His One Woman (15 page)

It seemed sensible for him to question Aunt Percival, who he was sure was well aware of everything which passed in his household, however trivial it might be. Her reply puzzled him a little.

‘My dear Jacobus,' she said gravely, ‘I was of the impression, before he left, that he was about to propose to her, and that makes it all the more strange that he never replies to any of the letters which I know that she has been writing. I did not think of him as a Don Juan or a trifler, but I am beginning to fear that he was.'

She was beginning to fear something else, but she did not tell the Senator that. Time would soon tell her if her suspicion about Marietta's strange illness was correct, and then not only she but the whole world would know the unhappy truth.

‘Hmm,' said the Senator. ‘I agree with you. I thought him a most worthy young man. I suppose it only goes to show how easily we may be deceived.'

This statement did not truly represent what he was beginning to think. That there was something wrong, something odd, about the whole business, particularly since Marietta's agony at Jack's continuing silence was becoming hard for her to conceal.

The Senator did not like his niece Sophie. She was the only one of the pretty cousins whom he did not care for, and this was because of her cruel treatment of Marietta. It was obvious to him that young Dilhorne's defection was pleasing the girl. More than once he had caught an expression on her face when she was looking at Marietta which could only be described as gloating. This happened whenever she thought that she was unobserved.

Among the wrongnesses which seemed to have af
flicted his household was the fact that idle Sophie had suddenly become enamoured of being at his side. He had always thought that she disliked him, too, and now here she was cheerfully carrying out all those duties which she had previously jeered at Marietta for performing.

He was sure that she was up to something. It gave him an odd feeling. It was feelings like these which had helped the Senator to make a fortune whenever he had paid heed to them. Something lay behind Sophie's transformed behaviour—but what? He did not deceive himself that she had suddenly begun to care for him, so that he was daily confronted with a puzzle, and a puzzle which he did not like.

‘I shall write to the man myself,' he told Aunt Percival abruptly. ‘In the meantime, I shall go down to the study and collect my mail at once, instead of having Sophie bring it up to the library.'

A conversation with her might enlighten him as to her motives. He had always avoided talking to her because he sensed that she saw him as an uninteresting old man. Well, that uninteresting old man would try to solve the puzzle she presented by drawing her out.

He opened the door to the little downstairs study where the mail was usually placed before it was sorted out for the different members of his household to collect. It was a pleasant room, and there was already, at this early hour, a small fire burning in the grate. Over the mantelpiece was a portrait of the Sen
ator's beautiful wife. She was looking down at Sophie who, as the Senator quietly opened the door, was busily sorting the mail.

She had not heard him, and for a moment he stood there watching her. She was in an uncharacteristic pose, her pretty face serious, intent on the letters be fore her. He was grudgingly acknowledging the conscientious nature of her labours when she suddenly abstracted a letter from the pile before her, read the superscription on its envelope, and then held it assessingly in her hand for a moment.

The Senator concluded that it must be one for her, and was about to make his presence known when she waved it before her, almost in derision, making no attempt to open it, or to read it.

Curious again, he paused when she suddenly leaned forward and tossed the letter deep into the heart of the fire.

The wrongness about her, which had plagued him for weeks, suddenly shrieked at him that something here was going badly awry. To investigate the matter further he moved briskly into the room and spoke to her sharply.

‘Why are you burning that letter, Sophie? Is it yours to burn?' He still had no suspicion of what she was really doing, but when her face flamed first bright red and then ashy white, and she flung at him, ‘Oh, it's nothing. It's one of mine from an unwanted suitor,' he
went over to the grate and bent down to see if he might find out to whom the letter was addressed.

By some freak of the fire as the envelope flared up Marietta's name was plain upon it, and then, before he could read anything further, the poker in Sophie's hand pushed the letter deep into the flames and it was lost.

The Senator suddenly knew why his beloved daughter had never received a letter from Jack Dilhorne. He straightened up to meet Sophie's enraged and defiant gaze, before saying thickly, ‘Why are you burning Marietta's letter?'

