Not Quite a Husband (14 page)

No, it couldn’t be Leo. He was on his way to Paris. And he would not show up at some woman’s back door as if he were conducting an affair
.

“Really?” said the woman. “The house is quite empty.”

“Perhaps this is not such a good idea after all.”

But the voice sounded so much like Leo’s
.

“Oh come, you are here already.”

The door closed. Footsteps crossed toward the front of the house. Then up the stairs
.

“Miss?” the housekeeper asked
.

Bryony turned toward her blindly. “I beg your pardon?”

“I was just asking if you and your ladies would like some tea?”

“For Miss Simpson and Mrs. Murdock, yes. None for me,” she said. “And do you have a powder room that I can use?”

The housekeeper gave her the directions to the powder room. Bryony took the steps up from the basement, through the green baize door, and found the main stairs that led up from the front hall. She climbed up with a quietness that belied what she repeated madly to herself: It couldn’t be Leo, it couldn’t be Leo, it couldn’t possibly be Leo
.

He would never do anything like that
.

Would he?

The bedrooms for the master and the mistress of the house were usually two stories up from the ground floor. She walked ever more softly as she set foot on the landing
.

“Still like to have your door open, I see,” said the man
.

Bryony jumped. The door was almost immediately to her left. And if she were to take two steps closer and look through the opening, she would—

She covered her mouth with her hand. A woman lay on an enormous bed, completely naked
.

“And I still undress faster than you,” said the woman. She batted her eyelashes
.

“With commendable speed,” said the man
.

She would not think of him as Leo. She would not, even though she shivered every time he spoke
.

He moved. His face became visible in a mirror on the far side of the room. Her mouth opened, but no scream would emerge. For a moment the world teetered on edge. Then she descended the stairs with the swiftness and silence of a ghost, shaking every step of the way
.

She had never forgotten Toddy. She had never forgotten her three years of incandescent happiness. And she had never, contrary to what she’d made herself believe, reconciled herself to her loss. All along she’d been waiting for another fairy godmother to come along—because that was what Toddy had
been, her friend, her faithful companion, her fairy godmother who’d dispelled loneliness and breathed magic into her life.

Leo had possessed that magic. Whenever he arrived at a gathering, excitement reverberated to the rafters. When he spoke, his audience listened hungrily, as the children had done with Toddy. And when he smiled, young ladies literally swooned—two separate instances of it at the first ball he’d attended in London.

But most important, he’d included her in that magic. In those better days, when he looked at her, it had always been with great interest and singular attention, as if she mattered, truly, significantly, not just to him, but to the world at large. And the world at large had noticed. Society, which had never known quite what to do with an odd duck like her, had warmed perceptibly toward her because
he
had seen something in her.

And
she
had seen
him
as the long-awaited successor to Toddy, the new guarantor of her happiness, the one who would banish the dogged monotony from her life, restore laughter and splendor, and usher in a new golden era. And she’d loved him for it, with the uncritical fervor of an adolescent and the faith of a child.

Her Leo, so bright, so beautiful.

And in the end, so catastrophically flawed.

It was bizarre, thinking back, to see that she hadn’t been angry. Not that day, and not in the week that followed—her anger had only come when she saw him again, before the altar, on the day of their wedding. Until then she’d known nothing but shame, such shame that she’d gone straight home to bed, to whimper under the cover, such shame that she could not look herself in the mirror, such shame that she was convinced every conversation in every drawing room must be about nothing but her ignorance and her gullibility.

In time anger had superceded shame. And in time misery had superceded anger. But the shame was always there, a dark, sorry thing that infested the subterranean layers of her heart. It kept her close-mouthed about what happened, because she could not face that shame.

Or the pain of reliving his betrayal.

“You are not really interested in a letter from someone you’ve never met,” she said. “You want to know why I no longer wanted to be married to you.”

He stared at her, his gray eyes the color of rain. “Fair enough. Why?”

“Because I realized that you were a callow youth, full of yourself, and full of the sort of frivolities that I despised. It shamed me that I’d chosen so poorly.
That of all the men in London who would have made me a suitable spouse, I had to pick a self-centered popinjay.”

He was very still, not even breathing, it seemed.

She exhaled. “And there you have it. Good night.”

B
ryony was awake for a full five minutes before she realized that Leo was in the tent with her. She bolted upright. Judging by the light coming in from the gap between the tent flaps, she’d slept well past sunrise.

“There is something you are not telling me,” he said quietly.

