eyes off her, thinking that if only she were his wife, she’d be having his child.

“This week or next.” She shrugged tiredly. “Though, of course, John thinks it’s not for another month or so. This is going to be a ‘premature child.’” She sighed, wondering bitterly when her lies and deceptions were ever going to end.

She poured tea and offered him cake and asked about his wife. “Juliet is a wonderful actress,” he said, “but she has a sharp tongue.” He grinned wrily. “I guess she keeps me on my toes.”

“I hope you will be very happy, Ned, but …”

“But?” He raised his eyebrows in a question.

Lily was suddenly very afraid of losing him. “Don’t abandon me, will you? Promise you will always be my friend. Promise me you will be there if I need you. I’m so lonely. So alone.”

“I’ll be there,” he promised.

The following week Lily went into labor. It was six o’clock in the evening and John was not home. The doctor came and she swore to him that the baby must be premature, even though both of them knew perfectly well it was full-term. But it was not his place to comment, and when John finally arrived and worriedly asked if his wife would be all right even though the baby was so early, he said reassuringly that everything was going well and there was no need for concern.

John paced the library floor all night while Lily bravely gritted her teeth, fighting the waves of pain until ten hours later Finn’s son was born.

John peered proudly at him, swaddled in a lacy woolen shawl in his mother’s arms. “He looks like you, Lily,” he exclaimed. But she knew he did not. He looked just like Finn.

One evening a week later at around eight o’clock, the
doorbell rang and the parlormaid told John that Mr. James had come to see him. “Show him in, show him in,” he cried, pleased.

“This is a surprise,” he said, coming forward to shake hands. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Finn ignored his outstretched hand. He said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Adams, but I have not come here to see you. I have come here to see my son.”

Puzzled, John stared at him, and then his face turned gray. He needed no explanations, he had only to remember Lily’s lengthy visits to New York, her irritability with him, her seduction of him, and then the “premature” birth. He had been made a fool of and it struck at the very core of his honest, upright being.

“I cannot allow you to see Lily or the child,” he said quietly to Finn. “Would you please leave? No doubt when Lily is well enough she will be in touch with you.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Finn said, eyeing him sadly. John was an unintentional victim; he had not wanted to hurt him, but it was the only way.

He watched John walk to his favorite chair by the library fire and sink into it. He sat, staring blankly at the flames. His face was expressionless and he held out his hands to warm them.

Finn walked from the room, leaving him alone with his misery. He let himself out and walked around the corner to his own house on Louisburg Square. It was the end for Lily. Now he would wait for her to come to him. And he was certain she would.

Later that night John Adams walked quietly upstairs to his wife’s room. She was sleeping and he stood looking at her for a while. He told himself he had been an old fool ever to think that anyone as desirable as Lily would not be stolen away from him, a man who knew and understood so little of the ways of women; a man in his sixties, set in his routine, wrapped up in his work the way he was. He had neglected her, expected her, so young and so vital, to stay cooped up here alone with no friends, no parties, not even
another woman to gossip with. What could he expect but that she would fall for the first handsome young man she met?