His One Woman (22 page)

Jack thought for a moment of Sophie as he had seen her last night with her vulgar escort, and remembered the dazzling young beauty of his first encounter with her. He did not reject Marietta's judgement. Of course, Marietta was right; they must secure their future by forgetting the past.

‘Come, my love,' he said tenderly, sinking on to the settle and laying her head on his chest. ‘Let us try to make up for the lost years while I tell you that this time I shall not leave you until the knot is safely tied and we are man and wife.'

‘We are agreed on that,' she said, reaching up to kiss his cheek. ‘The waiting will be as short as I can make it.'

Holding her, Jack thought, was almost the same as it had been before, but not quite. If they had both suffered and learned patience, they had also learned something more—to savour each moment as though it were the last without wrenching at it. Their new happiness would have a depth which the old one had not possessed. They had had to lose one another in order to learn how truly deep their love was.

Marietta slipped from his arms to look earnestly at him. ‘You are still the Jack I remember, even if
you resemble your brother Alan more and your old self less. I think that we have both finally grown up.'

‘Which I needed to do more than you,' Jack admitted gravely. ‘My father was right there: I took all my good fortune in life as my due—now I know better.'

He then told her something which Avory had said to her in almost the same words before he had returned to the Army for the last time.

‘I have seen war, Marietta, and it changes a man. What was a game for me, a thing of abstract shapes on maps and plans and tables, disappeared when I encountered the realities of battle. As a consequence the bloodless shapes became men who suffered, bled and died, because Charles and I wrote and drew on paper. It was why, after I had sailed on the
Monitor
, I asked to go South, to join in the river war: I couldn't remain behind the lines and play God there. I can't forget that.'

‘Nor would I ask you to,' she said gently, ‘but for a little you must enjoy the calm of peace here, still far from the conflict, because I want you to meet the children for whom you will be responsible when we are married. The sooner they get to know you, the better. Come.'

Jack was greatly moved by the expression on her face when she spoke of the children. It was half-teasing, half-loving, so he immediately did as he was bid. He assumed that these were Avory's children from his first marriage, and he followed her when
she led him on to the big enclosed veranda at the back of the house.

There were chairs and tables there, and another settle. A pretty, raven-haired little girl, wearing a white dress and a black sash, sat at a table writing carefully, her tongue protruding between her lips. Beside her, on a rug, a blond baby boy who was hanging on to the table leg was busy hauling himself upright to stand for a moment on sturdy legs before launching himself across the room to greet Marietta and the strange man.

He was so excited that he lost his balance, sat down and, nothing daunted, began to pull himself up again, turning his bright blue eyes on them, and offering them—and the world—a friendly grin. If Cobie had a fault, it was that he loved all the world, indiscriminately.

The little girl stood up and curtsied when she saw the stranger.

‘Susanna,' said Marietta, ‘this is Mr Jack Dilhorne. Jack, this is Miss Susanna Grant, Avory's daughter.'

Susanna gave him another small curtsy, and said, ‘How do you do, sir? I trust I see you well.' She then turned to Marietta and asked her, still grave, ‘Pardon me, Mama, but is he an uncle?'

‘Yes,' said Marietta, as serious as the child. ‘Yes, I think that you can safely say that he is an uncle.'

‘Welcome, Uncle Jack, then,' said Susanna, bobbing yet again before she resumed her work at the table.

‘And this,' said Marietta, picking up the little boy
who was now hanging on to her skirts, ‘is Cobie, and he is mine.'

Her face was alight with mischief when she came out with this while turning to face Jack, his child in her arms. The mischief on her face matched Cobie's, who was putting out his arms, mutely asking to be allowed to go to his new friend.

‘Yours?' said Jack bewildered. ‘How can that be? Any child which you and Avory had could not possibly be as old as Cobie.'

‘Oh, Jack, you goose,' said Marietta, laughing at him over the top of his son's fair head. ‘Look at him. He's yours. With that hair and those eyes, and his charm, who else but you could possibly be his father?'

‘Mine!' Jack was thunderstruck. He did mental arithmetic rapidly in his head. ‘Of course, that afternoon! No!'

