by Rose Lerner
But of course. He had had to send her a note she could show Jamie when he failed to return. Perhaps he had even considered to himself that he was acting in her best interests, when he wrote that.
No, Lydia thought. This is wrong. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t leave me. Arguments against his leaving marshaled themselves neatly in her head, things he had said, things he had done, his hands in her hair, his hands—
He’d meant to stay that morning. She was sure of that. She supposed he must have changed his mind. Men were notoriously afraid of being tied down.
But he had seemed so happy.
Every argument led back to the one counterargument that couldn’t be countered. He was a professional liar. She couldn’t know what he had been thinking. She would never know what he had been thinking, about anything.
With a chill, she recalled that first time in the greenhouse, and his sadness afterwards. He’d been sad on their wedding night, too, hadn’t he, and put it off? He’d never explained. She’d never asked him to.
He’d seemed happy this morning, but what did she know of his true feelings?
She had—God, she had encouraged him to lie to her. She had as good as given him permission to do this to her.
Maybe he would come back.
She hardened her heart. Was she supposed to wait patiently? Was she supposed to keep a light burning and watch the road for him? He was gone. If he came back, she’d decide how she felt about it then. For now—
He’d said he loved the curtains. Tears spilled over, and she couldn’t stop them.
“Let me take you home,” Jamie said.
“But the auction—”
“They’ll manage without you,” he said firmly, and Lydia let herself be shepherded out the door. She couldn’t bear—oh, she couldn’t bear to go to the Dower House and pretend to Wrenn that nothing was wrong. She knew already that if she did, she’d sleep in his bed and cry into his pillow and—
She was already grieving. It wasn’t fair that she had to do it more, do it again. He’d promised to stay.
She leaned on Jamie. “Can I stay at Wheatcroft tonight? The Dower House will feel so empty—” Her voice broke.
“Of course. Lydia, is there something you’re not telling me? Something in the letter…?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m so upset. Perhaps a first separation from one’s husband is always difficult.”
He nodded and put his arm around her. She was terribly, terribly grateful to still have Jamie. “I love you,” she told him.
His hand tightened on her shoulder. “I love you too.”
This was her reward for putting feelings above practical considerations, she decided in the morning. She got up, dressed with the aid of one of the housemaids, and walked briskly back to the Dower House. She calmly informed Wrenn that Mr. Cahill had gone to visit his dying aunt. She answered her correspondence. She even saw a morning caller. Then she put a new mince pie carefully in Mr. Cahill’s basket, lay down in his bed, pressed her face into a pillow that smelled like him, and cried.
She couldn’t think about him. She couldn’t stand to picture his face. He must have decided that whatever he felt for her didn’t matter. He’d loved those girls he’d kept in London too. He’d told her that, and she’d foolishly thought it was sweet, pretending it didn’t mean he could leave her as easily. What had he called his victims? Flats? What a flat he must have thought her.
The worst of it was that she had no pride, no pride at all. She didn’t care what he’d thought of her. She only wanted him back. She wanted him with a feeling like hunger or thirst, an elemental physical need that, unsatisfied, grew all-consuming.
She distracted herself with practicalities. How long should she wait before she became alarmed at the nonarrival of letters? How long before she pretended to write to his aunt, and how long before she could pretend to hear that he had never arrived, and become frantic with worry? If she advertised for him in newspapers, would it put him in danger? But no, there were hundreds of thousands of dark-haired men of middling height in England. He’d be using a different name by now. He wouldn’t be found.
She planned it over and over, and tried not to think about the rest of it.
She missed her father. Somehow all the sadness mixed up together, and it was as if she were back in those first few days without him.
Christmas visitors kept coming, that day and the next. The twenty-second was the last day Parliament sat before Christmas. Mr. Jessop and Mr. Dromgoole would be home soon, and she would have to tell them that Jamie would not be carrying on the Wheatcroft interest. It seemed surprisingly unimportant. She would be sorry to disappoint them, but that was all.
