It had been hours before Aidan and Sophia had been able to escape into his carriage.
“Well, your aunt is quite a woman.”
Sophia remained quiet.
“I thought I had seen the most inventive of matchmaking mamas, but your aunt seems quite ruthless. You never told her about your encounter with my brother in the forest?”
“We agreed no good could come of it. Remember?” Her voice was lifeless again, as distant as the day they’d met about the guardianship. The advance of the afternoon disappeared in the dark between them.
He drew her to his side and placed an arm around her shoulders. “I remember. We had only just met at the fair, and I had been unpardonably forward. In the forest, I was afraid you wouldn’t trust me, and I wouldn’t be able to get you away from him unmolested.”
“I thought you were kind, up until the moment you told your brother that I was ‘a pitiful country virgin who would make any reasonable man miserable for the whole of his life.’”
“I said that?”
“You did, but I understood that you needed him to find me unappealing. It’s important that you know: I never knew our time together had been part of some plan. After you left, it was clear she intended to marry me off, but I never knew before. I only knew she’d manipulated the night with Tom.”
“Tell me what happened that evening, Sophia. How did my fiancée”—Aidan bit the word—“and my best friend come to be in a compromising position. It’s only fair to tell me.”
“Yes, it is only fair.” Her voice sounded far away, her face turned to the carriage window, looking out in the dark.
“Before you left, we agreed it wasn’t necessary to announce our engagement, that I could wait for you because my uncle wouldn’t force me to marry against my will. My aunt was furious that you had left without a declaration and even more adamant I should marry soon. Phineas brought a factory owner from Manchester—a Mr. Mortimer—to visit. He was fifty or older, with wooden teeth, and the smell of liquor on his breath. I thought if I avoided him, he would turn his attentions to some more amenable girl, but my aunt encouraged him over my objections. He tried more than once to force a kiss or an embrace. So when I found he would be at the festival ball, I determined to remain home, even though the servants all had permission to attend. My aunt was eager to leave me behind.”
Sophia paused, lost in her memory, and Aidan waited until she picked up the thread of her story once more.
“Tom had planned to leave the next day. When he found I’d stayed at home, he sought out my aunt to send me his farewell. Instead, he overheard my aunt giving Mortimer instructions on how to gain me as a bride that very night. Annabella had left the conservatory doors open and given him directions to my room. She even gave him a key in case I’d locked my door, saying I had been playing coy to win his affections. It would be best, she said, if we were ‘discovered’ in my bedroom. She told Mortimer to use whatever encouragement he thought necessary, and Mortimer called for his horse.”
“Tom would have been horrified.”
“He was. He had no time to find my uncle, but his horse had already been called, and he knew the shortcut through the fields. Even so, he had only minutes before Mortimer would arrive. Tom slipped through the open conservatory door and followed my aunt’s directions to my room. Tom had already realized that, without servants in the house, he might be able to thwart my aunt’s plan only by offering to marry me himself. But he didn’t tell me that part. Instead, he told me to run to the mews and take his horse to Annie’s; I grabbed a cloak and ran to the front hall. But it was too late; we could hear Mortimer in the conservatory. We had just enough time to slip into the drawing room before he entered the main hall and took the stairs to my room. Unlocking the front hall door was too risky, so we thought to escape through the open conservatory door. But Mortimer had left his footman standing guard on the path. We could hear Mortimer return to the main floor, opening door after door looking for me. And Tom told me I had to marry him, that there was no way I wouldn’t be ruined, and I couldn’t risk that Mortimer would still want to marry me. Tom promised to find you before the wedding and to help us run away, you and I. He said he wouldn’t mind my jilting him for you. We could hear Mortimer drawing closer and closer. I thought of his clammy hands and his putrid breath, then I looked at Tom’s kind face, and I agreed.”
“Then your aunt and uncle arrived home.”
