Fragile Mask (25 page)

‘
He means that martinet who is his neighbour at
Pittlesthorp,’ Osmond explained. ‘Dash it, Hawk, why in the world
didn’t you think of that before?’

‘
I did,’ Denzell replied, shrugging. ‘I thought of it at
Teresa’s wedding. I tackled both Kenrick and his father on the
matter, but neither seemed to think there was any
relationship.’

‘
But you do,’ Unice said shrewdly, watching him. ‘Don’t
you?’

‘
Unice, I simply don’t know. All I can tell you is that
Bevis Chaceley seemed interested, and then just brushed it off. It
was rather a feeling I had, than any firm idea.’

‘
What feeling?’ she demanded.

Denzell gave a self-conscious laugh. ‘A ridiculous feeling,
born I am sure out of my then unrecognised emotions towards Verena.
I felt as if they had cast Verena off.’

Osmond moved to the dresser, seized a glass, and poured
himself a brandy. Lifting the vessel, he spoke in his most
determined voice, just as if, Denzell thought, he had never made
any previous objection.

‘
There is nothing for it, Unice. You will have to go and
beard the girl. This matter must be sifted. Ferret out every bit of
information you can.’

***

Verena received her guest in the little parlour. She was
wary, and a little sorry that Mama and Adam should have chosen to
go down to the Rooms this Saturday morning, for Unice’s demeanour
indicated she was going to touch on matters Verena would prefer not
to discuss. It was clearly dangerous to be private with her today.
Nor was she mistaken.

‘
Verena, you look terrible,’ Unice began by way of opening.
‘So pale and wan.’

Oh, heavens. She knew how haggard she looked, for the
mirror in her bedchamber had told her so, the paleness of her
features emphasised by the plain white muslin gown. It was why she
had chosen to remain at home. She should have denied herself. Only
Unice was too kind a friend to be served so shabbily.

‘
I have had the headache,’ she offered. ‘It—it kept me awake
the better part of the night.’

‘
The headache,’ repeated Unice in the flattest of tones. She
leaned forward and reached across to the other chair, pressing the
hand that lay on its wooden arm. ‘Dear Verena, you will not fob me
off with such a taradiddle, so do not think it. Headache indeed!
You are greatly troubled, are you not? What is the matter,
Verena?’

Verena was obliged to force down a rising lump in her
throat before she could speak. ‘There is—there is nothing the
matter, Unice. Beyond the headache, that is.’

But Unice was not to be deflected. ‘Oh, Verena, how can
you? After you have sat at my bedside all through my toiling with
little Julia. We cannot be anything but intimate now. Pray don’t
reject my friendship.’

Verena swallowed. She managed a faint smile. ‘I could not
do so, Unice. Indeed, I am grateful for—for your concern. But you
mistake—’

‘
It is Denzell, is it not?’ broke in Unice with
candour.

Verena closed her eyes, bringing up her fingers to her
cheeks, which seemed to burn. She bit at her lips to stop their
trembling, and became aware of Unice’s fingers grasping her
arm.

‘
Well, he said he had blundered, but I had not thought he
had overset you as much as this,’ she uttered.

Verena’s eyes flew open, and she regarded the other woman
in doubt and concern. ‘He told you?’

Unice nodded. ‘I found him last night, starting on the
brandy. He was in such despair, poor Denzell.’

An instant stab of conscience attacked her. ‘Don’t say
that! Pray don’t say that, Unice.’

‘
He loves you, Verena.’

Not that again. Please
not that. She shook her head.

‘
No, he cannot love me. I told him he must not. He does not
love me.’

‘
Well, I have known him a very long time, and I have never
seen him behave this way over any girl.’

It was the last thing Verena wanted to hear after last
night. Betsey thought she had cried herself to sleep, but she had
lain prone with exhaustion, unable to speak or move as the maid
covered her and went away.

Sleep had come, fitfully. But mostly she had
thought. Thought and thought and
thought
through those
long night hours, trying to persuade herself Denzell had mistaken
some other feeling for love. He did not know her. She had never
given him anything but the false picture of herself that she gave
to the world. How was it possible that he might love
her.

It must be some image he carried, some creature he had
summoned up in his own mind. But it was not her. And now, when she
was tired and wretched, and on tenterhooks at the expectation of
Nathaniel’s arrival—though she was trusting he could not get here
for another couple of days—here it was again.

‘
Unice,’ she said in a voice of strict control, ‘do not
encourage him in this theme, I beg of you. If it was true—if he did
indeed entertain such feelings for me, it could only lead to his
unhappiness.’

‘
I don’t believe you mean that, Verena,’ Unice said. ‘If you
wish to know what I really think, it is that you care more for
Denzell than you dare to say.’

A flare of emotion ripped through Verena. An emotion she
did not recognise. She felt her own trembling and a bursting in her
chest. But the little corner of coherent thought that still
remained urged her to refute this impossible idea. She thrust the
words up through a throat that seemed to rasp at every
sound.

‘
You would wish to imply that I am
in love
with him, is that it?’

‘
Yes, Verena, yes!’

A harsh sound that might have been a laugh escaped Verena’s
lips. ‘How little you know, Unice.’

She rose from the chair, pushing herself to the window and
staring out at the green of the trees and the way the sun dappled
through their leaves to fall in uneven shadows on the ground below.
The rough passage of feeling that had torn through her but a moment
before was subsiding. A hollowness was descending upon her chest.
That emptiness she knew she could never fill. Never—because
Nathaniel had forever closed the doors on the
possibility.

‘
I have no heart with which to love,’ she said into the
glass of the window, her tone bleak.

‘
That cannot be true,’ cried Unice on a note of distress.
‘You have such warmth, Verena. You proved that the night my Julia
was born.’

