With This Curse: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense (17 page)

If Atticus felt the same way, one would not have known it to look at him. He was pacing before the fire with as much restless energy as if he had just sprung from a cage. His pale blue eyes were bright with fury.

“Lord Veridian is not worth your anger, Atticus,” I told him. “As disgusting as he was, his words can’t hurt Richard now. I’m sure that everyone knows the truth and will dismiss his foul lies accordingly.”

He halted in mid-stride and turned astonished eyes to me. “Clara,” he said in a different voice. “That isn’t what enrages me. I know how much it must have hurt you to have him speak so coarsely about women in that unfortunate situation.”

I wasn’t certain whether to laugh or take his words in earnest. “I have known several of these unfortunates,” I said slowly, “and I do feel compassion for them, but I’m not certain why you should think that the subject is one that I take personally. Certainly it isn’t well suited to drawing-room conversation, but I was not offended on my own behalf.”

To my bewilderment, he actually went on one knee beside my chair and took one of my hands in his. “You’re so brave, Clara, but you mustn’t feel that you have to hide your feelings from me,” he said gently. “I know how wounded you must have been by those coarse references to light women.”

An explanation for his solicitousness was finally dawning on me. “Is this to do with Genevieve?” I asked. At his solemn nod—I cannot deny it—my heart sank. My voice was dull when I asked, “Is she your mistress?”

He stared at me. “My
mistress?
” he repeated, in a voice of such consternation that I had to believe it sincere. “Good God, Clara, of course not!”

But that left only one other explanation. “Your daughter, then,” I said. Even, it seemed, as honorable and decent a man as Atticus was not a stranger to dalliance. With no wife for so many years, what other course was open to a man of normal passions? So he had taken a lover, who had borne him a daughter. It spoke well of him that he was taking responsibility for her, paying for her education and upkeep, even introducing her into his own circle. It was more than decent; it was generous.

Still, it gave me a little twinge to imagine how happy he must have been with this woman to have embraced her illegitimate child so completely. Would he still be with the woman of his heart if his position, and hers, had permitted it?

As I pondered these depressing thoughts, Atticus drew back as if to take the full measure of me and make certain I was the same person he thought he knew. “Clara, there’s no need to keep up the pretence,” he said, in so bewildered a tone that I felt churlish for having evoked it. “You don’t have to hide the truth any longer. I know the sad secret that you’ve had to conceal.”

“What secret?” I demanded. “Atticus, what is it that you think I’ve been concealing?”

Such compassion in his eyes. “Why,” he said softly, “that Genevieve is your daughter.”

“My
daughter?”
My voice was an incredulous squeak.

He bowed his head. “Don’t think for a moment that I am sitting in judgment on you, Clara. I know how much you loved Richard—it shone in your face like something holy whenever you looked at him. You were young, passionate… without a father to guide you…” A wry smile flicked over his face and was gone in an instant. “And Richard could have charmed the virgin goddess Diana herself into his arms. It would have been impossible for any young woman in your position to have withstood him. I don’t condemn you, Clara.”

I had been silent during this generous speech only because I was too stupefied to speak. Now anger was overcoming shock, and I found that I had no lack of things to say. I rose abruptly to my feet, and the motion stopped the words on his lips.

“Are you saying,” I demanded, “that you think I was your brother’s
doxy?
”

He was on his feet again, but my words made him recoil. “I would never use that word, Clara.”

“But you thought it of me just the same. I cannot believe your presumption. Just because I was a servant, without the moral compass of highborn, enlightened people like yourself, you concluded that I was a loose woman? That I had no sense of propriety, of how to conduct myself? That I—” I whirled away from him, unable to look at him any longer, and hugged my arms tightly around myself so that I would not reach out for the closest objects at hand and hurl them at the wall—or his head. “Do I look that debauched, or that foolish? It seems that according to you I must be one or the other.”

“Clara, I… I don’t know what to say. Am I to believe that you aren’t…?”

“I am neither Genevieve’s mother nor anyone’s mother. I never lay with your brother or with any man. But I can’t expect you to believe me, no, not a harlot from below stairs. You can’t trust me to give you anything but falsehoods.” No wonder he had reacted so strongly to Lord Veridian’s remarks about impure women—he had assumed that I was among them.

His hands clasped me firmly by the shoulders. I gave in grudgingly to the pressure, and he turned me around so that we stood facing each other. I must have looked ferocious indeed, and I certainly felt so. I could feel the heat of humiliation in my face, and my heart was flailing in my chest.

