Cry for Passion (2 page)

“But you can’t,” she said quietly. Decisively. The scent of spring and roses teased his nostrils. “You can’t buy passion. No matter how much one might wish to do so.”

Her unshakable resolve exacerbated the loss that pulsed through his veins.

“And just how did they find this passion, Mrs. Clarring?” Jack’s derision slashed through the stinging wind and the bump and grind of metal wheels skimming cobble. Amid the mob and over the street vendors’ calls scattered voices sang, “. . . Oh what a happy land is England!” “By passing around French postcards? By sneaking into pornographic shops? Or did they discover it while reading so-called academic books that serve no other purpose than to detail sexual perversions?”

Rose Clarring did not glance away from him.

He realized with gut-clenching certainty that she saw within his eyes the secrets of the thirteen members of the Men and Women’s Club; secrets he had been duty-bound to reveal, but which he had not.

The neatly written minutes detailing their weekly meetings were indelibly scrawled on his mind.

Provocative discussions. Damning disclosures.

Men and women questioning. Women and men revealing.

Loneliness. Desire.

“You’re frightened,” Rose Clarring surmised.

Jack was a barrister, but he was also a politician. Men whose lives depended upon popular opinion did not admit to fear. Grief.

Guilt.

“And what are you, Mrs. Clarring?” Jack riposted. “Your name will be in the papers tomorrow. You’re a very pretty woman. Perhaps even your likeness will be printed. You will no longer be able to hide your clandestine meetings from your husband. He can put you away, just as my client attempted to put Mrs. Hart away. Only there will be no Whitcox to save you. I would be very afraid, were I you.”

“Would you, Mr. Lodoun?”

“Yes,” he said, fighting the sudden drumming of his heart and the soughing of his lungs.

She searched his gaze, as if she were the barrister and he an adverse witness. “What is more terrifying than living without love?”

Nothing, Jack thought. Nothing was more terrifying.

But he could not say that.

“You said your husband loves you,” he shot back.

Pale sunlight infused her face. Shadow darkened her eyes.

“The first time I saw my husband,” she unexpectedly confided, “I was watching my two youngest brothers. They were only nine and eleven. I took them to the park. They were quite a handful. When I warned them not to whip their hoop in the street, they laughed. They would have been run over by a cab had it not been for Jonathon.”

The man to whom she had been married for twelve years, one month, three weeks and two days.

“This is not necessary,” Jack brutally interrupted.

“But it is, Mr. Lodoun,” Rose Clarring said, white feathers whipping the air; a guinea-gold curl lashed the slender curve of her neck. “He snatched them up, one under each arm, and whirled them around until their laughter filled the park.”

Unwitting images flitted before Jack’s eyes: pictures of a woman weighted down with packages instead of two children whipping a hoop; the figure of a forty-four-year-old man instead of the twenty-one-year-old boy Jonathon Clarring had then been.

But Jack, unlike Jonathon Clarring, had not been there to cheat a cab of death.

Forcefully he beat back the images. “The trial is over, Mrs. Clarring: Go home.”

But Rose Clarring did not hear him, caught up in her own past.

“I laughed, too.” The innocent happiness that flooded the cornflower blue eyes stabbed through him. “It was impossible not to be happy when I was with Jonathon.”

But now she proposed to divorce him, a husband she loved.

“I don’t want to hear this,” Jack said harshly, suddenly choking on the scent of coal and manure, and the asphyxiating perfume of springtime roses.

“But I need to tell you,” catapulted through the air. The brief glow of happiness drained from Rose Clarring’s face. Inside her eyes he glimpsed the pain he had evoked in the witness box. “I need you . . . I need someone . . . to understand.”

But Jack didn’t want to understand this woman when the woman he loved lay dead in the ground.

A heavy omnibus lumbered past them, wood creaking, wheels groaning.

The barrister inside Jack noted that Rose Clarring’s breasts heaved with the force of her breathing. He felt no triumph at finally shattering her composure. Not when the man inside him stared at those breasts and appraised their size.

Stoically Jack met her gaze.

Black vulnerability dilated her pupils; instantly it was swallowed by determination.

