Margarita and the Earl

by Joan Wolf

  My Lord,

  I know it is a very great sin for a wife to leave her husband, but that is what I have done. It is impossible for me to live with you at this moment. I must have time to try to think, to try to understand how I best can live in the future. I will try very hard to come back, but I do not know if I can.

  I have taken Nicky as I could not leave him. I know you will be worried, and I will write as soon as I am settled. I am going to someone who I think will understand.

  This is not your fault. The fault is in me.

  Margarita

  Nicholas sat, white-lipped, staring at the piece of paper. He couldn’t take it in. She had gone. He read the note again. What had happened? He looked toward her room and then he remembered. Last night. But she had responded to him. He hadn’t raped her, for God’s sake.

  He started pacing around his room. He had to bring her back. God knew what would happen to her. Alone. His blood ran cold at the thought of her stopping at an inn by herself.

  He picked up the note again. “I am going to someone who I think will understand,” she had written. Who? She knew hardly anyone in England.

  Immediately, the name flashed into his mind. Mrs. Frost. Of course, he thought, with a wild rush of relief. That was where she was going. He frowned. She had left at noon. If he knew Margarita, she would not want to stop by herself at a posting house. She would probably push to make the whole trip in one day. Nicky was terrible in the carriage, but she would not want to have to deal with him in strange surroundings all by herself. She would go straight through to Winslow.

  He felt immensely better, having come to this conclusion. He looked at his watch. He would have light for at least four more hours. He ran downstairs and told Reid to have his curricle brought round to the door in fifteen minutes and to have some cold meat and ale brought to the dining room immediately.

  “Yes, my lord,” the butler said.

  “Her ladyship has gone back to Winslow and I am going to follow her,” Nicholas informed him.

  “I see, my lord.” Reid bowed, his face impassive.

  Fifteen minutes later, Nicholas was in his curricle, expertly winding his way through the London streets.

  *

  It was eleven o’clock the following morning when the Earl of Winslow’s curricle pulled up at the door of Whitethorn. Emma Frost was in the front yard watering the flowers. “Mr. Nicholas!” she exclaimed, surprise causing her to revert to his old name. She put down her watering can. “I didn’t know you were back at Winslow. I hope nothing is wrong?” This last was said a little anxiously, as Nicholas’s face was looking alarmingly rigid.

  “Is my wife here, Mrs. Frost?” he asked.

  The surprise on her face was unquestionably genuine. “Your wife? No. I haven’t seen her ladyship since she left for London.”

  There was no mistaking the shock on Nicholas’s face. She saw him shut his eyes. “Are you quite certain?” he then asked, very calmly.

  “Yes, my lord.” She hesitated. “What has happened?” But the curricle was already moving away, down the well-tended drive.

  *

  They were surprised to see Nicholas at Winslow, but of course, all the servants assumed that Lady Winslow was still in London. If anyone thought it odd that Lord Winslow had arrived alone, without any extra clothing and without his valet, they confined their comments to the servants’ quarters. Nicholas went immediately to the library and closed the door behind him. He stood for a very long time looking blindly out the window, his eyes for once focused inward. She was not at Whitethorn. Where, then, could she be? And perhaps even more importantly, why had she gone?

  She had left him. Once, long ago, another woman who said she loved him had left him. But he did not feel now, as he had felt then, betrayed and victimized. He knew, had known all along, through all the hours of fast, dangerous driving last night and this morning, that Margarita had not betrayed him. He had betrayed her.

  She loved him. He did not question that; he knew it was true. She had fled because she loved him, because it is impossible to live with someone who rejects your love, who holds it carelessly in his hand to be smashed as of no value whenever it becomes inconvenient. Nicholas understood her all too well. Had he not once done the very same thing?

  He moved from the window to the worn leather chair and sat down, stretching his legs before him. What a fool he had been, he thought bitterly. What a bloody, infantile fool. “This is not your fault,” she had written. As usual, she was being too generous. It was all his fault. Because he was afraid to admit he loved her, he had driven her away. And of course he loved her, had loved her for a long long time. He would give everything he possessed in this world—including Winslow—to get her back.

  There was nothing to do but to return to London. She had said she would write him. She must have friends somewhere—possibly South Americans—whom he did not know. The first frantic wave of his fear for her was gone. Margarita was sensible. And she had Nicky with her. No matter how upset she might be, he knew she would never do anything that might possibly harm Nicky. She had said that she had somewhere to go, and he believed her.

  He sat on for half an hour longer, and when he rose, it was to go upstairs to his bedroom. He walked over to his wardrobe, slowly took out an old velvet box, and opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper. He took the paper to the window, and for the first time in seventeen years, he reread the letter his mother had left him when she eloped with John Hamilton.

  When he finished, he rested his forehead against the windowpane. From the point of view of a mature, rational mind, the letter was perfectly comprehensible. It was also clear that the writer’s heart was very near to breaking.

  He closed his eyes and thought back. He knew what his mother’s life had been like at Winslow. One of the reasons there was such hostility between him and his uncle was that at a very young age, Nicholas had constituted himself his mother’s protector. His father he remembered only as an occasional brilliant presence, rarely seen and unimportant in his son’s life. It was his mother he loved, his mother he learned to fight for and to defend.

