Cry for Passion (13 page)

The clerk shut the door, closing in a man who had sacrificed everything with a man who offered everything.

“Lodoun, old chap.” Stiff white collar pushing up a roll of fat, Blair Stromwell plopped down into the burgundy leather wing chair opposite Jack. He slapped two newspapers onto the edge of the crowded oak desktop. Settling back onto tufted leather, he pulled out a cigar from a dark brown wool frock coat. “Want one?”

Jack concealed his distaste. “No.”

“Ah, the Bible.” The older man affably nodded toward the black, leather-bound book that peeked out from underneath the mound of letters. “Interesting reading, that. I’m particularly fond of Job: ‘The eye also of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight, saying, No eye shall see me: and disguiseth his face.’ ”

The spring sun warming Jack’s hair turned winter cold.

Puffy lids concealed Stromwell’s gaze: He had short, spiky lashes.

A match sparked.

“In the last three years you’ve lost”—Gray smoke billowed out of the senior MP’s thin mouth and curled up around a veined, bulbous nose. Without warning, the spiky lashes lifted and pale brown irises made translucent by the sun pinned Jack—“five trials to James Whitcox, what?”

Blair Stromwell knew his record as well as Jack.

“Yes.”

“Those are the only cases you’ve lost,” the older man stressed. A plume of acidic smoke pelted Jack’s face. “Ever.”

Jack was not expected to answer, so he didn’t.

The older MP blew out the burning match.

“A sterling record, nonetheless.” The razor-sharp acuity inside his eyes slid behind complacent affability. Leather squeaking—bulk shifting—the chairman leaned forward and dropped the blackened matchstick into a ruby-faceted ashtray. “One in which to take pride.”

The dull pain pulsating inside Jack’s groin traveled upward and lodged inside his left temple.

“Are you here to commiserate my losses, Chairman, or congratulate my wins?” he asked flatly.

“You’re not like Whitcox, old boy.” A gray ring of smoke circled the chairman’s balding head, dissipated like the fragile trust of a woman. “He’s a barrister; you’re a politician. Whitcox’s kind don’t care about the values of this country. Now I remember his father—”

A man who had also held the position of attorney general.

“What can I do for you,” Jack coldly interrupted, “that couldn’t wait until this evening?”

When the House of Commons sat, Jack implied.

The cordiality inside the senior MP’s eyes vanished.

A soft knock bounced off oak cornices and beige silk-swirled walls.

Stromwell did not look away from Jack; Jack did not look away from Stromwell.

The door opened, a waft of cool breeze.

“Your brandy, Mr. Lodoun.” The clerk’s voice cut through the pulsing silence. “Mr. Chairman.”

Liquid splashed. Crystal glinted.

When the clerk moved to set down a gold-rimmed decanter, Jack waved him back.

The door quietly clicked shut.

Scooping up a snifter, the chairman assessed Jack for long seconds. “You didn’t return to the Commons last night after supper. Had you done so, you would have been there when the Prime Minister read a petition from those shrieking sisters and canting brothers. This evening we take a third reading. As a party Whip, it’s my duty to ensure that the Conservative party members attend this reading, and that we stand united. We do not support women’s suffrage. Do we?”

Jack cupped his brandy snifter, round like Rose Clarring’s breasts. Unlike flesh, the glass was cold and brittle. “Have I ever been disloyal to the party?”

“Sixteen months ago Lord Salisbury was forced to stand down.”

“Six months later he was back in office,” Jack said.

“Only because the liberal party was divided.”

“Lord Salisbury is Prime Minister because Gladstone didn’t listen to public opinion,” Jack sharply corrected.

“Which brings us back to you, Lodoun.”

The tension dancing on Jack’s skin focused on the senior member of Parliament.

The chairman paused, deliberately swallowing amber liquor, brown eyes shining over the crystal rim.

In the distance the first-quarter bells struck: It was two fifteen. Outside the closed door to Jack’s office a smaller chime rang.

The chairman lowered the snifter, brandy-wet lips glistening, as if coated with a woman’s sex. “We allow the members of our party many liberties, as long as they’re discreet.” A sweeping motion of his hand trailed gray smoke. “Some men’s wives, you’ll agree, fairly beg to be fucked.”

