Her voice rough, Annabell said, ‘Nothing ever is, is it?’
She sighed from exhaustion, wishing this was over and she was in her own room, locked behind a concealing door where she could release her grief and pain instead of holding them in. She did not want this talk, but she would not turn away from it. She was made of stronger stuff, or so she had always believed.
‘No, but then life isn’t easy,’ Lady Mainwaring said. ‘I want to tell you the truth.’
Annabell laughed a short, sharp bark that did nothing to conceal her hurt. It was the best she could do.
‘What if I don’t want to know the truth, Lady Mainwaring?’
Elizabeth Mainwaring looked at her from the corner of her eye. ‘Then leave. I won’t follow you, and I won’t try again.’
Annabell turned away. That would be the simple solution. She could walk away tonight and tomorrow she could leave Rosemont. Susan and her Mr Tatterly were very likely settled, therefore Susan could stay here or not as she chose without jeopardising her relationship with her fiancé. She could go to Guy’s London town house. But running away would accomplish nothing, especially on her excavation. Still, she thought she would go anyway. She was tired beyond imagining. She could always return later, hopefully when Hugo and his new bride would not be in residence.
She angled a glance at the other woman. Elegant and beautiful as she was, Elizabeth Mainwaring did not look happy. Bitterness flooded Annabell. The woman had Hugo, but she was not ecstatic. What irony.
Perhaps it would be better to hear her out. If nothing else, one of them might walk away from this encounter feeling better.
‘What do you want to say?’ She didn’t try to keep the resignation from her voice. ‘Let us air the dirty linen and be done with it.’ She looked at the expanse of grounds, silvered by the full moon, and refused to feel regret. She made a sudden decision. ‘I shall be leaving first thing in the morning.’
‘You don’t need to.’
She shrugged. ‘There is no reason to stay. The initial excavation is done. Jeffrey Studivant will be arriving tomorrow afternoon. He was originally going to assist me. Now he can finish it all. He is eminently qualified.’
‘Ah. So you aren’t running away. I had wondered.’
Annabell felt the heat of anger burn through her chest, easing some of the previous pain of loss. ‘No, Lady Mainwaring, I am not.’ Then honesty made her add, ‘Only a little. I would have left for a while no matter what. My brother and his wife have just had a baby. I would like to spend time with them.’
Only a small white lie. She did want to see Guy and Felicia again and little Adam. The fact that she would not have gone for some time if Lady Mainwaring had not arrived was only a small matter.
The other woman lifted her elegant and rounded white shoulders in a very Gallic gesture. ‘I would have left had I been in your place. I have never believed a stoic face worth the effort. Better to leave behind whatever is hurting you.’
The admission took Annabell by surprise. She turned to look at her nemesis. ‘I would imagine you have scant experience of being hurt and consequently having to be a stoic.’
‘You would have been wrong.’ Her voice was ironic.
‘How little we know each other,’ Annabell murmured.
‘True. But we are both women and as such, we both live with our emotions close to the surface.’
Annabell looked sharply at Lady Mainwaring. ‘You are marrying Sir Hugo, yet you sound sad.’
‘Perhaps I am.’ She turned to face Annabell. ‘Perhaps I wish things had turned out differently, but they have not. That is why I sought you out.’
A pang of discomfort lodged in Annabell’s gut. ‘Don’t feel you must tell me anything, Lady Mainwaring. Sir Hugo and I were not engaged, not did we exchange vows of any kind.’
‘No?’
Annabell shook her head slowly. ‘No.’
‘Then am I mistaken in thinking you care for him?’
Annabell’s fingers froze in the act of pulling her shawl close. She had to pick her words carefully. Lady Mainwaring might speak as though she intended to bare her soul, but so far she hadn’t. And Annabell didn’t think she could make herself more vulnerable to this woman than her love for Hugo already made her.
She spoke slowly. ‘In the time I have been here, I have played cards with him, gone on picnics, sat across from him at the dinner table. He even taught me how to waltz. I would be lying to say that after all that he means nothing to me.’
