His One Woman (21 page)

J
ack could not sleep. The memory of the dislike on Aunt Percival's face when she had seen him, and the glee on Sophie's when she had taunted him with the destruction of his letters, prevented him sinking into the blessed oblivion where he could forget them.

Sophie had made him appear to be the worst kind of exploitative swine, and he had no notion whether, when he sought her out in the morning, Marietta would even agree to meet someone whom she must regard as her treacherous seducer. To her, unaware of Sophie's wicked behaviour, he was a man who had taken her to bed, made love to her, and then had callously abandoned her. It was enough to destroy any woman's love. Would it even arise from the ashes when he confronted her with what Sophie had confessed to him and Carver Massingham?

He could hardly wait for the new day to arrive when he could set off for Bethesda. He had asked Butler, before he left the Reception, to tell him ex
actly where the Hope Farm was, and how to get there.

His face had been so ravaged that Ezra had looked at him queerly, saying, ‘It's not really a farm any more. The Senator bought it for a summer home so that he needn't spend the hot weather in Washington itself. It's not a long ride.' He gave Jack the directions he needed, while wondering what Sophie Hope could have said to distress him so profoundly.

‘Take my gig,' he offered kindly. ‘It will be easier than riding.'

Jack scarcely looked any better the next day. It was fine and sunny and he rose early, the marks of a sleepless night plain upon his face. All the way along the road which, once out of Washington, was little better than a track, he thought carefully of what he might say to Marietta. He wondered whether she would even believe him when he told her of Sophie's wickedness. Would she be able to credit that, since he had loved her so dearly, the last two years had been a time of great suffering for him because he thought that he had lost her—or had never really had her, or her love?

The one thing which worried him the most of all was that, even if she believed him, it was possible that she might have lost the love for him which had once moved her so powerfully that she had joyfully given herself to him on their last day together.

After all, she had been Avory Grant's wife, and he was still only eight months dead. Butler had told
him that the marriage had been a happy one, and that since his death at Fredericksburg she had virtually retired from society. The night on which Jack had seen her was the first occasion on which she had attended a public event. Well, he could only try his best, and pray that God would be kind to him—and to her…

When he arrived at the farmhouse there was no one to be seen. The place lay peaceful under the sun, like something lost and out of time. He felt his presence, and what he had come to tell them, to be nothing less than sacrilege.

A black servant, not Asia, came to the door. Oddly enough he seemed to be expected, for when he gave her his name and asked to see Mrs Grant, she immediately showed him into a big, airy room which looked out on to an idyllic view of fields, hills and trees: Marietta was not present.

He paced the planked and polished floor nervously until the black servant entered and said, ‘Mrs Grant to see you, sir,' before rapidly retreating—to be replaced by Marietta.

It was a Marietta whom Jack had never seen before. All the careful, formal and staid attire which Senator Hope's daughter and secretary had always chosen to wear was gone.

Her lustrous hair was unbound; instead, it was tied loosely at the nape of her neck with a broad, cherry-coloured ribbon. The long sweep of it fell down her back. She was not wearing mourning, but was sport
ing a simple cream-coloured cotton dress, decorated with sprigs of flowers. A broad cherry-red sash circled her waist. The skirts of her dress were full and flowing since she wore no crinoline cage beneath them. Her slippers were also bright red. Over the dress was an apron of fine cream linen trimmed with lace.

It was her face, though, which had changed the most. The severe air, which she had worn as an armour, had gone. Instead, her expression was soft and tranquil, with more than a trace of the humour which she had always possessed but had rarely revealed. Jack had forgotten her humour after experiencing the sober intensity of the women whom he had met in New York.

Strangely, this belated, and unexpected, meeting reproduced the pattern of their first one, that long-ago day in Washington. Jack was standing at the window when Marietta entered, looking out at the meadows and the trees. He turned to greet her when she slowly advanced until she was immediately in front of him.

He bowed—as did she—as though they were strangers newly come upon one another, and if Jack thought Marietta had changed, she thought that Jack had. He was more serious-looking, for one thing. There had still been something of the eager young boy about him when they had first met—and even when she had last seen him.

Now he was more like his brother Alan. There was a basic seriousness written on his handsome face, and
also something wary, which was coupled with a fundamental sternness which he had never shown before. He shared something with Avory in that. This new Jack surprised her a little since he was not quite as she remembered him. From looking younger than his years he now appeared to be older than them.

‘Aunt Percival has already told me that you twice arrived at my Washington home wishing to see me,' she said calmly.

Oh, dear, how banal her words were, how unwelcoming. Like Jack, Marietta was fearful that the two lost years, coupled with their lost letters, might have changed his feelings for her: that he might now no longer love her as he had once done. Aunt Percival had said that Jack's distress on being reproached and turned away had been very evident. Perhaps that simply meant no more than that he was upset at being misjudged.

To soften her words she added with a slight smile, ‘And here I am.'

Jack swallowed. He had thought so much of what to say to Marietta when he saw her again, but to no avail. He only knew that, as she stood there before him in all her new-found loveliness, his own feelings for her had not changed. No, that was wrong; they had become intensified—if that were possible.

Her face was so serene. The Sophies of this world would be eclipsed by it, since Marietta's beauty was that of character which was bred in the bone and not in the flesh which cruel time would ravage and de
stroy. Sophie had been right to fear her, for how in the world could she ever rival this?

Marietta's smile was tender and slightly mocking.

‘So silent, Jack,' she said. ‘Not like you at all.'

He found his tongue at last. He would have liked to fall before her, to kiss the hem of her garment as the Bible had it, but that would be theatrical, considered, not at all the fashion in which he wished to speak to her again.

