by Lydia Joyce
“Who are you, then?” Fern cried. “Why have you changed? Because …” She searched for a vulgarity and realized that she knew none to describe what she wanted. She said viciously, “Because sticking your thing in me is more exciting than sticking it between someone else’s legs?”
“No, Fern,” he said, gripping her more tightly. “Listen to me, mon ange—”
“Don’t call me that!” Fern’s shout sliced through his speech, her entire being rejecting the endearment. She jerked away—tried to jerk away, but his hand on her arm was too strong. “Don’t you ever call me that again.” A ringing silence followed her outburst until she spoke again. “I am not your ange. I am not another one of your … your whores.”
“I am sorry,” he said simply, so quietly that she stopped trying to pull away from him and just stood there. “I am sorry for what I was. I am sorry for not considering that it might hurt you—for not considering that you might have the capacity for being hurt. What I discovered, yes, in some ways, I did discover it between your legs, as you so eloquently put it, Fern. But that was only the beginning. You brought me to life, however unintentionally, and I am different now. You are different,” he added. “You knew what I was when you married me—”
“How could I have known?” Fern interrupted. “I knew nothing! I might as well have been a cage-raised songbird, thrown into the woods. I knew what I was meant to know, and I was not raised to have thought to have questioned it.”
“You knew enough,” Colin said, his eyes glittering like ice. “You knew that I was cold. You knew I was empty.”
“I did not know what it meant,” she whispered, unable to accept what he proposed.
“But you knew,” he repeated. “I have changed, Fern. Know it and be glad.”
She shook her head. “In less than five days?”
“Sometimes a lifetime isn’t enough. Sometimes five days is plenty,” he returned.
Fern looked into his eyes and saw behind the chilly glitter … him, looking back out at her, earnest and true. She closed her eyes, feeling the tears slide past.
“And what of your natural child? And whatever other natural children you have left in your wake?”
“As far as I know, this is my first,” Colin said evenly. “As for what is to be done with it, I will leave that up to you. In any case, I will send my mistress—my former mistress—the funds that she needs. Then you may tell me what you want done, whether the babe should be left in Naples … or something else.”
Fern nodded, swallowing around the hardness in her throat. “Please. Let me go. I need to think. I need to be alone for a while.”
Colin released her, stepping back. “Do not leave the keep,” he said, “and I will let you be for a time.”
She nodded. Scarcely seeing him, she pushed to the door and stumbled down the perilous staircase. She had to think. She had to cry—she was already crying now, silent tears turning into racking sobs that made her stomach clench and her body shake. Where could she go? She rejected the cold, empty great hall and sought out the stairs to the kitchens.
She cast around the vaulted dimness, but she already knew where the only private places were—the stone rooms by the stairs. She kept her eyes averted from the second one as she approached the first and opened the door. Within was the bed box, still full of ancient straw. Shunning the bed, she slid down the corner opposite and gave herself over to her tears, her mind spinning faster the harder she wept.
She hated herself for crying—twice in as many days! She couldn’t remember the last time she had cried so much. She couldn’t remember the last time that she had cried at all. It had been years, surely, since she’d had anything to cry about. That she’d had anything she cared so much about to cry over …
She bit her lip against a wracking sob. Her soul hurt. That was the only way she could think of to describe the pain that seared through her, deeper than bone, piercing her very essence. She felt betrayed, and yet she knew that, rationally, she had no right to feel that way, as she had possessed only the faintest sense of affection, scarcely returned, when she and Colin had made the decision to be joined together for life.
Yet it still hurt the same, stinging her pride, of course, but far more than that, making her doubt the meaning of what she and Colin had shared. How could it mean anything when he gave it away so easily? How could it be more than a momentary delusion when he had given all this before, to someone else, and it had meant nothing? Yet the night before had felt so real …
Why couldn’t she have continued through life as blithely as she had been when she agreed to marry him, untouched by any emotion deeper than a faint unease and a callow fluttering of desire? She’d forgo the dizzying euphoria of their nights in an instant if only she could be rid of this, too.
But that wasn’t true, and the realization only made her cry harder—out of anger with herself and frustration with the entire mad world. That was the crux of it. The very attachment that brought a new kind of joy into her life also made her vulnerable to a new grief.
Mon ange. The hateful words reverberated through her head. He had changed, he said. He was a new man. And yet still he said mon ange.
How much had she changed, then? She felt as if the scales had fallen away from her eyes during these past few days, and yet a child blind from birth did not know what sunlight was like, so how could she know what she saw?
And how much could a man, however fundamentally altered, change the habits of a lifetime in the space of five days? She felt like a new person, a very different person, and yet she still could not keep chickens or arrange her hair. Perhaps changes, however true, took some time to work their full effects.
Mon ange, mon ange, that ever hateful mon ange! When the moment came, she could not tell him how much those words alone had hurt her. She had spoken the truth about his planned infidelity (Who was A? Alexander, Andrew, Alphonse, Albert, Arthur?), but she had not been able to spit out the heart of the matter, scared that she could not say words that would make her feelings seem other than trivialities and even more terrified of the answer if she could.