‘A friend, nothing more?’
Annabell took her time folding the ends of her scarf across her breast, wondering why she was suddenly so cold. The night was nearly balmy. But she knew why. She felt caught in a situation with no easy solution. It made her defensive.
‘Why are you doing this?’
Lady Mainwaring turned away and leaned over the stucco railing so that she seemed poised to fly into the night air. ‘Guilt?’
‘Guilt?’ Annabell was certain she had misheard.
Arms still on the railing, Elizabeth Mainwaring looked at her. ‘No matter how you skirt around your feelings, Lady Fenwick-Clyde—which I call you because I sense you don’t like or trust me—I believe you care deeply for Hugo. I also believe he cares for you. That is something where Hugo is concerned.’
She turned back to gaze over the rose bed that spread from the house nearly to the artificial pond. The scent of its blooms wafted on the breeze.
‘I have known him for many years. He knew my husband,’ she added. ‘After I became a widow, I waited the acceptable year and then approached him.’ Her perfectly formed mouth twisted. ‘As you can probably imagine, he accepted my offer.’
Annabell sucked in air, but said nothing. She must have made a sound, though, for Lady Mainwaring looked back at her.
‘Does that shock you?’
‘Should it?’ But it did. As independent as she professed herself to be, she did not think she could pursue a gentleman.
‘Not if you knew me.’ She turned back to her contemplation of the moonlit garden. ‘Anyway, he took me up on my offer. That was nearly a year ago. I even went to the Continent when he did. Although, in all honesty, it was not so much for Hugo as for the excitement. Everyone was there.’
‘So you and Hugo have been lovers for nearly a year?’
‘Yes. But he dropped me when he met you, even though he had made arrangements to return to London when I did and to carry on as we had been doing.’
Another sharp intake of breath. Hugo had been telling her the truth when he said Lady Mainwaring was no longer his mistress. For what good it did now.
‘And his action would not have bothered me.’ She stopped speaking for so long, Annabell began to wonder if she had finished. ‘You see, I cared for someone else.’ Elizabeth Mainwaring gave a bitter, disillusioned laugh. ‘I was a fool, but I loved him. I cuckolded Hugo with him.’
Annabell seethed with indignation. How dare she treat Hugo like that, betray him with another? She had thought only the married did such things.
Lady Mainwaring shrugged. ‘At the time nothing mattered to me but this other man. And, if Hugo knew, he did not let on. However, looking back, his visits did lessen. Yet, he was always careful in what he said, and it was easy for me to be so with him. He is a wonderful lover, but I do not love him so I was never caught in the throes of impatience. When Hugo paused for his protection, it was more than acceptable. I did not want to bear his bastard any more than Hugo wished me to.’
She turned around and leaned backward on the parapet, closing her eyes. Her voice lowered. ‘I had already borne someone’s bastard, delivered it and given it up to a tenant farmer. A little girl.’ Her voice caught. ‘My husband did not take lightly to being cuckolded. Charles told me to give up the child or run away with my lover, who would not have me for he was married himself, or find myself turned out with no support.’ She opened her eyes, but Annabell sensed she did not see anything but the past. ‘I gave up the child.’
Annabell gasped. She could not help herself. But she instantly regretted it. ‘What you did is not so unusual in our circles.’
‘No,’ Lady Mainwaring agreed. ‘But, nonetheless, it was not easy to do. I was in a fit of melancholy for at least a year afterward. I vowed that I would never get myself into that position again, and if I did, then I would keep the child.’ She gave Annabell an apologetic look. ‘That is why I am so very sorry to do this to you, but I will not give up my baby again. Nor will I raise the child as a bastard. Hugo had an easy life of it, but his father was a powerful man at court and in society. No one dared ostracise Sir Rafael or his illegitimate son. I am not so fortunately placed. And society will accept much from a man that it will not condone in a woman.’ Bitterness dripped from her last words.
