‘I am, I am,’ he confirmed. ‘Give me my staff and I shall visit the washroom. After which, I shall answer all your enquiries.’
She placed the staff in his hand as he stumbled away, his figure that of an aged man. She felt the impulse to go after him, but instead put two hens’ eggs on to boil and sliced a loaf, adding a little salt and pepper to the breakfast tray. By the time he returned she had set the dining room table and their meal was ready.
He made no murmur as he sank to his seat and ate without enthusiasm. A sad fondness crept over her as she recalled the younger, happier Lucas Benjamin who always enjoyed his meals with such gusto.
‘Thank you,’ he said at last. ‘I haven’t eaten so well in many days.’
‘Sir, that is distressing to hear.’ She waited for a further explanation but once more he drifted into his own thoughts and sat mute.
Ettie cleared the dirty crockery and busied herself in the kitchen, repressing the urge to beg him to tell her what had happened. When she returned, she found him in the salon, staring up at the portrait.
‘I hope you don’t mind that I removed it and hung it there,’ she apologized once again.
‘Secrets,’ he rasped. ‘We all have secrets.’
Ettie thought this was rather a peculiar answer, but she nodded and replied, ‘I never knew your mother. But I imagine she was very beautiful.’
‘Love must be blind,’ he whispered. ‘For that is the only explanation.’
Ettie moved a little closer. ‘I am sorry, Sir, I don’t understand.’
‘Lies, Ettie, all lies. A nest of them.’
‘Sir, you are confused from your journey,’ she insisted, ‘come and rest. I shall call the physician.’
‘A physician cannot cure what ails me.’ His lips quivered and she thought he might collapse. ‘I shall tell you from the beginning,’ he choked on a rattled breath as he sank to the stool. ‘You see, I have been travelling for nearly a month. A coach here. A carriage there. But in the end, all were beyond my means. Instead I ventured on foot, until at last I reached the French coast. Enough, saved, yes, enough to cross the Channel by boat. But after that … I have returned here destitute!’
‘But Sir,’ Ettie replied in bewilderment, ‘after your letter, I did as you asked. With a friend’s help I took the chest to the Bank of England.’
He gave a low groan. ‘Don’t ask me about them!’
‘But why, Sir?’
‘Don’t ask! Don’t ask!’
Ettie could make no sense of what he was saying. ‘Your wife, Sir, and the baby, what of them?’ she burst out. ‘Please tell me.’
Desperate eyes looked up at her. ‘Clara and my darling child, my family, they are gone, Ettie. Gone!’
Had her employer lost his senses? She wondered in fear. ’Gone, Sir, gone where?’
‘Perished, both of them,’ he cried desperately. ‘In childbirth. Or in death, both are the same for me – and for them!’
She swallowed, trying to absorb this madness. Was Lucas delirious? Had hysteria overtaken him? ‘Sir, I shall call the physician,’ she repeated.
‘A priest would be better, for it was I who killed them. I who failed them. I still hear her cries and see her dead face that was once so alive and beautiful. And my son, deformed and no larger than my hand, his poor, twisted body dragged from her, not a breath in his lungs, or cry from his mouth.’ He bent forward, arching his chest with howls so dreadful that Ettie could not bear to hear them.
‘Hush now, Sir.’ She knelt beside him and took him in her arms. His sobs travelled through her like punches, each one more violent than the next.
Chapter 39
‘I cannot live without Clara,’ he sobbed as he raised his head from her shoulder. ‘I have no desire to exist.’
‘But how can this have happened? Are you sure, Sir? Is there not some mistake?’ She knew this was a foolish remark, but hope remained inside her for just a few seconds. Perhaps Lucas might be wrong, his senses scattered from hunger and exhaustion?
But her hopes were soon dashed.
‘I held her dear body in my arms. I beseeched her to wake from her sleep. I kissed her cold skin, as frozen as the grave. I took my son, as lifeless as she, and offered my own life if only theirs be spared. But death refused me and I was left with corpses the sight of which I will never forget. There’s no mistake, Ettie! We shall never see them again.’
Tears overwhelmed him until he fell back in such distress, that all she could hear was the prolonged and heart-breaking agony of an abandoned man.
Ettie did not know how long it was that she stayed beside her employer as he tried to release his anguish; one minute babbling incoherently, the next too consumed by his woe to speak.
All the while, she tried to reserve some small part of herself. For if she let herself go, sorrow would devour them both. The loving, hopeful couple who had departed the shores of England a year ago, were now reduced to one. Perhaps less than one, Ettie feared, for this man was broken.
It was no easy task to assist him to the bedroom, for he was unsteady and dithered on every stair. But eventually he sank to the bed and allowed her to remove his clothes.
This intimacy would once have caused them both great embarrassment. Now he seemed not to care and obeyed her gentle commands. Filling the pitcher and soaking the flannel in the bowl, she bathed him tenderly, as if he was a child. The sight of his emaciated body distressed her beyond words. But after a while she composed herself and continued with her nursing, drawing on his nightshirt and bringing him broth to eat.
For a while he slept, but was so restless that Ettie stayed all night in the chair,