Why? That word bundled up all her pain and anger into a single neat package. Why her, why Colin, why his mistress, why everything? Why couldn’t she decide to hate him or forgive him and be done with it? Why couldn’t she decide the same about herself and her own weakness—like a climbing rose, her mother always said. But when the trellis bends, the rose falls, and she was revolted to see herself droop so helplessly at the actions of another.
Did she even have the right to be hurt, the privilege to forgive? She had known nothing about marriage a week ago—and nothing about this pain in her lungs and her gut that was now tearing her asunder. She had not understood what unfaithfulness even meant, much less had any idea that she might choose a husband to be true.
She bit her knuckles hard and brought her sobs slowly under control, but her mind would not still, running ever more frantically in the same circles, over and endlessly over again. The bastard—what was she to do with it? Colin had left it up to her, but she wasn’t sure whether it was out of consideration or cowardice. Didn’t he care? She honestly didn’t know.
She knew that a good wife—a perfect wife—would welcome the child into her house with open arms, treating it no differently from one of her own flesh. But she wasn’t a good wife. She was rebellious and, yes, selfish, and she didn’t know that she could look at the child and not feel a stab of bitterness toward both it and her husband. And worse, she knew that everyone else would know that the child was a Radcliffe bastard, and behind her back, there would be whispers about whether it was Colin’s, Peter’s, or Alexander’s. Even she had known what an infant “poor relation” usually meant. It was pride, pure and simple, that rose like bile in her throat at that thought, and the discovery of it in her disgusted her almost as much as the fear of idle speculation filled her with dread.
The sins of the father were not the child’s, and the babe deserved a house where it would be lo
ved. She just didn’t know whether she would be capable of that, whether she could become reconciled to her husband’s old choices.
Yet … how horrible could it be? Fern took a shuddering breath. The child would be no Jane Reston’s get, to be flaunted in front of her to shame her with her failings and her husband’s infidelity. That thought stopped Fern cold, shocking her into considering a comparison.
Charlotte Radcliffe’s husband had conducted a flagrant affair after his marriage in order to humiliate his wife. Colin … even the Colin she had first married was not that kind of man. He had not been vicious, merely absent. Indifferent, rather than unkind. That would be little consolation except that he had lost his indifference. Even at his most distant, she was certain he now cared. Did that mean that he would never stray again? She didn’t know the answer to that—she did not know him well enough, still, and she wasn’t even sure that he had been himself long enough to truly know himself, either. But she was certain that he would never do it to hurt her, for he was not a vindictive man. That was something. But was it enough? Could she have the faith to trust him—trust them—that they could make this marriage work between them, without destroying either one of them?
Fern found herself drawn, almost inexorably, toward the letters she still carried in her pocket and the specter of the disastrous marriage whose darkest secrets might be contained within. She pulled them out, examining the packet again. It was thinner and lighter than the other one, and the faded blue ribbon disintegrated at her tug. The letters spilled across her skirts. As she was gathering them up again, two words, scrawled in large letters in the middle of one page, caught her eye:
The Truth.
She finished gathering the rest of the letters and slid them back into her pocket again, then picked up that one. In the light coming in through the doorway, still sniffing slightly from her fit of weeping, she unfolded the stiff, brittle sheepskin and began to read.
… for know I well The Truth of what happen’d the night of thy predecessor’s death—I do not yet call him thy pater, knowing this—and the events that afterward occurred. Thou must knowest, too, now that thy cousin’s heir has met such an untimely end and thou art but one man from the barony. For this is thy secret more than mine, to hide in thy bosom, and the bosom of thy son, and thy son’s son forever more.
‘Twas in the dark of night that I heard Master Radcliffe open the door of his chambre, just below mine, and wishing to have privy conversation with Sir Thomas, I silent descended with the expectation of being his shadow and thus escaping detection whilst ensuring the greatest time for my dialogue with our guest. Master Radcliffe paused, as was his wont, upon the verge of descending to hurl vile oaths at my dear sister through the closed door, and above him, I paused, too. He began his descent, and I was upon the moment of following when the door to his chambers open’d again and a pallid figure emerged.
Before I could decide to retreat or call out, it glided down the stairs after Master Radcliffe, its movements so unearthly that my blood ran cold. I pursued, and just as I came into sight of Master Radcliffe, with the figure behind, I saw the ghostly shape reach out a wraithish hand—and push him from the stair! He bellowed like a bull, and for an instant I thought he had caught himself and bethought myself to flee his certain wrath, but he tottered like a nursling on leading strings, and fell—down to the floor, where his brains were instantly dashed out upon the stone. I gasped, and the figure turned, and I saw that it was mine own sister. Not yet Charlotte but Lettice, who had slid from her innermost bedchamber thru his after him in order to wright his demise. She wore nothing but her shift and her hair wild about her head, and in that thin garment I could see the swell of her belly.
“He would like to have killed me,” was all she said. And I kept my tongue because I knew that it was true enough that he would kill all three of us rather than see a child not of his own flesh inherit Wrexmere—And also because I knew that, round with the stable hand’s child, Lettice would not interfere with my designs to marry to Sir Thomas. I left within the week, and four months later, thou earnest into the world and wert given into the hands of Charlotte and christened with the false name of Radcliffe.
