Revenge in a Cold River (20 page)

The hot chocolate was finished but Beata had not bothered to ring the bell for anyone to take the tray away.

Miriam sat opposite her, her hands folded on her knees, not comfortable anymore. “Do you remember Walt Taylor? A big man but very gentle.”

Beata tried to recall, but nothing came to her: no face, no voice.

“I'm sorry,” Miriam said quickly. “I think that was before we really knew each other. Piers was still alive….” She tailed off as if the words had evaporated into the warm, fire-lit room but the name of Piers Astley drove out all other recollections and for a moment Beata saw her expression, the lost look.

“I'm sorry,” Miriam said again, leaning forward compulsively, gathering herself. “That was clumsy of me. Here you are mourning the death of your husband only a couple of weeks ago, and I am talking of twenty years in the past. But…something of the edge remains, the sudden cut where you thought it was all healed.” Indeed she looked as if the pain were raw inside her and time had done nothing to heal the wound. “I really am sorry, Beata. I did not mean to be so thoughtless.”

“Please don't apologize.” Beata did not find it hard to say. “It was not sudden, like Piers's death. Ingram was ill for over a year, and he was not a young man.”

“But you're young,” Miriam said warmly.

Beata smiled with a quite natural ease. “Thank you, my dear. I admit that under the black weeds, I feel it. Most of the time, I look forward to the future.” That was only partly true. She also dreaded it. The hold of the past was very strong, as if Ingram's last grip on her had not loosened with his death.

“Most of it? You have times of grief. It's natural. I didn't know Ingram, but you must have memories that linger, fill your mind with sorrow.”

Oh, yes! She could see Ingram's face in her dreams. She could feel the touch of him, smell his skin as if he had only just let go of her.

Should she give Miriam the answer she expected? The hypocrisy of it almost suffocated her.

“Yes, I do,” she agreed. “You might have found Ingram interesting, but you would not have liked him.” Was that too much truth? She longed to be able to tell someone, to talk to Miriam as they had years ago, sharing young women's secrets, as if they had been sisters.

Miriam stared at her, the beginning of understanding in her eyes. The softness of her expression almost evoked their old intimacy. Was it conceivable that Piers Astley had abused Miriam the way Ingram York had abused her? Was that the understanding in Miriam's eyes?

She should change the subject, if she could—or take the chance to speak.

“It is a…relief.” She chose the word intentionally. It left her room to interpret it differently if she changed her mind and wished to retreat instead. She was afraid, on the brink of not being alone with her secret wrapped up inside her, eating away at her like a disease. Would Miriam have the faintest idea what she meant? Has she ever been possessed, owned but not loved?

“Was he in pain?” Miriam, too, was guarding her meaning.

“I have no idea,” Beata said more sharply than she had intended. Now that the possibility of real honesty was so close she was irritated at the hesitation in reaching it.

Miriam's face clouded. The tenderness in her eyes was so deep it seemed to be her own pain she was feeling.

“What was he like? Really?” Her voice was no more than a whisper.

Now it was either the truth, or lie. Either way, it was irreversible. She was soul-weary of lies.

“For the first couple of years he was all right.” Beata chose her words with as much precision as she could. “Then little things changed. At first it was only the occasional roughness, a deliberate hurting at moments of intimacy. But they grew more frequent until it was every time.” She was going to say it all now. She did not look at Miriam's face because she knew she would not stop. This was a test. If Miriam was disgusted, disbelieving, then Beata would know she could never risk telling Oliver.

“He began to exercise other tastes,” she continued. “Revolting things that were humiliating, and terribly painful. I should have had the courage to stop him. I tried two or three times, but he hurt me more. Of course it was in places no one else would ever see. I couldn't go to a specialist doctor, another man, and tell him my husband had done that to me.”

She felt Miriam's hand on her arm, very gently, and at last she looked up at her.

Miriam had tears in her eyes and her face was pale with anger.

“I'm so sorry.”

