Georgia forced herself to look into the woman’s eyes.
‘But have you inherited anything else from your mother?’
‘I – I hope so,’ said Georgia, completely thrown.
‘Well said,’ smiled Lady Carlyle. ‘We could do with a few more children who wish to follow their parents’ example, who understand the importance of family.’
Georgia looked over at Estella, hoping for some sort of sign to explain this insane turn of events, but her mother just looked away and took a sip of her drink.
‘Your mother was just telling us about the tragedy at your house in Devon. Terribly shocking, I imagine.’
‘Yes, yes it was,’ said Georgia.
‘And I understand it began in your art studio, Mrs Hamilton? Most distressing. You must let us know if we can do anything to help. Tell me more about your work. Perhaps we have a friend who could loan you some studio space.’
Her mother’s eyes started to sparkle.
Oh no, thought Georgia. Don’t tell her about the abstracts, please don’t tell her about the abstracts.
‘It’s fine art, portraiture mostly. Some landscapes, but I feel my forte is in the human form.’
Perhaps sensing some sort of impropriety at the mention of the human body, Lady Carlyle pursed her lips.
‘Portraiture? Might I have seen anything?’
‘I have recently completed a commission for the Earl of Dartington.’
Lady Carlyle’s face broke into a smile.
‘Indeed? Oh, I know Hugo very well. Was it a family portrait?’
‘No, just Lady Linley actually. She sat in the Long Gallery, do you know it?’
‘Oh, very well. I have spent many a pleasant hour gazing out towards the Lizard. How is dear Abigail?’
Georgia watched in amazed silence as her mother and Edward’s began to bond, discussing the various country houses and London retreats of England’s gentry. Estella’s hitherto scandalous career being at the beck and call of wealthy men was instantly recast. Instead of a subversive bohemian, she was simply a well-connected and seemingly much-in-demand artist to the upper echelons of society, her familiarity with the bedrooms of various earls and lords no longer suspect or grubby. And Estella played her part brilliantly: self-deprecating, knowledgeable, witty, she was the perfect balance of well bred and interesting, the sort of artist it was safe to invite to dinner. Georgia sat quietly, offering up a prayer of thanks to whatever deity had seen fit to turn Estella Hamilton into Thomas Gainsborough for the night. Perhaps they might pull this off after all.
‘Well, I’m flabbergasted that Edward never informed me of your family’s artistic side, Georgia,’ said Lady Carlyle. ‘I had no idea your mother was so accomplished. Perhaps we could call upon your talents sometime soon, Mrs Hamilton? I have been meaning to commit my two boys to oil before they run off and start families of their own.’ She smiled over at Georgia. ‘I wonder if we might . . .’
Slowly the smile slipped from Lady Carlyle’s face, to be replaced by a look of disbelief, then horror.
‘Oh my word,’ she whispered, her hand flying to her throat.
Georgia turned and gasped. Standing in the doorway of the French windows that led to the gardens was Clarissa, her dress torn from one shoulder. There was a cut over her eye and scratches and dirt along one side of her face.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, then slid to the floor.
Suddenly the room exploded into pandemonium. Estella ran across to Clarissa’s side, crying for help, Lady Carlyle jumped to her feet and began calling for footmen and butlers, and Peter, Sybil and Lord Carlyle appeared from the other room demanding to know what had happened.
‘Will everyone please stop shouting?’ said Estella, her voice cutting through the hubbub. With Peter’s help she carried Clarissa to a sofa and a maid brought a blanket to drape over her bare legs.
‘What happened, darling?’ said Estella, kneeling down next to the girl.
Clarissa’s face was pale and she distractedly pushed a shaking hand through her hair. Georgia could see that her knuckles were scraped and her nails torn.
‘I – I don’t want to cause a fuss,’ she stuttered. ‘I’ll be all right in a moment.’
‘Tell your aunt, Clarissa,’ said Lady Carlyle with authority in her voice. ‘This is clearly a serious matter and we need to get to the bottom of it quickly.’
