Cry for Passion (3 page)

“I didn’t say you were unfaithful,” the fifty-nine-year-old man harshly denied.

Rose held his gaze. “But it’s what you think, isn’t it?”

How ugly was the color of guilt.

He flushed. The gaze of the man whose eyes Rose had inherited slid away.

“Why didn’t you tell us, Rose?”

Rose glanced down at the fifty-three-year-old woman who was taller than Rose, but who was golden-haired like Rose. “Tell you what, Mother?”

“Why didn’t you tell us it was you who didn’t want children? All these years we thought it was . . .”

The older woman’s voice faded, unable to complete the thought: All these years we thought it was Jonathon who did not give you children.

The secrets Rose had kept from her family pushed up inside her throat.

Too late.

Their revelation would not now alter the future.

Rose drew in an unsteady breath. “Is that what the paper reports, that I joined the Men and Women’s Club to learn about preventive checks?”

The face that all of Rose’s life had shone like a beacon—pale with worry during childhood illnesses . . . flushed with pride at social recreations . . . wet with tears at her wedding—turned a dark, shameful red.

“Perhaps, Mother . . . Father”—Rose’s corset squeezed her heart—“I didn’t tell you about the Men and Women’s Club because of your reactions now.”

Or perhaps Rose had not told them because she had needed a private place where she could be a woman instead of the mother others daily expected her to become.

“What of Jonathon?” Horror suddenly choked her father’s voice. “Surely you didn’t leave him to discover this through the papers, like you did with us?”

Rose felt the gaze of her mother and father more keenly than she had felt the stares of all the men and women inside the courtroom, judging her dress, her face, her voice, her marriage, her very worth as a human.

“I told Jonathon about the club,” Rose said. A half-truth. Or a half lie. Jonathon had been unconscious from too much drink when she had told him about the club and the decision she must make.

“And the trial?” her father persisted.

“No.” Rose met his gaze—his familiar face now blanched from shock—and braced herself. She had answered Jack Lodoun when he examined her; she would truthfully answer her father. “I did not tell him about the trial.”

“Oh, Rose!” Her mother gasped in dismay.

Her father’s face suddenly turned old and aged.

Because of her.

Darkness blotched Rose’s vision.

“Mr. Davis, Mrs. Davis,” cut through the tightening noose of emotion. “I prepared a tray. Mrs. Clarring no doubt missed tea-time.”

Rose gratefully turned to the impossibly black-haired butler who had in the past publicly frowned when she muddied his floors, but who had privately sneaked her cookies at bedtime. “Thank you, Giles.”

Giles whisked away The Globe and deposited a silver tray on top of the leather drum table.

His hands were rock steady. Unlike Rose’s hands.

Carefully she picked up a heavy, silver-plated teapot that radiated heat.

“You may go, Giles,” her father shortly instructed.

Black tea leapt out of delicate, gold-rimmed china.

An ugly splotch spread over the silver tray like the blemish she now created on her husband’s reputation. Growing with each breath . . . with each purchased newspaper . . .

Rose set down the teapot. Simultaneously the twin doors to the drawing room clicked shut.

“Why did you testify, Rose?” her mother asked pragmatically, more like the mother of Rose’s past.

Rose stared at the still-growing stain. “I was subpoenaed.”

By the barrister whom she had asked to win her a divorce.

A man who had accused her of joining the Men and Women’s Club to learn about prophylactics, so that she need not be burdened by children. A man who—while guilty of loving another man’s wife—had then accused her of joining the club in hopes of finding a lover who would give her the sexual titillation her husband did not.

What had she been thinking?

“You’re a woman.” Her mother summarily dismissed the legal laws of England. “You could have been excused.”

“No.” Stiffening, Rose met her mother’s gaze. “I could not.”

“Why not?” her father asked, cornflower blue eyes bright with hurt.

They’re my friends stuck inside her throat.

In two years she had not made one friend of a club member, purposefully segregating her life from theirs.

“A man tried to commit a woman—a member of the club to which I belong—to an insane asylum, Father.” Rose took a deep breath. “Simply because he did not approve of what we discussed.”

“He’s her son,” her father objected.

“And he was wrong,” Rose rebutted.