The throb in Jack’s groin and his left temple spread to his chest and his testicles.

“But we do not soil our own backyard.” The pale brown eyes studied Jack through a billow of gray smoke. “The core of this country is patriarchal. Marriage and children are our God-given rights. Poor. Rich. A woman and a child are properties that any man can acquire. It’s what brings men together. It’s what unites this country: men.”

Leather squeaked.

Stuffing the cigar—brown like the dildo Rose Clarring had stuffed into her vagina—between wet lips, the chairman reached out and tossed a newspaper across the desk.

Jack instinctively glanced down.

His name snared his gaze.

“When you take family matters out of the hands of men,” sliced through the coldly slanting sun, “you endanger our entire way of life. What would become of us if women had the same rights as men? Soon they’d want to serve in Parliament. Women are not the same as us, dear boy; men reason, women feel.”

An image of Rose Clarring’s cornflower blue eyes stripped of innocence stabbed through Jack.

He knew with sudden clarity that she had read The Pall Mall Gazette.

Jack had forced her to confront her dream of passion. Then he had reduced it to a solitary act of satisfaction.

While he watched. And said nothing. His flesh weeping the tears she did not.

And now she had read his quote, not realizing the machinations of Parliamentary law.

“That’s not to say they’re less deserving of justice,” shouldered aside Jack’s thoughts. “It’s simply that they cannot be trusted to act on reason. And that is what the law is, Lodoun: reason. No one needs to understand that more than does a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary.

“Now that, in The Pall Mall Gazette, is what we want to see from you in the future.” Leather squeaked; The Standard—the leading Conservative paper—crashed down on top of The Pall Mall Gazette. “Not this.”

The reporter for The Pall Mall Gazette had privately questioned Jack’s motivation in stepping down as attorney general. The reporter for The Standard publicly speculated that there existed a personal rivalry between Jack Lodoun and James Whitcox.

Jack had made allies in Parliament, but he had also made enemies.

If a reporter should dig, he would unearth dirt.

“Do you understand, Lodoun?”

Jack glanced up from the two papers.

A clear warning blazed in the translucent brown eyes.

The Conservative party would allow no more indiscretions, those eyes conveyed.

No more affairs. No more controversy.

No more losses.

“Perfectly,” Jack said.

The pounding throb inside his temple dissipated.

Jack perfectly understood what he had to do.

Chapter 14

Afternoon sunlight burned Rose’s dry eyes.

“Mrs. Clarring, I’ll be going now!” wafted up the stairs on a pungent wave of lye soap and beeswax polish.

The employment agency had sent a housekeeper instead of a butler. She and Rose had cleaned until they had nothing more with which to clean.

“Very well, Mrs. Dobkins.” Blindly Rose tucked the duvet more firmly beneath the mattress. Sparrows squabbled outside the bedroom window. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

A faint murmur was swallowed by a clicking closure.

The housekeeper was gone.

Rose collapsed on the edge of the bed.

A telltale creak rang out over the squeal of the bedsprings, the step of a foot on a stair.

It was too heavy to belong to Mrs. Dobkins.

Knowledge of whom the step belonged to resonated throughout her entire body.

Rose closed her eyes against the light that papered the naked walls.

Another creak pierced the solitude, the top stair. Wooden heels irrevocably advanced down a narrow wooden corridor.

The footsteps stopped; their impact did not.

Images seared the backs of Rose’s eyelids.

Jonathon Clarring. Jack Lodoun.

Neither her husband nor her barrister was the man she had thought he was.

The innocence they had stolen was a palpable pain.

But she could not speak of her hurt. So the man who stood in her bedroom doorway spoke of his past.

“James Whitcox has never lost a trial,” carried on a scrabble of talons and the flutter of wings.

The images of Jonathon and Jack Lodoun were joined by the forty-seven-year-old barrister and fellow club member.

“Three years ago, neither had I. When I came up against him on the bench, I wanted to learn more about my rival: I started with his wife.”

Rose had no image of Cynthia Whitcox.

“I’d seen her at social events—we travel in the same circles, the men who create law and the men who practice it—but only in passing. I knew she’d be attending a court function, so I attended. She wore a red silk gown.”

Behind Rose’s closed eyelids, a woman materialized beside the three men: She wore a red dress, but she had Rose’s face.