Annabell could do nothing but stare at the woman. Pity mingled with rage in her breast. Pity for the situation Lady Mainwaring was in and the pain she had experienced when giving up her previous child, and rage that the woman had decided to force Hugo into marriage.
‘Is Hugo the father of your child?’
Lady Mainwaring’s striking blue eyes glowed softly as though tears filled them. ‘I don’t really know.’
Annabell kept a tight rein on her voice, willing herself to show none of the disgust she felt. ‘Yet you are forcing him into marrying you.’
‘To provide a name for my child. Yes.’
‘What of your other lover, the one who might just as easily be the father? Why don’t you make him marry you?’
For the first time since her arrival, Elizabeth Mainwaring faltered. Her elegant fingers clutched tightly to the plaster railing, and her magnificent bosom rose and fell as though she fought for air.
And Annabell knew why. ‘You love him.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he does not love you in return.’
Elizabeth Mainwaring shook her head. Her voice was soft and hurting and lost. ‘No, he does not.’
‘I am so sorry.’
And she was. After falling in love with Hugo and then losing him to this woman, she understood the agony of not having the person you love. Just a short time ago she would not have understood, but now Lady Mainwaring’s pain was an emotion she knew only too well.
Suddenly she understood. ‘That is why you won’t tell him about the child.’
Elizabeth Mainwaring’s breath caught. Annabell sensed the other woman’s tension.
‘Yes. He…’ she turned away so Annabell could not see her face ‘…he told me from the first that he would not marry. He has been hurt before.’
Annabell did not try to keep the sarcasm from her voice. ‘Haven’t we all?’
‘Yes.’ Elizabeth Mainwaring’s was just audible. ‘And even should he change his mind and marry for the child…I do not think I could marry him, loving him as I do, and have him not care anything for me.’ Her beautiful mouth twisted. ‘I have not your strength.’
Annabell found herself hating and despising this woman. Elizabeth Mainwaring had made her own situation, and she was ruining another person’s life because of her own selfishness and weakness. Yet, she truly understood, now that she had loved and lost Hugo, what it was like to be emotionally devastated.
‘Will you tell Hugo?’ Lady Mainwaring’s voice cracked.
Annabell blinked back tears of anger. Would she tell Hugo? Would she make Elizabeth Mainwaring’s child a bastard? Even for her own and Hugo’s happiness? Perhaps if Hugo had ever told her he loved her, but he had not. In all likelihood, he would eventually be as happy with Elizabeth Mainwaring as he would have been with her. And she would get over this. Pain was not constant, it faded with time. She knew that from her parents’ death. The first days and weeks, even months, she had felt as though a heavy weight lay suffocatingly on her chest. Then slowly, it had eased. Now when she remembered them it was with joy and love for what they had meant to her. Eventually that would happen with her feelings for Hugo. It had to.
‘No, I won’t tell him. It is not my place.’
Rather than stay and hear any more, Annabell turned away. She would walk in the rose garden and delight in the silvered beauty of the blooms and heady scent of their ripening. Tomorrow she would leave.
She descended the steps to the gravel path and began to wander aimlessly. She told herself that in time none of this would matter anymore. In time.
Chapter Sixteen
Dawn barely crept over the late spring sky when Annabell stepped into the travelling chaise that had brought her to Rosemont a few months before. She told herself that in time her chest would no longer feel as though someone had pried it open and ripped out her heart. But not yet.
‘Annabell.’ Susan’s voice penetrated Annabell’s misery.
‘Yes, dear?’ Annabell leaned forward in her seat to look out the window. ‘I thought I told you not to bother getting up. We will meet up in London soon enough.’
Worry puckered Susan’s pale brows. ‘Yes, you did, but I could not help but feel concern. As I told you last night, your departure is so sudden. Are you sure you are not sickening and need me by your side?’
Annabell made herself smile, but she knew it was a poor thing. ‘Quite. Guy and Felicia have asked me to visit in London. They have gone there for the Season so Guy can take his seat in Parliament. Besides which, Mr Studivant will be here tomorrow. You will be completely occupied helping catch him up to where we are. And I know he will want you to stay as long as possible to continue your illustrations.’
