Lady Hathaway's House Party (20 page)

Before she said anything, Belle spoke. “He wants a divorce,” she said in a high, breathless voice. And she was still being a child—lying, not taking any blame. “We’re getting a divorce,” she altered the statement.

“He has never agreed to a divorce!” Kay said, startled.

“Yes, he has.”

“You’ve talked him into it, you mean.”

“I just mentioned it once.”

“More than once—you mentioned it before tonight, Belle.”

“Yes, I mentioned it before, but I didn’t mean it.”

“Why on earth did you mention it, then? Oh really, Belle, you should be shaken.”

“I know,” she said, and tears spurted into her eyes. Any desire to shake her was eliminated at seeing the poor girl in a heap of misery on the bed. “Never mind. I’ll speak to him. I’ll tell him.”

“No—I must tell him myself,” Belle said, her head coming up, as she wiped the tears from her face.

In the dim glow Kay saw quite clearly the gold band on her left hand. “I’ll send him up, shall I?”

“Yes, if you please,” Belle said.

Kay ran down the stairs so fast she nearly tripped over her skirt. She darted from room to room looking for Oliver, but she did not think to look in the garden. She was seized with the awful thought that he had left, had set out for London or Belwood without saying goodbye to her. In the mood a divorce would precipitate, he might do any foolish thing. With some remnant of reason, she thought of the stables—she could discover there if he had left, if his carriage was gone. She turned to look for a footman to send off there, and saw Oliver coming down the hall from the library.

He looked white and dazed, like Belle. “We’re getting a divorce,” he said.

Her relief at finding him still here was followed quickly by anger, as such anxieties usually are. “It would serve you right,” she snapped.

“Kay, don’t you
care?”
  he asked, hurt. “I said we’re getting divorced.”

“I ain’t deaf. I heard you. Besides, I’ve been talking to Belle.”

“She must be happy about it, at least.”

“Marvelously happy!” she replied ironically. “Tears of joy running down her face. You should both have a shillelagh across your backs. Go on up and see her.”

“There’s nothing more to say. It’s all settled.”

“She has something she wants to say to you.”

“She asked to see me?”

“Yes, she’s waiting for you in her room.”

“All right. I’ll go,” he said, and walked off slowly.

Chapter Fifteen

It had taken some little while for Lady Hathaway to find Oliver, long enough for Belle to imagine he wasn’t coming, and to work herself into a fine lather. When he came he walked into the room without knocking, such mundane matters as tapping at a door quite beyond him. He found her leaning against her propped pillows, crying into her hands. He had never seen Belle cry before, and to know that it was his fault, that he had done this to the person he loved best in the world, grieved him.

“I’m sorry, Belle,” he said, his voice unsteady.

She looked up as he advanced into the room, but no words came out of her choking throat.

“It—it will soon be over,” he went on in soothing tones, which caused her sobbing to increase noticeably. A feeling of helplessness washed over him. “Don’t cry, Belle. Please don’t cry,” he pleaded, and going to the bed he sat on its edge to try to comfort her with soothing pats on the shoulder.

“I’ll make it as easy for you as I can. Perhaps you needn’t appear in court at all,” he hazarded rashly. “I wish there were some other way . . .” She looked up hopefully, her sobs arrested, till he spoke on. “An annulment or something,” he finished up, but of course there was no other way. No annulment, no pretending it had never happened. A hiccough of a sob escaped her as she tried to recover her composure to talk to him.

“Oh, please don’t cry. I can’t bear to see you cry,” he said, and put his arms around her, to cradle her head against his breast. “I only wanted to make you happy, Belle. All my stupid behavior . . . I still want to make you happy. I have nothing you want but your freedom, and even that I can’t give without hurting you. The divorce will be hell, but we’ll face it together. Don’t worry your reputation will be ruined. It won’t. I’ll see to that—do whatever I can.”

“A divorce would be horrid, Ollie,” she said, trying to work her way around to wiping the thing out entirely.

“No, it won’t be so bad. You’ll see.”

“Oh, it would. I think it would be
horrid.”

“It will be all right, Belle. It will be fine.”

“Don’t you
mind,
then?” she asked.