Nor did he wish to woo her with words, or deeds, even though his body was telling him that she had lost none of her attraction for him, and so he found talking to her strangely difficult. All his fine speeches, composed in his head on the journey to Bethesda, had flown away, scattered by the mere sight of her, radiant in her new-found serenity.

‘You think me a traitor,' he said at last, for she was waiting for him to answer her, her expression slightly quizzical, because she, too, was finding speech difficult. Later, each was to think that it would have been simpler if they could have fallen into one another's arms and continued where they had left off on that day when they had celebrated their love in his rooms.

‘A cur who betrayed you,' he continued, ‘and then, mouthing false promises, deserted you, after destroying your virtue.'

‘Yes,' she told him gravely. ‘That is true. I felt all of those things when I never heard from you. I could not sleep for thinking of them. But I never stopped loving you, Jack, even when I married Avory, and
so I told him. You see how much I cared, and thus how gravely I was wounded.'

She said nothing of her and Aunt Percival's suspicions of Sophie's guilt. That was to come. She must know whether he still felt anything for her before she assumed that he might still feel the same as she did.

‘Is there any way,' Jack said, ‘that I can convince you that I never stopped loving you, that I wrote and wrote to tell you so, to speak of the future which I hoped to share with you? It was only after months of silence that, with all hope gone, I finally surrendered to what I supposed were your wishes, and stopped beseeching you to write to me. Oh, Marietta, I never deserted you, either in mind, or body. And then I heard that you had married Avory Grant.'

He stopped, unable to speak further for memory of the pain he had then experienced.

Marietta put out a hand to touch his, murmuring softly, ‘So, in the end, you supposed that I had abandoned you. But, Jack, I too wrote, and received no answer from you. What was I to think but that you had taken your pleasure and gone?'

‘No,' he said, and she saw that his face was full of an old pain. ‘And then I came to Washington, because my duty required it, and tried to speak to you, to find out what had gone wrong, why you had deserted me, and then, last night I discovered what had happened to our letters, that Sophie…Sophie…' and he choked on the name.

Marietta took his hand and stroked it, trying not to let her tears fall.

‘That Sophie burned them,' she finished for him. ‘That she destroyed the future that we might have had, and in the doing I fear that she may have indirectly killed my father.'

‘You know?' exclaimed Jack, lifting his ravaged face. ‘How can you know? She only confessed it to me last night at a White House Reception, when by accident she said something to me which betrayed that she knew that we had each written to the other. I nearly wrung her neck before I wrung the truth out of her.'

Marietta kissed the hand she had been stroking, the hand which had written to her of love and the future.

‘How strange life can be, for Aunt Percival told me only last night that she saw your face yesterday after she had confronted you with our belief that you had cruelly abandoned me. She thought, for the first time, that you were not lying when you tried to tell her that you had written to me constantly. And when you claimed that
you
had never received any letters from
me
, she came here, post haste, to tell me of her sudden dreadful suspicion that Sophie, who had been caring for my father's mail because of my illness, had intercepted them and destroyed them…and destroyed us.'

It was Marietta's turn to drop Jack's hand, to put her own up to cover her face as her tears began to choke her.

‘Marietta,' said Jack hoarsely. ‘She destroyed nothing but paper. I still care for you and always have done, even when I believed that
you
had betrayed
me
. I will not lie to you. After I had been told that you had married Avory I met another woman whom I wished to marry, although I never loved her as I had loved you. Thank God, she refused me, although I was sorry at the time. She said that she did so because it was quite clear to her that I was still grieving for you and could not give her my wholehearted love. It was she who made me understand that loving and losing you had destroyed other women for me.

‘Aunt Percival told me, when she was reproaching me, that you had married a good man, and I know that you must have hated me for what you thought I had done. Is there anything left for me in your heart—or do you simply pity me? Is there a possibility that if I asked you to marry me you could bring yourself to do so?'

‘Oh,' she said, the tears running down her face. ‘Can you doubt it? You did not listen to me when I told you that I never stopped loving you, and that I didn't cheat Avory. I told him of you, of our love for one another, and he accepted it and me, and adopted Cobie. If I stayed faithful to you in my heart when I thought that you were a traitor, you may judge of my feelings towards you now that I know that you were not. Of course I will marry you.'

The mention of Cobie passed Jack by because he had heard that Marietta Grant had two children, one
of them Avory's by his first wife. Perhaps, Marietta later thought, she had purposely not dwelt upon him. She did not wish to use Cobie's existence to blackmail Jack into marriage.

It was Jack's duty to kiss her tears away, which merely resulted in his mingling with hers. But now they were tears of joy which they shared together. Presently he raised his head and said, brokenly, for the enormity of what had happened was still with him, ‘Shall we marry as soon as possible so that we may make up for the lost years? You had better know that I am more of a savage than I thought I was. I could have killed Sophie last night for what she has done to us. When I think of all those loving words I wrote to you which she turned into so much ash… I said that she had only destroyed paper—but what paper—'

Marietta put her hand upon his mouth. ‘Shush, my darling,' she said gently. ‘If Aunt Percival is right, her worst crime was to my father. But that is past, and it is useless for us to repine. Let us forget her, and think of our future together.'

He took her into his arms again and kissed her gently on the cheek. ‘I almost fear to touch you, my darling. Two years ago I was too daring, too sure of myself, and of our future happiness. I tempted the gods and was taught a bitter lesson: that we may not have all we want by right, as and when we wish it. I was too greedy, and so we were both punished.'

‘You were not the only one, Jack,' she said softly into his chest. ‘I had to learn a bitter lesson, too. That
I could not take what I wanted, as I did that last afternoon, and forget all else. I did not remember that time and chance will deal with all of us, and sometimes harshly.'

‘Sophie, too, then,' he said, bitterly.

‘Sophie, too,' she agreed. ‘What she did to us was dreadful—what she has done to herself is worse.'