He sat cross-legged in the far corner of her tent. Even in the relative dimness inside, she could tell that his eyes were bloodshot. In his hand he held a mug of tea, tea without any steam curling above it.

“How long have you been here?”

“I’m not sure. An hour, maybe.” He took a swallow of the tea. “I came in to tell you it was time to get up, but I decided to let you sleep some more. I don’t imagine you slept very well last night.”

“I’ll be fine. If you will step out, I’ll get ready and we can start.”

“I’m not stepping out,” he said calmly. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what it is you are hiding from me.”

“What makes you think there’s something I’m hiding from you?”

“Because I wasn’t that callow a youth, I wasn’t that full of myself, and I wasn’t that frivolous. And self-centered or not, I most certainly was not a popinjay.”

“You certainly think well of yourself.”

“Other than your virulent dislike of me, I have no reason to think that I grate on people particularly. And you were the one who proposed. How did I go from a man you wanted to spend a lifetime with to a man you couldn’t stand?”

“Sometimes much can be discovered in the space of a few weeks.”

“A few weeks? You refer to the length of our engagement?”

She rubbed her temple. She’d said too much already.

“You were still working,” he said. “We saw each other alone only on Sundays, with one dinner with your family during the week, and perhaps one visit
with Will to check on the wedding preparations. And I was gone the whole week before the wedding. Even if my character were truly rotten, there was no time for you to discover it.”

He frowned. “Was someone feeding you rumors?” “Do I look like the sort of person people come to with rumors?”

He looked at her steadily. “Then what was it?” She got off the bed. “Leave me alone.” “I already told you I won’t. We can stay here til the end of time, if you like.” “I need to use the facilities.” “Tell me and you may use the facilities as much as you like.” He was adamant. “Even our criminals are formally accused and informed of their crimes. You tried, convicted, and sentenced me without ever giving me a chance to defend myself. I deserve better than that from you. I deserve at least the truth. Or am I truly to think of you as heartless and capricious?”

She was angry again, angry enough that her shame faded into the background. Indeed, why should she be the one who was ashamed? She’d done nothing wrong. He was the one who had destroyed any chance they had at happiness.

She clenched her fists. “No. You may not think of me as heartless and capricious.”

Suddenly he was afraid, as if he were faced with Pandora’s box, the calamities within which, once let loose, could never be put back again.

But it was too late. Now she wanted him to know. Now her eyes burned with anger. Now her voice took on the weight and the inexorability of that of an avenger.

“That letter you were so sure showed every flaw in my character—the woman who wrote it, Bettie Young, she worked for a certain Mrs. Hedley. When I delivered Bettie Young’s baby, it was at Mrs. Hedley’s house, on a day the servants were supposed to have the afternoon off.”

There was a roar in Leo’s head.

“You do recollect, I hope? But then again, perhaps you did this sort of thing all over town, and Mrs. Hedley’s was but one address among many.”

He shook his head mutely. No, he had not done this sort of thing all over town. And he had a fine recollection of what happened that day.

He’d met Mrs. Hedley in Cairo, at the end of a North African journey that took him from Casablanca to the Nile. A young widow, she’d kept house for her brother, who worked at the British Embassy. During Leo’s two weeks in Egypt, they’d had an excellent time together.

Several years later, on the day he was to depart for Paris, they’d run into each other quite by accident in London. He hadn’t known that she’d returned from Cairo—her brother had at last married and she was happy to get away from the heat of tropics—but she had known about his upcoming marriage.

Three months after that, they’d met one last time, on the elegant suspension bridge in St. James’s Park, this time at his instigation.

“I need to know something,” he asked Mrs. Hedley, his voice low even though there was no one nearby. “Are you sure you never told anyone about what happened in April?”

“Of course not.” Mrs. Hedley scowled at his question, insulted. “I wouldn’t get you in trouble that way. Besides, Mr. Abraham and I had already met by then. He started courting me two weeks after that. I certainly will not have him think that I’d done anything with my widowhood except wait for him to come along.”

“But your servants—they were there that day.”

“They didn’t even know who you were. It wasn’t as if you left a calling card on your way out. Besides, they were completely preoccupied: My maid had a baby that afternoon in the servants’ hall.”

He apologized for questioning her discretion, she accepted his apology, he wished her the best of luck
with Mr. Abraham, and they parted amicably, she for an excursion to Bond Street, he to his empty house in Belgravia. Months later, when he read the letter from Bettie Young, thanking Bryony for saving herself and her child, he’d made no connection between the letter writer and Genevieve Hedley’s maid.

He should have. He should have known all along that
this
was the dark heart of their story.