His One Woman (20 page)

She began to wring her hands: a gesture which she had thought odd when she had seen other women doing it, but now nothing else seemed to answer, or would convey strongly enough the depths of her misery, both for herself and for Jack.

‘If I know him,' said Aunt Percival, ‘he will be here tomorrow and he will want an explanation. If he does not come, then it is up to you to try to see him. You must do what you have always done—the right and proper thing—and that means telling him the truth about Cobie—not that he will not know it the moment he sees him.'

‘Yes,' said Marietta, steady again now that she knew the worst, for she felt sure that Aunt Percival, that hater of whim whams, that monument to sound common sense, had found the true explanation for the puzzle of the lost letters. ‘Cobie is the one most hurt by all this, for all that my dear Avory tried to do for him.'

She laughed without humour. ‘Ironic, is it not? For if Sophie had not driven Jack away, she might have
married Avory, instead of giving me my brief happiness with him. The gods are not always unkind, except that they must be laughing at her—and at Jack and me. Oh, I know that I must take some of the blame for Cobie. I was so happy that I failed to consider the consequences which might flow from my afternoon with Jack.'

Marietta was grateful, later, that Aunt Percival had forewarned her of Jack's possible arrival and Sophie's treachery. She had had time to go to her room and try to sleep after she had wept over the past. In the morning there would be no more tears, for she must accept what had happened—and wait for Jack. She must not greet him with tears, for they might seem to reproach him.

Marietta had no doubt that Aunt Percival's reasoning had been correct, and that Sophie's dreadful behaviour to her over the last two years had been all the more bitter because of the great sin which she had committed, which had harmed not only herself, but also Jack and their innocent little boy.

Before she slept—and sleep was long in coming—she wondered not only where Jack was now, but what he had been doing in the long months which had passed since she had last seen him. Did he still love her, as she undoubtedly still loved him?

L
ike Marietta, Jack was also remembering the past. Unlike her, he was still puzzled as to what had happened to their letters. Oh, the misery of remembering all those lovingly penned words which had never reached their intended recipient. He had to believe that what Aunt Percival had told him was true and that each of them had—wrongly—thought the other to be treacherous.

He took his misery with him to the White House. Had it not been a part of his duties he knew he would not have gone there.

The atmosphere at the reception that night was serious and subdued: the mad, hopeful ecstasy of the early days of the War had long gone, killed by death and battles lost, but the darker mood of the evening matched his own thoughts.

‘We're a quiet lot tonight, Jack,' remarked Ezra wryly, ‘especially you.'

‘Yes,' said Jack soberly. ‘I suppose there are many
like me who are thinking of the dead. All wars have their dead, I know, but it means little until you have seen action.'

‘It had to be fought, though,' said Ezra, who was a down-to-earth fellow, not given to much philosophising. So far as he was concerned, the war was a job to be done, like any other, and if there was benefit for him in doing it, so be it, it still had to be done.

‘Oh, I don't deny its necessity,' Jack said. ‘But you know that the South see it just as you do, as a holy war, and they're the worst wars of all. When they're beat, it will be a long time before they recover—or forget.'

Ezra shrugged. ‘They wanted it,' he said, ‘and they started it at Sumter.' Jack did not contradict him, but even that thought did not comfort him.

He was standing alone in an alcove, watching the chattering throng, when a woman's voice behind him, echoing Ezra's, said, ‘You're quiet tonight, Jack.'

He turned to see Sophie Hope—for a quick glance at her left hand told him that she was still unmarried. She was being squired by a bear of a man: fat, almost middle-aged, with a hard shrewd face. He was obviously one of the new breed of entrepreneurs who were doing well out of the war. Jack thought him to be a strange cavalier for Sophie.

She smiled at him enticingly, but her youthful charm and her pink and white prettiness had faded in the two years since he had last seen her. His
brother Alan had been prescient: she was growing fat and, given a few more years, she was like to become an old maid. Her once-soft mouth had a hard, petulant set to it.

‘Miss Sophie,' he said politely, bowing a little. ‘I trust I see you well.'

‘Very well,' she said, and looked at her escort patronisingly, making no attempt to introduce him to Jack. ‘Carver,' she almost snapped at him, ‘pray fetch me an ice and do not trouble yourself to hurry back, I beg of you.'

He reluctantly moved away to do her bidding while Sophie turned her faded charms on Jack.

‘He's Carver Massingham,' she told him carelessly. ‘Rich but a bore, and a boor as well,' she finished dismissively. ‘Although he has his uses.'