She didn’t care, either, that the Pink-and-Whites had won the auction by almost a thousand pounds. The rivalry had only ever been intended to spur bidders on to raise more money for the widows and old women of the town. The total sum raised, though—that still gave her a dull satisfaction.
Maybe Caro was right, and she had been bored by politics all those years. Not her work, politics. She could do her work without the Wheatcroft interest. She could help people, and find apprenticeships, and organize charity auctions, and never have to manage an election again. That sounded terribly restful.
By noon on Wednesday, she only needed two more mince pies for Mary. When she had them, she could stop receiving callers.
Wrenn brought in a card, turning it over and over in her hands. “Mr. Sparks is here, madam. He brought his wife’s card. Shall I show him in?”
Lydia was curiously glad to find Jack Sparks inspired the same hearty dislike as ever. She didn’t want to insult Caro, though, so she nodded.
Mr. Sparks came in. He was a big man, imperfectly groomed and untidily dressed. His pale, fine hair stood up everywhere except where his hat had been a few moments before. He looked very out of place in her sitting room.
“Please sit down, Mr. Sparks. How do you do?”
He sat in a small, high-backed chair that looked like doll’s furniture next to his size. She conjectured he had chosen it because he didn’t wish to stay long. “I’m well, thank you. Mrs. Sparks wanted me to give you these as a wedding present.” He held out a small box, of such a specific shape that Lydia knew even before opening it what it would contain.
She lifted the lid and pulled out a calling card. Mrs. A. W. Cahill, it read in sharp, clear, beautifully engraved letters.
A month ago, she would have been embarrassed to receive a gift from a friend made in her husband’s own office, a clear reminder that Caro had married beneath her. A few days ago, they would have made her so happy. How she had thrilled, to be called Mrs. Cahill!
“Thank you,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”
“Caro wanted to come,” Sparks said abruptly. “I didn’t think—I don’t want to see her hurt. But you let me in. Would you receive her, if we came together?”
Lydia had always thought she and Caro would be two old maids together. She spoke with difficulty around the lump of bitter envy in her throat. “Yes. I would be happy to see her.”
Sparks nodded and stood.
Caro had such beautiful manners when she wanted to—but Lydia knew her well enough to know she found Sparks’s gracelessness charming. For the first time in two days, she felt an impulse to smile. “Ask her to come before Christmas and bring a mince pie. I’m collecting them for a little girl from the workhouse. And before you go, let me give you a draft on my bank for Christopher Tobill’s bond.”
Unexpectedly, he gave her a crooked smile. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to dun you.” He stood and waited while she wrote out the draft. He read it over carefully, then folded it neatly and tucked it into his pocket. It was good to know he could be careful about some things, even if his personal appearance was not one of them.
“Did you like the column on your wedding?” he asked.
“Caro rewrote it dunnamany times.”
She and Mr. Cahill had read the column gleefully aloud to each other. She’d cut the paragraph out and saved it with her slipper.
Last night she’d burned the paper and put the slipper back in her wardrobe. It was only a slipper after all. Nothing special.
“It was lovely. Thank her for me.” How could her voice sound so normal? “Happy Christmas.”
When he was gone, she told Wrenn she was feeling unwell, and not to admit any more visitors. Lying in her bed, she stared at the ceiling and thought about walking to Wheatcroft just so she could sit in the window seat and stare at the Italian garden. It was so far, though. She lacked the energy even to sit up.
Wrenn knocked. “You have a visitor, madam.”
“I’m not receiving,” Lydia called, surprised Wrenn would ask.
Wrenn opened the door. Lydia sat up and tried to look as if she’d been reading. “I know, madam, but…” She handed Lydia a card. Lydia’s heart pounded so loudly she could no longer hear Wrenn’s voice.
Mr. Ralph Cahill.
Chapter Twenty-Three
As soon as Wrenn was out of the room, Mr. Ralph turned on her. “Where is my brother?” he demanded.
Lydia’s heart sank. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “What is that supposed to mean?”
She glared back, not caring that he towered over her. “He left. He left in the middle of the Gooding Day auction and he didn’t say goodbye.”