Verena turned slowly, and all the tortured past was
reflected in her countenance for Unice to see.

‘
Look at me, Unice. Is this an object for
devotion? I have grown too cold, too hard—too
bitter.
I
cannot love—and I cannot bear to
be
loved.’

She saw doubt and concern in Unice’s face, and dredged up a
faint smile. ‘You would do better to advise Denzell to forget me,
than to try to win me to his heart.’

There was a moment of bleak silence. Then all at once,
Unice shook her head, rising to face her.

‘
No! No, I won’t believe it. You speak as if you are past
redemption, past all change. That cannot be. You are young,
Verena.’

Verena sighed. ‘I feel an hundred today.’ She moved a
little and reached for Unice’s hands. ‘Pray give it up, Unice. Even
were it possible—were I changeable as you insist—there is no power
on earth that would persuade me to leave Mama.’

Unice returned the pressure of her hands. ‘I understand, my
dear. But surely, when your Mama is well again, when she returns
home...’

Verena dropped her hands,
turning away.

‘
She will never return home.’

‘
But Verena, you don’t mean that you intend—Lord above, you
cannot devote your entire life to your mother.’

‘
But I
will,’
said Verena
fiercely, turning on her. ‘I had rather lose ten thousand chances
of happiness than see Mama endangered yet again.’

‘
Endangered?’ echoed Unice, blinking at her. ‘I don’t
understand.’

‘
No, you don’t understand. Why should you?
Love
in your world, Unice, is all sweetness and light, but I
know better.’

Unice shrugged. ‘Verena, what
is
this? You
speak of love as of some monstrous thing.’

Verena’s eyes filled. It was too much. She could no longer
keep silent, not with the danger so close, with Nathaniel
practically on the doorstep.

‘
Monstrous
,
yes.’ Her voice grated on the word. Then, instinctively, it
softened as she let it out at last. ‘Oh, Unice, if you had heard,
as I have from a child, the cries of fear and pain, the blows
falling, and then seen, when at last you dared to enter where you
had no right, the piteous bruises that disfigured that once lovely
face, then—oh, then, Unice, you would not talk to me of
love
!’

‘
After that,’ Unice said, ending her tale in a depressed
manner, ‘she would say nothing more.’

‘
Dash it, Unice,’ protested her spouse, pushing himself up
on his elbow where he lay on the grass under the chestnut tree in
the Ruishtons’ garden, whither he and Denzell had repaired in the
morning heat to await Unice’s return and hear her report. They had
both discarded their frock-coats, and were lounging in
shirtsleeves. ‘She can’t have left the matter there.’

‘
Can’t she?’ said Denzell, moodily throwing twigs across the
lawn. ‘You don’t know how close she is.’

He was seated with his back against the tree trunk, his
legs outstretched and crossed before him, his hat thrown to one
side with his coat, and his long fair hair untidily ruffled from
its contact with the bark behind him.

He had listened to Unice’s account with a heart growing
heavier by the minute. He had wanted to know what it was that
caused Verena’s barriers. There could be no doubting the meaning of
the little Verena had told Unice, but its portent did nothing to
uplift his spirits.

His first reaction had been one of intense compassion—both
for Verena’s mama, and for Verena herself to have borne witness to
the cruelties of which she spoke. Then followed the inevitable
realisation of a Herculean task: how to persuade Verena that all
men did not beat their wives.

Small wonder she was afraid. Everything she was under that
cool veneer had been crushed by a fear so intense he doubted his
ability to assuage any part of it. Even would she permit him the
smallest opportunity to make the attempt—which of course she would
not.

‘
I don’t know how she did it,’ Unice was continuing, ‘but
she managed to recover that serene face of hers, and behaved quite
as if nothing untoward had occurred.’

‘
I can see her doing it,’ groaned Denzell with
feeling.

‘
But, dash it,’ cut in Osmond, ‘she could not have supposed
that you would be fooled by it after all that.’

‘
No, and I said so,’ agreed his wife. ‘But for all the good
I got by it, I might as well have spared my breath.’

‘
And she would say nothing about this Chaceley
business?’

‘
My love, I had not the heart to bring it up after what she
had told me. I tried to express my sympathies at least, but she
would have none of it. She said that I should not mind it because
she should not have said as much.’

‘
But she did,’ Denzell put in, ‘and it is typical of her
that she should clam up just at the point when you had made a
breakthrough. I love her desperately, but I could willingly shake
her when she does that.’

‘
For shame, Denzell. It is clear enough now why she cannot
confide in anyone.’

‘
Yes, but I am not anyone. And as for this absurdity that
she has no heart—I wish I might have her alone with me for five
minutes, and we should see that.’

Osmond grinned at him. ‘Rising to the challenge, eh,
Hawk?’

Denzell slumped back, sighing. ‘I wish I might. Unice, did
she say nothing else at all?’

Unice shook her head. ‘She would keep repeating that I
should not heed her since she was not herself, and then she invited
me to remain to meet with her brother and Mama when they returned
from the Rooms.’

A quick frown entered Denzell’s eyes. ‘So he’s back, is
he?’

Osmond cocked an eyebrow. ‘That sounds grim, Hawk. What’s
the poor fellow done to you?’

‘
Nothing,’ came the short reply. ‘And yet...’

‘
He has been here once or twice since Christmas, Denzell,’
Unice said, puzzled. ‘What of it?’

‘
What of it? Do you imagine I am coxcomb enough to believe
that these haggard looks you have described are to be set solely to
my account?’

‘
No one believes that, Hawk,’ soothed Osmond. ‘Obviously
can’t be so, if what Unice tells us is the truth. But why should
you think the brother’s presence means anything?’