The Secret Hours

by Santa Montefiore

‘I don’t know. I don’t think she ever saw him again.’

  Wyatt is torn between relief and disappointment. So I tell him about Castle Deverill and its history, about Uncle Bertie and JP, and Kitty. Wyatt is very interested in the Deverills. He likes the idea of a family castle and a long history going back to King Charles II. The more I tell him the happier he is with me. I feel like the unpopular kid at school who has suddenly made friends with the coolest kid in class, and my dad is really pleased with me.

  I am relieved to be home. Wyatt takes my case upstairs and I shower. I let the warm water wash off the plane and the weariness and I close my eyes and think of Cormac. His gentle face floats into my mind and I hold him there, caressing each beloved feature with my attention. I’m brought abruptly back to reality by the door of the shower opening suddenly. It is Wyatt. I stare at him in alarm. He’s grinning. I haven’t seen that look on his face in years and my skin prickles with dread. He wants to make love.

  ‘Darling, I’m really tired,’ I protest. But Wyatt doesn’t care about tired, or headaches, or not being in the mood. He has always taken his pleasure when he wants it. He hasn’t wanted it for years. Why does he want it now?

  ‘Come on, Faye! I haven’t seen you for two weeks. We haven’t slept together in a long time. Let’s just plant a quick flag.’ I think of the pioneers crossing America and staking their claims. Wyatt wants to do just that. He wants to reaffirm his claim on me. Does he perhaps, deep down inside, sense that I now belong to someone else?

  He runs his eyes over my naked body and I feel ashamed. I’m no longer a young woman and Wyatt hasn’t seen me naked in a very long time. Cormac made me feel beautiful. He loved all my flaws so that they no longer felt like flaws; Cormac loved me just the way I was. Wyatt is a man who demands perfection and I know that in his eyes I don’t shape up too well. I slip past him and wrap myself in a towel. He reaches for me but I shake him off. ‘Wyatt, I said I’m tired.’

  He looks at me with a wounded expression. ‘Don’t I at least get a hug?’

  I know where hugs usually end up, but I don’t want to be mean. I know I need to hide Cormac behind a veneer of normalcy. I let him embrace me and gingerly pat his back, hoping it will be over quickly, that it won’t lead to sex. I don’t feel easy in his arms. My heart aches for Cormac’s. I feel like I’m being unfaithful to him and it sickens me.

  Wyatt holds me in a tight embrace. ‘There, that’s better,’ he says. ‘I am your husband, after all.’

  ‘I know,’ I reply, feeling guilty. ‘It’s just been a long flight.’

  ‘You’re home now,’ he says. ‘You won’t be going away again.’

  Once more the tone of control. I feel the claustrophobic sense of walls closing in around me. Of limitations, prohibitions and obstacles that have kept me in my place all my life. My instinct is to accept them, to jump back, to be obedient, but something takes over, something deep inside me that refuses to be suppressed. ‘I’ll be heading back to Ireland to scatter Mom’s ashes,’ I tell him firmly.

  ‘Logan can do that,’ he replies, dismissing my plan as if it isn’t important, as if scattering my mother’s ashes is something anyone can do.

  ‘Logan and I will do it together,’ I say and I feel my jaw clench with determination. ‘If you think I’m leaving my brother to put our mother to rest on his own, think again!’

  I know, as I say those words, that I don’t sound like me. I sound like a Deverill.

  Wyatt steps back and stares at me in confusion. ‘I don’t like that tone,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I reply sharply, sharper than I intended.

  ‘You’ve changed, Faye. I don’t know what you’ve been up to in Ireland, but I suggest you snap out of it. You’re home now and I won’t be spoken to like that.’

  I purse my lips and walk into the bedroom to dress. I can feel his eyes up on me and wish he would leave me alone. Why, when he’s spent the last thirty years rushing to the office or the golf course, does he now linger in my bedroom?

  ‘After calling the children, I’m going to go and see Logan,’ I tell him, slipping into my shoes. ‘I need to talk to him.’

  Wyatt is uncertain how to deal with this new, strong Faye who has come back tossing her mane like a headstrong mare. He runs a hand through his hair and sighs. ‘Sure,’ he mumbles.