“It’s not up to you to interfere in another woman’s family,” her mother adjured.

Rose snared her mother’s gaze, a paler shade of blue. “If Father put you away, Mother, would you say that it’s not my place to interfere?”

The color drained out of the older woman’s face. “Your father would never!”

“But he could, Mother.”

The danger to women had been made very evident inside the courtroom.

Rose captured blue eyes, her eyes. “Couldn’t you, Father?”

Puzzlement shaded the hurt inside his gaze. “Do you think I don’t love your mother, Rose?”

Rose remembered all the nights she had lain awake, crying from the pain caused by love.

“I think,” she said steadily, “it’s not always a matter of love.”

Maternal concern enveloped Rose; Rose, the woman, derived no comfort from it. “Rose, you know your father and I love you.”

And Rose loved Jonathon. And Jonathon loved Rose.

But he was not her father. And Rose was not her mother.

And love was no longer enough.

“I’m divorcing Jonathon.”

The muted rattle of carriage wheels permeated the silence.

At night, lying in bed alone, the passage of a carriage was much louder.

Sometimes, Rose remembered, the loneliness of the passage had deafened her.

“I don’t understand you, Rose.”

A smile lifted Rose’s lips; it contained no humor. “Then that makes two of us, Father.”

“Are you doing this because of that club?” angrily demanded her mother.

“No,” Rose said honestly.

But society would think so. Just as society now thought of her as an adulteress.

Impossibly, a small ember of hope sparked inside Rose.

“I love you”—she took a deep breath, slowly released it—“but the Men and Women’s Club, the trial and my divorce have nothing to do with you. I hope you understand that.”

Fleetingly Rose glanced at the bronze- and silver-framed photographs scattered throughout the drawing room.

Rose had five brothers, ages thirty-one, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-five and twenty-three. The framed pictures catalogued each and every one of their lives: their childhoods . . . their school days . . . their weddings.

Cameras had progressed even as the obligation to produce a family had not.

A baby boy—the son of her youngest brother—grinned into the lens of a Kodak that did not require a separate shutter. A tottering boy balanced on roller skates, the middle child of her oldest brother.

Bright marble eyes snared Rose’s gaze.

A motionless rocking horse stood in a corner, horsehair mane tangled, gaily painted body chipped with age and use.

She and her brothers had rocked on that horse; now her brothers’ children rocked on it.

In this room was everything her husband had ever wanted.

Squarely Rose met first her mother’s gaze, and then that of her father.

“I hope you support my decision.” She reached into her reticule and pulled out a card: The front—printed in elegant black font—bore Jonathon’s address; the back of the card bore her own neat handwriting. “I’ve leased a row house. This is my new address. I hope, when I have my house in order, you’ll visit me.”

Their shock weighted down her shoulders.

“Enjoy your tea,” Rose said, because there was nothing more to say.

The thick green carpet sucked at her feet. Outside the drawing room, the oak floor amplified each hollow heel tap.

“Your coat, Mrs. Clarring,” elicited a sharp start of surprise.

Giles had always appeared out of nowhere, Rose remembered.

She held out her right arm . . . her left. “Thank you.”

Mechanically she tugged on her gloves and grasped the proffered umbrella.

Giles thrust a column of paper into her left hand; it took Rose a long second to realize it was The Globe.

“It’s not a very good likeness, Mrs. Clarring.”

Tears blurred her vision. “You think not, Giles?”

But he did not answer, asking instead, “Did Mrs. Hart win her liberation?”

Rose had testified at two in the afternoon. The trial had ended four witnesses, two hours and fifty-nine minutes later. Too late for The Globe to print the verdict, but not too late to ruin Rose’s reputation.

“Yes,” Rose said. “She won.”

There was no emotion inside the butler’s eyes. “I sent the pot-boy to fetch a cab.”

“Thank you,” Rose repeated, blinking back the tears.

She had no choice but to walk the solitary course she had planned. The door to her childhood closed behind her.

Pale pink tinted the darkening sky.

A horse waited at the curb; it was as black as the hansom it pulled.

Rose slammed shut the cab door and sat down on cracked leather. Forcibly she concentrated on the descending dusk instead of her destination.

