Spence looked up from the contract which was spread across his desk blotter, put down his fountain pen and stood up. “Come in, Sharley. So Martin finally worked up the nerve to unburden himself, did he?” His voice held a combative note, and there was no glint of humor in his eyes.
“How dare you try to keep him from telling me in the beginning?”
He moved around the desk and settled against the corner of it, arms folded across his chest. “What would you have done, Sharley?”
“What did you expect? That I’d run straight to Charlotte and tattle, with never a thought of what might happen to her?”
“You were so angry I had no idea what you’d do.”
“I’m not a child to be pampered and sheltered!”
“If the whole thing blew up,” Spence said slowly, “I didn’t want you to be caught in the middle of the explosion.”
“Oh? Well, thank you for protecting me from the guilt feelings if Charlotte died of the shock! You know, I’m amazed that you didn’t tell her straight out yourself, Spence. You seem so certain that her health problems are all a fraud. Why would you hesitate to sock her with the truth?”
“I never said she’s a fraud. I simply think she’s stronger than she lets on. And whatever her health problems, there was no reason for anyone else to be stuck in the middle of it. I thought it would be infinitely better for Martin to confess instead of being caught. There would have been some hope of patching things up calmly then, without hysterics and heart palpitations, if he could tell her that he’d made a mistake, but he’d come to his senses in time and was making amends.”
Sharley couldn’t see her aunt taking such news calmly under any circumstances, but she had to admit Spence had a point. It was a bad situation no matter what, but some approaches were better than others.
“But you didn’t let that happen, Sharley. You wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t give me time to talk to him. Before there was an opportunity to get anything straightened out, you’d made sure that Charlotte knew every nasty detail.”
“I didn’t!”
“What did you think you were doing, shouting at me in the hallway?”
She bit her lip.
“After that, for Martin to have told her that he was the guilty one, not me, would have been like a confession wrenched out under torture. Admitting fault after you’ve been caught red-handed isn’t the same thing at all.”
Sharley said stubbornly, “You could have told me what was going on.”
“In the hallway of Charlotte’s house, with her standing there giving you instructions in etiquette? How could I have explained anything?”
She sat down on the arm of a chair. He was right, she thought. She had dealt him an impossible hand. Still…
“And when did Martin have the chance?” Spence went on. “When did he have an opportunity to talk to you without Charlotte right there in the room?”
Sharley was silent, trying to remember. She had actively avoided Martin those first few days, thinking that he was naively trying to maneuver her and Spence into a reconciliation she found impossible to imagine. “Martin doesn’t seem inclined to tell Aunt Charlotte the truth even now.”
Spence sighed. “He may have a point. No matter how he explained it now, he wouldn’t be able to eliminate the suspicion that he only confessed because he had no other choice — and perhaps was fudging around the edges at that.”
“And only telling as much of the truth as he had to, to get by? Is that what you mean?”
“Exactly. Sometimes the truth causes hurt with no redeeming value. It might be better if Martin just cleaned up his act without Charlotte ever knowing why.”
Sharley frowned a little. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“Sometimes the best way to apologize isn’t to say ‘I’m sorry,’ it’s to make sure whatever caused the hurt doesn’t happen again. The affair is over. What good would it do now for Charlotte to know what happened? But that’s for Martin to decide, not you and me.”
“And by keeping quiet, he can avoid all the nasty consequences, can’t he? I don’t think you’re as worried about Charlotte’s feelings as you are about making sure Martin doesn’t suffer any hurt from his own stupidity!”
“Maybe you’re right,” Spence mused. “I don’t think you understand quite how nasty it would be if Charlotte took a notion to punish him.”
Sharley shrugged. “I can’t see her divorcing him. So what else could she do?”
“You really don’t understand? Well, as long as we’re clearing the decks... Sharley, do you even know how Hudson Products came into being?”
She was startled. “What does Martin’s business have to do with this?”
Spence’s voice was deliberate. “It was based on Charlotte’s money.”
She gasped. “Charlotte’s? But that’s impossible! If Charlotte had money, my mother would have had something, too. They were sisters.”
“That seems reasonable, yes, if it had been family money. But it wasn’t. Charlotte inherited it from her first husband.”
Sharley said woodenly, “I never knew that.”
There was a glint in Spence’s eyes which might have been sympathy. “Martin worked for him as a machine operator — not much more than day labor. If it wasn’t for Charlotte, that’s what he’d still be. But Martin married his boss’s widow, and she funded his business enterprise.”
When a woman provides the money in a marriage, she has a right to call the shots....
That hadn’t been just an observation, Sharley thought. When Charlotte said that, she had been stating a personal creed.
“From what I’ve picked up, it happened so long ago that I wouldn’t be surprised if you never even heard that Charlotte was married before.”