  And she loved him. For the first time in many years, he allowed himself to remember the warmth and laughter of her, the smile that used to shine out of her eyes whenever their glances chanced to meet. He realized now that his presence had been the only thing that had made life at Winslow bearable to her. And then he went away to school. And John Hamilton arrived. Gentle, sensitive, kind, understanding John Hamilton. Nicholas remembered that once even he had liked the quiet, scholarly man who had stolen his mother.

  He looked again at the letter in his hand. “I will always love you,” she had written. “They would never let me take you and it would not be right of me to take you. Winslow is your heritage. But I am your mother and I will always love you. Please try to understand.…” The words blurred before his eyes. He thought of Margarita having to leave Nicky.

  “Poor Mother,” he said softly to the quiet air. “What a rotten son you have.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “The heart—the heart—is lonely still.”

  —Byron

  When Margarita decided to run away from Nicholas, her biggest problem had been where to go. It was in the hour before dawn that the answer came to her, the one person in England who would have family ties to her, the one place where Nicholas would never look. She went to her mother-in-law.

  Charlotte Hamilton lived in a charming cottage near Oxford. Margarita had gotten her direction from Nicholas and written to her after Nicky’s birth. They corresponded occasionally since then, both of them carefully avoiding the one name they had in common.

  Charlotte and John Hamilton had lived very quietly. He published several histories of medieval England that were well received in academic circles, but he never had a popular success. He lectured at Oxford, and the money from that, as well as from the articles he wrote for scholarly journals, was what they lived on. Charlotte had been living since his d
eath on the money sent to her quarterly by her son. It was a modest but sufficient sum that allowed her relative comfort for a number of years; she had become accustomed to a limited income. Nicholas increased her allowance considerably when he came into the title and the Winslow collection.

  Charlotte was deeply surprised to have Margarita arrive at her front door. She welcomed her daughter-in-law and grandson with brisk kindness, allotted them rooms, sent off to borrow a crib from a neighbor, and saw about dinner. She fed Nicky and helped Margarita put him to bed. Then the two women sat down in the pleasant sitting room and Charlotte said very gently, “Perhaps you had better tell me, my dear.”

  Margarita looked at Nicholas’s mother. Charlotte was in her late forties and looked younger. It would take a shrewd eye to pick out the silver hairs that blended in with the natural blonde of her hair. Her eyes were dark blue and the lines at the corners of them were very faint. She smiled encouragingly at Margarita. “What has Nicholas done?” she asked.

  In a low voice, with her eyes on her tensely folded hands, Margarita told her an edited version of the events that brought her to Charlotte’s door. The fault, she earnestly insisted, was not Nicholas’s. “He was forced to marry me, you see. And he has been so good to me: reading to me when I was sick, teaching me to play cards and to dance, buying me new clothes, and cheering me up when I felt sad. No one could have been kinder. It was not his fault that I fell in love with him. But I did,” she said with devastating honesty. “I love him more than anything else in the world, and I cannot bear it that he does not love me.”

  This was a pain that Charlotte was only too familiar with. Her heart ached for Margarita, and for her son, who would not accept the priceless gift offered to him by his wife. “I needed to be away from him for a little,” said Margarita. “To try to understand what it is I must do. May I stay with you? It will only be for a little while.” It was a request that Charlotte could not find it in her heart to refuse.

  Margarita sent a message to Nicholas at Berkeley Square, saying that she was safe and with friends and that she did not want to see him yet. She did not give him her direction.

  *

  Life at Morgan Cottage soon settled into a routine that revolved largely about the needs of Nicky. Charlotte was thrilled with her grandson and loved to take him out into the garden, where he crawled around on the grass, picking up leaves and worms and flowers. He was tanned and strong and happy and was beginning to drink milk out of a cup.

  Margarita, however, was not happy. Her mother-in-law was a kind, undemanding companion, and Margarita was grateful for her quiet understanding and for the sympathy she saw in her dark blue eyes, but somehow, being away from Nicholas did not help. She was even more unhappy than she had been in London. There was a great pit of loneliness deep inside her, and nothing, not Nicky, not Charlotte, could ever serve to fill it up.

  She couldn’t sleep. She was convinced that she was a failure as a wife and as a mother. She had no patience with Nicky. He tired her unendurably. Charlotte was better with him than she was. His mother had only robbed him of his father and then neglected him herself.

  She felt crushingly guilty all the time. She had no right to leave Nicholas. She had gone against the law of God and the law of the land in doing so. And for what reason? Husbands were unfaithful all the time. One week in London had taught her that. Many wives had to put up with far more than she. Nicholas, at least, was only unfaithful when she was out of reach.

  She was bitterly, blindingly, unreasoningly jealous of his other women. She knew that. She even knew that she was more important to him than anyone else. But it was not enough.

  Suppose I have another child, she thought to herself. Suppose I am sick in bed, for months, as I was with Nicky. How can I bear it, lying there, knowing he is making love to Catherine Alnwick? I cannot bear it. It is impossible.

