by Mary Balogh
Frederick laughed rather harshly. “The incurably honest Clara,” he said. “You do not like to lie and so you say nothing.”
“You are my husband, Freddie,” she said.
“To be meekly honored and obeyed,” he said. “You are good at those things, are you not, Clara? It would not fit your notion of a good wife to tell me that you despise me. Well, I know that you do. And if you do not, you should. Someone called me a rake and a wastrel very recently. Both terms are quite accurate.”
She did not want to hear this. She did not want the fragile peace between them destroyed. She had so little. She did not want to lose even the little she had. If he continued in this vein, there would be too much in the open between them. There would be no possibility of holding together a viable marriage.
“Freddie,” she said, “you are my husband. That is all that matters to me.”
“Your property and fortune are not in trust, are they?” he said. “I worked that out for myself some time ago, Clara. You just did not want me to get my hands on all your wealth. You were very wise. Almost the whole of your very generous dowry has gone already in the expected way. My own income will doubtless go the same road. But don’t worry. I can’t get my hands on your fortune, can I? And I would not take any of it if you were to offer it. Would you, Clara? Like the dutiful wife you are? That is why I married you after all, isn’t it? You can come and visit me in debtors’ prison some day. Have Robin carry you in there.”
“Freddie, please don’t.” But it was too late already. Everything was ruined.
“I have been unfaithful to you with a dozen women since our marriage,” he said. “More. But then you knew that, didn’t you, Clara? You knew when you married me that I was a rake. And you knew that a woman never reforms a man after marriage. You have been wise enough never to have tried.”
God. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. She bit her lip and stared fixedly ahead.
“I suppose you have partly blamed yourself,” he said. “I believe that is usual with virtuous women. You have blamed yourself because you are crippled and because you perceive yourself as ugly. If only you could walk and were beautiful you could hold my love and fidelity and keep my feet on the straight and narrow. So you think. Do yourself a favor, Clara. Learn to hate me. I am worthy of nothing better.”
“Take me home,” she said.
“Archie and I are a well-suited pair, aren’t we?” he said. “I gather he offered your virtuous companion carte blanche last evening and was rejected. She has more sense than you had, Clara.”
“I shall go back to Ebury Court tomorrow,” she said.
“It is a shame,” he said, “that you cannot obtain a bill of divorcement for simple adultery, is it not? You would have me cold, Clara.”
She closed her eyes and willed them to be home soon. They had left the park behind them several minutes before.
“You must wish,” he said, “that you could open those eyes and find yourself back in Bath, the last few months all a bad dream.”
“Yes,” she said.
He laughed. “You must blame yet another weakness in my character,” he said. “If only I had been a little firmer of purpose, Jule would have married me and you would have been saved, Clara. You would never have met me. But I was not firm of purpose at all. I let her get away, and she married Dan.”
Oh, God. Oh, God.
The barouche stopped in front of their house at last. Frederick jumped out and reached for her. His face was set into a cynical, devil-may-care type of half smile. Clara stared straight ahead again after one glance at it.
“I want Robin to carry me inside,” she said.
Frederick made an impatient sound, grabbed her none too gently, and slid her across the seat toward him, preparatory to picking her up.
She spoke with icy distinctness. “I want Robin to carry me inside.”
There was a pause before his hands left her and he turned without another word to enter the house. Robin appeared within a minute and carried her up to her private apartments. She did not see her husband again before leaving for Ebury Court with Harriet early the following morning.
Chapter 14
Self-loathing could sometimes reach such depths that one plummeted frighteningly close to despair. Frederick touched very close the morning after his drive in the park with his wife. He walked home, still wearing evening clothes, feeling unclean and unkempt and unshaven. Mostly unclean.
He had joined Archie for dinner at White’s after all, and had drunk reckless amounts of wine with his meal and lavish glassfuls of port after it. The evening had developed along predictable lines from then on. The night rather. Lizzie had not said anything to Annette, it seemed. He had been admitted with no trouble at all and assigned a new girl, a young one who could not have been at work for any great length of time, though she had not been a virgin. But her skills had been used with conscious deliberateness and she had protested her pain when he had been rough with her. He had given her a generous gift of money before leaving her, though he knew she was strictly forbidden to accept any personal payment. He still felt as he walked away with Archie as if he had deflowered innocence.
“Trouble in paradise?” Lord Archibald had asked.
“I don’t want even to think about it, Arch,” he had said, “much less talk about it.”
Nothing more had been said.
And then the gaming and the drinking—at a private home rather than at a club. And waking up, or rather regaining consciousness, in a bed in the same house when it was already light, with a head like a lead ball and spirits even more leaden than that. He had looked about him gingerly. At least there was no naked female beside him or anywhere else in the room. It was a marginally cheering thought until he remembered the little girl at Annette’s. And until he remembered the card games, at which he had lost a sizable sum as far as he could recall. And all the drinking.