His face twisted with grief—and then he put his arms around them both. ‘Oh, my darling Marietta, you mean…that on top of my apparent desertion you had to face this alone. And when I think of how I would have cherished you both…'

He fell silent and Marietta felt his hot tears on her cheek.

He took the little boy from her and hugged and kissed him—something which Cobie took entirely as his due.

‘Cobie—for Jacobus, I suppose?'

‘Yes—for my father—and for you. Even with you
apparently gone for ever I wanted him to have at least a part of your name.'

‘I cannot speak,' exclaimed Jack, who knew that he usually had a ready tongue, but the enormity of what he was hearing had silenced him.

Susanna had lifted her head from her work, and was regarding him approvingly.

‘He knows how to hold a baby properly,' she said. ‘I suppose that now poor Papa has gone we need a man about the house, and it would be useful to have one who is good with baby boys.'

This old-fashioned piece of wisdom, garnered from Susanna having heard Aunt Percival and Aunt Lucy Grant talking, nearly overcame both her hearers.

Marietta, realising that there was still much that she and Jack had to say which was best done out of Susanna's hearing, undid the veranda door and beckoned Jack to a long wooden seat overlooking the meadows and the distant forest. Jack followed her, still carrying an interested Cobie who was busy inspecting his new playmate—he seemed to be a fearless child.

They sat down together, Jack looking around him at the kind of view which American landscape painters loved to celebrate. Even Cobie was quiet, as though he sensed that his mama and this new uncle needed a moment or two to digest the enormity of what had happened to them.

Finally Jack said suddenly, after kissing Cobie's warm cheek, ‘It is not every day that one discovers
that one has a family. I still feel that I would like to strangle Sophie for what she did to us both in depriving me of the first years of my son's life. How you must have suffered when you knew that he was coming, and I had apparently abandoned you to ruin, and left Cobie fatherless into the bargain. Oh, I am doubly shamed. One afternoon's heedless pleasure, for I must take the blame for that, condemned you to a living hell.'

Marietta looked at his handsome face, for his new sternness had made him even more attractive to her, and said gently, ‘Oh, Jack, do not reproach yourself overmuch. I was your willing partner and must take my share of the blame, if blame there is. We could not have known that Sophie would be so cruel. Remember, I was not alone in my grief, for I had Aunt Percival to help and comfort me. She was a better liar than I could have been, and as a result of her scheming no one knows that I am Cobie's mother.

‘Not even Sophie has guessed that, and I pray God that she never will. The only thing, Jack, is that he's so like you, and will be more so, I fear—no, I mean hope—when he is older.

‘Before it became apparent that I was breeding, I had a convenient breakdown and Aunt Percival took me deep into the country to have my baby at the farm of a distant cousin who asked no questions of us. We pretended that I was the grieving widow of a dead war hero. Besides, I passionately wanted my coming child, for it was all I had left of you. After he was born Aunt Percival and I went back with him
to Washington, saying that he was an orphan relative of hers whose mother had died at his birth after asking her to adopt him—which she legally did.

‘Avory guessed that he was mine. I could not help loving him from the very moment he was born, for he is a lovable child, as you are already finding out.'

She paused to laugh at the sight of Cobie rearing up to pat his new friend's face.

‘You see, Avory not only married me, but he adopted Cobie, too, and gave him his name, saying that he liked the idea of having a ready-made son—even if I were to give him sons of my own later. You must not be jealous of Avory, my darling. He was a good man, and Cobie and I helped to make what were to become the last months of his life happy.'

‘No,' said Jack soberly, ‘I'm not jealous of him, although how I would have felt if I had returned to find him alive, and you happily married to him, is something I am relieved not to have had to endure.

‘In any case, when I thought that I had lost you for ever I tried to console myself with another woman—as I have already told you. But I ought, in fairness to her, to tell you more. She is one of the new breed of Yankee women who are making careers for themselves, like men. She was a journalist, and had decided that marriage was not for her. She and I became lovers—I tried to persuade her otherwise, and proposed to her. I even told her a little about you, for she had sensed that I had had an unhappy experience with a woman before I met her. Later, as I've already told you, she said that the real reason
she refused me was because I was still in thrall to that other woman, and she would not be content to be second-best in my life.