“Of course I mind! I’d rather cut off my right arm,” he said fiercely. “But it’s not the disgrace of the divorce I mind. It’s losing you. It’s the only thing I can do to prove I love you, and I’ll do it gladly. I want you to be happy.”

“I want you to be happy too,” she told him in a timid voice. She had never seen him so distraught before. He was as unhappy and hurt as herself. And he always had been. His brittle exterior too hid a real human heart.

“I don’t deserve to be. I’ve been a damned fool. I had my chance and I wrecked it. You don’t have to go on paying for your mistake. You’re too young.”

“I’m not so young anymore,” she said, squaring her shoulders to accept her share of the blame. “I know I acted like a stupid child, Ollie, expecting you to take care of me and make me happy, and, and everything.”

“Oh, God, Belle, I
wanted
to.”

“I know you did. I know it now, but I didn’t help you. It takes two to make a marriage work.”

“No, it wasn’t your fault. You were young, innocent. I should have known better. I should have taken better care of you."

“At least
you
tried. I ran away. I didn’t even try.” Oliver began to perceive that their roles were reversed, that a rather staggering change in attitude had crept into the conversation, and looked at her questioningly. “Darling, it’s not too late,” he said, rather tentatively.

Tears welled up in her eyes, but her face was beaming. The flood had burst, and Oliver knew it was the flood to lead on to fortune. He felt he was in a dream, someone else’s dream, where the moves were unknown to him. Salvation was within his grasp, but how to grasp it? A wrong word or move might ruin his grasp.

“We don’t
have
to get divorced,” she suggested.

“No, we could get married instead,” he replied, in a polite voice that might have been discussing a party. “I mean, go back to being married. We must be either married or divorced, don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” she replied happily, this caldron of unreason suddenly the soul of rationality. She smiled shyly at him, as uncertain as he was himself, but suddenly approachable with her old sweet expression.

“I love you, Belle,” he said. It seemed the simple way; without artifice was what the dream demanded.

“I love you too, Ollie,” she answered, and went into his arms that were going out to her.

“Why didn’t you say so, you little beast?” he said softly into her ear, and kissed her, still in the dream, quietly and with the restrained passion the trance called for.

“I thought you’d laugh at me,” she said, laughing at herself for such an absurd fear.

“Laugh at you! Belle, my God, what kind of a monster did you take me for? Surely I wasn’t that incomprehensible to you.”

“You were, Ollie. You grew into a stranger.”

“How is it possible for two sane adults who love each other to have grown so far apart? It wasn’t like that before we got married. Then you wouldn’t have been afraid to tell me.”

“In those days you used to tell me too.”

“I was trying to tell you all the time, darling. All that stuff I gave you that you hated and laughed at, they were my magpie’s glittering offering to his mate. But unlike a pie, I have a voice of my own. I should have told you with words, shouldn’t I?”

“I shouldn’t have laughed at your things. Was that
really
a physician’s stick I gave you?”

“Certainly it was. My friends took to calling me Dr. Avondale, and inviting me to prepare them a posset. But you are guilty of only one inappropriate gift; I have dozens to my discredit.”

“It was only you I wanted.”

“You never said so. Next time we’ll talk to each other. Talk to me. Tell me everything.”

“Be there and I will. I’ll talk so much you’ll wish I’d be still.”

“No I won’t! Wish you would be still, I mean. I’ll be there, listening with both ears, and expecting to hear some very sweet words too, to make up for this long silent nightmare we have been through. Though you have been less silent since we got here, at Kay’s. I noticed right away you’d changed.”

“I didn’t change as much as you. You were so violent I was half afraid of you. And to see you being
rude
to Lady Dempster. What got into you, Ollie?”

“I became unhinged, between thinking you hated me, and loved Henderson, and your talk of divorce. About
that
you would talk, wretch! Never a word of kindness, but a whole harangue of abuse. Never mind, I didn’t mean to complain, and deserved every word of it too. We’ll discuss something else. Tell me how you feel now, this very minute.”

“Happy. Relieved. And you?” She placed her hands on his two cheeks and looked at him closely. He grabbed her fingers and kissed them.