Thou art no Radcliffe, my dear John. Thou art the brat of a loose woman and a stable hand, begotten in the filth of the barn, and the Restons shall forget it no more than I. I, though, am thy friend and kinswoman, ever eager to protect—
“What are ye doing?”
The rough question sliced through Elizabeth Gorsing’s poisonous words.
Fern looked up, startled, her heart hammering at the sight of Joseph Reston standing in the doorway. The man scowled down at her, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. In her absorption, she had not even noticed his occlusion of the light from the kitchens, but now she was preternaturally aware of how much of his bulk filled the doorway.
“I am reading a letter from my sister,” she heard her lips say, and she folded the correspondence calmly and pushed it into her pocket even as her heart began to race. The secret of the papers—I know it now, she thought. The second John had been a sham Radcliffe, and so his heirs’ claim to the Radcliffe title was illegitimate. Colin’s claim to the title was illegitimate. It was a hoax two and a half centuries old.
Joseph Reston was still glowering down at her. This was her chance to get back at Colin, if she chose, she realized suddenly. She could hand the letters over to Joseph Reston and give him the leverage with which to continue his family’s traditional extortion of the Radcliffes. Or she could reserve them for herself and have them anonymously published and delivered over to a magistrate. Whether or not, after so much time, the title would be in danger was uncertain, but it would cause Colin more than a little consternation in return for the pain he had inflicted, however unintentionally, upon her.
But she did not want to see him disinherited, she thought with sudden, absolute clarity—with a certainty that had been rare to her since she had married him. Regardless of her own future, she did not want him hurt, as much as he had hurt her. He mattered far too much to her for that, and if his actions had caused her to discover a kind of grief she had not understood before, then it would only hurt that much more if he were harmed.
The man’s face darkened. “I saw the letter. It had that old type of writing on it. Give it here.”
She stood, slightly more jerkily than she intended, and wiped the tear tracks from her cheeks. “Excuse me,” she said, edging out of the doorway past Mr. Reston. “It was rather sad news, and I would like to be alone.”
The man caught her wrist as she went past. Gasping at the liberty of the gesture, she snatched back her hand. “My good sir!” she said crisply, backing away from him. “That is impertinent and offensive behavior.”
“Give it here,” he repeated, his voice growing rougher as he extended his hand peremptorily.
Fern’s heart beat faster. Could she bluff? Staring at the man’s set, purpling face, she knew it was impossible.
She had forgotten her knife under the mattress upstairs—and doubted it would be of much use against a man who could overpower her many times over, anyhow. Where could she run? He now stood closer than she to the stairs up to the keep. The door to the pump yard was somewhere behind her—but all that lay beyond was a rainstorm and the treacherous, flood-deep bog.
You could still give it over, part of her whispered. It is the easy way. But she held Colin’s future in her pocket, and, she decided suddenly, her own. She would not surrender it into Joseph Reston’s uncertain keeping.
“It is not yours,” she said clearly, edging closer to the staircase to the great hall. “It was addressed to me. Reverend Biggs gave it to me this morning.”
“No, it weren’t,” the man growled. “I saw it, and that weren’t no letter written while ye were alive. Give it over now.” He took a lumbering step toward her—and she turned and fled.
She sprinted toward the stairs, but Reston dove and caught the edge of her skirt, his yank whirling her away and jerking
the fabric from his grasp simultaneously, leaving him sprawled on the ground between her and the stairs.
“Colin!” She screamed his name at the top of her lungs. “Colin, help!” He had promised her time—she prayed that his newfound impetuousness would override his word, for she had no chance of being heard if he was still in the bedchamber. “Colin!” She tried once more as Reston grunted and pushed to his feet, his face flushed with fury. Then she ran with all her strength, her long skirts tangling around her ankles. She ran in the only direction she dared to go—toward the Tudor hall, the image of the great oaken front door burned upon her brain. If she could only make it outside, she could try to run for the village, and perhaps Colin would see her from the window before Reston caught up with her …
She flew up the two steps to the dining room and ran down its length toward the passage to the front hall, pushing her legs as hard as she could against the flags. Her corset felt like a vise around her lungs, dots appearing in front of her eyes as she struggled to suck in more air.
She could hear Reston’s heavy footsteps behind her, growing closer. She wasn’t going to make it. He was too close, and she could not get the air that her muscles demanded.
He grunted as he lunged for her again—she felt his fingers brush her skirt. She tried to run faster, but her body could not do it. She rounded the corner into the passageway, her smooth-soled shoes sliding on the stone. Reston came around too fast. His body slamming into hers, he knocked her into the wall as he continued past, falling through the passageway and into the hall. Fern lurched and regained her balance, her vision swimming dangerously. Reston pushed to his feet again, and she tried to dart away, back into the dining room, but he cut her off, pressing her back toward the stairway and the upper reaches of the Tudor wing.
“Give it to me,” he growled.
Fern’s fist tightened around the documents in her pocket. She felt the brittle parchment crumble, and she squeezed harder, willing the letters to dust.