Gaming, drinking, womanizing—all vices he could give up at a moment’s notice. It was simply a matter of willpower. He threw an arm over his eyes to prevent the daylight from paining them further. Yes, he could give them all up. When hell froze over. Perhaps.
He walked wearily homeward feeling unclean. Knowing that he would still feel so even after having a hot bath and a shave upon arriving home. Knowing that he would probably never feel clean again. Or be clean.
At first when he had woken up and even when he had dressed and dragged himself outside, no one else in the house having been up yet to delay his leaving, he had forgotten the events of the day before. Now memory of them hammered through his temples and into his conscious mind.
Jule had had her revenge and told Clara everything. And so he, noble mortal that he was, had whipped up his guilt and his hurt and despair into cynical fury and had unleashed it all on the most precious possession that remained to him. His wife.
He had told her, among other things, that he had bedded a dozen women or more since their marriage. She probably had known it anyway. Clara was not stupid. But it was a firm convention of society that wives were to be protected from the harsh reality of knowing without a doubt that their husbands were unfaithful. He had broken one of the strictest taboos of the ton. And, which was far more important and far worse, he had hurt her immeasurably too. She might not love him and she might have known the true state of affairs, but it must have been painful and humiliating to be told the bald truth by her husband himself. He must have made her feel even less of a woman than she already seemed to feel.
He had done that to her. For that alone he deserved to be shot.
He was going to have to apologize to her, he thought as he approached his own house and glanced up at the blank windows. An apology was a pitifully inadequate atonement, of course, but it must be made. And with it a vow to change if she could just find it in her to overcome the disgust she must feel for him. He could change, and he would change. It was merely a matter of wanting to do it. And he wanted to. He was sick of that other life. Mortally sick. The very thought o
f last night was more powerfully nauseating than the headache he still carried around with him.
He went straight up to his rooms when he entered the house and ordered hot water for a bath and his shaving gear. He would clean himself up on the outside at least before going to face Clara, though he was all impatience to do it without delay. He was going to start a new life and he was all eagerness to begin it—with his wife at his side. He would be able to do it with her there. But it would be discourtesy itself to go to her now. He would wait until he was clean.
An hour later, too nervous to go along himself to her sitting room as he normally would, he sent his valet to ask if he might have the honor of waiting upon her. The formality might seem a little excessive coming from a husband and directed to his own wife, but he was very aware that she might well not want to see him. He might have to exercise a patience that would be agony to him and send regular such messages through the day until she weakened and admitted him to her presence.
His valet returned. “Mrs. Sullivan is not at home, sir,” he said.
Frederick frowned. Out? This early? “Did you find out where she has gone?” he asked.
“To Ebury Court, I gather, sir,” his valet said, wooden-faced.
I shall go back to Ebury Court tomorrow. Frederick could hear the words as she had spoken them in the barouche the day before. He had forgotten. She had meant them, then.
“When did she leave?” he asked.
“A little over half an hour ago, I gather, sir,” the valet said.
He had been in the house already. Immersed in a bathtub of hot soapy water. Trying to make himself clean for her. Perhaps she had known he was at home. Perhaps not. Perhaps she had not been interested in knowing either way.
“Thank you, Jerrett,” he said. “That will be all.”
For the first two weeks there seemed to be nothing to live for. Nothing at all. It was frightening to know life to be so empty, so devoid of all meaning. It hardly seemed worth getting up in the morning. She had to do so in order to keep up appearances for Harriet and the servants. And of course her neighbors and friends started to call as soon as they knew she was at home again. Some of the visits had to be returned.
She had to go on living unless she was prepared to take the step of actively ending her life. That was the one thing she could not contemplate doing. But she did only the living she felt forced to do. She stopped going out except for the occasional visit and to attend church, when she took a closed carriage. The weather was turning from autumn chill to winter cold. It was too cold to go out in her barouche or in her chair onto the terrace. Besides, she could not have bothered to make the effort of dressing up warmly and having Robin carry her outside.
She wondered if letters would start coming from Freddie again, ordering her to take the air each day. If they did, she supposed she would obey him. He was still her husband and always would be until one of them died. But no letter came.
She stopped exercising. It was troublesome and time-consuming and painful. And worthless. She was never going to be able to walk. There was no point in even trying. She spent her days indoors, embroidering, reading, talking with Harriet or with the occasional visitor, sometimes doing nothing at all.
Two weeks passed during which she tried to persuade herself that she was no worse off than she had been until just a few months before when she had been Miss Clara Danford. Life was the same as it had been then—dull and tedious, perhaps, but also comfortable and respectable. Thousands of poor souls in England would give a right arm to change places with her. If she could just blank the last few months from her mind, from the moment of her meeting with Freddie on, then she should be able to pick up the threads of her old life without any great damage having been done.
But life was not that simple, of course. The months of her marriage could not be blocked from either her mind or her emotions. Neither could Freddie.