“Safe! Like a fox that has just made it to his lair, with the hounds baying after him. A squeak-in. Belle—when did you put this back on?” he asked, fingering her wedding ring, whose absence he had been noticing throughout the days.

“As soon as you said you would divorce me.”

“You had no intention of going through with it, then?”

“Certainly not. You are always giving me things I don’t want. Diamonds, divorces . . .”

“It was a close shave, wasn’t it, honey?”

“Very close, and I would rather you not call me Honey. It has associations I would prefer to forget for the present.”

“Yes, darling, sweetheart, wife. And how dare you think I liked that overstuffed bird of paradise? If you must accuse me of a flirtation, why couldn’t you have picked on one of the dashers I tried to make you jealous with? Why must you think my taste so lacking, and my breeding too, as to be having an eye on my wretched cousin’s equally wretched wife?”

“Your taste has always been in question, Oliver, and lately your breeding too appears to be deteriorating.”

“You must resume your duties, to improve them. I’ll ship George off to India. Get him a job there and let him become a nabob. Honey—Mrs. Traveller— would love it.”

“You can call
her
Honey. And after they are safely in India you can call
me
Honey too. Will it be all right, about the money he—er—borrowed?”

“She should have made it to Doncaster in time to cover for him, and I should have told you the truth.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I just wanted you to think it was innocent, my going into her room, as it was, of course. You mentioned the damnable word ‘duel,’ and I lit on to it like a drowning man. Just when things had seemed to be going so well with us, too. Then to see you next day, boasting of your
intimacy
with Henderson. That was a dreadful stunt to play on me. You know, I was as jealous as a bear of him. How much reason had I to be, by the way?”

“None. He was a soothing companion. He never demanded a thing, nor gave a thing either. After the chaos of that London crew I found his dull talk and dull self calming. A calm is welcome after a storm.”

He seemed satisfied with her answer. “Very true. We’ll go to Belwood and be calm for a while, shall we?”

“I’m not afraid of London now."

“I have some unfinished business in London. Messrs. Jackson and Fischer, and cousin Hasborough.”

“Let us consider the business finished. No harm came of it in the long run.”

“But what a lot of harm in the short run! And it didn’t seem so short, either. About a million years. Do you not want to go to London, then?”

She wanted very much to go to Belwood, to see her mount and the course he had set up, and to be alone with him, but he had been on his way to the city. Probably wanted to go there. He always spent the season in London. “Yes, let’s go to London,” she said, not quite able to hide her reluctance.

“Belle—darling, are you
talking
to me? Let’s not sink back into our old mistakes.
I
do not want to go to London. I’ll go there, or to France, or to hell if that’s what you want, but don’t go only because you think I want it. Our poor marriage is only a tender shoot yet. Hardly an inch off the ground. Is it ready for the scorching blasts of a season? Shouldn’t we go to Belwood and let it get some roots down before giving it a season?”

“I would like to see Guinevere, and the course,” she said, relief showing so clearly on her face that he could not quite suppress a laugh.

“And you weren’t going to tell me till I made you! Haven’t we learned anything?”

“I thought you wanted to go.”

“I want to make you happy. That’s all. Just tell me the truth, always. All the truth. Now, what would you like to do, this minute?”

“I’d like to go down and surprise Lady Dempster, for I know she was at the keyhole, and thinks we’re getting divorced. And I’d like to tell Marnie and Beth too, and Kay of course! Oh, we must tell Kay, Ollie.”

“Certainly we must,” he agreed amiably, not quite liking her plan for their immediate activities, as his own were centered on remaining exactly where they were, but he wanted to show his reformed nature, and arose to straighten his tie and brush his hair at her mirror while she performed those feminine chores so delightful for a new husband, as he felt himself to be, to observe.

Within minutes they descended to the rout, arm in arm, smiling and showing all the manifestations of love in bloom. Lizzie Dempster, who had been busily spreading the tale of their imminent divorce, was unhappy with them.

“What is the meaning of this?” she inquired sharply, as though she had caught them out in some untoward behavior.

“Oh no,
you
are not to be the first to know,” Oliver told her, laughing, and went to look for his cousin. Lady Dempster trailed at their heels, a few yards behind, determined to be the second at least to know what was afoot.