She was so patently telling Jack that she was free to accept his advances that Jack almost laughed. Instead, he said in as neutral a voice as possible, ‘For fetching and carrying ices, I suppose.'

Her laughter at this—although she was not sure that Jack was making a joke—was consequently rather strained.

‘You look worried, Jack, not quite the man you were. Were you looking for Marietta—or the widow Grant, I ought to say. She rarely goes out in public these days—so unfortunate, Marietta.' Her eyes glittered when she came out with her most cruel dart. ‘One way or another, she can't seem to keep a man!'

‘Now, why should you think me worried?' he countered, refusing to reply to her spite about Mar
ietta. He was not minded to wear his heart on his sleeve for Sophie to peck at. She had become a hard and bitter woman: her sneer at Marietta was even harsher than those she had uttered before he had left Washington. ‘On the contrary, I am most happy to be here—and to be entertained.'

His last sentence was a direct lie, but he thought that it was all that Sophie deserved.

His coolness made Sophie savage. How dared he look at her as though she were some ugly specimen in a mad doctor's study! Her desire to hurt him and to disparage Marietta suddenly outran her discretion.

‘No? You weren't looking for Marietta, then? From all those letters you wrote to her from New York,' she began unwisely, ‘I thought that— Jack! Whatever are you doing?'

Her exclamation came out as a shrill scream of fear, for Jack's face had changed dramatically on hearing her careless words and grasping their meaning. He thrust out a hand to grip her wrist so tightly that another cry of pain was wrenched from her. ‘Jack! Let go of my wrist! What do you think you're doing?'

Pleasant Jack Dilhorne's expression was murderous. Sophie suddenly realised what she had unwittingly admitted. She stood, still and silent, her free hand suddenly over her betraying mouth, her own face grey.

‘Sophie,' he said, his voice unrecognisable, ‘to what letters are you referring? And how came you to see them? Only this afternoon I learned that Mar
ietta had never received a single one of mine. So how did
you
know about them?' Jack's voice never rose, but became so hard that it was unrecognisable. In manner and speech he had become a twin to his formidable brother Alan. He tightened his grip on Sophie's wrist so strongly that she feared that he was about to break it.

‘Jack! Stop this at once. I don't know what you are talking about. Let me go at once, d'you hear!'

‘No, Sophie. Not until you tell me how you knew that I wrote to Marietta when no one else did. What did you do with my letters, Sophie? Marietta, Aunt Percival and Asia never saw them, but you have just said that you did. So tell me, what happened to my letters which Marietta never received? And to hers which never reached me? Answer me, Sophie, or it will give me the greatest pleasure to wring your neck as well as break your wrist!'

For one moment she met his hard stare and endured the pain his grasp was causing. Her head dropped, only to rise again, to show him her eyes, blazing and triumphant.

‘Oh, damn you, Jack Dilhorne! Here's the truth and much pleasure may it give you! I burned them, all of them, and hers to you, so that you each thought that the other was faithless. I laughed when I watched them turn to ash. Why should that plain stick take all my beaux away from me and not pay for it? Even when I'd got rid of you, she had the impudence to rob me of Avory Grant and marry him.

‘And now you're back, still mooning after her, I see. I'm glad I burned your letters. I'd do it again.'

Unseen by either of them, Carver Massingham had returned with a small tray of ices to hear the greater part of what was being said. He had done nothing to betray his presence, but had watched and listened to them, his face avid, but his pleasure at seeing Sophie manhandled carefully suppressed.

The berserker rage which Jack had never felt before and was never to feel again, and which, unknowingly, he shared with his dead father and his two elder brothers, had him in its grip. The world slowed to a stop, until all that it contained was Sophie's white, hate-filled and triumphant face while she taunted him with her actions which had cost him Marietta, his peace of mind and two years of his life without the woman he loved, the woman whom he might, for all he knew, have permanently lost.

Afterwards, he never knew how it was that he didn't wring Sophie's neck on the spot as he had threatened. His hands were reaching out to clutch it—and then the world started again when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

It was Carver Massingham, holding the tray of ices in one hand and, having heard all he wished to hear, touching Jack's shoulder with the other to prevent him from doing the unforgivable.

‘I say, Dilhorne, what in the world do you think you're doing?'

His coarse voice banished the berserker rage. Jack
dropped his hands and stared at Sophie, whose scarlet wrist was beginning to bruise and to swell.