“I knew it. I guess I never thought about it.” Sharley took a deep breath. “No wonder you were afraid I’d tell her. If she threw Martin out, where would you be? Right with him, no doubt.”
His mouth tightened. “She couldn’t do that, exactly. He owns the business. But in a divorce court, if she made an issue of her contribution to his success…”
Sharley went on, recklessly. “No wonder you didn’t want me caught in the middle. By the time the flak died down, I might have been disinherited!”
Spence walked around his desk and sat down. “Your inheritance or lack of it has never been an issue with me. But this whole conversation confirms that I was right in the beginning, doesn’t it?”
“About what?”
“That it wouldn’t pay to trouble you with explanations. And that I shouldn’t waste my time begging you to understand.”
“Because there wasn’t anything to forgive?”
He looked at her for a long-drawn out instant, and then said deliberately, “No, Sharley. Because there wasn’t anything worth saving.”
The words struck cruelly deep into her heart, and she struck back. “You never gave it a chance, Spence. You asked me to trust you, blindly, with no reason — nothing but your word. But you didn’t trust me — not even enough to share the facts and believe that I would use the truth responsibly!”
He pushed his chair back and walked across to the window. “Is this a demonstration of your responsible use of the truth? I didn’t have to tell you about Charlotte’s money, you know. Now you’re using it against me.”
Sharley bit her lip. He was right, and she was ashamed of herself. “I’m sorry. That was... insensitive of me. But you must agree the circumstances were black, Spence. And you weren’t willing to give any explanation at all — of course I had to conclude that you didn’t have one! Even at the cabin, with no one else around, you had all the time in the world to explain, and you wouldn’t!”
“By then, it didn’t matter anymore.” His words had a deep ring of truth, and sadness.
Sharley whispered, “What do you mean?”
“You’d told me all I needed to know that afternoon, shouting at me in the front hall. You wouldn’t even try to take my word.” He
turned away from her to look out the window. “A woman who doesn’t trust me isn’t the kind of woman I could love.”
Each separate word seemed to burn a hole into her heart. It was a final death knell to any hope she had ever had of working things out. Sharley swallowed hard and said quietly, “I’m very sorry. You see, I loved you, Spence.”
He didn’t even turn his head. “Are you certain you didn’t just like the idea of being in love?”
But it wasn’t a question, really. He sounded as if he was stating a fact.
Sharley wet her lips. “And I still love you,” she whispered.
He didn’t answer that at all.
Before she could humiliate herself further by bursting into tears, she turned on her heel and walked away, for the last time, from the man she loved.
CHAPTER TEN
The calendar said it was spring, and Sharley had noticed just that morning as she left the Hudson house to go to school that Martin’s daffodils were beginning to bloom. Yesterday she’d even seen a fat robin strutting across the lawn. But now it was snowing — huge, fluffy, lazy flakes that probably wouldn’t accumulate, but which made springtime seem only a distant dream.
She stood by the window in her classroom and looked out past the bird feeder, where a couple of goldfinches were scolding, to the playground beyond. The noise of children playing came softly to her ears, and she sighed and turned back to her desk. She had a precious few minutes of quiet time to work, and she was wasting it.
The truth was that she wasn’t quite in top form yet. It was her first day back at school, and she was grateful there was only another hour to go. Perhaps the doctor, and Aunt Charlotte, hadn’t been so far wrong after all.
She took the top paper off a stack of vocabulary tests and reached for a red pencil just as the classroom door opened. Amy Howell put her head around the corner, and seeing that Sharley was alone, came in.
“Are you sure you’re doing all right?” she asked. “You look a little pale.”
Sharley nodded. “I’m holding up.”
Amy pulled a chair around and sank into it. “I bet you wish you’d gone skiing with us after all.”
Sharley smiled wryly. “Now that you mention it, yes. A twisted knee would have been nothing.” She reached into the bottom drawer of her desk and took out a small flat box. It had been sealed, then wrapped in a plastic bag which was stapled shut. She pushed the package across the desk.
Amy eyed it cautiously. “What’s this?”
“You can’t guess? It’s only proper to return bridal gifts, if one isn’t going to be a bride after all.”
“Oh, the negligee? What do you think I’m going to do with it? It was bad enough going into the store to buy it; taking it back is out of the question.” But — mercifully, Sharley thought — Amy slid the box under her arm and didn’t pursue the matter further. “You brought your car today, didn’t you?”
Sharley nodded. “I figured I wouldn’t be eager for a walk home by the time the day was over. Why?”
“My car is in the shop having new tires put on. Can you drop me off downtown so I can pick it up — or are you headed straight home to bed?”