  ‘Then I must set up a meeting with Mr Wilks. There are certain things in the will that I have to deal with now I’ve been to Ireland.’ I look at him steadily. ‘Mom’s ashes will be scattered in Ireland and I will be the one to do it. I’m sure Logan will want to come too. But if he doesn’t, I’m going. I just want to make that clear.’

  Wyatt puts his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘I suppose your mom is only going to die once,’ he says.

  I have an awful feeling that, for Logan, she’s going to die all over again.

  I lie on the bed and pull the telephone onto my lap and call the children. I speak to Edwina first, who asks me about Ireland but isn’t really interested in hearing the details. It’s early morning for her and I can sense her impatience to get to work. She tells me she will call me later, she has lots of news. She’s working on a new and exciting project and she wants to tell me about it. How typical of Edwina to only think about herself. But I smile, because I know and love her in spite of her faults, and I’m happy that nothing has changed this side of the Atlantic. Happy to be here, in Boston, with a clear conscience because I am home and she is none the wiser. Then I call Walter. He’s never been very communicative on the telephone. He is sweet and asks me how it all went. I tell him I met lots of his grandmother’s relations and that his greatuncle is a lord, but he’s not interested in titles like his father, and he doesn’t really care about his grandmother’s relations. He’s a Deverill, but he doesn’t know what that means. He’s happy being a Langton.

  Then I call Rose and it is like rubbing balm into my heart. Just hearing her voice stops the aching and fills me with gratitude for the fact that I am here. That I haven’t left her father, that I haven’t disappointed her or made her unhappy. I’d do anything for Rose. Anything. I tell her about Kitty and the castle. I tell her about Mom’s diary and that she left Ireland because she fell in love with the wrong man and came to America for a fresh start. I don’t tell her about Jonas and I don’t tell her about Cormac and I don’t tell her about the baby. I protect her from the truth. She is fascinated and wants to meet her Deverill cousins. She loves castles and would adore to visit. She does not tell me about herself, she does not cut me off with the excuse of having something better to do. She says she’s going to come up and spend the weekend with us as soon as she can get away, because she wants to see me. ‘I missed you, Mom,’ she confesses. ‘I know I don’t see you very much, but you’re always on the end of a telephone and I suppose I got used to that. I felt your absence. I’m glad you’re home.’ And because of Rose, I’m glad I’m home too.

  I meet Logan in the park. It feels strange to be in Boston. It’s almost as if I’ve never left, and yet I feel different. There’s a power in me that wasn’t there before. I no longer feel small.

  It’s spring. The park is green. Birds clamour in the branches and sunshine streams through the leaves, covering the grass in a soft, dappled light. We sit on a bench. I hand him Mom’s diary. ‘You can either make your way through this – it’s mirror writing, a little clumsy to read, but not impossible – or I can tell you what’s in it.’

  Logan, like Wyatt, is taken aback by my tone. He looks at me with an expression of surprise. I wonder, do I sound so very different? He takes the diary and opens it in the middle. ‘She really wrote all this in mirror writing?’ he asks, gazing into the neat but illegible lines of script. I know he doesn’t want to plough through it.

  ‘Leonardo da Vinci wrote in mirror writing too,’ I tell him.

  ‘Mom must have been a genius then,’ he quips.

  ‘It’s a fascinating read.’

  He sighs. ‘I�
�m sure it is. But I’m busy. Just give me the abridged version.’

  ‘Okay, the reason Mom wants her ashes scattered in view of Castle Deverill is because that was her home. Her grandfather was Lord Deverill of Ballinakelly, a title given to his ancestor Barton in the mid-seventeenth century by King Charles II . . .’ I tell him about the Deverills, which amazes him as much as it did me, and then I tell him about Arethusa. ‘She was wild and, I’m afraid to say, rather louche. She was having an affair with a local boy called Dermot McLoughlin, who was the son of the blacksmith, but she then went to London . . .’ I tell him about the London season, her brother Rupert and the parties. Then I tell him about Jonas. He leans forward with his elbows on his knees and shakes his head in disbelief as I recount Mom’s love story.

