She swallowed back the sharp defense that came leaping to her tongue. With icy dignity, still less now would she permit him to think she would stoop to blackmail.
“I am,” she agreed. “And yes my emotion is engaged on Fanny’s behalf. It seems someone’s needs to be. Yours is not.”
He flushed hotly.
“That is unfair, Mrs. Pitt! Surely you must have some idea what it would do to my present family if such a thing were to become known? They are totally innocent, just as innocent of any wrong as Fanny. I have four daughters and a son. Would you have them ruined for Fanny’s sake?” His voice shook a little and Charlotte realized with sudden pity how appallingly difficult it was for him to be telling such intimate details of his life to someone who was not only a stranger, but an unsympathetic one.
“It is my error,” he went on, looking not at her but at his plate. Neither of them could eat. “I married Fanny’s mother when I was twenty and she seventeen. We thought we loved each other. She was so very pretty, full of life and laughter…” For a moment his face softened. “Like Fanny herself.” He sighed. “For four years everything was happy; Fanny was born, and then James. Then when James was still a baby, Lucy changed completely. She became infatuated with a dance teacher, of all things. I suppose I was absorbed in my work. I was an aspiring lawyer then, trying to take all the cases I could, and finding it hard to make sufficient money to keep us well-and I was ambitious.”
Charlotte took a bite of her meal, but her attention was undivided.
“I left her too much alone, I accept. And I was not yet in that place in society or income where I could offer her the pastimes she wished.” He shrugged. “She left her home and went off with the dancing master, taking the children with her.”
Charlotte was stunned. She knew the law regarding errant wives and their children.
“Did you not require that she at least leave the children in your custody?” she asked in surprise. “Even if you did not wish her back.”
He blushed. “No. I thought of it-and the embarrassment of admitting that my wife had run off with a dancing master. It hurt that I should lose my children, but what could I offer them? A nurse to care for them while I was working. She loved them and was a good mother.”
“And the dancing master?”
“It did not last.” There was pity both in his face and in his voice. “In two years he died of typhus, which was perhaps less cruel than if he had deserted her. She was living in the house off the Kennington Road, which he owned, and it became hers.” He colored with awareness of guilt. “Of course I should have divorced her, but I was ashamed of the scandal. And since I was in law, my friends would have known and I could not bear their pity. I could not afford to entertain, and with two nursing children Lucy had not had the inclination to accept invitations which we could not return. They did not know I was married, and so I simply said nothing.”
“What about her parents?” Charlotte asked.
“Lucy was an orphan. Her guardian, an elderly uncle, had nothing more to do with her personally after our marriage. He considered finding her a husband a discharge to his duty towards her.”
“And you did not take her back? Or your children?”
“Neither Lucy nor I had any desire to live under one roof anymore. And it would have been cruel and pointless for me to demand the children. I had no wife at that time who could raise them, and as I have already admitted, I did not wish the world to know of my unfortunate relationship.” He looked up at her, his eyes soft in spite of the misery in them. “And by then I had met Regina, and learned to love her in a way I had not loved Lucy. I was desperate she should not know of any earlier marriage. Her parents would never have looked upon me favorably. It was hard enough to persuade them I could provide for her adequately as it was…” He stopped, looking up at her.
It was not an attractive story and he was painfully aware of it, yet she could very easily understand how it had happened. Told in the space of a few minutes it was bereft of the shock, the sense of humiliation and loneliness; the young man fall of overwhelming inadequacy, fearing ridicule, coming home tired to the house where so shortly before he had been met by wife and children, now finding only servants, polite, distant and unsympathetic.
At last he had simply denied it, pushed it from his mind. Then when happiness had offered itself in the form of Regina, he had grasped it, paying the necessary price. And now twenty-three years later the price had suddenly become so very much higher, and not only he had to pay it, but Fanny-or else Regina and his other children.
“Did you pay Weems?” she asked without warning. His face was slack with surprise.
“No. As God is my judge, I never even knew the man.”
“But you let Horatio Osmar off. You threw the case out without calling Beulah Giles.”
“That had nothing to do with Fanny or my first marriage-or with Weems or his murder.”
“No.” She was about to add that it had everything to do with the secret society of the Inner Circle, when Pitt’s warning about their power rang sharply in her mind, and she bit the words back. “No,” she said again. “I did not think so, but I had to ask. What are you going to do about Fanny and Herbert Fitzheibert?”
“What are you going to do, Mrs. Pitt?”
“Nothing. I have already done all I can. It is your decision.”
“Fitzherbert may betray me, in Fanny’s interest-and his own.”
“He may. But if he does he will lose Fanny’s love forever, and he is quite intelligent enough to know that.”
“I must think.”
“Please do not leave it long. Once Fanny has refused him he may believe her and not ask again.”
“You press me hard, Mrs. Pitt.”
For the first time she smiled. “Yes. It is a very hard matter. I daresay Mrs. Carswell-by that I mean Regina-may find it very difficult to accept that your marriage to her is bigamous.” She saw him wince but carried on. “But I think she might find it no more painful than the thought that you have been currently having an affaire with a girl Fanny’s age. Surely when faced with two such awful alternatives, there is something to be said for the truth-and before the lie can bite too deep with its pain.”
“Do you believe that? How would you feel, Mrs. Pitt, to discover that your husband was not your husband at all, and that your beloved children were illegitimate?”
“I cannot think how dreadful I should feel, Mr. Carswell. Or how angry and how confused and betrayed. But I think I might find it easier to forgive than the thought that my husband had loved and been intimate with a girl not much older than my own daughter.”
He smiled very bleakly. “How very aspiring to the genteel, Mrs. Pitt. I might even say working class. A lady would accept such a thing as part of life, and as long as it was not forced upon her attention or made public to her embarrassment, she would scarcely observe it at all. Indeed, a lady of refined tastes might very well be glad her husband satisfied his less pleasing appetites elsewhere without troubling her, and causing her to bear a larger family than she wished, or her health could support.”
“Then I am quite definitely of a distinctly lower class, Mr. Carswell,” she said with crisp satisfaction. “If that is the guide by which to judge. And I would not be surprised if Mrs. Carswell is as well. But the decision is yours.” And with that she bent to eat some of her almost cold pork chop, and drink a little of the really very good wine.
“I will speak to Fitzherbert,” he said at last, just before they rose to leave. “And to James.”
“Thank you,” she accepted, matter-of-factly, as if he had passed the salt. But inside she felt a little swift, singing happiness, very small, very bright.
In the days after the garden party at which Fitz had made it only too apparent that he did not intend to marry Odelia, and had virtually defied Lord Anstiss, Jack Radley became very slowly and painfully aware of just what such an act had cost him.
Nothing was said. No overt comments were made and Jack did not hear Anstiss himself make any remark at all, and he saw him on several social occasions. The first thing he came across was at his club, where he overheard quite by chance two men he knew slightly, discussing Fitz and shaking their heads over the fact that he had been blackballed from another club of which one of them was a member.
“Good heavens, George. Herbert Fitzherbert? Really!” The man’s blond eyebrows rose in amazement. “Whatever for? Always thought he was a pretty decent chap-one of us, and all that.”
“So did I,” his friend agreed. “That’s what made it stick in my mind.”
“Sure it was Fitzherbert?”
“ ’Course I’m sure. Take me for a fool, Albert?”