“Clara, I am truly sorry to have insulted you,” he exclaimed, his eyes anxious as they sought mine. “I beg your pardon, sincerely.”

His voice had never been more gentle and warm, but my pride was still smarting. “You might have asked me,” I snapped. “Rather than assuming that I’d fallen into Richard’s bed—even had he tried to lure me there, which he did not. He never—”

My words came to an abrupt halt as I remembered the many times Richard’s wayward hands had tested my resolve; remembered the persuasive words he had murmured to me so often, telling me of the sweetness of love’s pleasures stolen furtively; and I fell silent. What I had thought was a game might have been quite in earnest, and Richard had not been entirely above reproach. But he, too, had been young—nearly as young as I—and if in his love for me he had sometimes trespassed against respectability and convention, I could scarcely condemn him for it.

My silence must have been revealing, for Atticus heaved a great sigh and drew me, astonishingly, into an embrace. “I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice muffled by my hair as he held me against him. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have assumed it was you. For me to have blurted it out unthinkingly… I can only imagine how grievous a shock it must be to find out this way.”

My arms struggled up between us so that I could push myself away from his chest. “What are you saying? That Richard was unfaithful to me? That’s a lie as vile as any of Lord Veridian’s preposterous claims.”

“Clara, it pains me to say it as much as it must pain you to hear it, but Genevieve is Richard’s daughter, though you aren’t her mother.”

“Impossible.”

“Inarguable.” How could a man’s voice be so tender yet so relentless? “You’ve only to look at her, Clara! Her hair is a few shades lighter than Richard’s, her eyes a bit darker, but she’s his blood.”

“It’s absurd even to suggest such a thing!” Even her age gave the lie—Richard had been in love with me, had spent with me those last months before he was to leave for the Continent.
I
was his sweetheart. “This is the cause of your devotion to her, then?” I demanded. “You truly thought she was your niece?”

“I think it still,” he said gravely. “Please try to look past your wounded pride and see it, my dear. I suppose Richard must have been trifling with Mrs. Collier. If that is so and she was actually Genevieve’s mother, it’s no wonder Collier thought the girl was his! I went to their cottage on a hint from one of Richard’s letters, and when I found out when the child had been born I… well, I remembered how much time he was spending with you all those months before, and how suddenly you’d been sent away. I’d heard the rumor that you carried his child.” He reached for my hand, and even though I snatched it away, his voice remained as tender as before. “I loved her for your sake, Clara. I knew that someday you’d want to be with her again, even though circumstances had forced you to give her up. From what Richard said in his letter I thought he must have told you to place her with the Colliers. They seemed happy enough for me to take her into my care and give her all the advantages they couldn’t offer… and you know the rest.”

I knew that I had never before heard of anything so monstrously presumptuous. “No wonder Mr. Collier is so angry at the Blackwoods,” I exclaimed. “You took his child away, claiming she was another man’s, and sent her to another country, where he would never even be able to see her. The poor man must have been half mad with grief.” It would explain his resentment of me: if his child was to be brought into the grandeur of the Blackwoods’ orbit, he would have wanted her decently wedded and accorded the full status of her position. A wife, not a ward.

“Collier is not her father,” he said, with a firmness that made my hands clench into fists. “His wits may be too turned for him to see it, but Genevieve is a Blackwood.”

“As for his wits,” I said shortly, “madman or grieving father, he seems to have no difficulty in finding a way into Gravesend when it suits him. He left this note for me on my bureau the night that he made his way into the house. Evidently Birch and the others did not discover him until he had been inside for some while. I’ve no idea if he may turn violent if he is continually thwarted in his wish to see Genevieve, but it would probably be wise to set extra watch on the house.”

I had kept the note with me ever since the night it had appeared, and now I thrust the torn fragment of paper at him so that he could read the words scrawled in the unsteady handwriting. “And now, if you don’t mind, I’d prefer that you take your nasty assumptions out of my sitting room.”

He didn’t respond at once, so absorbed was he in staring at the note. “Collier left this? You’re certain?”

“I believe one can fairly rule out Mrs. Threll,” I said sarcastically. “I found it after I retired that night. It rather unnerved me to know that he had been among my things.”

He looked up at me, his eyes narrowing. “Among your things, you say. Where exactly?”

“In the jewel case. I found it when I went to put the ruby collar away.” As I spoke, it occurred to me for the first time that this was a curious place for Collier to have left the note; why not place it in plain sight, where I would see it at once? What meaning could the jewel case have had for him? Then I shook the questions off. A man as troubled as Collier probably did not even understand his own actions.

