Belgravia (43 page)

He took off his hat and threw it down impatiently. “But will he see to it? Or has he done so already?”

His words cut her like a knife.
Will he see to it?
In all her thoughts, Susan had included the child as part of her calculations. Not once had she entertained the notion that she might get rid of it. She’d waited ten years to become pregnant, and now that she was, John wanted her to risk her life, to flush it out and away? Indeed, he did not even appear to understand there was an issue to be discussed.

She shook her head impatiently. “Of course not!” Then she paused, staying silent until she could breathe more easily. “I don’t want to be rid of it. Did you think that I would? Have you no feelings for the child?”

John looked at her, seemingly puzzled. “Why would I have feelings?”

“Because you’re the father.”

“Who says? What proof do I have? You fell into bed with me at the first opportunity. Am I to take from your behavior that you’re a new Madame Walewska, untouched and pure until you caught the eye of the Emperor?” He laughed harshly as he poured himself some brandy from a waiting decanter and threw it down his throat.

“You know it’s yours.”

“I don’t know anything.” He filled his glass again. “This is your problem, not mine. I will, as a friend, pay for you to solve it, but if you refuse, then that is the end of my responsibility.” He dropped into a chair.

Susan looked at him. For a second, her rage was so great that she felt as if she had swallowed fire, but she knew enough to keep control of her feelings. If she shouted, she would get nothing from him. But might there still not be a way to bring him around, if she played her hand carefully?

“Are you quite well?” she said, moving away from the subject. “You seem preoccupied.”

He looked at her, surprised by the gentleness in her tone. “Do you care?”

Susan was nothing if not resourceful. “John, I can’t answer for you,” she smiled winningly, “but I have been in love with you for many months. Your happiness means more to me than anything else on earth. Of course I care.” Even as she spoke the words, she marveled at her own dishonesty. But she could see they’d had an effect. How weak men were. Like dogs, one pat and they’re yours for life. “Now won’t you tell me what’s the matter?”

He sighed, leaning back, putting his hands behind his head. “Only that I’ve lost everything.”

“It can’t be as bad as all that.”

“Can’t it? I have nothing. I am nothing. I will always be nothing.” He stood and walked to the window. His rooms looked over the courtyard in front of the building, and he stared down at the activity below, at the people hurrying about their daily lives, while his life seemed to have vanished in a puff of smoke.

Susan was beginning to understand that she was dealing with something more than petulance. “What has happened?” she said.

“I’ve discovered that I will not, after all, be the next Earl of Brockenhurst. I will not inherit my uncle’s fortune. Or Lymington Park. Or Brockenhurst House. Or any of it. I am heir to nothing.” He did not care that she knew. Anne and James Trenchard would have seen Sophia’s papers by now, and sooner or later they would have them looked into. They must, and when they did they would learn the truth and publish it for the whole world to read.

“I don’t understand.” This extraordinary revelation had for the moment taken Susan’s mind off her own predicament.

“That man, Charles Pope, is the heir. My nemesis. It seems he is the grandson of my uncle and aunt.”

“Isn’t he supposed to be the son of my father-in-law? That’s what you told me before.”

“That’s what I thought before. But he’s not. He is my cousin Edmund’s son.”

“But then why has he not been recognized as such? Why does he bear the name Pope? Shouldn’t he be… what is the courtesy title?”

“Viscount Bellasis.”

“Very well. Why isn’t he Viscount Bellasis?”

“He is.” John laughed, but the sound was harsh. “He just doesn’t know it.”

“Why not?”

“They all thought he was illegitimate. That was why he was put away, given a false name, brought up far from London.”

Susan was genuinely interested. Her mind was working like one of the new railway engines. “When did they find out the truth?”

“
I
found out the truth. They don’t know it yet. There was a marriage between Edmund and the Trenchards’ daughter. In Brussels. Before Waterloo. But they think it was false. They think it was a trick to seduce her.”

Susan blinked. So many revelations at once. Oliver’s sister, Sophia, of sacred memory in that household, had been seduced. Except, no, she had not. At least, not without a wedding first. It was almost too much to take in. “So you say they don’t yet know the truth?”

“I don’t believe so. You see, I had a friend of mine look into the marriage, and it was legal.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his inner pocket. “They think the clergyman who presided at the ceremony was in reality a soldier, and so it wasn’t valid. When the facts are that he
was
a soldier, and an Anglican priest as well. And I have the proof right here.”

“I’m impressed you haven’t burned the papers. If they don’t yet know.”

At this, he laughed again. “Don’t be. I would have done, but there’s no point. I only have copies of the proof of the marriage. They have the originals.”

“But if they haven’t seen your friend’s evidence—”

“They’ll find out the truth. They’re bound to.”

And now Susan saw her chance. Far from his loss ruining her hopes, she realized almost at once that it gave her a real option for the future. A realistic ambition. “John,” she said carefully. “If all this is true and the title is gone—”

“And the money.”

