The Devil's Web (29 page)

He fumbled for a moment with his own clothing, got to his feet, and strode out of the hollow.

Madeline found when she picked up her blouse that her hands were trembling almost too badly to allow her to do up the buttons. What had she said that was so bad?
Why the tirade? Had she hit on a raw nerve?

He had been smitten with Mr. Beasley's sister many years ago, Mr. Beasley had said.

He had fought Mr. Beasley after she had married another man, and he had fought the two brothers of her husband.

Why?

The one child—the oldest—looked quite different from the other three, Miss Trenton had said. He was tall and thin and dark. One would hardly guess that he had the same parents as the other three.

“Henrietta!” Mr. Trenton had hissed, in an agony of embarrassment.

Perhaps even yesterday there had been the tiniest, vaguest uneasiness in her. But so tiny and so vague that it had been forgotten.

What if it was true?

What if
what
was true?

Oh God.

“Did you think I had left you?” James asked from the lip of the hollow, his voice as cold as ice. “I was fetching the horses. Come on, Madeline, let's go home. We just spent
too long together this afternoon, that's all. It is tempting fate too strongly to spend more than an hour at a time in each other's company, is is not? And I think it would be wise to keep this sort of activity—” he gestured back to the hollow, “for our marriage bed, where it belongs.”

“I could not agree more,” she said, pulling on her jacket and willing her hands to steadiness while she buttoned it and pinned her hat to her hair. She glared steadily up at him while she set her foot in his hand so that he might help her mount her horse. “I certainly did not marry you with the expectation of such dealings encroaching on my days. I was told that a wife owed that duty only at night.”

“If it is only duty and not pleasure,” he said, “it would suit me well to make it much briefer for you, Madeline. I will do so tonight.”

“Good,” she said, turning her horse's head for home even before he was in the saddle. “It
is
a duty. How could it be anything else?”

And how could she expect such a barefaced lie to be believed? she wondered a few minutes later when her temper had cooled a little. He had only to think back on any of the numerous beddings he had shared with her to know that there had been a great deal more pleasure than duty involved in her response. But of course he was too angry to think rationally.

And now she was probably going to be subjected to nights in which he would take his conjugal rights without ever making love to her again.

The afternoon had started so well. And turned magical when he had talked to her and told her a great deal about himself. And grown delirious when they had made love. But now they were back firmly to the old hostility. And
the seeds of doubt and suspicion had been sown in her mind.

Oh, she was very angry indeed.

She hated him.

Why in the name of all that was wonderful had she married him?

T
HE SLIM CHANCE THAT THEIR MARRIAGE might have brought them relative contentment seemed to have slipped away during that afternoon when for perhaps an hour they had both known even more than contentment. Had that afternoon not brought them brief happiness, each reflected bitterly, perhaps the unhappiness might have been kept at bay too.

She was sorry she had married him, James convinced himself. She had done so only because he had ruined her on that hillside at Amberley and rushed her afterward into a commitment. She would never have married him if she had had time to reflect.

He thought of the men he had seen her with in London, Colonel Huxtable and others, and of Captain Hands at Amberley. He watched her with Alfred Palmer and Carl Beasley and even young Mark Trenton during the weeks and months that succeeded their disastrous ride on the moors. And he knew that he was not the man for her. He had nothing to offer that would meet and nurture that glow of vitality that was always there in her for other men.

The only way he could please her was sexually. And that enjoyment was despite herself. She did not like him.
After that afternoon she rarely spoke to him unbidden.
And because he was hurt by what she had said to him on that occasion, and burdened with the guilt of having forced her into an unwanted marriage, he stopped taking advantage of that one vulnerability in her.

He did not stop their marriage. He was too selfish to do that entirely, he told himself ruefully. And besides, he wanted an heir. Though as for that, he would not mind if she presented him with half a dozen daughters and no sons. He wanted a child—one he could acknowledge and hold and give his name to. One he could love.

If he was capable of love. He was not sure that he was.

And so he continued the marriage. But he no longer made love to his wife. He took her each night in what became a brief and regular routine except for those few days each month after she told him, defiance and triumph in her eyes, that she could not. She had come to enjoy telling him in so many words that he had not succeeded in impregnating her.

Or so it seemed.

Sometimes he tried to be kind to her.