  ‘Jesus! No wonder she kept her history to herself,’ he muses, unable to reconcile his impeccably behaved mother with the rebellious, lusty girl she once was. He does not like to hear that she had lovers. He does not want to think about our mother having sex at all. ‘It’s in the past,’ he says, wanting it to remain there. ‘Her private life has got nothing to do with us. We shouldn’t even know about this.’ He frowns. ‘Why do we need to know about it? Why did she want you to read her diary? I don’t get it.’

  I continue telling him her story. When I reach the point where she leaves on the boat for America, uncertain whether the child she is carrying is Jonas’s or Dermot’s, I stop.

  ‘So, whose was it? Please don’t tell me there’s a black kid out there who’s our half-sibling!’

  I take a deep breath. I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want to shatter his world. But I have to. Mom left me no choice. ‘Logan, the baby was you.’

  It takes a moment for my words to settle. They remain spinning around his head for a good while before they slow down, form a coherent line and make sense. He stares at me. His face is twisted with horror and disbelief. He blinks. I know what he’s thinking. That he’s heard wrong. That I’m joking. Surely, he thinks, there must be some mistake.

  ‘You’re Dermot McLoughlin’s child,’ I explain, drowning in compassion. He looks so hurt, so shocked. Yet, there’s nothing I can say to make it better. ‘Dad and Mom decided to bring you up as a Clayton,’ I continue. ‘They kept the secret all their lives. They never told a soul. But it’s in the diary. She wants you to know. She wanted me to tell you.’ How I wish she had had the courage to tell him herself.

  Logan stands up. He cannot believe it. He puts his hands behind his head and paces up and down the path. I remain on the bench, my heart going out to him, this tall, strong man who now looks as vulnerable as a boy.

  ‘Who else knows about this?’ he asks after a long while.

  ‘No one. Only you and me,’ I reply. I don’t want to tell him that Kitty and Uncle Bertie both know too, because they have read the diary. Sometimes it’s better not to tell the whole truth. Just part of it.

  Logan sits down and holds me steady in the grip of his stare. ‘No one must know about this, ever. Do you understand? Not Wyatt, not anybody.’ His face is red like a berry and his mouth is distorted. He no longer looks like Logan, but an ugly version of him. He shakes his head. ‘I will never forgive Mother for this,’ he says in a deep, deliberate voice. ‘Never.’

  ‘Would you rather she had told you herself?’ I ask.

  ‘I’d rather not have been told at all.’ He drops his gaze to the ground. ‘I’m going to forget you ever told me, Faye. Do you understand? I’m going to ignore it.’

  ‘All right, if that makes it easier—’

  He cuts me off. ‘Nothing will make it easier, Faye.’ He stands up. ‘I need some time alone.’

  I get up too. ‘Sure. I will arrange to meet with Mr Wilks. There’s that third part of her wealth that she’s left to an anonymous person. I’ve been to Ireland. He can tell us who it is now.’

  ‘She should have discussed all this with us before she died,’ he says in a quiet and angry voice. ‘Not left mines to explode beneath our feet once she had gone.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Logan.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry, Faye. Just keep this to yourself. That means not telling Wyatt.’

  ‘I won’t tell him.’

  ‘You tell him everything.’

  ‘Not any more,’ I reply. He nods. As far as we are both concerned, Logan is still a Clayton.

  I telephone the attorney’s office and make an appointment for Logan and me to meet him the following week. I keep my promise to my brother and tell Wyatt nothing. Wyatt has no intention of divulging Mother’s affair with Jonas Madison, but he tells everyone about her aristocratic family. I bump into the wife of one of his golfing buddies at the bakery and she comes straight up to me, a radiant smile on her prettily painted face, and declares that she always knew Arethusa had blue blood because of her fine features and imperious bearing. ‘Wyatt says the castle is one of the most beautiful in the whole of Ireland and that if your mother had been a boy she’d have inherited it and the title.’ Her eyes widen and she adds, ‘Then Logan would be a lord!’ That’s just ridiculous. I silently curse Wyatt for showing off. I’m glad I kept the details of my visit to myself. I hastily pay for the bread and hurry out of the store. She calls after me. ‘We must do dinner. We haven’t seen you in much too long!’ I have no intention of having dinner with her and her bland bore of a husband. But that evening Wyatt announces that we are invited to their house for a small gathering of friends – and by small, I know he means at least ten couples – and he has accepted. He always accepts on my behalf without consulting me. I never minded before. I mind now. But I don’t want to fight on my first day home. I smile and say how nice. Then I tell him I want to go to Nantucket for the weekend. I don’t tell him it’s because I need to talk to Temperance.