A lamp boy walked the pavement, lighting wrought iron street-lamps one by one. The teardrop-shaped flames did not disperse the gathering shadows.

All too soon the hansom jerked to a stop.

“Wait for me,” Rose instructed the cabby.

Twilight was brick by brick swallowing the familiar town house, turning mellow gold into murky gray. Through a mullioned window she glimpsed Emily, the chambermaid, lighting a parlor lamp.

The shadow-dulled door did not magically open.

Rose slid a key into the lock. Simultaneously the door swung open.

Metal jerked free of metal.

“Mrs. Clarring!” the forty-year-old butler who came by his black hair naturally gasped, white-gloved hand clutching his chest.

“Justin,” Rose returned, fighting to lower her fisted hand instead of clutching her own chest.

Between one blink and the next the butler’s startled face transformed into an expressionless mask. Gloved hand dropping, he stepped backward in a half bow.

It was so obvious he had read about the trial.

Rose would not cry.

“Is Mr. Clarring home?” she asked instead, jagged key piercing her glove.

“No, madam.”

Relief swept through Rose.

She would face Jonathon. But not tonight.

Please, God, she thought, not tonight.

“A cab is waiting outside,” Rose calmly informed the stiff, disapproving butler. “Please have the trunk in my bedchamber brought down, and strapped onto it.”

“Very well, madam.”

The butler turned with a flap of black coattails.

Beyond the gleaming curve of a mahogany staircase, five closed doors barred her entrance.

She had betrayed her husband, the closed doors accused her. She no longer belonged in his house, they judged her.

Turning—swallowing back the nausea rising up inside her throat—Rose’s gaze was captured by a gleam of silver.

Envelopes were neatly stacked on a tray. Folded beside the evening mail lay a newspaper that could only be The Globe.

Dropping the key into her reticule, she quickly, decisively strode to the cookie-cornered table. The first drawer contained calling cards . . . there a pen . . . a stack of notepaper. . . . The second drawer contained envelopes.

Rose blankly stared at a white sheet of vellum paper.

She saw the heavy silver ashtray—a wedding gift from her youngest brother—that set on Jonathon’s desk. She saw the long-stemmed glass rose—a memento of her honeymoon—that lay upstairs on a nightstand.

There were so many memories inside these four walls.

The gold banding her ring finger throbbed, another memento.

Rose peeled off her black leather glove and twisted off her wedding band.

Gripping a thick metal pen, Rose stared down at the blank vellum paper that was weighted down by gold.

No words came to mind.

How did a woman tell a man whose body she had welcomed into her own . . . a man who had made her family his family . . . that she could no longer live on the emotion sustained by memorabilia?

Chapter 3

“Bloody shame you lost, Lodoun.” Wood scraping hard oak flooring pierced the muted din of masculine rumbles. An acrid burst of smoke obliterated the oily black current that was the Thames. “Dreadful miscarriage of justice, if you ask me. Women joining secret sex clubs. It’s all very well for the men, lucky dogs, but the very thought of our ladies . . . But there you have it. Our ladies wouldn’t, would they? I pity Clarring, poor sod. Married to a bit of a slut, what?”

Slut infiltrated the muffle of alcohol.

Jack had told Rose Clarring she would be in the papers on the morrow.

He had lied: She had made the evening newspapers.

Laughter needled his skin.

The verdict of the trial had come too late to be printed, but there were no secrets between the courts and Parliament: Each and every MP knew he had lost.

Jack turned his head away from the bow window and dispassionately studied Blair Stromwell, a senior member of Parliament and the Chairman of Justice. “Do you know Jonathon Clarring?”

“What?” The senior man glanced up from The Globe. Gray smoke spiraled up from the brown stub of his cigar. “Don’t you?”

Jack knew his reputation. Jack knew the desires of his wife.

She wanted a divorce. A moral obligation, she had claimed.

Jack lifted the crystal snifter—cupped between his fingers like a woman’s breast—and drained body-warmed brandy.

The alcohol burned all the way down to his testicles.

He set the snifter down onto solid oak. The thud of crystal impacting wood—the sound of other glasses, of other MPs drinking and breathing politics—reverberated throughout St. Stephen’s Club. Beside his empty snifter, amber winked in the bottom of a crystal decanter.