“Mrs. Hurd was telling me at dinner last evening,” he said to Madeline one morning when he knew she planned to drive into the village, “that the milliner has some very dashing new bonnets for the winter. Why don't you buy some?”

“Why?” she asked him, looking very directly into his eyes and lifting her chin in an expression he had come to recognize. It was an armor she put on against him. “Am I not fashionable enough for Lord Beckworth's taste?”

“I thought you might like having something new and pretty,” he said. “We are very far from London.”

“Have I complained?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “but it has occurred to me that perhaps
you miss a fashionable center. Would you like me to take you to Harrogate for a week or two?”

“So that we may take the waters and promenade in the assembly rooms?” she said. “I think not, James. We would have to endure each other's company all day long.”

“I had not thought of that,” he said stiffly. “It would be a terrible infliction, would it not?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Well.” He rose from the breakfast table and tossed his napkin down beside his empty cup. “If you change your mind about the bonnets, Madeline, you may have the bill sent to me.”

“Thank you,” she said, “but you have made me a generous enough allowance that I have plenty to last me until the next quarter.”

He left the room angry and hurt.

“Your letter this morning was from Dominic?” he asked on another occasion.

“Yes,” she said. He thought he was to be punished with only the monosyllable, but she added after a few moments, “And from Ellen. They both wrote.”

“They are well?” he asked. “And the children?”

“Yes,” she said. “All well.” Another pause. “The babies have been cutting teeth. Charles in particular has been very cross. Dom has been walking floors with him at night. It seems that no one else can comfort him.”

It was a long speech for her. With him, anyway. She could still chatter brightly when they were in company.

“Olivia is not so bad?” he asked.

“She is sensible enough to fall asleep when she is feverish, according to Ellen,” she said.

“Do you miss your family, Madeline?” he asked quietly.

She carefully moved a pile of peas from one side of her
plate to the other. “I am a married lady,” she said, “living in my husband's home. I left my family behind when I married. It is the way of the world.”

“It is a pity we live so far away from them,” he said.
“Hampshire and Wiltshire are not so far distant from each other. Your brothers can visit each other with comparative ease.”

“Dom and Ellen are going to Amberley for Christmas,” she said. “And Jennifer Simpson too.”

“Are they?” He sat looking at her downcast eyes as she shifted the peas back to their original position on her plate. “We have been invited to Jean Cameron's wedding to Howard Courtney in Abbotsford just before Christmas.
Would you like to go?”

She looked up at him fleetingly. “So that you may have a last look at your old love before she marries someone else?” she said.

He made an impatient gesture to a footman to remove their plates. “I thought you might like to spend Christmas with your mother and brothers,” he said. “But of course it would be good to see Jean again. She is invariably friendly.”

“Yes,” she said, “and pretty.”

“Yes.”

Silence stretched as it so often did when they sat alone together at meals.

“Do you want to go?” he asked abruptly at last.

“No,” she said.

He looked at her, surprised. “Why not?”

He thought she would not answer. She waited until the footman had placed their dessert plates before them and moved back to stand beside the sideboard.

“My brothers both have happy marriages,” she said very quietly at last.

She said no more. But she did not need to. Her words cut like a knife. Close as she was to her family, much as she must long to see them again, especially at Christmas, she would stay away from them rather than see her own marriage in contrast to theirs. And she would not have them see what a disastrous marriage she had made.

And did he want Alex to see?

“Well, then,” he said, “we will have Christmas alone together here. Did I tell you that my mother has decided to take up permanent residence with my aunt?”

“Yes,” she said.

There was no pleasing her. And though sometimes—far too often—he lashed out in anger at her and they quarreled loudly and bitterly a few times every week, he took the burden of the blame upon himself. It was Madeline's gaiety, her seemingly irrepressible vitality, that had first attracted him to her years before. It was the same quality that had drawn him back to her as a drug early in the summer. And yet now, in the privacy of their own home—though not outside it and in company—the gaiety and vitality were gone. And in their place sullenness or defiance.

He had done what he had always known he would do if he married her. He had destroyed her. And in the process his hard-won confidence in himself and faith in life were being fast eroded too.

M
ADELINE HAD NOT EXPECTED
her marriage to be a happy one. She had married because she had to. Not because she had given herself to him on the night after his
father's funeral. That had not forced her into marriage.
Had that been all, she would have refused him, even knowing the risk she ran of bearing an illegitimate child.