  One week went by and then another. Margarita was thinner, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. “This cannot go on, my dear,” Charlotte said to her one night. “You are making yourself ill.”

  “I know.” Margarita looked at her with great, haunted eyes. “I will write and ask Nicholas to come and see me. If he will take me back, I will go.”

  “You cannot be more unhappy with him than you are here,” Charlotte said gently.

  “Yes.” Margarita gave a slight shrug of her shoulders, and something in that small, resigned movement hurt Charlotte unbearably. She remembered so well what it felt like, to offer love and to have it rejected. She had worshiped brilliant, handsome Christopher Beauchamp when she married him. She could not believe that her son, her Nicholas, was the same kind of man as his father.

  “If he will take you back?” she said now, carefully.

  “Yes.” Margarita looked more closely at her face and hastened to add, “Don’t look like that, Charlotte. Of course he will take me back. But he will want to—arrange it—so that no one will guess that I ran away. I am sure he has given out some story about my whereabouts that he will want me to support.”

  Under similar circumstances, Christopher would have taken her back, too, of that Charlotte was certain. But she would have paid for her transgression. She said now to Margarita, “I hope Nicholas won’t be too angry.”

  “He will be angry because he will have been worried about me. But he will forgive me. Nicholas has the unfailing charity of the truly generous.”

  After Margarita went upstairs to bed, Charlotte sat on for another hour, putting together in her mind all the things she had heard Margarita say of Nicholas, as if they were a giant puzzle. It seemed to her entirely possible that he was not as indifferent to his wife as Margarita seemed to believe.

  The next morning Margarita wrote to Nicholas. She had a reason other than the one she gave Charlotte for wanting him to come to Oxford. She had grown very fond of her mother-in-law and hoped very much for a reconciliation between her husband and his mother. Perhaps if Nicholas came and saw Charlotte, he would relent in his hostility toward her. He might not come. He might just send the coach for her or send her a message. But she thought it was worth a try to get him to Morgan Cottage.

  Whatever he wanted her to do, she would do. She had no choice but to go back to him. That was “la realidad.” She could not stay here forever. Unlike Charlotte, she had no other man to elope with. She could never leave her son, and he was Nicholas’s heir; he belonged with his father at Winslow. Duty, convention, the ties of love, all dictated that she return to her husband. She had not spoken to a priest since she left London, but she was in no doubt as to what the Church would tell her. She must go back to Nicholas and try to be a good wife to him. And what Charlotte had said was true: better to be miserable with him than miserable without him. She settled down to fill in the time until she received a response to her letter.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another!”

  —Matthew Arnold

  Margarita was correct in assuming that Nicholas had given out a story to explain her sudden absence from Berkeley Square. He told a few hostesses that a Venezuelan friend of hers received news that her brother had been killed at Carúpano, and Margarita went to give what comfort she could to the family. He did not know when to expect her back, he said. He would stay in London until he heard from her.

  As he did not want to occasion comment by drastically changing his style of life, he attended a few dinner parties and receptions. He was polite but distant to all his dinner partners; any lady attempting to get up a flirtation with him was rapidly discouraged by the frost in his manner. He did, however, have one encounter with Eleanor Rushton that could not be accurately described as frosty. She came up to him at a crowded reception and put a light hand on his arm. He turned, looked down, and when he saw who it was his eyes narrowed. She took one look at his taut, hostile, contemptuous face and removed her hand as if it suddenly burned. “You have done your damage,” he said in a low voice that seemed to cut through to th
e bone. “I never want to see you again.”

  “Nicholas!” she said pleadingly, but the bitter, ruthless line of his mouth did not relax. He turned and left her. She did not go near him again.

  *

  He was in London for over two weeks before Margarita’s second letter came. The relief he felt when he saw her small, precise handwriting on the envelope was so intense that he had to close his eyes for a minute. He was by himself in the breakfast room and he carefully slit the envelope and extracted the letter. He read:

  Morgan Cottage

  August, 1816

  My Lord,

  If you will take me back I am ready to come. I have been staying here at Morgan Cottage with your mother for these last weeks. She has been so kind to me and to Nicky. Please do not be angry with her for not telling you of my whereabouts. I promised her faithfully that I would do that myself.

  It was wicked of me to have run away. I know you must have been worried and I am sorry. I will try very hard to be a good wife to you in the future.

  I would like it very much if you would come to Morgan Cottage to get me. If you feel you cannot, I shall understand. I will do whatever you want me to.

  Your wife,

  Margarita Beauchamp

  Nicholas finished the letter and then reread it. Margarita spoke excellent English but was less comfortable writing it. Nevertheless, something in the simple, almost childlike, sentences hurt him savagely. With his mouth set in a severe line, he looked again at the opening sentence. So that was where she had gone. He knew she corresponded with his mother. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of that possibility before.

  He rang the bell, and when Reid appeared he began to issue orders. “I shall be escorting her ladyship and Lord Seldon back to Winslow, Reid. I want a bag packed for me immediately. Have the carriage at the door in forty-five minutes, please. I also want Mrs. Wade, her ladyship’s personal maid, and my valet to return to Winslow today. I will be taking the carriage so you will need to hire a post chaise for them. See to it, will you?”