Clarissa looked up at her like a frightened rabbit, her eyes darting back and forth. The confident, unflappable girl from the walled garden had gone – she looked terrified.
‘Answer us!’ shouted Sybil. ‘Who did this to you?’
Estella silenced her with a glare, then turned back to the girl, gently touching her hand.
‘Who was it, darling? You can tell us.’
Georgia was shocked to see that Clarissa was looking directly at her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘But it was Edward. He came to the swimming pool and started touching me. I tried to push him away, but he forced me into the hut . . .’ She started to sob.
The room erupted again, and Georgia found she had added her own voice to the noise.
‘How dare you say such a wicked thing about him,’ she shouted. ‘Edward would never do any such thing.’ She stepped over to Clarissa, grabbing her wrist. ‘Take it back!’ she yelled. ‘Take it back!’
‘He raped me,’ roared Clarissa. ‘How can you stick up for him when he did that to me?’
Sybil looked as though she was about to faint.
‘We had better call the police,’ said Peter, his voice a low, menacing growl. Georgia had never seen him look more angry.
‘I think we should find out what’s gone on first,’ said Lord Carlyle. He was a commanding presence in the room, but as Georgia looked at him, she could tell that he was sick with worry.
‘Let’s call the doctor first,’ said Lady Carlyle, her voice barely audible.
Everyone agreed that that was the first thing to do.
Georgia could barely remember what had happened next. Everything was sucked up into a hole of accusation and disbelief. The rest of the party guests were quickly and discreetly escorted off the property in such a way that it was impossible for any of them to know anything of the true drama that was going on. Georgia ran around the grounds looking for Edward, but before she could find him, she spotted him being bundled into a distant wing of the house by some officious-looking gentlemen. Her mother relayed to her the version of events that Clarissa had told her parents and the Carlyles, and Georgia had sobbed all the way through it.
Apparently Clarissa had been in the walled garden, drying off from her swim, when Edward had come in looking for Georgia. Clarissa had been wrapped in a towel and he had come over to talk. He’d stroked her chin and told her she was beautiful. He’d asked her to drop the towel, and when she had refused, he had turned rough.
Georgia had screamed that it was all a lie. She had raced to find Clarissa, to plead with her to tell the truth, but she was being examined by two doctors – one who had been called by the Carlyles, the other by Peter Hamilton.
The final thing she remembered of the evening was hearing a car draw up to the front of the house and a familiar voice pierce the still night air.
‘Georgia, I did nothing,’ roared Edward as she ran to the window and watched him being pushed into a waiting car.
It was the last time she ever saw him.
28 December 2012
Amy’s cup of tea had gone cold. She gazed at Georgia in amazement as the old woman finished her tale.
‘What do you mean, it was the last time you ever saw him? Did he get put in jail?’
‘He was sent to Singapore almost immediately afterwards, like some hideous upper-crust version of transportation.’
Amy could see the old woman’s lip trembling as she told her what had happened next.
‘He contracted typhoid out there – I have no idea how, or why he didn’t respond to treatment. But he died within nine months of the par
ty. They flew his body back to England. I only found out about his death after the funeral.’
She looked down at her hands.
‘I was nineteen years old and I had lost the love of my life.’
The simplicity of her words made Amy catch her breath. She stood up and went to sit beside Georgia, putting her hand gently over hers.
‘He was buried in the grounds of the village church close to Stapleford, their family home,’ said Georgia, looking up, her eyes glistening. ‘I go to see him every year. Not on his birthday or Christmas – I’ve always worried I might run into one of them, although I doubt they ever go.’
‘Who? I mean, who are you worried about running into?’ asked Amy.
‘Oh, Clarissa or Christopher. The Happy Couple.’ She smiled, but her face was stiff.
‘The Happy Couple?’ frowned Amy.
‘Oh, they were married, didn’t I say? My cousin and Edward’s brother. In fact, you could say that Clarissa got everything she wanted.’