Atticus was staring at the note again now, and I thought I saw his jaw tighten as if in anger. “You needn’t worry about being disturbed like this again,” he said grimly. “I’ll see to it that this isn’t repeated.”

“I’m sure you will. Now, if you would be so good as to remove yourself from my room?”

He seemed on the point of protesting, but a glance at me, standing stiffly by the open door awaiting his departure, seemed to change his mind. Thrusting the note into a pocket, he strode to me, looked searchingly into my eyes for a moment, then bowed and departed.

I shut the door firmly behind him, turned the key, and snatched up a cheap china vase painted with roses. My hand fairly twitched with the urge to hurl it against the wall. Such a satisfying crash it would make.

But it would make extra work for the maid whose duty it was to keep my sitting room tidy. After a moment’s fevered thought, I fetched a paisley shawl from my bedroom wardrobe, spread it on the floor beneath the wall, and flung the vase with all my might.

The crash was, indeed, satisfying. Triumphant, I gathered up the shawl with its litter of china fragments, opened the window, and flung the pieces out into the darkness. Then, a fraction calmer, I retired to my bedroom.

It could scarcely have been a quarter of an hour later, if that long, when I heard running footsteps approach my door. There was a fusillade of knocking. My first thought was Atticus, but what would bring him on the run like this to rap so furiously on my door? Then a voice called, “Madame! Aunt Clara!” and I realized my mistake.

“Genevieve?” I opened the door a crack and found her standing, flushed and breathing hard, at the threshold. “What’s wrong?”

“You must come,” she blurted. “Uncle Atticus and his father—a terrible argument. I am frightened.”

Fortunately I had progressed no further in undressing for bed than taking my hair down; I had been too occupied in continuing my discussion with Atticus in my head, adding many brilliant points and incisive observations that would have reduced him to humble capitulation. Genevieve grabbed my hand and led me at a half-run down the hall, around the corner, and through the gallery that separated my rooms from Lord Telford’s.

She told me in an urgent half whisper that she had gone to Lord Telford’s rooms to leave a note and a posy of flowers, since he had shown no signs of forgiving her impertinence. It was when she came to deliver these that she heard the two men in argument. “They are so furious with each other,” she whispered. “I heard Lord Telford saying dreadful things. That you were not worthy to bear the Blackwood name—I am sorry, Aunt Clara—and that I was a disgrace to his house. Uncle Atticus, he spoke more quietly, but so calmly—so calmly that I knew he was quite, quite angry—and he asked, ‘By what right do you have anonymous notes placed in my wife’s chamber? It was a cowardly thing to do. If you had a grievance to air with her and me, you should have spoken out to our faces!’ I give you what they call the gist, you understand—”

“I understand. What else? Tell me quickly.”

“At that, Lord Telford begins to laugh, a dreadful laugh, and he says that he will do just that, he will tell everyone to their faces that you are—that you—I did not recognize the word he used.”

I suspected from the deepening flush in her cheeks that she had understood only too well what Lord Telford had called me, but I did not press her.

“And Lord Telford, he then said that he would have you thrown out of the house to return to your proper place, and he said that I should be sent with you, as a brand of shame. I did not quite understand that.”

Thank heaven, it appeared that Atticus had not shared his theory about Genevieve’s parentage with the girl herself. I could not imagine how hurtful it would have been for her to have expected me to give her a mother’s welcome, only to find none awaiting her. At least she had been spared that crushing disappointment.

Now that we were nearing Lord Telford’s chambers I tugged at her hand to slow her steps. Cautiously and quietly, we approached the door.

It might have been wide open for all the good it did in preventing the argument inside from reaching our ears. Lord Telford’s reedy voice was raised in anger. “I had my suspicions about that woman from the first. All these years you’ve shown no inclination toward marriage, neglected your responsibility to sire an heir, and then suddenly you marry this wealthy, mysterious widow you produced from thin air? A preposterous story. It was the night that you gave her the ruby collar that I found out—that is, I finally recognized her. A servant! You put a servant in the highest place at Gravesend under me, a strumpet no better than she should be, who departed here in disgrace—”

“I must ask you not to speak so of Clara.” Atticus’s voice, in contrast with his father’s shrill ranting, was coldly controlled, but just the sound of that even, clipped sentence gave me the image of him: standing firm, indomitable, unmoved, his eyes glacial with anger and stubbornness, as the storm of his father’s rantings broke over him. “My wife has been forced to earn her living, yes, but that is scarcely a sin. The charges you make against her virtue are entirely unfounded. And even if they had any basis in fact, Clara’s life before our marriage is no one’s affair but hers and mine.”