The Widow's Confession (28 page)

At the words
Mary White,
Theo and Delphine’s eyes had met. Theo seemed to be searching for something to say.

‘Marriage is a sacred bond,’ he said. Delphine wanted to say, ‘No, no it is not. Not that kind of marriage.’

‘You are shivering, both of you. I will get some blankets.’

He went out and they heard him ascending the stairs.

Polly turned her gaze to Delphine’s face. ‘How does he know what marriage is?’ she said.

Delphine sensed spite behind her words. ‘He means to help you,’ she said, ‘but I know it is hard to hear his words. Polly, you may tell me – has there been more to this?
Were the bodies on the beach anything to do with you?’

Polly frowned, but kept her eyes on Delphine’s. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Now you wish to pile every sin on my head. Is that convenient for you? It hardly surprises me. Mr
Benedict took me to the Ranelagh Gardens. We drank champagne as he told me all about you as a little group – how amusing he was. And you sit here all grave and pious, as though you are a true
lady and I am dirt.’

‘You are mistaken,’ said Delphine. ‘I am not judging you. I do not like you, it is true. But I would have dragged you out of the water myself, if I had to. I understand the
damage a man can do to a woman.’

‘Yet you do not defend me,’ said Polly. ‘Instead, you ask me if I am a murderer. Such a fine lady, you are.’

‘I am talking to you,’ said Delphine. ‘I am trying to talk to you, Polly. We should speak openly with each other. Why are you not listening?’

‘Mr Benedict knows who you are,’ said Polly, and for the first time a smile seared its way across her red lips. ‘What would happen if I told
him
?’ She nodded
towards the door, at the distant sounds of Theo returning.

It was like the day she had met Benedict, Delphine thought; the day the carriage had come hurtling down the hill towards her.
So this is how it ends.
She had no idea exactly how much
Benedict knew, and what he had told Polly, but she knew it was enough to lay waste to the façade she had carefully built around her. She held Polly’s gaze. ‘Tell him,’ she
said.

It was strange, the relief that flooded her, now that the moment had come. And in that kitchen, soaked to the skin, the thought hit her like the revelation she had spent so many years hoping
for, staring at stained-glass windows.
I have already lost everything. There is no need to be afraid.

She rose as Theo entered the room, blankets in his arms. ‘Polly has something to say to you,’ she said. ‘Go on,’ she prompted Polly. ‘Say what you have to say. Tell
him.’

The girl looked at her mutely.

‘Very well. Shall I begin?’ Delphine turned to Theo and looked directly at him. ‘I am not a widow, Mr Hallam. I have never been married.’

Unbeknownst to me, Julia had begun to make her own quiet bid for freedom. She, who had been so against our making connections in the town, who had so often kept her face
veiled. When I heard what had happened I worried for her, and even more so for Mr Steele. I wondered if my comments about money had burrowed deep into her mind, and made her risk a marriage she
would not normally have wished for. Our family had allowed us an income, as long as we stayed away; they had never increased it, even as the years passed. It was enough for us to live decently,
though not well, but its unchanging nature worried me. I thought that one day, when the memory of us had faded enough, it would stop altogether. But now I see it was not the dwindling of the money
that terrified me, so much as the proof it offered: that the love they had for me, hidden beneath convention and anger, had dwindled, too, wasting away to nothing.

I should not have worried for Julia when I learned what had happened. That I did worry shows me how little we knew each other, even after all those years.

They had come into Victory Cottage in a hurry, knocking things off the hallstand, Edmund holding the dripping child in his arms and thinking, It is so small, so dark in here.
It no longer felt like the comfortable cottage he had taken refuge in on the night of the mist. In the parlour, he laid the girl down on the sofa and saw how threadbare its embroidery was,
unsoftened by the evening firelight and candlelight. He looked around and became aware that the books and ornaments which had been present before had all been removed, and the suspicion that
Delphine and Julia were packing up to leave entered his mind. There was a chill stealing over him, the chill of autumn, and he realized, warmed as he had been by his terror and excitement, that he
was now cold, cold to the bone, from the seawater soaking his clothes.