“Not quite. Tom saw the door to the conservatory opening and pulled me into an embrace that must have looked convincing. Mortimer pulled us apart, flung his gloves in Tom’s face, and challenged him to a duel. That’s when my aunt and uncle returned home, to Mortimer decrying Tom as a rake and a ruiner of young women.”
“How did Mortimer explain his presence?”
“He had followed Tom, seen him let himself into the house. My aunt, not wishing to be discovered, railed that I was a light-skirt ruined by lust. My uncle looked distressed. But Tom declared that he was the happiest of men because I had agreed to be his bride. Since I was wearing my cloak, we appeared to be eloping.”
“What did your uncle do?”
“He asked me if Tom was telling the truth, and I said yes. Then he embraced us, gave us his blessing. He thanked Mortimer for his concern, told him there was no cause for a duel since Tom was to be his ward’s husband, and escorted Mortimer to the door. My uncle told Tom to meet him in the morning to discuss terms and to let himself out the way he had come in. Then he took my aunt’s arm and escorted her from the room.”
“What happened then?” Aidan kept his voice softly encouraging, just enough to prompt the story to continue. He’d seen men like this in the war, telling of the loss of a battle or a friend, drifting to a place where they relived the memories as they told them. For years, he’d wanted her confession, and this might be the only time he would hear it.
“Tom and I went to the drawing room to plan. We wrote letters to your father, hoping to find you. The next morning Tom and my uncle agreed on terms; my settlement was more than generous. Tom stayed until the end of the week, convincing people that ours was a love match: he met me after church with flowers; he bought me ribbons in the village; he announced to all that he was the luckiest man alive. It was a fairy tale: the orphan ward beloved by the rich lord of a local estate.”
“Why did Tom leave at the end of the week? Not on business, I assume.”
“No, he went to London for a special license and to search for you. But he could find no news.” Her words if anything sounded more rote. “I realized that though we had loved each other, it wasn’t meant to be.”
Aidan felt a pang of conscience. Tom hadn’t found him because he hadn’t wanted to be found. But he would make it up to her. “It was meant to be. Your aunt interfered where she shouldn’t have.”
“Had I realized her intentions, I wouldn’t have stayed home that night.... But I didn’t know, and then it was too late.” She began to cry, and he pulled her head to his shoulder and held her . . . as he had when they had hidden from his brother.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Back at Tom’s manor house, Aidan escorted an emotionally exhausted Sophia to her room, then, with a gentle embrace, took his leave. He had much to consider after Annabella’s revelations at the dinner table and Sophia’s subsequent confessions. He carried a glass of claret to a chair near a lamp in his room. When he’d returned from the attic, hot with passion and anticipating the beginning of their affair, he’d hidden the packet of Tom’s papers. Retrieving them, he laid them on the table next to a folded packet made of well-worn oilcloth.
At first he’d wished to be present when Sophia experienced emotional moments, like going through her husband’s things, in order to spark a liaison. He’d intended to use her unspent passion for him and any unresolved feelings for her husband to his advantage. He had cared little how distasteful his plan might be, for he had not planned to build a relationship built on real attachment.
But somehow over the last
weeks, his revenge had lost focus. Over the years, having no interaction with Sophia, he had found it easy to write the story of their past as he wished. In it, just as his father had predicted, Sophia was a fortune-hunting orphan, who used her beauty and wit to steal his heart, then abandoned him when another richer lord expressed his interest. Aidan had ignored anything that contradicted the story he’d created.
But now he began to see the holes in his narrative. If she had been a fortune hunter, surely she would have wished to keep her engagement to a poor soldier a secret, leaving her possibilities open for another better match. But he had been the one who wished to keep quiet, postponing the conflict with his father until after he’d received his annuity.
