a little at a time, Zenobia knew, carefully, watching how each penny was spent: it was her form of power. 'You are very gracious,' Zenobia said aloud. It was habit, not any liking for him that prompted her words.
He gestured towards Helen. 'May I present my wife.'
'How do you do, Miss Gunne,' Helen said dutifully. 'I am delighted to make your acquaintance.'
'And I yours, Mrs. Carfax.' Zenobia smiled very slightly, as one would to a woman one had only just met. 'May I offer my deepest sympathy on your recent bereavement. Everyone of sensibility must feel for you.''
Helen looked almost taken aback; her mind had been on something else. ' 'Thank you,'' she muttered. ' 'Most kind of you ...' Apparently she had already forgotten Zenobia's name.
The next thirty minutes passed in desultory conversation. James and his mother were obviously close, socially, if not emotionally. Zenobia watched them with intense interest, making occasional remarks to Helen sufficient to be civil, and now and again searching her face when she was watching her husband. From those trivial words, the exchanges of polite society, the pauses between, the flicker of resentments, suppressed pain, habits of manner so deeply ingrained as to be unconsciously adhered to, and the edge of fear unheard or ignored by others, Zenobia guessed at a whole history of hungers unmet.
She knew Mary Carfax and was not surprised that she both spoiled and dominated her only son, flattering him, indulging his vanity and his appetites, and at the same time kept the purse strings tightly in her own jewel-encrusted fingers. His carefully well-mannered resentment was inevitable, his shifts between gratitude and rancor, his habit of dependence,' his underlying knowledge that she thought him a fine man, the best, and his own whispering doubt that he had never
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justified such esteem and almost certainly never would. If it had been Mary Carfax who had been murdered, Zenobia would have known where to look immediately.
But it was Etheridge. The money leapt to mind, massive, lavish, all that even James Carfax could need to gain his precious freedom. But from whom? Only from Mary-it would tie him to Helen, now that the Married Women's Property Acts had been passed.
Or would it? One had only to glance at Helen's pale face, her eyes on James's or staring blindly through the window at the sky, to see she loved her husband far more than he did her. She praised him, she protected him, a faint flush of pleasure touched her cheeks when he spoke gently to her, her pain showed naked when he was patronizing or used her as the butt of his swift, light jokes, distasteful in their subtle cruelty. She would give him whatever he wanted in an attempt to purchase his love, and Zenobia's heart ached for her, knowing her pain would never cease. She was seeking something which he did not possess to give. Changes unimaginable would have to be wrought in James Carfax before he had the depth or the power within him from which to draw generous or untainted love. Zenobia had loved weak men herself, when she was alone in Africa, and old memories resurfaced, and old hungers. She had woken to the slow, scalding pain that her love would never be returned. You can draw little from a shallow vessel; the quality of feeling reflects the quality of the man-or woman. The soul with little courage, honor, or compassion may give what they have, but it will not satisfy a larger heart.
One day Helen Carfax would know that, would understand that she would never earn from James what he did not have to give her, or to anyone else.
Zenobia remembered some of her own romantic adventures, the rash giving, the clinging to hope, and wondered with a cold, sick fear if Helen had already paid the greatest
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price of all, having taken her father's life with her own hands, for the money to buy her husband's loyalty.
Then she looked again at the pale face with its white-rimmed eyes, now resting on James's elegant figure, and thought the fear was for him, not for herself. She was afraid that he had done the deed, or somehow contrived to have it done.
She stood up slowly, a trifle stiff from having sat so long.
'I am sure, Lady Mary, that you have family business to discuss and would care for a little privacy. It is such a delightful day I should like a short walk in the sun. Mrs. Carfax, perhaps you would be so kind as to accompany me?'
Helen looked startled, almost as if she had not understood.
'We might walk as far