Amy didn’t know what to think. It had been a horrible story, a terrible way to treat someone in your family – and she could certainly see why Georgia hadn’t wanted anything to do with the Hamilton or Carlyle clan after that. All the same, she wondered if her bitterness – and the passage of the years – had begun to cloud everything.
‘I know it’s difficult to accept what happened, but . . .’
Georgia looked at Amy, her chin raised defiantly.
‘But what?’
‘Well, isn’t it about time you let it go?’
‘Let it go?’ said Georgia in disbelief. ‘But she was evil. Clarissa was evil.’
‘Evil?’
‘She lied, don’t you see that?’ said Georgia. ‘She lied about everything. Edward didn’t rape her.’
‘So you still don’t believe her story? None of it?’ asked Amy carefully. She didn’t want to upset her friend any more than she had to, but at the same time, it wouldn’t do Georgia any good to see out the rest of her days being so angry, lonely and estranged.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Georgia said quietly. ‘Which is easier to believe: that a young man gets drunk and sexually assaults a woman at a party, or that a woman is prepared to destroy a man’s life by claiming that he did?’
Amy didn’t know the answer to that one. Both crimes were heinous.
‘Well, I never accepted Clarissa’s story for one minute, and I never will,’ said Georgia, her voice fraught with emotion. ‘I never believed that Edward did what she said – no, it’s more than that. I always knew deep in my heart that he would never have done that. And he swore to me in his letters that nothing had ever happened with Clarissa. He said that yes, he had come into the walled garden looking for me, but he had gone straight out again when I wasn’t there.’
‘Then why did she do it? Even if she was that wicked, why do it? The scandal would have had an impact on her life, her prospects of marriage.’
‘You are absolutely right.’ Georgia looked at Amy with a new respect. ‘Clarissa didn’t mean for Edward to die. I think her plan spiralled out of control,’ she said, her mouth fixing like concrete.
She settled her hands back in her lap and took a deep breath.
‘Like you, I couldn’t fit the pieces together at first. And remember, this was the fifties; rape was much more difficult to prove – and to disprove. There was certainly no DNA testing. It really did come down to one person’s word against another’s.’
‘So no one was ever sure if Clarissa was raped?’
‘Exactly. This wasn’t about whether she consented to sex with Edward; it was whether she had sex with him all.’
‘Wasn’t she examined?’
‘By a doctor, yes. But again, back then, they simply confirmed that she’d had sex. Even that was hard to prove because she had been swimming. The doctor examined Edward too, and confirmed that he had recently ejaculated, but Edward confessed that he’d recently had sex with me.’
‘But if she hadn’t had sex – of any kind – with Edward, who had she had sex with?’ asked Amy.
Georgia sighed.
‘About a year after Edward’s death, I heard that Clarissa was dating Christopher Carlyle. I immediately thought that was strange. I mean, her story was that she had been horribly traumatised by Christopher’s brother – would you want a daily reminder of what had happened? Would you want someone who looked like him to come anywhere near you?’
There was a definite logic to that, thought Amy. If it was her, she certainly wouldn’t, but again, it wasn’t proof.
‘Maybe they just fell in love,’ she said.
‘Maybe,’ replied Georgia without conviction. ‘Either way, within another six months they had announced their engagement. I had just gone up to Cambridge, and one day in the quad I met an old friend of Christopher’s. He told me that he’d seen Clarissa and Christopher together in the summer of ’58. They definitely knew each other then. I remember seeing them together at my birthday dance.’
‘What does that prove? Surely they would have bumped into each other – they were on the same social circuit, weren’t they?’
Georgia shook her head.
‘Christopher had confided in him – he and Clarissa were an item. So I think the person Clarissa had sex with that night was Christopher, not Edward.’
‘But why on earth would she accuse Edward of something so awful?’
‘Envy? Greed? Spite?’ she said softly. ‘I’ve been asking myself that question for the past fifty years.’
She fell silent for a moment, seeming to gather her thoughts.