Even more striking, somehow in his anger, Aidan had forgotten the depth of her intelligence and the tenderness of her heart. He’d never imagined love might have played a part in her marriage. Then, to see her still so affected by Tom’s loss. To watch her draw herself together and muster the strength to look him in the eye and pretend she was unmoved . . . It had forced Aidan to reconsider their youthful liaison. Perhaps what he had seen as mutual passion had been no more than an indiscretion for her. She had been an innocent, of that he was certain, and he suddenly had to consider she might not have been fully aware of the route their passion would take. But then they had both been innocents.
All these years he had thought himself foolish to have trusted her, to have believed she could be faithful despite his absence. He unfolded the oilcloth. Inside lay the wooden wafer on which Sophia had sketched herself in pen and ink. Her face was little damaged by time, though the wafer’s edges had smoothed to a fine finish. He’d carried her portrait with him through the wars, unable to leave it at home, unable to let it go. In the hidden pocket in the lining of his boots, she’d gone everywhere with him. He’d unwrapped her portrait hundreds of times over the years, to remind himself of her faithlessness. But now, he looked at the portrait anew. He saw once more the generosity of her smile, the warmth of her eyes.
Perhaps he had been foolish not to have trusted her more, the woman he believed understood his sense of duty. Even if he hadn’t trusted Sophia, why hadn’t he trusted Tom, a man he’d known would never betray him?
He knew the answer: Aaron. The eldest son, the bully. Even without being duke, Aaron had almost run the estate into the ground. When Aaron died, as far as Aidan knew, only their father had grieved. Judith and Benjamin had each protected their younger brothers in their own way, but Aidan had been the one who openly stood up to Aaron and the one most frequently punished for it. Aaron had taught Aidan that trust was foolish and that attachment only led to pain. A favorite fishing pole, a bird’s nest filled with eggs, an affectionate barn cat, nothing was safe if Aaron wanted it or wanted to destroy it.
Their father had been a negligent accomplice in Aaron’s terrors. Married twice, he had cared little for the women who bore his children, and more for the wealth or power they brought to the union. In that way he was a man of his generation and class, and the women he married had no expectations he would be otherwise. And perhaps Aidan’s upbringing had made it easier to believe that any man of greater fortune or position would just as easily suit Sophia’s fancy, that she would jilt him the first chance she got if the money and the title were better.
And yet, save for marrying Tom, Sophia had never deceived him. If he had read her letter, rather than torn it unopened into small bits and watched them sink into the bay, perhaps he would have saved himself the torment of the last decade.
He turned to the packet, ten letters in Italian. Would these prove or disprove Sophia’s story or would they be about something else entirely? All he knew was that Tom had hidden them where only he or Aidan could find them.
The letters were in chronological order, the earliest dating back some eleven years. He looked over them as a group first. Only two were in Tom’s hand, and both of those late in the correspondence. The others were in the same ornate Italian script. Of those only the first—a brief but effusive thanks for a basket of food, medicines, and money—was addressed to “your lordship.” The next three letters offered no salutation, but they indicated an intimacy between the Italian letter writer—who signed only with the initials FB—and the letter’s recipient. Aidan skimmed them quickly: sorrow at their separation; despair at the idea of marriage to another; some warm passages in which the writer anticipated a joyful and happy reunion; requests to remember his obligations to her; thanks for various presents, jewels, dresses; her delight at his gift of a small house at the edge of the city with a view of the sea. Aidan stopped reading, stunned. Tom had had a mistress almost from the moment they arrived in Naples. It was no different from the behavior of other men of his class, but Aidan had thought Tom better than other men.
He felt angry on Sophia’s behalf. Tom had bought his mistress jewels, but Sophia had none. Tom had bought his mistress dresses, dozens every year, but Aidan had seen Sophia’s wardrobe, and unless she had left the majority of her finery in Italy, she owned few gowns suitable to her rank.
Had Tom neglected his wife so obviously—and had Sophia known? He thought of her tearful moment holding Tom’s jacket. No, she couldn’t have known. Or had she loved her husband only to find he cared little for her? He thought again of Tom’s letter instituting the guardianship; his old friend offered more concern for his son than for his widow. Had Tom regretted marrying Sophia? Did he find his unselfish act had come at too great a cost?