“I’m sure that’s what you told everyone. But I know it’s a lie.”
Lydia hated him. She’d already been over this so many times in her mind—did he, didn’t he, why? She didn’t want to go over it again. “It isn’t! Why would I lie?”
“How should I know? But why would he call attention to himself by leaving in the middle of a public gala? Why would he leave without saying goodbye, unless he thought you would call the constables? I warned you—”
“Men leave women without saying goodbye all the time!”
Mr. Ralph paused, frowning at her as if she’d surprised him. But he shook his head. “No. He’d have waited until after Christmas. He promised that little girl he’d take her to see her sister.”
Lydia had told herself that too. Surely he wouldn’t have left those mince pies, so lovingly nestled in their basket! She’d thought she was being naive, but if his brother agreed with her— At first she felt overwhelming relief, that she hadn’t simply been lying to herself about everything.
Then she remembered the way Jamie wouldn’t meet her eyes when he handed her Mr. Cahill’s note. The first pricklings of fear began at the nape of her neck. “He didn’t take any of his money with him,” she said. It hadn’t occurred to her that that was strange. After all, he could come back for it whenever he liked.
“I know. I stopped at the bank.” His mouth was a hard line.
She pulled the letter marked If you are not Ralph Cahill, please do not read this out of her pocket and thrust it at him. “Maybe—”
He tore the letter almost in half in his haste to unfold it. The soft thing inside was an old handkerchief. It didn’t look like much, but Mr. Ralph went pale.
He went paler as he read. Lydia would not sneak a look at private correspondence. She would not.
“What does it say?” she asked finally.
He turned terrible blue eyes on her. “Allow me to translate from the Yiddish. Ralph—You mustn’t tell Lydia the contents of this letter. Don’t tell her for anything. Swear you won’t. It’s too late to do anything. I must be in Australia by now. I’m sorry for everything. You deserved the truth, since that’s what you wanted. I’m sorry I never let you speak Yiddish after we left London. I’m sorry—well, you know everything I have to be sorry for. I’m proud of you for looking for something better.”
Mr. Ralph pressed the back of his hand to his mouth for a moment before continuing. “So here’s the truth. Lydia’s brother has dug up Fred Maddaford. I’m going to Cornwall to be tried for my crimes. Don’t worry. There’s three thousand pounds in the bank in town. I gave instructions that you can always draw on them. Take the lot, won’t you? I love you, your brother, Asher Cohen.”
Lydia couldn’t move. She couldn’t tell if the emotion paralyzing her was fear or rage or guilt. “He told you not to tell me,” she said, as if his brother’s small betrayal could make her less guilty.
“Yes, because unlike me, he gives a damn about how you feel,” Mr. Ralph said. “Where’s your brother?”
She had known Jamie was acting strange. She should have guessed why. “At Wheatcroft. Wheatcroft—Wrenn!” she shouted. “Wrenn, we need the carriage! Pack an overnight bag and the biggest hamper you can. Mr. Cahill has taken sick on the road.”
As she flew out the door a quarter of an hour later (the longest quarter-hour of her life), a thought halted her on the threshold. Mr. Ralph, following, cannoned into her and didn’t apologize. “Oh, and Wrenn,” she said, craning her neck to see around him, “get two more mince pies, I don’t care what you have to pay, and make sure someone takes Mary Luff to see her sister on Christmas Day.”
They didn’t speak on the way up to the house. There was nothing to say. Yet as they pulled into the circular drive, her head filled with words. “He said I should tell my brother the truth. He said—I never thought anything like this would happen. I thought at worst we’d have to leave town together, I thought—”
Mr. Ralph jumped down from the carriage without stopping to help her. “I’ll forgive you when we’ve got him back. Where’s your damn brother?” He pulled the heavy front door open as if it weighed nothing. “Wheatcroft!” His shout echoed in the great hall. “Wheatcroft!”
Lydia called for Jamie too, but her voice was high and thready and didn’t carry.
