So she steeled herself against the humiliation, readied herself for the lies that would pass her lips, and adopted an air of civility as though donning a suit of armor.
*****
Maynard Bagstock was a fat, old man. His wrinkles, deep and lined, folded over and developed wrinkles of their own. His jowls were huge and sagging. His eyes were deep-set and bordered with deep black pits. The bags were thick and black. His hands were mottled and his face was one mass of old flesh. He never smiled. He only leered. In his eyes there was the capacity for hatred. The love of hatred.
His nephew, Saul Cartwright, was the opposite in every way. He was young, perhaps two or three years older than Zita. His face was strong and smooth. His jaw was square and strong. His eyes were ocean-blue, a blue so pale they were almost clear white, and he was a well-built man. Maynard look as though he was always on the verge of toppling over; Saul looked as though it would take many men to make him fall. Zita liked his hair. It was cute. Brown, mid-length, and curly.
Maynard struggled from his chair when Saul entered the drawing room. “Nephew,” he grimaced. “Good to see you.”
“And you, uncle,” Saul said. He looked at Zita and then bowed. “And you must be Zita Bagstock. Your Grace, Zita Bagstock.”
“You give her the title and not me?” Maynard coughed. “Just call her Zita; she doesn’t deserve the title. Married into it, she did. It’s mad, that a woman can just marry a man and steal what he has. They don’t even have to give much in return, but open their—”
“Uncle,” Saul said hurriedly. “I am sure you do not mean that.”
“Did you come here to tell me what I do and do not mean?”
“I came here to visit.” Saul inclined his head. “I am sorry if I gave offence.”
There was a long silence, in which Saul’s face twisted with anxiety. Then Maynard let out a booming laugh. “Give me offense! No, I’m too old for that. Look at my wife, my boy! Look at her. The smooth skin, the beautiful smile. Go on, Zita, smile for the man.”
Zita blushed fiercely. This was his favorite thing to do when company visited. Making her smile as though she was happy. As though she didn’t lie awake every night wishing she was somewhere else.
“I am sorry, uncle,” Saul said. “I am tired from the journey. Would it be possible to bathe and rest, and continue this later?”
“Sure, fine,” Maynard said.
He’d already lost interest in his nephew. He turned back into the drawing room and slumped down on his chair. He waved a hand. “Zita, go and show my nephew to his room.”
“Uncle, that won’t be necessary,” Saul said. “Surely a servant can—”
“This is my house!” Maynard snapped. “We do things my way. Zita.Now.”
Zita walked to the door with as much dignity as she was able. “This way, my lord,” she muttered, and left the room, Saul at her side.
She walked through the winding corridors of Bainmore Castle and kept her eyes on the ground. She even walked like a servant these days. It was almost impressive what one year of sustained verbal and physical abuse could do to a woman. She reached the rooms, and finally looked at Saul. “You can stay here, my lord,” she said. “If it is not to your pleasing, we can find you different rooms.”
“It’ll be fine,” Saul said. “You don’t have to call me lord. You’re far above me in station?”
Am I? So why does it feel like I’m smaller than a dormouse these days?
“As you say, Saul.”
“Can I use your name?”
“Sure.” She just wanted the conversation to end.
“Thank you, Zita.”
Zita made to leave. Saul cleared his throat. Zita could have kept walking, could have ignored him. She needed to get back to Maynard. If she wasn’t back soon, he would begin to get angry. And then angrier and angrier. Until he finally burst and did something awful and violent.But she turned. She was curious.
“He’s a brute,” Saul said. “I know it. You don’t have to say anything. I know it would be dangerous for you. But you should know that I know. He was a brute before you married him, and he’s still a brute. I am sorry, Zita. I wish there was something I could do. I am sure you were not always like this. I am sure you still remember happiness.”
Zita almost agreed with him. But this could easily have been a trick. Maynard could have put his nephew up to this, made him say it to trap her. She held her head up. The perfect picture of a proud Duchess defending her husband’s name. “My husband is not a brute,” she said, the words like acid on her lips. “He is a fine, upstanding man.”
A small smile touched Saul’s lips. “My mistake,” he said.
Zita turned and walked away from him as quickly as she could. His eyes were on her as she walked. She could feel them. But it didn’t make her uncomfortable.
It made her curious again.
*****
Saul had business to conduct in Wells. He had a stake in a silk business which had a base of operation in Wells, which was only a few miles from Bainmore Castle. In the mornings, he would ride to Wells and conduct his business. He would return just after luncheon, and then spend the rest of the day in the library. This routine kept for around two months. Two months in which the hell continued, in which Maynard used her, hit her, called her names. In which Maynard was, in fact, an awful, despicable man. Sometimes, Zita would imagine ways to end his life. Push him down the stairs. Lay a pillow over his old, drunken face. Feed him lemon cakes until his body exploded.
But she would never do any of this. She wasn’t a killer. She didn’t have it in her. But she didn’t need to do anything. It was April, and spring had just begun. The trees were turning green again and birds sat in the gardens and tweeted in the mornings. A servant came to Zita’s room and asked if she would join her husband. She couldn’t refuse this, even though she knew that at the end of the walk there would be some horror.