Once more Aidan could see Tom’s hand reaching out to him from beyond the grave. Yet he still had no idea how to appease his old friend’s spirit.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In the morning, a box arrived by footman from her uncle. Sophia opened it to find a series of almanacs, one for each year from 1774 to 1798, and all filled with her mother’s fine, precise hand, along with a small set of books tied in twine. On top was a note, sealed with her uncle’s signet. She opened it carefully, not tearing the paper under the wax seal:
My dearest child,
These are your mother’s journals, kept until her death. Your father wanted you to have them on your twelfth birthday, the age your mother was when she began writing them. But in my grief for my dear Clara, I forgot his wishes, and by the time I remembered I had remarried, and Annabella declared them inappropriate for a young girl. Not realizing my wife’s hatred of bluestockings or how she tormented you for being your mother’s child, I acquiesced. I realized those things too late, after you were engaged to marry a fine man, though I fear not the man you would have chosen.
I regret few things, but one most deeply: that I married a woman who could not love you.
I had forgotten these books until last night, when you walked into the room with your mother’s beauty, intelligence, and grace. My brother had no greater wish than that you would grow up like her: a woman of conviction and passion who feared little and loved deeply.
If you ever wish to talk about your parents privately, I will arrange it.
Your ever most affectionate uncle,
Lawrence
It was too much, she thought. All the things that had come to light in the last day: that her uncle hadn’t sanctioned Annabella’s behavior; that he had valued her mother. Perhaps if Sophia had known, she could have confided in him.
Aidan was completing some tasks Seth had left him, giving her several hours to herself. She took the box and retreated to the depths of a hedged maze where a giant copper merman, green from oxidation, rose in the middle of a sunken pond.
She began at the beginning. The first volumes were more exercise books than diaries, and Constance recorded her responses to and observations of her schoolwork in the margins. Sophia began to trace the development of her mother’s mind and ideas. It was strange in some ways to be reading her mother’s words from when Constance was not much older than Ian, and Sophia was often moved to offer advice or sympathy. She wished she had received the books as her father had intended, when she was herself the age o
f her mother.
Quickly however, the content shifted, and Constance came alive. Clever and witty, she was used to being the center of an intellectual if aloof father’s attention. Her comments on the local society and on her first visit to London had been incisive, but touchingly naïve. She’d had a brief attraction at sixteen to a soldier bound for the American wars. She was never presented at court, never danced at Almack’s; but she stole away to the dark alleys of Vauxhall with a young man and had her first kiss. She deemed it a great disappointment.
Through her father’s connections, she became a teacher at a boarding school in Hampstead. Her charges were moneyed: daughters of wealthy merchants, the unacknowledged—but cared for—daughters of various nobles, and American heiresses sent to England for culture. Most of her students were well aware of their precarious positions in society—all knowing they needed good matches to stabilize their fortunes and knowing equally well that their good looks and other charms, more than their education, would ensure their future happiness.
Constance, unmarried, had grown discontented. She looked at the idea of marriage anew, wondering if that were the path her heart would take, with its responsibilities for house and home. She saw no other choice she could make as a woman, or as a woman of her class.
Then something happened, something that troubled Constance and transformed her. She’d gone to a market to buy ribbon and paper. There a girl, not older than fifteen, was drawn by a halter into the square, as if she were cattle. The man who led her was in his sixties, apparently her husband. A man from the docks, a sailor, stood to the side. The girl looked at the sailor imploringly, and an old woman spat “adulteress” on the ground. The bidding began, the men in the crowd jostling and calling out slurs. Once the men took her lover’s measure, they found it amusing to raise the price. Eventually the sailor stopped bidding, unable to buy her, and turned away, leaving her in the square. One of the drunken men won the day, gaining a “housekeeper for life,” he said, for six shillings.
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