After two weeks she glanced at herself in the looking glass one morning and saw herself. Really saw herself. She looked somewhat familiar except for the short hair. Thin face, so pale that it was almost yellow. Large, wistful eyes. She wondered if she had been eating well or even adequately, and could not remember.
“How has my appetite been?” she asked Harriet at breakfast. She had had the butler put two sausages and two slices of toast on her plate and now found the prospect of having to eat everything quite formidable.
Harriet gave her a strange look. “Poor,” she said. “Like it used to be.”
“When was I last outside?” Clara asked.
“The day before yesterday,” Harriet said, “when we called on the Goughs.”
“In a closed carriage,” Clara said. “When was the last time I was out in the air?”
Harriet thought. “I think that must have been in London,” she said.
The afternoon when she had driven alone in the park with Freddie. An eternity ago. She looked toward the windows. Gray, heavy clouds. Trees bending in the wind. It was a wintry scene. Chill, raw winter, not the cheerful frost winter of Christmas imaginings.
“I shall drive out in the barouche for half an hour this afternoon,” she said. “You may stay inside if you wish, Harriet.”
But her friend smiled. “Welcome back,” she said.
Clara looked down at her plate and determinedly speared a piece of sausage. It was the closest either of them had come in two weeks to admitting that there was anything wrong. Harriet probably had no real idea of what had happened to bring them back so precipitately to the country.
Welcome back. Yes, she was back, she thought grimly, taking a slightly larger than ladylike bite out of one slice of toast. She was back to stay. She might feel regret at no longer being Miss Danford of Ebury Court. She might feel pain at the memories of the last months, which had transformed her into the Honorable Mrs. Frederick Sullivan. But she had a life to live. One God-given life not to be wasted in self-pity.
“I wonder,” she said, “what Robin knows about teaching someone to walk.”
Robin had been a pugilist with a promising career ahead of him until one ill-fated bout in the ring with a famed prize-fighter had put him in a coma for almost a month and he had given in to advice not to fight again. But he had trained to box for a living. He knew something about making the body fit and strong.
It was a little embarrassing having a man help her exercise her legs. Her neighbors would have been scandalized had they known. Her father would have turned over in his grave. Freddie would probably be furious. Harriet was intrigued.
“I have always felt so helpless,” she said. “So eager to help you, Clara, but not knowing how to go about it. There was always so little progress.”
Clara had a daybed set up in her private sitting room, that setting seeming a little less intimate than her bedchamber. She always covered herself carefully from the waist down with a white cotton sheet. Harriet was always in the room, quietly sewing or knitting and smiling encouragement when it was needed.
And it turned out to be not really embarrassing at all. Robin’s hands were strong and impersonal, as was his whole manner. Indeed, Clara had heard the rumblings of rumors from belowstairs, rumors occasioned by the fact that Robin, young and brawny and reasonably good-looking despite a broken and crooked nose, seemed quite uninterested in any of the maids or in any other female of the neighborhood. But Robin’s personal preferences were none of her business, Clara had decided long ago. She was grateful for the fact that he did not make her aware of him as a man.
The exercises were frightening but surprisingly free of real pain. There was to be no more gentle clenching of the toes and flexing of the ankles. Her legs were bent and straightened, bent and straightened with speed and force, both while she lay on her back and when Robin rolled her over onto her stomach. Her legs were massaged by hands many times stronger than Harriet’s— sometimes Robin reached his hands beneath the sheet without removing it—until she could feel the blood pulsing through them and the feeble muscles clenching an
d relaxing. Until sometimes she had to bite her lips in order not to scream. Once—only once—she began to cry almost hysterically.
“How long, Robin?” she asked him after the first week, when her progress was exciting her. “In your expert opinion, how long?”
“By Christmas, Mrs. Sullivan,” he said, “if you have the courage and if you keep eating well.”
Robin had even been giving her instructions on the food she was to eat. Wholesome, body-building food.
“If I have the courage to put up with this torture,” she said, “I will surely have enough to walk when the time comes.”
Robin grinned, one of the rare occasions when he lost his impassive expression. “By spring I will be looking for new employment, Mrs. Sullivan,” he said.
She had not thought of that. Robin was conscientiously working himself out of a job. “What will you do?” she asked.
“Open a boxing saloon,” he said. “See if I can take some business from Gentleman Jackson.”
“If you need a recommendation,” she said, “refer your customers to me, Robin.”
She began to be able to move her legs as she sat in her chair. She could even lift them one at a time from the floor. But Robin, a strict taskmaster, would not allow her to try to stand. She would fall and perhaps hurt herself and certainly discourage herself and they would have to start all over again, he told her. She waited with forced patience for him to decide that it was time.
But she began to feel alive again. She began waking up in the mornings to find herself looking forward to a new day.
There were three unexpected visitors, one coming alone, two together. But no Freddie. And no letter from Freddie. It was better so, Clara told herself. It was better to reconstruct her life without looking back.
Clara and Harriet had returned from a drive one sunny afternoon and had only just settled in the drawing room when the butler arrived to announce visitors.