‘She was right. For good or ill you are, were and shall be the one woman for me. The one woman of whom my father spoke, and whom he found to transform his life, as I hope that you will transform mine. I parted amicably with Peggy and I later heard that she had married an older man, the editor of one of the magazines for which she wrote. I sent a letter to her wishing her well—as she had wished me when we parted. “Find that woman, Jack,” she wrote back to me, “and marry her.” As with Avory, you must not be jealous of her since it was that advice which brought me back to you when my duty led me to Washington. Otherwise, I might not have come looking for you.'

‘Thank God you did,' said Marietta, kissing first Jack and then Cobie because Cobie looked unhappy at being left out of the caressing stakes.

‘Tell me, if it does not still distress you too much, when was he born?'

‘No, it does not distress me to speak of it, and even if it did, you should know the details of your son's birth. He was nearly a month early, for which I was grateful because he was already so large,' Marietta told him, smiling reminiscently.

‘He came into the world on March 9th, the same day as the Battle of Hampton Roads—of which I did not learn until many months later. He was most inconsiderate because he spoiled everyone's midday
meal with the speed of his arrival. One minute I was putting greens on to boil, and in the next he was on the way. He has made up for that since by being the most agreeable and happy child a mother could be blest with. He rarely cries.'

‘Putting greens on to boil!' Jack exclaimed at this revelation of a Marietta whose duties, when he had known her, had been so far removed from the mundane tasks of the kitchen.

Marietta laughed a little. ‘Oh, I had to do my share of the work. The Hentys were quite poor and I refused to be pampered. Besides, I liked being mindless then.'

Jack was struck by another thought. ‘You say that he was born on the day of the great naval battle—around midday. How very strange. Do you remember that when we first met I spoke to you of the warship which was to become the
Monitor
? We joked about it, did we not—remember the exploding muffins? I was on board the
Monitor
on the day of the battle, as an observer for Ericsson and the Navy Department. I was busy wondering whether I should ever see land, let alone New York, ever again when the oddest thing happened.'

How was he to tell her of having seen her in the middle of the battle without sounding remarkably eccentric? He stopped to consider his words, but before he could speak again, Marietta said slowly, equally struck, ‘How strange, I had an odd experience just before Cobie was born. Tell me of yours.'

Her tone was so insistent that Jack forgot all cau
tion and continued, ‘Our captain was struck to the deck and blinded. I went to help him, for I tried to do my bit in the battle. When I bent down, saying to him, “Hold on, help is at hand,” he disappeared, and I suddenly thought that I saw you, lying down in bed, with Aunt Percival nearby. You were in pain, but before I could say, or see, anything more, you disappeared and I was back with Worden.

‘I never told anyone of this—other than my brother, Alan, when I wrote to him a little later. You may think me mad, but I would swear on oath that that is what I saw in the middle of the noise of battle.'

Marietta's face had turned white with shock.

‘Oh, Jack, you have explained something which happened to me at the moment Cobie was born, something which I have never been able to understand, and I have tried to forget. I never even told Aunt Percival of it, and I usually tell her everything.

‘I was in the last agonies of birth when you suddenly appeared before me, stretching out your hand. You were hardly recognisable. Your face was black and your forehead was bleeding. You were speaking. You said, and I still remember quite clearly what it was, “Hold on, help is at hand”—and then you disappeared.'

It was Jack's turn to look thunderstruck.

‘My face
was
black and my forehead was bleeding that day,' he finally came out with. ‘What you saw of me was true only on that one day because I had taken part in the battle, replacing one of the dead
sailors—which explains the black of the powder on my face. My forehead was gashed and bleeding because a shell from the
Merrimac
scored a direct hit on the
Monitor
's gun turret and a fragment of its metal struck my forehead. Fortunately it was only a fragment, or I should not be here, talking to you. How strange that you should have seen me so plainly as to be able to describe me so accurately.'