She was wrong. His Grace was dying.
He sat propped up in his bed, his fat tongue lolling from his mouth like a diseased dog. Sweat covered every part of him. The physician from Wells sat beside the bed, taking measurements, and then left the room to talk with Saul. Saul stood at the doorway, watching. Zita knew what she was expected to do. She was expected to let out a cry of anguish and run to her husband’s bedside.
The cry was convincing, she thought, and she ran to the side of the bed and slumped down in a chair. “Husband,” she said, hating the anguish in her voice. “Are you sick? Oh, please do not tell me you are sick!” Perhaps a tad melodramatic, Zita.
“They’ve poisoned me,” he coughed. His voice was a raspy whisper. “The bastards’ve poisoned me.”
“Who has, my love?”
My love. Never were falser words spoken.
“Them.” His fingers fidgeted. Zita got the sense that he wanted to wave a hand over the room. But he was too weak. “All of them. They’ve always been jealous of me.”
“Of course they have. You are an impressive man.”
An impressively evil man, and I’m not sad a bit that you’re dying.
He soiled himself shortly after. Zita fled the room and found the nurse standing outside. “My husband needs you,” she said. Saul was standing alone just outside the door. The nurse went into the room, and Saul closed the door after her. “Where is the physician?” she said.
“Gone,” Saul said. “There’s nothing he can do. He’s instructed the nurse how to make him most comfortable. He smoked too much. That’s what the physician thinks.”
“He did,” Zita confirmed. “He did everything in excess.”
“You don’t seem sad,” Saul said. He moved closer to her.
“Oh, I am.”
No, I’m not. In fact, it’s taking a substantial amount of effort to keep a smile from my face.
Saul
glanced at the door, and then leaned close to Zita. “Walk with me, Zita,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I want to speak to you.The real you.Where people cannot overhear us.”
“I am sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” Saul said. “And you know that I know. Please, let’s not play this game.”
Zita looked into his eyes and tried to gauge what sort of man he was. What kind of game he was playing. Perhaps Maynard had asked him, even on his deathbed, to make sure that Zita was faithful. Perhaps this was a trap. But there was another consideration. Zita hungered for human companionship that wasn’t Maynard’s. She couldn’t exactly talk to the servants. She nodded briefly. She would go on a short walk. But nothing more.
Saul led her through the corridors to the library. He closed the door behind them. Zita sat on one of the chairs at the desk, and Saul took the other. He leaned his forearms on his elbows. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry?” Zita raised her eyebrows. “What do you have to be sorry about?”
“I am sorry that we live in this world. That so often our hands are tied. I am sorry that you had to marry a depraved old man. And I am sorry that I couldn’t do anything about it. I’m sorry for it all, Zita.”
“You hardly know me, sir,” Zita said. “Don’t you think you’re being presumptuous?”
“Tell me to leave, then,” Saul said. “Look inside yourself. And if you want me to leave, I will. No questions. I will leave the Castle this very night. My business in Wells was concluded two weeks ago, anyway.”
“Then why are you still here?” Zita asked.
He looked at the ground. His hands worried each other. A brush crept into his cheeks. “I was trying to get the courage to do this, what I’m doing right now. Speak to you, that is. Tell you that I understand. That you’re not alone. Uncle was a horrid man. It’s okay, nowhere else is here but us.”
Zita wanted to believe him, wanted to believe that whatever she said would be just between them, but it was difficult. This past year had taught her to become an amazing actress; it wasn’t simple to cast aside her role. She took a deep breath. “You could be lying,” she said simply. “You could be an agent of my husband’s. He is dying, and he wants to reassure himself that I love him, so he has sent you to find out.” She swallowed, and made herself go on. “I love him very much. He is the best man I have ever met.”
Saul shook his head slowly. “I hate the man, too, Zita,” he said. “You don’t have to lie to me.”
“I won’t say that I’m lying.”
“That’s not an outright denial.”
“No, I suppose it’s not.”
“Then we are getting somewhere.”
“If you say so.” She paused, and took a deep breath. This man made her nervous. But not in the same way that Maynard made her nervous. There was no fear in it. There was excitement. “Why do you care, anyway? Why do you care if I do or do not love my husband?”
“Because you deserve better,” he said. “Every woman who marries a wretched, abusive man deserves better. And it is a sign of the shame of England that so few of you ever have the chance to experience anything other than a man’s wont.”
“Very pretty words,” Zita said. “But you will be gone soon. And I will still be here.”
“Oh, no,” Saul said. “I am not leaving until …” He smiled to himself. It was a faraway smile, as though he was looking at something in the distance.
“Until what?”
He turned the smile on her. “Until I know the real you.Meet me here, on the morrow.”
“That would look incredibly bad,” Zita said. “I would have to attend to my husband.”
“Attend to him, then,” the young, handsome man said. “And then come here. I know you must keep up appearances, but do you not deserve a little relief?”
“Who says you are a relief?”
“Your smile.”