‘Yes, I understand all that,’ Susan said peevishly, ‘but I still can’t help but worry at this suddenness. It is not at all like you. You never leave something unfinished. At least, I have never known you to do so, and I have known you for these many years.’
‘Five, dear. Perhaps six. I was much less reliable in my younger days.’
‘Faugh! You are being purposely obtuse.’
‘Yes, I am,’ Annabell said gently. ‘I don’t wish to discuss my reasons with you, Susan. Please respect that.’
Susan’s mouth formed an astonished O seconds before her eyes filled. ‘I’m so sorry, Annabell. I didn’t mean…don’t wish to pry. I just…’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘I was just worried. You have been different since Sir Hugo’s arrival, but it seemed a happy difference. Now you seem distracted and sad.’
Once more Annabell forced a smile that didn’t reach her eyes or ease her heart. ‘I need to go, Susan. Take care and join me in London as soon as you can. We must plan your wedding. And I shall miss you.’
Susan blushed a rosy pink and started speaking, but Annabell rapped on the carriage roof and the coach lurched forward. She waved to her friend.
Fortunately it was a beautiful day and the trip to London promised to be quick and uneventful. She needed something in her life to go simply.
She pulled the curtain over the window, thought better of it, and hooked the heavy green velvet back. The morning sun would improve her disposition. Consequently, when the carriage drove past the Roman villa, she could not help but see it and the workers she had hired from the village who were rapidly erecting the more permanent awning where the temporary tent had been. She would come back later, perhaps next year, and stay at the village inn.
Hugo would be married by then…and a father. The unhappiness that thought caused was like a rock in her stomach. She hiccupped as she tried to stifle the tears that seemed to insist on falling. She had cried more than enough last night, yet here she was doing so again. She was a watering pot.
She finally gave in to her misery.
Later, she pulled the handkerchief from her reticule and blew her nose with force. Somehow she felt that if she did everything with determination, she would manage to keep going forward with her life. After all, she had not wanted to marry Sir Hugo. After Fenwick-Clyde, the last thing she wanted was to put herself at another man’s mercy.
So what if Hugo was nothing like her husband? Fenwick-Clyde had seemed a reasonable older man when she first met him. She h
ad not wanted to marry him, but neither had she feared and loathed him. Instead, she had been young and impressionable and had still thought she would find a grand passion.
What a fool she had been. Was.
She sank back onto the velvet squabs and closed her eyes. Even more recently she had found herself longing for a love that would complete her life.
She had watched Guy and Felicia’s stormy courtship with all its pain and passion and found herself wanting to care for someone like they cared for each other. They had defied the conventions of polite society and now neither was accepted by the sticklers of the ton, but they were ecstatically happy. They had each other and their baby.
She shifted, trying to get more comfortable. Sleep had eluded her last night and exhaustion rode her like a demon. Still, her thoughts would not quit so she could rest.
She was being as silly as Susan so often was. She was happy. Finding someone would only complicate her life. Particularly someone like Hugo. He was a rake, with every charm and flaw that epitaph epitomised.
But there is no man more faithful than a reformed rake, a tiny voice said in the back of her mind. That voice had been more and more persistent as her liaison with Hugo had progressed. She had nearly believed it.
Then Elizabeth Mainwaring had arrived.
Annabell turned again, frowning at her inability to get comfortable. She finally gave up, sat up and stared out the window. The lush Kent countryside passed by her window, bringing the fresh scent of growing green things. She loved this time of year. Spring always seemed to promise new futures. It was the time the Romans had believed Persephone returned from the Underworld, bringing rebirth with her. She believed they were right.
She was unable to distract herself for long from Hugo. Her thoughts returned to him will she or nil she. He had lodged in her heart and remained there no matter what she told herself.
Her hands clenched the seat cushion, her nails sinking in. If only it didn’t hurt so much.
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