“I’ll take you. I have to stop at the dry-cleaners anyway.” She glanced at the window and sighed. “It looks as if I took my winter coats in too early.”
The end-of-recess bell rang sharply, and a couple of minutes later kids started drifting back into the classroom. Some of them were wearing only light jackets, and most still had snowflakes caught in their hair.
“Great,” Amy muttered. “I suppose we’ll have them all sneezing for the rest of the week.”
Sharley taught a short math lesson, then sat down and gratefully allowed one of her students to pass out worksheets to the rest of the class. She wondered how long it would take to get her stamina back.
She opened a desk drawer to get a textbook; at least she could work on next week’s lesson plans for a few minutes. Under the book, at the bottom of the drawer, was the picture frame which used to sit on the corner of her desk — the snapshot of Spence and Wendy in the office at Hudson Products, in happier days. Sharley stared at it for a full minute, and then she turned the frame face-down. She couldn’t quite bring herself to destroy the picture; to do so would be saying a final goodbye, and that she was not yet strong enough to do. It was over; she knew that. But surely there was no sin in continuing to wish for a little while that things could be different.
When she looked up, sensing a new presence in the classroom, she actually thought for a moment that she was seeing things. Just inside the door, standing on one foot, was Wendy Taylor, looking around hesitantly.
Sharley pushed her chair back and crossed the room. “May I help you?” she said softly.
“I’d like to talk to you. But I’ll wait till your class is over.”
“I have a minute now.” She ushered Wendy to the hall and propped the classroom door half-open behind them — far enough so she could hear any budding revolution inside, but not so far that a quiet conversation would be overheard by the children.
“I’m sorry to come here,” Wendy said. “But it was the only place where I knew I could talk to you alone. I owe you an apology.”
There must be a hundred reasons for Wendy to beg her pardon, Sharley thought, and wondered which one was bothering Wendy’s conscience. “Why?” she asked bluntly.
“For begging Spence not to tell you what was going on.”
Sharley’s eyebrows raised.
“You were so angry that I was scared — terrified of what you’d do. Now I believe I underestimated you.”
“Because Martin confessed to me and I haven’t betrayed his confidence?”
“That and other things. I’m sorry, Sharley. If I’d let Spence explain right then, before you left the cottage—”
That’s right, Sharley wanted to say. You’d have done us all a favor if you just hadn’t interfered. But that wasn’t quite the truth, and it wasn’t fair to put the blame on Wendy. “No one has that much power over Spence. If he’d really wanted to tell me, he would have.”
Wendy frowned a little. “Not after you’d questioned whether he was telling the truth. His word is a big thing with him, Sharley.”
The comment stung Sharley’s heart. She wanted to say, It’s just a little late for this chat, don’t you think? “I need to get back to my students, Wendy. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Wendy’s face paled a little. “I just wanted you to know that I’m going away. Martin isn’t sending me, and I’m not running — but we agreed that it would be better if I didn’t stay in Hammond’s Point.” Her voice was full of pain. “You don’t need to be afraid of anything blowing up in your face again. I care for Martin too much to do that, and I respect the decision he’s made.”
Sharley’s throat tightened. She really does love him, and she’s as miserable as any of us. She put a hand out to take Wendy’s. “I’m sorry things couldn’t have been easier.”
“For both of us,” Wendy agreed. She squeezed Sharley’s fingers for a moment, then she turned and hurried down the long hall to the outside doors.
*****
The streets were lightly frosted with snow by the time the school day ended, and slick spots lay where they were least expected. Droves of children walking home, heedless of the difficulties faced by drivers, meant that all of Sharley’s concentration had to be focused on the road.
As they stopped for a school-crossing light, Amy said cautiously, “I saw you had a visitor this afternoon.”
Sharley gave her a quizzical look.
“Do you mean you’re on such chummy terms with Wendy Taylor all of a sudden that you forgot she came by?”
“Not exactly,” Sharley said uneasily. Amy’s question was a difficult one; if Sharley admitted that she no longer held Wendy in contempt, it was bound to lead to questions. Yet she could hardly keep up a facade of hatred, either, when she honestly felt sympathy for the woman.
Sharley
was beginning to appreciate the impossible position Spence had found himself in. Once the reasons for their broken engagement had become public knowledge, any attempt at an alternate explanation of why Spence and Wendy had been together in the gardener’s cottage would have thrown suspicion wildly on anyone within a mile of the main participants. No wonder Spence had felt his only option was to take the heat.
She stopped outside the tire place, and Amy gathered up her books from the floor. But she didn’t get out of the car. She looked thoughtfully at Sharley and said, “There’s one more thing you probably ought to know. I wrote it off as catty rumor, and I’m sure that’s all it is — but it doesn’t seem to be dying down.”
A Singular Honeymoon Page 16