Zita had not even known she was smiling. Only once he said it, she felt the smile on her face. It felt strange, a twisting of the lips which she hadn’t felt for so long. And there was a warm glow in her stomach, and a vibrant energy moving around her body. It took her a moment to identify it as fun.
She rose to her feet. “I will be here on the morrow,” she said, “after luncheon, after I have attended to my husband.”
Saul nodded. “I will see you there, Zita.”
“Very well, Saul. I will see you there.”
That night, as she lay awake, she didn’t think of Maynard or her sadness. She thought, instead, of Saul’s handsome face, his energetic voice, his strong body, his square jaw. She thought about his ocean-blue eyes and the way in which he had looked at her. Like she was a real person.And not just something to be ordered around.Like she really mattered.
She kept telling herself that it could be a trick, but became harder and harder to believe. And when she finally slept, she dreamt of Saul.
*****
Thankfully, Maynard was so ill that he was unable to talk, or touch her, or do any of the horrid things which normally brought him pleasure. Zita supposed it was wrong of a wife to be so pleased with her husband’s ill health. But she was pleased. And she wouldn’t denyherself that. Seeing this evil torturer on his back, moaning in pain, unable to move or speak, brought her relief. She knew she should feel bad about it, should question herself, but she didn’t. She didn’t feel the need to. This man had hurt her; let him suffer.
She met with Saul after she attended her husband in the morning. She met him fifteen times over the next couple of weeks. They fell into a sort of routine. She would attend to her husband, whose health weakened by the day, and then she would walk through the Castle to the library, where Saul awaited her.
This day, the sixteenth, he was on his feet when she walked through the door. She nodded to him and together they sat. Sometimes they didn’t say anything for several minutes. It wasn’t needed. They were just two people, sitting together. Sitting with him, she found, brought her a great deal of peace. When they did speak, it was about everything. Zita told him of her childhood, when she and her sisters would hide in the dining room and giggle madly when Father stopped around the house trying to find them. She told him of her love of painting, and how she had had to quit whenshe came here. Maynard would not tolerate that. He told her about his time in the war in France, and the horrors he had endured, and his relief when he had finally come home.
Today, he rested his chin on his knuckles. “You still don’t trust me,” he sighed. “You still think this could all be a plot to trick you.”
Zita wanted to deny this, but she knew that Saul would see through her. They had become so close that he would definitely see through her. She didn’t bother denying it. Just nodded her head slightly. “I have become cautious, it is true,” she said. “I cannot stop now.”
“But I am not your enemy,” Saul whispered. He regarded her for a few moments, his eyes brimming with emotion. “I am your friend, Zita. I want to be your friend. Maybe even—” He stopped, and shook his head. “Let me tell you a story from when I was young.”
“Okay,” Zita said. “Tell me.”
He nodded. “I was around nine years when I first met uncle Maynard. He was a grotesque man, even back then. He talked to my sister and her husband – who was just a lord – like they were peasants. He made sordid comments about bedroom matters. He laughed too loud and he used the house as though it were his own. He even tried to touch Bessie, our beloved maidservant who had been with the family since before I was born. I learnt all of this later. At the time, I just saw a big, scary man.
“I was in the gardens, playing with some children – I forget who – when he came out and slapped me across the face.”
Zita gasped.
Saul nodded and went on. “I didn’t k
now why he did it. He just walked up, slapped me, and then walked away like it was the most normal thing one could do. I cried, of course. But when I told my mother, she said: ‘He is a Duke, sweet. Just try and stay out of his way.’ He was a Duke, and so he was allowed to his children. It was only years later that I realize why he did it. It wasn’t because of anything I’d done. It was because he enjoyed it, plain and simple. He liked inflicting pain.”
Saul watched her and waited. All their conversations, their meetings, over the past two weeks led to this. She could tell the truth, or she could retreat into herself. The ever-present fear was still there; it was always there. She couldn’t ignore it. She could never ignore it. But she could run away from it, as she always did. And hide it. And pretend to the outside world that she was happy, a regular English wife, as she had been doing for over a year.
But something in Saul’s face stopped that. It was so open, honest, and shrewd. She knew, by looking at him, that he had seen through her long ago, and any lies she told would be purposeless. He already knew the truth. He already knew that she was unhappy. There was no point in pretending otherwise.
She sighed. It was a risk, but it was a risk, she discovered, that she wanted to take.
“I hate him,” she said. The words were oddly calm. She had imagined saying these words before, and they had been fierce and full of rage. But they were placid. They could have been discussing the weather. “I hate him, Saul. I have always hated him. He treats me worse than a dog. He hits me, calls me brutal names, and—and other things.” The degradation whirred around her mind. The humiliation.The lack of personhood.“To tell you the truth, I was glad when he fell ill. I hope he dies. I know that is a horrible thing to say, but it’s true. That’s how much he’s hurt me.”
She waited and watched, as he, moments ago, had waited and watched her. He could laugh at her, reveal himself as Maynard’s ally. He could go to her husband right now and tell the man all of this. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he opened his arms.
“Come here,” he said.
Romance: Detective Romance: A Vicious Affair (Victorian Regency Intrigue 19th England Romance) (Historical Mystery Detective Romance) Page 40