Her brother appeared at the top of the stairs at a run. “What is it? Is Lydia well—oh, Lydia, it’s you.” His gaze fell on Mr. Ralph, and he stopped running. His eyes grew wide.
She almost hadn’t believed it until that moment. But she saw that Jamie knew who Mr. Ralph was, that he was afraid of what he would do. Jamie had sent Mr. Cahill to prison. He hadn’t wanted to leave her after all, and here she’d been feeling sorry for herself when he was all alone, when he—
Coming down the stairs, Jamie showed them hastily into the study. Mr. Ralph lifted his hands as if contemplating violence, then lowered them. Then he raised them again and slammed Jamie hard against the wall. “Where is my brother?” he growled.
“Let him go,” Lydia said sharply, protectiveness cutting through the fog of self-recrimination. “Let him go now. He was only trying to protect me.” She might never have found out. Jamie had done this terrible thing for her own good, and the secret would have stood between them, always. What had Mr. Cahill said? That secrets made a pane of glass between two people? She couldn’t bear to think of the long lonely life that might have been, the decades of missing her husband, and Jamie bearing the awful solitary burden of knowing he was the cause of it.
“Lydia,” Jamie said. There was blood on his lip, where he must have bitten it. “I don’t know what he’s told you about Mr. Cahill, but—”
“I knew.” The words dropped into the room like stones in a pond, so heavy they made almost no splash at all. “Jamie, I knew everything. I knew and I loved him—”
“You love him,” Mr. Ralph corrected fiercely, dropping Jamie, and Lydia couldn’t believe she’d used the past tense. “Where is he? We’re getting him back.”
“No, we aren’t,” Jamie said.
Lydia pushed herself between him and Mr. Ralph. “Yes, we are.” Her thoughts flew ahead already. Of course they would get him back, and—and what? It didn’t matter. It only mattered that he was in prison, he was alone and no doubt pretending not to be frightened, and she had put him in the way of it. “Where is he?”
>
Jamie looked incredulous. “Lydia, I spoke with an old man who says these men robbed him of a hundred pounds under false pretenses. They take people’s trust and then they rob them. He…” Jamie looked so sorry, so sorry at having to tell her this, she almost laughed. She swallowed it. It wouldn’t have been a nice sound. “He robbed you, Lydia. He wanted your money.”
“We only took fifty pounds off Fred Maddaford, and he was a nasty old man who hated his own daughter,” Mr. Ralph said loudly. “And if you don’t help me, I’m going to the newspaper.”
Lydia couldn’t breathe. It was awful, it was, and yet she couldn’t breathe for thinking that Mr. Cahill had probably liked that old man. He would probably defend him to his brother. That didn’t make him a good man. But it made her love him. Jamie had blanched at the dreaded word newspaper. She would have too, once. Even Caro couldn’t save her if Jack Sparks got ahold of a story this good.
“I don’t care,” Lydia said through her teeth. “I don’t care who he robbed, I don’t care if the story of his life is printed in next week’s Intelligencer, I don’t care about any of it. Tell me where he is right now.” She straightened and gave her brother a look that brooked no refusal.
She hated to browbeat him. She hated watching him crumple. But she hated it distantly. All that mattered was getting them in that carriage. “Kellisgwynhogh,” Jamie said. “Lord Prowse is taking him to the gaol there. They’re using the name he gave Maddaford. Cas Carne.”
Lydia’s voice was steel. “Will you come with us and explain to your friend that you want him to drop the prosecution?”
“I’ll put on my boots.” Jamie looked at his feet. “Lydia…”
“It’s my fault,” she said flatly. “I should have told you. Only somehow, I didn’t think you’d understand.” That last part came out nastier than she’d meant it to.
“I don’t understand!” he flared. “I don’t understand. He told me he’d been in prison before, he—”
“I’m not listening to this,” Mr. Ralph interrupted, and Lydia remembered Mr. Cahill saying, It scared Ralph something awful. “Get whatever you need to look rich and powerful and get in the carriage. We’re leaving. And get someone to spell the coachman. We’re driving through the night.”
