you can learn to ride.' Toby jumped up and down with excitement and then dashed off ahead through the trees. 'Take my arm,' Duncan said, offering it. 'I must have kept you awake too long last night.' He was grinning at her. 'I do not need assistance, thank you,' she said, and was aware of his grin fading even though she was not looking at him. 'What is it?' he asked.
She swallowed. 'Nothing,' she said. Coward that she was, she wanted to obliterate the last few minutes, to go back beyond those words of Toby's – /I am four and a half/. What the mind did not know … 'You make /nothing/ sound like a whole lot of something,' he said, his face turned to look closely at her.
She opened her mouth to speak. Closed it again, the words unspoken.
There could be no happy answer to her question once it was asked, could there? Either way, everything would be changed. And if her worst fears were realized, everything /must/ change.
Oh, dear God, no, not that. /Please/ not that. 'Maggie,' he said, his voice soft and even trembling with some emotion, 'I need to – ' 'Duncan,' she began at the same moment. 'Tell me the tr – ' But even as they both stopped to allow the other to finish first, Toby was dashing back toward them, yelling as he came. 'Come /on/, Papa,' he cried. 'I want to go riding.' And he inserted himself between them, took a hand of each, and half trotted along what remained of the path, pulling them along with him and prattling excitedly.
Despicably, Margaret was relieved. She did not want to know. She needed to demand the truth, and she would do it. She /must/ do it. But, ah, God forgive her, she /did not want to know/.
For the truth, whatever it was, was going to change things. Was going to lower him in her opinion. Was going to call for some action. Was going to create some conflict. She did not want things to change. She liked everything as it was – and as it was becoming.
She was falling …
Oh, never mind. /Why/ could she not have let Toby's protest about his age pass her by without noticing its significance?
She feared that the courtship might be over.
How could it possibly continue if … Had she really married a liar? And possibly worse than that?
Perhaps the marriage would be over too, for all intents and purposes.
She was going to have to insist upon hearing the truth – at last.
Margaret swallowed panic.
23
SHE had not missed it, then. If Toby was four and a half years old, if he had been born just after Christmas, then he must have been conceived during the previous spring – before Laura left London.
It was inevitable that she discover the truth sooner or later, of course. It was foolish of him to have delayed, to have waited until his hand was forced, until she was upset and bewildered and had undoubtedly jumped to all sorts of seemingly obvious conclusions.
She was still subdued when he went down to the drawing room after tucking Toby into bed for the night. She had avoided his company until now, and he half expected to find the room empty. Perhaps he had half /hoped/ to find it empty. Would he have gone in search of her or put off the confrontation until tomorrow? It did not matter. She was sitting beside the empty fireplace, bent over her embroidery.
She did not look up or stop stitching.
She did not look like a woman waiting for the daily hours of courtship.
He knew beyond all doubt that he had not misunderstood this afternoon. 'Were you lovers before you ran away together?' she asked, drawing her needle out of the cloth, trailing green silk behind. 'No,' he said. 'Maggie – ' 'It was his child she was bearing, then,' she said. She attempted another stitch, but her hand was shaking. She rested it on the cloth, the needle pointed upward. 'Randolph Turner's.' 'No,' he said. 'Maggie – ' She looked up then and her eyes were swimming in tears. 'It has to be one or the other, Duncan,' she said. 'It cannot be both, but it cannot be neither. It is /one or the other/. Either you were lovers and fled when she discovered she was with child. Or she fled with you, taking her husband's unborn child with her – in which case you have withheld a legitimate child from his father all this time. Which is it, Duncan?' He stared at her, grim-faced. 'Neither,' he said.
She moved her embroidery frame to one side and stood up. Her hands closed into fists at her sides, and she took one step toward him, her face pale. 'You cannot tell the truth even when you are cornered, can you?' she said. 'I try to tell myself that at least there is a noble motive behind your lies – that you love Toby and cannot bear the thought of relinquishing him to his real father. But there is no real excuse. I wish it were the other – that you and she were lovers and ran off together and then concocted the story of violence and abuse to excuse yourselves.
It would still be despicable, but God help me, I wish it were that.
Which /is/ it?' He had brought this upon himself. He understood that. Even so, he could feel the stirrings of anger in himself. Her face was only inches from his own. 'It is /neither/,' he said curtly. 'I suppose,' she said, 'she had another lover and /he/ would not run off with her. How very noble of you! And the dead cannot defend themselves, can they?' 'Let me explain,' he said.
But she was angry herself now and horribly upset – that was quite clear to him. She clapped both hands over her ears in quite un-Maggie-like fashion. 'I am /sick/ of your explanations,' she said. 'I am /sick/ of your lies.
I will not listen to any more. And I /hate/ you for one thing more than all else, Duncan. You brought me here without telling me the truth, and now I have grown to love Toby too. And I too feel the temptation to hide the truth forever so that he can remain part of our /happy/ family. I will never forgive you for that.' And, without removing her hands from over her ears except to use one to open the door when she reached it, she hurried out of the room.
God damn it, he thought. /God damn it/!
She would not listen to him, and he could hardly blame her. But if /she/ would not listen, would the rest of the world? Had he always been right to fear as much as Laura ever had that it would not?
And what would Maggie do now? Keep her mouth shut? Speak out?
Should he /force/ her to listen?
They had been falling in love – or so he had thought. They had been learning to trust life again, to trust love again, to trust each other.
But her trust in him had been jolted because he had not been frank with her. And he had only himself to blame for that. He had been afraid to tell her everything, afraid of what she would advise, what she would perhaps try to force upon him, what he knew in his heart he must do.
He sighed deeply and left the room. But rather than follow his wife upstairs, where he assumed she had gone, he headed outdoors and strode in the direction of the stables. He was going for a ride.
For the next week Margaret kept herself busy, learning more about the running of the house, making tentative plans for dinners and parties to which to invite the neighbors, making calls upon the laborers' wives, bearing baked goods with her, exploring the park on foot, often taking Toby with her in the mornings while Duncan was busy, writing letters to family and friends, working on her embroidery.
She did nothing about the new knowledge she had acquired. Actually, it was only /suspicions/ that she had acquired, and it was unwise to act upon suspicion alone. Or so she told herself. He had refused to answer her question, but he had wanted to /explain/ to her – the eternal plea of the guilty. Perhaps she should have listened anyway.
Oh, /undoubtedly/ she ought to have listened. She had asked questions and answered them herself, because it had seemed to her – and still did – that they could be answered in only one of two ways. Neither of them pleasant. /Was/ there another explanation?
She did not believe it was possible. But surely she ought to listen. She had always prided herself upon being a reasonable being, upon giving everyone the benefit of any doubt there might be of guilt.
But it was incredibly difficult to raise the matter again now that they had quarreled. She procrastinated. Which, she admitted to herself sometimes, was a kind way of saying she had become a coward. It was almost as