Beata sat motionless, hardly breathing. All she could feel was her heart thundering in her chest. Miriam understood. She did not know how or why, but she understood!

“Thank you,” she said very quietly. “Actually, justice caught up with him eventually, but it was not my doing. Less than a year ago, he had a seizure and was paralyzed, in and out of coma and, I think, nightmare. He couldn't move, and could only speak a little. He suffered a great deal. It would have been more merciful if the first seizure could have taken him.”

“How hard for you…waiting,” Miriam said softly. Then the anger was gone from her eyes and there was only a tenderness. “Piers died very quickly, I was told. He was shot in some stupid kind of brawl, in a saloon up in the gold country to the north, where he was looking after Aaron's affairs. That was what he did. He was trying to stop a fight, and got in the way.” She stopped, her voice gravelly in her throat.

“And you were just…told about it?” Beata tried to picture hearing such news about a man you had truly loved, not one whose death was your release.

“It must have been like a stab in the back from an assassin you did not even know was following you,” Beata whispered. “I can't imagine it.”

Tears filled Miriam's eyes. “They buried him out there. I rode out a few days after. The hills are beautiful, spring flowers everywhere. People in dusty clothes on the sides of every river and stream, panning for gold. You can see it in your mind. Women scraping at the earth to dig it up enough to plant greens and vegetables. Shacks with nothing over their beds and a stove of some sort, or even an open fire outside.” She gave a short, jerky laugh. “They don't call it gold fever for nothing. But those wild days had their advantages, too.”

Beata knew that very well. Her own father had been one of the wise ones, who did not look for gold themselves but made their way by providing for those who did. They lost a little on the failures, but made enormously on the successes, until he started to gamble. But she would not speak of that now; she had torn open enough wounds for the day.

“You didn't go alone?” she asked, really just to show her attention to Miriam's story.

“Yes I did, except for one of the men from Aaron's homestead. I don't even remember who he was. A friend of Zack's, I think.” Miriam smiled ruefully. “A nice man. He was very kind to me, patient. I feel guilty that I can't even think what he was called, or even exactly what he looked like. I was…stunned. The whole world changed for me in a few days.” She was looking into the past herself now, in turn acknowledging pain that would never entirely leave her.

“It wasn't Zack himself?” Beata asked it for something to say, not because it mattered. It was all so many years ago.

Miriam shook her head. “No, poor Zack was dead by then. Over a year before. That was a bit before you and I really knew each other.

“Zachary was the most totally honest man I ever knew. He and Aaron were closer than brothers. He was the only person whose opinion of him Aaron even cared about. Zachary's father took a huge area of land over from the Indians and that's where Aaron's success began. He was better at defending it than Zachary.” Her words were perfectly plain, but there were conflicting emotions in her face, respect and doubt mixed.

Beata knew something of the history of the West. This would not have been a purchase; it was plainly land-grabbing.

“Zack didn't agree with what his father had done,” Miriam went on. “He felt he shouldn't have taken it, gold or not. His father gave Aaron command of it, and when the old man was killed, Aaron inherited it.”

Beata was startled. “Not Zack?”

“No. But Zack didn't mind. He would have given it back; we all knew that. And the big gold stakes made it certain. There'd have been an Indian war, which the Indians would have lost, if they'd fought.”

“And Zack?” Beata asked.

“He yielded to the inevitable,” Miriam replied. “But he spent more and more time up in the Indian parts, trying to see they got something out of it. When he was killed, Aaron grieved for him terribly. That's how he understood my grief over Piers, I think. The world changed for him when Zack died. He lost something of himself that day, something good inside him.” She remained silent for several minutes, seemingly imprisoned in memory.

That was all about Aaron and Zachary. What of her first husband?

Had Piers Astley not been anything like the man Miriam had allowed people to suppose? Beata thought that if Miriam meant her to know she would have told her now. Beata herself had led people to think that Ingram was a clever, subtle, cultivated man, interesting in public and quietly decent at home. Why should Miriam be any different? She was a beautiful woman fighting for acceptance within her own society. London, just as much as the frontier town of San Francisco, was a place where to be outcast was a kind of death. Perhaps it was the same everywhere.