Julia put a hand on his arm, and her unexpected touch sent shivers through him.

‘Dear Mr Steele,’ she said, ‘will you put the kettle on the range? It should have water in it.’ He went silently, without replying, but feeling the sensation of her hand
on his arm as though it was still placed there.

He moved around awkwardly in the kitchen, hearing the wail of the little girl in her unfamiliar surroundings. The kettle was on the side, but it had no water in it, and he carried it back into
the parlour, befuddled, and thinking that all he wanted was a good strong brandy. What he saw there pulled him up on the threshold.

Julia had taken off her cloak and had wrapped the little girl in it. She had pulled the veil back from her face, and her profile was haloed by the light from the window. The little girl was
silent, her hands moving, her expression absorbed, for Julia was singing to her, her American accent giving the words a kind of lilt that was, to Edmund, both exotic and comforting: this new voice
imparting a deeper meaning to the words she sang, a resonance that echoed through him.

Suddenly aware of Edmund’s presence, Julia broke off and looked at him, her face flushed. ‘Mr Steele,’ she said. ‘Is all well?’

Edmund was holding the kettle in one hand and the lid in the other. ‘Miss Mardell,’ he said. He leaned back against the doorway, stared at her, and at the little girl who turned to
look at him in babyish wonder. ‘If I live long enough, will you consent to be my wife?’

‘Martha,’ said Theo, to the astonished girl who stood in his kitchen doorway. ‘Take Polly upstairs to the second guest room. See that she gets warm and dry,
and that she sleeps. You are to stay with her. On no account are you to leave her alone.’

The two girls glanced at each other, wariness in Martha’s eyes, a tired enmity in Polly’s.

‘But the dinner, Mr Hallam,’ said Martha.

Theo sighed. ‘I do not want dinner,’ he said.

Martha gave Delphine one long look. ‘Madam?’ she said. Delphine nodded.

‘Mrs Beck is here because she helped me with Polly,’ said Theo. He sounded weary. ‘Please, leave us.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, and curtseyed before shuffling out and going up the stairs, followed by Polly.

Delphine looked around the kitchen – at the red and black tiles on the floor, and the blue and white tiles on the wall. Beyond the small window she saw the movement of the evergreens,
their waxen leaves shining in the sun. The smell of this room was of mouldering bread, and of beer, and it was small to service such a large house. She supposed this would be the last time she saw
it, and she tried to fix it in her memory. At Theo, too, she looked – hungrily, without reservation or embarrassment. Unlike her, he was sitting forwards, bent over the table, slightly
hunched, his hands clasped together in front of him. She wondered if he was praying; whether almost every activity he did was a form of prayer. She looked over his head, the hair neatly shorn, the
summer light showing the gold in every strand. She did not know what it was that made her want to stay in this room, with him, for as long as she could.

At last he spoke, his eyes fixed on his hands, on the table. ‘Is it true?’ he said. ‘Did Polly really speak the truth?’

Delphine’s first impulse was to speak tartly about the confessional, to say that he was at last showing the true Catholic spirit Mr Benedict had suspected. But even as the words rose in
her mind, they only had a dull kind of shine to them, and she doubted that she had the energy to carry them off.

‘In part, it is true,’ she said. ‘Benedict has spun stories from a few scraps of information. I have lived as I am for so long, because people do not know what is true and what
is false. They know only that I am a lost woman. I cannot dispute that.’

He raised his eyes to her face. They were the piercing blue of the sky; there was nothing veiled about them, and his gaze had an intensity which, though she had seen it before, still had the
power to astonish her. ‘What is true and what is false?’ he said.

I still have a choice, she thought. But she knew she would speak to him; that she could not help but speak to him, and that there was no longer anything to be gained by staying silent.