  Wyatt loves Nantucket. He loves playing golf with Logan and he loves the society there. He thinks it is very superior, being made up of grand old Bostonian families who claim to have arrived on the Mayflower. When Mother was alive the beach house was home, but now it belongs to Logan and his wife Lucy. I’m not sure Logan is going to want to see me, but I telephone him all the same and to my surprise he acts as if nothing unusual has happened. He has erased our meeting in the park and the conversation we had. ‘Of course you must come,’ he says in a jovial tone of voice. ‘We’re filling the house with friends this weekend, so what’s two more.’

  I realize he is trying to drown out the revelation of his past with the noise of entertainment. I suppose he believes that if he surrounds himself with people and keeps himself busy, the horror of what I told him will recede until it becomes nothing more than a niggle in the back of his mind. I don’t feel like being with lots of people, but I know Wyatt will be thrilled, and I do need to see Temperance. It is a small sacrifice to pay. I will try not to look around the house that was once my home and lament the changes they have made.

  I miss Cormac. I miss the things about him that make him unique. The loping way he walks, the slight stoop in his shoulders, the gentle expression in his eyes, the crooked way he smiles, the gravelly sound of his laughter, his big rough hands, tanned forearms and ragged fingernails. I want to be the woman he sees when he looks at me, when only he looks at me. I want to blossom again beneath his gaze, when we are naked and alone and making love is not only an expression of our love but an effort to be close, and it is never close enough because as tightly as we press ourselves against each other our bones are always in the way. I ache for him with all my soul. I have no desire to eat and sleeping is restless and tormented. And all the while I have this nervous churning in my stomach and sickness in my heart and I know that it is grief. Grief I cannot share with anyone.

  We head off to Nantucket for the weekend. Lucy has indeed altered the house. It no longer smells of home. I compliment her changes, but she has stolen its essence. It is just a house and the ghosts of memories linger awkwardly in the shadows, feeling out of place and unwanted, and as much as I try to summon them, they do not come.

&nb
sp; Logan is the life and soul of the party. He laughs too hard, drinks too much and speaks too loudly. Lucy thinks nothing of it. She just assumes he’s having a wonderful time, entertaining all his guests. And they are nice people, I cannot deny that. I switch to my default setting and blend in with the other women, and I force myself into my old skin so that no one is aware of the change in me. The change Cormac has made in me. They are only aware of how well I look. Wyatt is attentive and I don’t know whether his appreciation of me is due to the glow of love that radiates out of me or the fact that I am descended from English aristocrats (he tells everyone!). But I fool him as well. I am really sick in my heart and desperate to return to Cormac, and every time Wyatt touches me I cringe. There was a time, not so long ago, when I craved his attention. Now I shrink from it he gives me more.

  At last I am alone with Temperance. I visit her in the house my mother has bequeathed her for her lifetime. It is a white clapboard house a short distance from the main one, where my father used to put up the servants. It is spacious, with large windows overlooking the garden. Big bushes of hydrangeas are planted all around it so that it looks like a white gull in a nest of blue. I sit on the small veranda, just like we used to when I was a child seeking her company. Just like we used to at the big house when Mom was dying and we shared that precious time in the early mornings while she was sleeping. I come to her now to talk about my mother’s secrets.

  ‘Tempie,’ I say, looking across at her and noticing how she has aged. Her black hair is streaked with grey and her skin, always so plump and youthful, has begun to line. ‘Mom left me her diary in her will and a request that I go to Ireland.’ Temperance smiles knowingly and I stop. I narrow my eyes. ‘You know about her past in Ireland, don’t you?’

  She nods. ‘I know everything,’ she says. Her eyes are wells of information. Deep, compassionate, secretive.

  My heart begins to accelerate. ‘You know about Jonas Madison . . .’