His words came out with great difficulty because the world had gone strangely dark as his violent anger seized and consumed him. In an effort to control his failing senses he put out a hand to take the poker from Sophie's grasp, before demanding, ‘How many have you burned? And did you burn her letters to him as well?'

‘It was my letter,' she exclaimed defiantly. ‘My letter, not Marietta's. You are growing too old to see properly. I may burn my own correspondence if I wish. It is no business of yours what I do with it.'

Her insolence, the patent lies which she was telling him, and the injury to Marietta, fuelled his anger even more. He tried to speak again, to confront her with her wickedness, but even as he stared into her pretty, vicious face, the rage finally overwhelmed—and destroyed—him.

Sophie's face disappeared, to be replaced by Mar
ietta's, alight with the joy which had filled it on the night when Jack had told her of his love for her, and then everything disappeared into the dark. He fell forward on to the hearthrug, prone at Sophie's feet, quite still, the hand with the poker in it flung in the direction of the fire…

Sophie, dazed, picked up the poker and stared down at him with something approaching horror. The Senator never moved, and she suddenly realised that she was saved. She flung the poker into the hearth, and fell on her knees beside him, screaming in a terror which was not all assumed. Somehow she had killed her uncle, and, whatever else, she had not meant to do that at all.

The door suddenly opened and Marietta appeared. She took one look at her father lying still and quiet before her, and then another at Sophie, who with great presence of mind had risen to her feet, still screaming. She carefully placed herself before the fire lest any evidence remain there of what she had done.

Marietta's first act was to pull the bell for the servants, and then, saying, ‘Stop that immediately,' to slap the still-screaming Sophie sharply on the cheek, thus adding one more to the catalogue of wrongs which Sophie felt that she had suffered at her hands.

Still careful to keep herself before the fire, Sophie began to sob quietly. Marietta, who was now down on her knees, trying to discover how ill her father was, said sternly, ‘Enough of that noise. Be of use
for once. Go and tell Aunt Percival to send a servant for the doctor.'

She began to lift her father's lolling head, in order to place a cushion beneath it, although her common sense had already told her that this was quite useless, as would be the services of any doctor whom Aunt Percival might summon. Her father had died before she had entered the room.

Before her, unheeded and unrecognisable, Jack's last despairing letter to her crumbled into its final ashes. No earthly evidence remained of Sophie's treachery and its dreadful consequences. Sophie hugged this thought to her all the way upstairs, and although she might have wished that what had just happened could have been in some way avoided, she knew that she was safe and Marietta finally thwarted.

In the turmoil which followed the Senator's sudden and unexpected death Sophie was not only as unhelpful as might have been expected, but, to both Aunt Percival and Marietta's surprise, spent her days having fit after fit of screaming hysterics.

‘Really, Aunt Percival,' said Marietta one afternoon after the doctor had been sent for and Sophie had been dosed with laudanum to make her sleep, ‘her behaviour is astonishingly excessive, considering how little she either loved, or liked, my father.'

‘Attention drawing, as usual,' said Aunt Percival nastily, not knowing anything of Sophie's mixed feelings of guilt and relief. She had stopped Sophie
screaming on that dreadful day before the doctor had arrived by slapping her so severely that her cheek was bruised. She was thus promptly added to Sophie's list of people to be dealt with one day.

While Marietta and Aunt Percival maintained a stoic calm at the funeral, Sophie distinguished herself by having her worst fit yet. She was promptly sent home with her parents by Aunt Percival, who told them that her consideration must now be Marietta, whose calm was as distressing to her as Sophie's excesses had been.

‘I want her out of the house today,' she had announced, ‘her proper place is with her parents.'

To Marietta she had said, just after the funeral when they were alone together again, once tea had been brought in and the curtains had been drawn, ‘Now all this is over and everyone has gone, you and I must have a serious talk, my girl.'

Marietta said with feigned innocence, ‘What about, Aunt?'