‘It is true that I was – am – disgraced,’ she said, ‘and through a connection with a man. What the world supposes to be that connection, is false.’ She did
not like the note of justification she heard in her voice, and paused to consider her words. ‘Mr Benedict heard of it because I sold a painting in London, and I considered it mine to sell. It
was necessary for me to do so, to support myself and my cousin. She knows nothing of this, and I would ask you not to mention it to her. It was an Old Master, and the dealer was suspicious of me
– a woman, not apparently wealthy, owning such a thing. I told him its provenance, in the strictest confidence, which he has broken. If my father finds out I have sold the painting, he will
be disappointed, but as for stealing it . . . that is not the case. It is from my family; it was given to me by my aunt, when I left. If they wished to seek it they would have done so, long ago.
They have always had track of me, through my agent in London. I am given a small income, but as the years pass, it is not always enough, for they will not increase it. I have broken no law. They
have always known where I was.’ Her voice cracked on the last word and she bit her lip; she had not expected emotion to creep up on her, to overtake her so quickly, choking up her voice. Her
distant family, the people she had tried to think of as dead, were suddenly so real that they seemed to stand in the corners of the room. I have gone from stone to sand in a moment, she thought.
She willed herself not to cry.

‘You were never married,’ he said, with a finality that indicated it was not a question. ‘Did you live with a man, as though you were?’

‘No. But why that should matter to you, I do not know.’

‘You have lived a lie. What is your real name? I presume the one you have given me is false?’

She met his gaze with her own. ‘I will not tell you. You speak to me as though you are my judge, but you have no such exalted place. Look to your own soul.’

She saw the flicker of doubt in his eyes, and knew she had hit some inner nerve; knew also that she had pressed on that point of doubt she had always seen in him. She had not wished to wound
him, but she had tired of his merciless questioning, seeing in it one weak individual finding strength in pushing down another. Once, they had been equal adversaries, over Alba – though she
had not known, at the time, that he was battling for the young woman’s soul. But now he had seen a way of triumphing over her, and had taken it, and she despised him for it.

He pushed his chair away from the table, but did not stand. ‘When I think,’ he said, ‘of the way in which you singled out Miss Albertine, and spent so much time with her,
trying to influence her.’

‘Do you suspect me of trying to drag her into some kind of wickedness?’ she said. She was angry, but she did not believe it wholly; saw the strain in his countenance, the movement of
his lips pressed together. He was unsure and uncertain. He was, she thought, trying to play a part; following the urgings of the God he had read of and been schooled in – a God that, she
guessed, had no direct words with his heart.

‘If you intend only to insult me then I will not speak to you of it any more,’ she said. She got up, quickly, and he sprang up, too; stood in the doorway. She took a step back,
astonished.

‘Tell me your name,’ he said hoarsely.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not under duress.’

‘Do you not understand?’ he said. ‘The truth is important, it is central to everything. I must know the truth about you. What is that, even?’ He gestured to the choker of
woven hair she wore. He shook his head angrily. ‘It is the same colour—’

‘—as Alba’s,’ she said. ‘Yes. But it is not Alba’s hair. It is mine. As it was when I was a woman of twenty. I wear it because I mourn for myself, for what I
once was, and for every part of the life I left behind.’

She picked up her bonnet. Felt, beneath her fingers, the tight weaving of the Parisian bonnet-makers, the smoothness that money can buy. It was an old bonnet, growing frayed through use.
‘You know the truth of me,’ she said. ‘If I did not tell everything about me, that is not a lie. Is it really Alba you are angry about? Is it really my effect on her, or on
someone else? I have never played a part – not like you, no. Not like you.’

She moved to go past him; he put his arm up to bar the door. She touched it; sprang back from it as though it was charged. ‘Let me through,’ she said. ‘Let me out.’

‘I will not,’ he said. ‘You have ruined everything. You are an agent of corruption. The devil lives in your words.’ The quiet certainty of his voice cut through her.
Their summer seemed to splinter like a mirror hit with a hammer. There was, it seemed, no way of escaping the darkness of New York and its judgement. Their sunlit days here had been merely an
illusion.