Had Aaron, who was clearly still in love with her, rescued her from a man who had abused her, and she dared not admit it? Why was a woman afraid to acknowledge that she had been beaten, or intimately used by a man who, at least in part, hated her?

Aaron obviously still found Miriam beautiful, whole, and lovely, even after nearly twenty years of marriage. Would Oliver Rathbone ever see Beata in such a way? Perhaps, if she never let him know the truth! Could he possibly understand as Miriam seemed to? There was the gulf between empathy and pity that Beata could not bear that he should cross.

But if she did tell him, wouldn't he always have the question in his mind, whether he gave it words or not—“Why did you let him?”

“You are very fortunate to have met Aaron,” she said quietly.

Miriam looked at her for a long, steady moment, then turned her head away and stared out of the window.

“It was a marvelous ride today,” she said softly. “Almost a gallop. Who would have thought you could do that in the middle of London, and all dressed up as if to meet the cream of the aristocracy…?”

“We did meet some of them,” Beata said, allowing herself to embrace the complete change of subject. “We spoke to at least one marchioness, a duchess, and two viscounts.”

“And with the horse you lent me, I felt the equal of any of them,” Miriam said, suddenly cheerful again, as if she could dismiss the past with a flick of her hand. “I am envious and grateful. With such a veil as you had, I doubt anyone recognized you. We must ride again. Please…”

Beata had no hesitation in agreeing. A weight had gone from her, not far perhaps, but gone nevertheless.

“Oh, certainly. I would like that very much.”

A
CTUALLY, THE NEXT OCCASION
on which Beata had any social contact at all was a brief visit to Dr. Finch's chambers in Belgravia, regarding the university chair in Ingram's name. She found the subject awkward because she did not really like Finch, and it was difficult to keep up the pretense that Ingram was an admirable man. She was relieved when Aaron Clive came into the room, interrupting a rather awkward conversation.

As soon as Aaron saw Beata he came over to her, smiling, taking both her hands in his and searching her face.

“How are you? You look wonderful, but you always do.”

She knew she looked tired. She saw her own face in the glass enough to understand what she should wear, whether a dash of color was needed.

“It gets easier every day.” It was a gracious answer that was also the truth.

She saw his candid smile and knew that he understood. How utterly different he was from Ingram!

“Are we progressing?” he asked Finch, turning to him with a smile of optimism.

“Most certainly,” Finch agreed. He was polite and kept a very slight distance, yet Beata had the powerful impression that his respect for Aaron came somewhere close to awe. Was it no more than Aaron's money, and therefore his power to endow the university with the funds it needed to obtain the very best from its teaching? Or was it the aura of power, and even romance that surrounded a man who had traveled, observed, created, and sustained an estate the size of a small country, as Aaron had? And yet still kept his grace, and always his temper?

They concluded the business quickly. Beata had come in a hansom. It was not worth getting her own carriage out for such a comparatively short journey. Aaron offered to take her home, since he had his carriage, ready for a considerably longer journey back toward his offices down by the river. It was a pleasant afternoon for late November. Unusually, there was no wind.

“Thank you,” she said, accepting with pleasure.

As it was, it took longer than either of them had expected. There was no way to hurry traffic where a dray had turned too abruptly and lost some of its load. They were obliged to wait, since they could move neither back nor forward.

“Miriam told me how much she had enjoyed your ride in the park,” Aaron said conversationally. “I hope you feel free to go again.”

From his tone of voice she was not certain if he was being a little ironic. Had he any idea what Ingram had been like? Could Miriam have told him? Surely not! That thought was unbearable! Or possibly Ingram's reputation was a good deal more accurate than he would have liked to think? She turned toward him, but there was no criticism in Aaron's face, only a slight humor, as if he could see the joke, but thought it unkind to let her know that. Many wounds can be borne simply because we believe no one else knows.