‘You know perfectly well of what I speak,' said Aunt Percival. ‘You are expecting a child, are you not? A child who has no father, for he has abandoned you. A child who will ruin you, for all your fortune. Have you thought once of what you intend to do to save yourself? Or do you intend to carry on and bear it before all Washington, to be a show and mock for Sophie and every other mean-minded gossip?'

Marietta stared at her aunt sitting there, placid, after she had uttered these scarifying words.

‘I intend to go away—' she began, but her aunt interrupted her as though she were a child again.

‘On your own, one supposes, without telling me.'

‘And how did you find out that I was pregnant?' counter-attacked Marietta, the tears she had so far refused to shed falling down at last.

Her aunt looked sadly at her. ‘Do you take me for a fool? I've not spent thirty years of my life watching over errant servant girls without recognising the symptoms of their folly—which you are showing so plainly.

‘Going off with that man on his last afternoon. Oh, don't tell me you were at Katy Hoyt's, I know better. Coming home that night with the sort of face on you that you had as a child when Cook gave you a plum bun instead of a plain one. Keeping your underclothing from the wash that week, missing your courses, enduring morning sickness. And a pregnant woman has a special look which I got to know well.

‘And here you are, so good and sensible and clever, and you've behaved no better than a poor servant girl when the first sweet-talking man comes along to seduce her and to leave her saddled with a bastard.'

‘Oh, it's worse than that,' sniffled Marietta defiantly. ‘For it was I who seduced him. I knew what I was doing and I'd do it again tomorrow. I can't say that I regret that afternoon, even if I didn't think I'd end up abandoned with a baby on the way.'

‘Didn't think you'd end up with a baby?' echoed
Aunt Percival incredulously. ‘Why in the world you never thought of such a possibility beforehand beats me.'

‘Oh, I suppose it was because it's a bad joke that the Hope women are slow to conceive, and Father and Mother were married for so many years before I was born. I must have thought that I was the same, and it was only one afternoon, and I thought that he loved me,' she ended breathlessly.

‘You didn't think at all,' said Aunt Percival severely. ‘You just jumped into bed with him with your head on fire—and now look at you!'

‘Oh, don't,' wailed Marietta. ‘I know that I'm wicked and a fool, and all that you say. I know that I'm a fallen woman and that I've lost my lover. What's more, I want him back again almost more than I want respectability. I know that when the news is out that I'm ruined. Sophie will dance on me all over Washington.

‘But I don't care. I want Jack, and I want my baby, oh, I do, I do…'

Grief over her father's death, added to the pain of her sad situation, overwhelmed her so much that Aunt Percival took her into her arms and rocked her as though she were the baby she had once been.

‘There, there, my pretty,' she crooned. ‘I can't get him back for you, and I don't want to after he's deserted you like this. But we'll save your good name for you. Trust me. I know exactly how to go about it.'

Marietta lifted her wet face to look wonderingly at her aunt. ‘You do?'

‘Yes, my darling. We'll go deep into the country to a farm where I have a distant female relative, and where no one else but her knows us. You shall be my poor niece whose husband was killed in that skirmish at Blagg's Crossing and who was left a widow to bear her baby alone. You had a breakdown, my dear, went mad with grief, and the doctor said that you needed country air to restore you before it was born.

‘Oh, I can be an inventive liar when I want, and I have helped so many poor girls before you that it would be a sad thing if I can't help you.'

‘But how shall we explain my disappearance from Washington?' asked Marietta anxiously.

‘My dear, you were so distressed that you could not bear to stay in the capital and went to visit relatives in Maryland. No one, knowing how close you were to your father, will query that.'

‘And afterwards,' Marietta said. ‘What about afterwards? And what about my baby? I don't want to lose him, too. I'm sure that it will be a him.'

‘We'll think about that while we're in the country,' said Aunt Percival. ‘Now dry your eyes and drink your tea. Thank God that because you were so close to your father no one will think it strange that you have fits of crying and are poorly as a consequence of grief over his death and will need to keep to your room before we leave. I shall tell everyone
that you collapsed when everything was over. No one will question that—you were bound to do so in the end, they will say, looking wise.'