“I need to tell you,” she repeated.

But no need went unpunished.

Jack couldn’t say that, either.

“When Jonathon set the boys down, staggering and giggling,” she continued, sunlight gilding the tips of her lashes, “he looked at me and said, ‘I want you to give me a dozen just like these.’

“And I wanted to give him sons, Mr. Lodoun.” The castigating wind drove home her earnestness. “I wanted to give him little boys with whom he could play. I wanted to give him little girls he could pamper. I wanted to make Jonathon as happy as he made me.

“You accused me of joining the Men and Women’s Club in order to learn about prophylactics, but it wasn’t preventive checks that robbed my husband of children: It was the mumps.

“I am a living reminder of every dream he ever dreamed. Every night when he is home alone with me, he drinks himself into a state of unconsciousness. As long as we are married, he will look at me and see only his inability to create life.

“Yes, my husband has the legal authority to do as you say.” Jack watched dispassionately as Rose Clarring took a deep breath—small, round breasts rising . . . falling . . . egret feathers flogging the wind—and regained the inner resolve that had defied his earlier examination, and that had won the sympathy of twelve jurors, all men with wives and children. “But I have the moral obligation, surely, to end the pain that is crippling us both.”

A distant bell pierced the whining, grumbling traffic and the muffled shouts interspersed with song. Three more strikes followed, Westminster Chimes announcing the quarter hour.

It was fifteen minutes after five: The trial had ended sixteen minutes earlier. In six hours and forty-five minutes, the first of June would end and the second day would dawn.

And where would he be? Jack wondered.

He had never fathered a child, but he had never wanted children. He had loved a woman, but he had not wanted marriage.

Jack stepped around Rose Clarring and raised his umbrella.

The flagellating breeze abruptly died.

“Who was the woman you loved?” catapulted through the stillness and stopped a hansom cab.

Jack stepped up onto an iron rung, spine straight; the cab tilted with his weight, instantly righted, his left foot anchoring the wooden platform. The gaze that followed him pierced the wool of his clothes, the flesh stretched taut across his body, the bones that held him rigid.

Swinging open the door, keenly aware of the cabby, who was a potential witness—every move he made, every word he uttered a matter of public record—Jack turned his head and caught Rose Clarring’s gaze. Clearly, coldly, he enunciated: “Cynthia Herries Whitcox.”

Daughter of the First Lord of the Treasury and wife of James Whitcox, Barrister, Queens Counsel.

Shock widened her eyes. Understanding slowly ate up her surprise.

He had represented one man for the sole purpose of destroying another. He had not cared that he would also destroy the members of the Men and Women’s Club.

In that, at least, he had succeeded, Jack thought: Their lives would never be the same.

Jack had butchered their reputations in the witness box. The papers would serve them up piecemeal to a public hungry for scandal.

The condemnation Jack expected did not blossom inside the cornflower blue eyes. Instead Rose Clarring asked the question that every night robbed Jack of sleep: “Do you ever wonder, Mr. Lodoun, if she would be alive still had she divorced Mr. Whitcox?”

Chapter 2

A sharp snap of wood pierced the grating whine of wheels and a wafting chorus of “. . . God save the Queen! These times are times, seldom to be seen. . . .”

One second Rose stared up into eyes so blue they looked purple; the next moment the cab into which Jack Lodoun had disappeared merged into a stream of traffic.

Her gloved fingers clenched around silk, metal and wood.

She had needed him, and he had turned away. As if the stark yearning inside his eyes had been a figment of her imagination.

And perhaps it had.

Hot tears pricked her eyes.

What could she—a woman who inspired only pain in her husband—know about the needs of another man?

“Gi’ ye a cab, missus?” permeated the disjointed cacophony of traffic and song.

Taking a deep breath, Rose turned.

Gentle, sympathetic eyes captured her gaze. They were on a level with her own.

The ageless, stooped man smiled a toothless smile. “ ’Ad a bit o’ a lov’rs spat, ’ave ye?”

Memories of endless blue skies and smiling blue eyes slashed through Rose.

They had been lovers, she and Jonathon, when they married.

“Yes.” Rose swallowed the loss that swelled inside her. “I would like a cab.”