No, it was not that that had forced her into marriage. It had been her knowledge that she had no other choice. For four years she had been obsessed with James Purnell, so much so that she could not find any happiness at all in the prospect of marrying any other eligible man.

She knew she would not be happy married to him. Yet she knew that it was only with him she stood any chance at all at happiness. When the opportunity had presented itself, she could not let him go. She did not have the courage to let him go.

Perhaps, she thought months after her marriage, she could have been marginally happy if the first month had not raised such hopes in her. She had had glimpses of heaven during that month—brief and tantalizing glimpses, but enough to plunge her into the deepest gloom once they disappeared forever.

There was nothing left. No companionship. No affection. No passion.

She had convinced herself during that first month that the physical pleasure without everything else was pointless and even degrading to her as a person. But once it disappeared from their marriage, she knew black despair.
She had asked for it, of course. She had told him it was merely a duty to her. But she had not expected to be taken so literally at her word.

It would last for just a few nights, she had thought at first, until his anger cooled. And so she had turned from him on those nights, when he was finished with her, and urged patience on her aching and dissatisfied body.

But those few nights had set a permanent pattern. He
had not kissed her since that afternoon on the moors, or caressed her, or unclothed her. There was only the swift and ruthless penetration of her body, the planting of a seed that never took root.

The moments of blackest despair came each month with painful regularity—even more painful on the one occasion when she was four days late. She was not even to have a child to comfort her, a child of his to love instead of him.

Each time it happened she rode out away from the house and lay on the ground sobbing until she felt that her chest would split in two. And then she would find the stream and bathe her face and sit beside it until the water and the air had repaired the damage done by her tears. Sometime during the rest of the day she would find the opportunity to tell James, but she would never let him see her disappointment. Or know her sense of inadequacy. If she never did have a child, the fault would be in her. James was capable of having children.

She had felt quite sick the first time she saw the John Drummond family at church, all of them remarkably alike, fair, plump, and amiable—except for the tall, dark oldest boy, with his intense dark eyes.

She had never met Dora Drummond face-to-face, or Jonathan Drummond. Somehow they were never at the same entertainments. But that the woman had been pretty—and still was in a matronly sort of way—was perfectly clear.

At some time during their youth James had made love to Dora Drummond, or Dora Beasley as she had been then, and left her with child.

It seemed sometimes to Madeline that there was a knife
permanently fixed in her stomach and twisting and turning at frequent intervals.

She had developed a clandestine friendship with Carl Beasley. Clandestine only in the sense that she did not tell James about it. There was nothing improper in the friendship.

He found her beside the stream on one of the occasions when she had gone out to cry in private. Fortunately she was past the first stages of grief, but even so it was still perfectly obvious what she had been about.

“Hello,” he called across the stream. He was on foot, carrying a gun. “Is it not a little cold to be sitting there?”

It was late in November.

“I had not noticed,” she said.

He took a closer look at her and frowned. And he came wading across the water. He was wearing hip boots. The dog that had come panting out of the trees behind him stood looking after him. Carl sat down beside her.

“What's the matter?” he asked quietly.

She was ashamed and embarrassed. “Oh, nothing,” she said with a slightly watery smile. “You know us women, sir. Always vaporish.”

“But not Lady Beckworth, I think,” he said. “You have not hurt yourself? You did not fall from your horse?”

She shook her head and smiled.

“Well, that is a relief anyway,” he said. “I would hate to see you with a sprained or broken ankle with all the dances of Christmas coming up.”

“That would be a terrible fate, would it not?” she said lightly.

He looked at her in concern again. “I will not pry if you would rather not confide in me,” he said. “But sometimes
it helps to unburden oneself to a stranger. Is it Beckworth? Has he been unkind?”

She shook her head. “No.”

He hesitated and reached across to squeeze her hand briefly. “But you are not happy with him, are you?” he asked.

She stiffened and said nothing.

“We used to be friends as boys,” he said. “I don't think he has changed a great deal. He is moody but not cruel. He must be hard to live with, but he is probably fonder of you than he seems. Am I speaking out of turn?”

Despite herself she felt herself relaxing. “Tell me about him as he used to be,” she said. “I know so little about his childhood.”

“It was not an easy childhood,” he said. “His father was a very stern man—did you know him? He was very devoted to his religion and what he considered godly behavior. I'm afraid there were very few people in this neighborhood who were deemed suitable associates for the Beckworths or their children.”