‘Whatever the reason, Clarissa got what she wanted: a good marriage. A great one, in fact. The Carlyles were one of the most prominent families in England at the time. When I found out about Clarissa and Christopher, I did a bit of digging around. I spoke to a few debs who had done the Season the same year as Clarissa. It turns out she’d been after Edward Carlyle – “set her cap” at him, as we used to say. I mean, to be honest, Edward was the catch of the Season – rich, titled, handsome and clever, he was the one all the girls were after. But according to her friends, Clarissa was obsessed.’
Amy shook her head.
‘But she didn’t get Edward, did she?’
‘No, but Christopher was the next best thing. With Edward out of the way, Christopher moved up the pecking order to elder son. And as Christopher’s wife, she became chatelaine of that great house: a real lady. Although only in name, of course, not in the ways that count.’
Amy tried to take it all in. It was a big accusation that Georgia was making; no wonder it had caused such a bitter rift in the family, and no wonder Will had said they didn’t want any whisper of the scandal getting out.
‘Did you tell them what you thought had happened?’
Georgia nodded.
‘Of course, how could I keep that to myself? My family thought I was wicked for even thinking such a thing. I was an outcast. Even my mother thought I was deluded. She knew how much I wanted Edward to be innocent, but like everyone else, she believed Clarissa. Why wouldn’t she? So my relationship with Estella never really recovered either.’
‘What happened to you? What did you do?’
The old woman shrugged.
‘What could I do? I left home, got a job. At night I studied. I lost myself in a world of books and kept thinking about university and how Edward said I’d be happy there, how I would flourish. I took the Cambridge exam and got in. I didn’t apply to Oxford. It would have been too painful for me. I went up to Newnham College and I made a new life for myself.’
She spread her hands.
‘And here we are.’
Amy looked around the apartment. When she had first come here, it had looked so impressive, all the art, all the books, the wonderful view. Now she could see it as Georgia must have done from time to time down the years: big and lonely, a consolation prize at best, a pale substitute for the grand house and the happy life she should have had – the life she sho
uld have shared with the man she adored.
‘Have you seen Clarissa since?’ she asked.
Georgia shook her head.
‘There was one occasion when I saw her on Regent Street. I know she saw me too, but she looked the other way. She knows what she’s guilty of, so it suits her to have deluded cousin Georgia wiped from her life. She doesn’t want a reminder of what she did. A reminder of the guilt, the shame, the fear.’
‘Fear?’
Georgia gave a low snort.
‘The fear of getting found out, fear of scandal.’
She was crying now, tears running down her pale, elegant face.
‘Edward proposed to me that night, he put a ring on my finger. We talked about our wedding day, about our honeymoon, the life we were going to have in New York. Does that sound like a man about to commit a terrible crime?’
Amy shook her head slowly.
Georgia beat her frail hand against her chest.
‘He did not lie, Amy, he just didn’t. He wouldn’t have done that. Not then, not any night. And if you don’t believe that, then you don’t believe in love.’
She bowed her head, her shoulders heaving as she sobbed. Amy moved closer to her on the sofa and put an arm around her.
‘So now you know,’ sniffed Georgia. ‘That’s why I am reduced to advertising for a companion in a magazine. That’s why I have no desire to spend Christmas with my family.’
‘And it’s why you’ve never been to New York.’
‘I think I was the only senior person in the publishing industry who had never been,’ she said with a sorry laugh. ‘But I could never go to the one place I could have been truly happy.’
‘Oh Georgia, I’m so sorry.’
The old woman took a deep breath and pushed herself up.
‘Well, let’s not spoil the day. It’s all water under the bridge anyway. Nothing’s going to bring Edward back, however many tears are shed.’
She bent to pick up the jug of flowers.
‘These are beautiful, you know,’ she said. ‘I am going to put them by the window.’
She took two steps, then seemed to stagger and pitch forward, one hand reaching for the window ledge.
The Proposal Page 26