No sooner did she fish out of her reticule a copper coin than a hansom pulled up to the curb.

Rose pressed the penny into gnarled fingers. “Thank you.”

Slowly—feeling as fragile as the old man who had procured the cab—she stepped up onto the eighteen-inch-high iron stair.

The cabby indifferently enquired: “Where t’, missus?”

She could not go back to Jonathon’s house that echoed with the lament of his unborn children. But neither could she keep the trial today a secret.

“Langham and Great Portland Street, please,” Rose said.

The cab reeked of masculine cigars and feminine perfume. Blindly she closed the door on the celebration of another woman’s victory and stared through water-spotted glass.

What should she tell her family? she wondered. The truth?

But what was the truth?

She had discussed provocative topics in the company of men. She had read books society deemed sexually perverse.

Above pointed horse ears, the black top hat and stiff back of a cabby materialized.

It had seemed so innocent two years earlier, congregating in the Museum of London, each meeting of the Men and Women’s Club called to order with the rap of a gavel.

Rose braced herself as the cab she occupied lunged in between careening carriages.

The trial today had also been called to order with the rap of a gavel, she recalled. The impact had bored through the floor of the windowless room where she had waited, alone, to be called as a witness.

The left wheel of the cab dropped into a pothole. Immediately the seat shot up underneath Rose.

She grabbed a leather pull. The cab irrevocably jolted forward.

Through the streaked glass, storefronts gave way to brick town-homes. Each row a community. Each house a home. Every woman filling a niche: wife, mother, daughter.

The cab slowed, jerked, horse stepping backward . . . forward . . . halting.

Rose stared up at the gray clouds that striated a blue sky.

The wind had chased away the rain. But now the wind had died.

Rose still did not know what to tell her family.

The impatient jangle of a harness sliced through a creak of wood.

Reluctantly Rose pushed open the cab door.

A thin line of sunlight marked the four-storied brick town house that she had called home for twenty-one years, but that had ceased to be her home the day she married.

Her bedroom had overlooked the street. Blinds now shuttered the tall rectangular window.

Rose paid the cabby.

The white-enameled door swung open.

“Mrs. Clarring.”

Giles, the black-haired, sixty-year-old butler who was no less stately than the town house, briefly bowed; simultaneously he held out an imperious, white-gloved hand.

“Hello, Giles,” Rose said huskily, offering up her umbrella.

The folded black silk disappeared; instantly the white-gloved hand reappeared.

Rose gave up her black leather gloves . . . her cloak. . . .

Not quickly enough.

The butler tugged warm wool off her shoulders.

Rose transferred her reticule from one hand to the other, losing her cloak. Feeling unaccountably naked, she stepped forward.

A familiar clearing of a throat stopped her.

Tears stinging her eyes, Rose wiped her feet on the doormat. Head down . . . inspecting her handiwork . . . she asked, “Is Mother home?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Davis are in the drawing room.”

She resolutely lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. “Thank you.”

A comfortably plump man and woman—his graying hair thinning, her gold hair graying—were seated around the leather-tooled drum table that had for all of Rose’s life been the center of the Davis family.

But it was neither tea, nor a puzzle, nor a game that occupied the man and woman.

Rose stopped short of the table, feet sinking into thick wool carpet, breath lodging inside her chest.

Judgment would not come on the morrow; it had come now, this evening.

Blue eyes—her eyes, masculine instead of feminine—glanced up and pierced her soul. “Do you think so little of us, Rose, that you let us learn about this in the paper?”

The hurt and betrayal inside her father’s voice squeezed closed her throat.

Her mother had taught her how to pour tea at that drum table, Rose thought with a bittersweet pang. Her father had taught her how to play draughts.

Now The Globe spread across the tooled leather, black print summarily destroying thirty-three years of trust and respect.

Jack Lodoun had said she was a very pretty woman. Rose did not look very pretty in the evening newspaper.

Underneath the drawing capturing her likeness the caption read: “Rose Clarring: A Woman in Search of Illumination or Fornication?”

“Do you think so little of me, Father,” Rose managed, “that you think I would be unfaithful to Jonathon?”