“She didn’t want me at first. But I didn’t care.” Neither regret nor remorse colored the implacable voice. “I saw her, I wanted her, I pursued her, and I won her. Just as Jonathon Clarring pursued you.”

But Rose had not been married. And Jonathon had wanted her babies, not her body.

“It wasn’t that difficult,” stung her skin, truth more painful than nettles. “Whitcox didn’t love her. Theirs was an arranged marriage. You were quite fortunate in that respect. Imagine marrying a man—a man you didn’t love—and lying in his bed waiting for him to take your virginity, sexual intimacy a matter of legal consummation.”

But Rose could not imagine another woman’s marriage when her own marriage consumed her every breath.

“She hadn’t shared a bed with Whitcox for twelve years. Like you, she saved her vagina for some imaginary lover. She was tight, like you were tight.”

The pinching vulnerability she had felt—stretching herself with a dildo—inched through Rose’s pelvis.

“I taught her how to take and give the pleasure Whitcox had not.” In his voice were reverse memories, the penetrator rather than the penetrated. “She was my wife more than she had ever been his. Even though she had borne him two children. Even though English law recognized him—and only him—as her lawful husband. But Whitcox married her. And Whitcox buried her. And now she’s gone.”

Rose stared at flickering darkness.

“You asked if Cynthia loved me,” squeezed her chest.

And then Rose had asked if she had yet demonstrated that a woman’s passion was worth a man’s reputation.

So that he would petition Parliament for a divorce.

A divorce he had never had any intention of petitioning.

“I believe she did.” Her pain bled into his voice. “But I will never know why. I will never know if she loved me simply because I gave her splendid fucks.”

Rose’s eyelids snapped open.

Jack Lodoun filled the doorway, head and shoulders framed by sunshine and shimmering dust motes.

He snared her gaze, eyes so purple in the clear light of day it hurt to look at him.

Purposefully, he added, “Just as you will never know if Jonathon Clarring married you because you come from a fertile family.”

For one long second she was immobilized by the pain inside his eyes.

A pain with which she had lived for twelve years.

Afraid of asking. But more afraid of knowing.

The clip-clop of four hooves permeated the silence. The grind of carriage wheels trailed after the lone horse.

Both bound.

The horse to the carriage. The carriage to the horse.

No release for either until they made the long journey home.

“But you asked the wrong question, Rose Clarring.”

The hair on the nape of her neck prickled a warning.

“Last night, in the cab,” he expounded, too-purple gaze holding hers, “you enquired if I had asked for a divorce. But you should have asked: What would I have done if—upon asking—James Whitcox had refused to divorce her?”

Rose didn’t need to ask: The answer was clearly visible in the taut stretch of his cheekbones and the hard line of his mouth.

“Nothing,” he emphatically stressed. “I would have done nothing. Parliamentary law is very specific: A woman may divorce her husband if he is a bigamist, if he commits incest or if he deserts her. Whitcox was guilty of none of those crimes. Nor is your husband.

“Every day I wonder if Cynthia would still be alive had I asked Whitcox. But I didn’t. Nor could Cynthia have won a divorce. And neither can you.” Jack Lodoun was illuminated by the sun; there was no light in the future he painted. “But a separation doesn’t require Parliamentary approval. I can win you a separation in the Courts of Summary Jurisdiction.”

Rose struggled to reconcile the man who so obviously hurt with the MP who had voted to deny a woman the right to a divorce, simply because the “law did not support it.”

Only one thing was clear: “You didn’t win Mrs. Whitcox a separation.”

“I didn’t offer to procure her one,” he flatly returned, pupils a stark black dot.

Yet he now offered to procure one for Rose.

“I will be unable to remarry. Jonathon will be unable to remarry.” The white band of flesh where Rose’s wedding band had marked her finger throbbed. “Of what use is a separation?”

“You will gain full legal control over your person.”

“So Jonathon can’t lock me away in an insane asylum, you mean,” Rose said. “As your client attempted to lock away Mrs. Hart.”

There was no apology inside his eyes for the man he had represented and the lives he had destroyed.

“Nor,” he added, “could he sue for restitution of his conjugal rights.”

The truth burned like acid all the way down to her empty, aching vagina. “My husband has no interest in claiming his conjugal rights.”