‘You,' said Jack thickly, ‘you…you treacherous whore,' and then to Carver, his face still avid when he heard this denunciation, ‘I wish you joy of her. Buy her a padlock for her tongue and cuffs for her hands when you marry her. You'll need them.'

‘Damn you, sir,' spluttered Carver, looking from one to the other and defending Sophie purely for form's sake. ‘How dare you speak to a lady so?' Underneath his apparent gallantry, however, he was thinking, So
that's
the kind of thing the bitch is capable of getting up to, is it? Damn if I've not found just the hook to catch Miss Sophie with.

‘A lady?' ground out Jack, looking around him, his expression still murderous. ‘What lady? I see no lady, sir. Merely some poor, white trash I believe you call it here.'

‘Damn you, sir,' roared Carver again, still outwardly chivalrous. ‘You'll answer to me for this, Dilhorne.'

‘Not I, sir,' said Jack, at last becoming aware of the stares which the scene had drawn and was still drawing. ‘I've no wish to kill you over
madame
here. Ask her what she did with my letters to Marietta and hers to me, and then ban fires from your home if you're stupid enough to marry her.'

He turned to go, still shaking, the remains of the rage causing a physical nausea so strong that he felt like vomiting on the spot.

Sophie's face was ashen. She seized Carver by the
arm when she thought that he was about to follow Jack—something which he had no intention of doing. His prime aim now was to deal with Sophie.

‘No, I beg of you, no,' she gasped, not wishing him to learn what she had done, unaware that he had overheard most of what had passed between herself and Jack, and fearful that Jack might tell the whole room of it if he were further provoked.

Carver stared at her. Melted ice was dripping on to the tray he carried.

‘What did he mean, Sophie, about his letters? Tell me?' His voice was suddenly as cruel as it was when he was dealing with his business rivals.

‘Nonsense, oh, it's nonsense,' she replied swiftly, trying to placate him: his face had become as unpleasant as Jack's had been. She was suddenly frightened of him—all her usual contemptuous treatment of him quite vanished. ‘I jilted him, that's all. And now he's trying to gain his revenge.'

‘Not what I heard,' returned Carver. ‘If that was Jack Dilhorne, he left you for your plain cousin. The jilting, if any, was on his side. What did you do with his letters, Sophie? Burn them, to keep them away from the plain cousin? Is that what you did?'

Mutely, she stared at him. It was hopeless to try to deceive him: his shrewdness was a byword.

‘Answer me, Sophie,' he said, putting down the tray and trying to clean his hand with his handkerchief where the ice had dripped on to it.

‘Why should I?' she asked sullenly. ‘It's no business of yours.'

‘Did you burn them, Sophie? I will have an answer, you know.'

‘You will not, for I shall leave you,' she said, defiance written on her face.

For the second time that night her wrist was caught in a cruel grip.

‘No, Sophie, you will stay, and you will marry me whether you wish to or not. Otherwise I shall tell the whole world of what you did, and that would destroy you. There is not a decent person in Washington who would speak to you again. Thank your God that I am a vulgar swine who knows how to control a jealous virago.'

‘You would not,' she panted. ‘You would not dare.'

His cruel eyes raked her body and for the first time Sophie realised the temper of the man whom she had teased and taunted. She was trapped and knew it. She did not want him, no, not at all. She now knew how hard her life would be if she married him, but not to accept him meant that she would be ruined: and over Marietta! That was the hardest cross of all to bear.

‘You leave me no choice,' she finally said.

‘I seldom give others any choice,' was his response. ‘And when you are my wife you will behave yourself—or take the consequences.'

He released her wrist. ‘Now we shall tell your parents that we are to be married; although they will not approve of me, they have never yet denied you anything—which is your downfall.

‘Look happy, my dear. You are going to be a bride
at last. In order to gain a place in your world, a man has been foolish enough to marry an unattractive shrew with a fat backside. One further thing. If your cousin should ever ask you about her letters you will tell her the truth, apologise tearfully, and that will be the end of the matter. I know the Marietta Grants of this world: they have all the honour and decency which you and I do not share.'

Sophie's smile on hearing these coarse home truths was a rictus of dismay. She had given Carver Massingham his chance to trap her, and now she must pay. She walked with him over to her parents, her hand clasped loosely over her damaged wrist, and tried to hold her grimacing smile in place.

The worst thing of all had happened, for now he was her cruel master who had pretended to be her humble slave.