She nodded. “And the money. Then why shouldn’t we marry? I know you would not have chosen me if you’d been the head of your family, but now you will be the son of a younger son. It’s not so much. I can divorce Oliver and go to my father. He has money of his own, lots of it, and I’m an only child. I’ll inherit everything. We could have a good life together. We’d be comfortable. We could have more children. You might take up a commission in the army, or we could buy land. There may be better-bred women on offer, but few who could provide for you as well as I can.” She
paused. She had made what sounded to her own ears like a good case. She would have a husband in Society, and he would have the means to live like a gentleman. Surely, given his situation, he had nothing to lose and everything to gain?

John stared at her for what seemed like an age.

Then he threw back his head and laughed. Except he didn’t just laugh. He roared with laughter. He laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks. Then he stopped and turned to face her. “Do you imagine that I, John Bellasis, the grandson of the Earl of Brockenhurst, whose ancestors fought in the Crusades and on almost every major European battlefield since, would ever—” He stared at her with malice, his eyes as hard and cold as stone. “Do you seriously imagine that I would
ever
marry the divorced daughter of a dirty tradesman?”

Susan recoiled with a gasp, as if she had been drenched with icy water. He had started to laugh again now, almost hysterically. As if all his own misery at his fall were finding its expression in his cruel, savage humor.

It was a hard and vicious slap across her face. Susan stood, her hands on her cheeks, her heart racing.

He hadn’t finished. “Don’t you understand? I need to make a brilliant marriage. Now more than ever. Not Maria Grey, with her downcast looks and her empty purse. A
brilliant
marriage, do you hear me? And I am sorry, my dear, but that scenario could never include you.” He shook his head. “Poor little Susan Trenchard. A grubby little tradesman’s tart. What a joke.”

She was quite silent and still for a moment, not speaking, not moving, until she felt she once more had mastery of her body and her voice. Then she spoke. “I wonder if you would ask your man to call me a hackney carriage? I will follow him down directly.”

“Can’t you go down now and hail one yourself?” He spoke to her as if they had never met before this day.

“Please, John. There is no need for us to part so badly.”

Was it some tiny shred of decency, a last trace of honor, that made him grumble “very well” and leave the room to give the order? No sooner was he gone than she’d seized the papers
abandoned near his chair, stuffed them into her reticule, and hurried out. She was halfway down the stairs before she heard him call her name, but she quickened her pace and ran through the courtyard into the street. A minute later, she was in a hackney cab and on her way home. As John rushed out onto the pavement, looking furiously up and down Piccadilly, she shrank from the window and leaned back in her seat.

Oliver Trenchard was in James’s library in Eaton Square, drinking a glass of brandy and leafing through a copy of the
Times
. By his own standards, if not his father’s, he’d had a busy day, although the office and his work for the Cubitt brothers had played no part in it. He’d been riding in Hyde Park for most of the morning, visited his tailor’s in Savile Row to approve the design of a pair of shooting breeches, then a luncheon party in Wilton Crescent, after which he joined a group of friends for a game of whist. Although Oliver wasn’t a gambler. He disliked losing too much for his wins to offset it. In fact, while his lack of industry may not have pleased his father, Oliver’s vices weren’t great. It was true that he drank when he was unhappy, but his real sin would have been women, if only he could have shaken off the image of his wife whenever he had an assignation. There she would be in his mind, with her superior smile and her eyes looking for someone to flirt with, someone other than her husband… and he would abandon his plans and go home. If he could just learn to forget her, he knew he could be content. Or so he told himself as he settled into his chair and raised his glass to his lips, hoping to avoid both his father and Susan.

Despite living in the same house, Oliver had successfully managed not to speak to his father since that unpleasant luncheon at James’s club. He had deliberately left the house late every morning long after James had gone to work, and he often returned home in the small hours, hoping his parents would both be safely tucked up in bed. However, that day he’d miscalculated, thinking James was out to dinner, and just as he put down his glass and folded the paper in half, his father walked into the room.

James stopped in his tracks. He was evidently not expecting to see his son there, either. “Are you still reading the
Times
?” he asked, slightly awkwardly after such a long silence between them.

“Unless you would like it, Father?” Oliver replied, politely enough.

“No, no. Carry on. I just came in to find a book. Do you know where your mother is?”

“Upstairs. She was tired after a long walk this afternoon. She wanted a rest before dinner.”

James nodded. “You have no trouble speaking to her, then?”

“I have no quarrel with her,” said Oliver calmly.

“Just with me.” James was beginning to sense that the tensions between them were coming to some sort of climax. Were he and Oliver at last to join battle when they had delayed it for so long?

“You and Charles Pope.”

This was the mystery that James could not fathom. “And you dislike him so much that you were prepared to travel the length of England just to try to ruin his good name?”

“Did he have a good name to ruin?” Oliver snorted, and returned to his paper.

“Did you give those men money? In Manchester? To write the letters?” James demanded.

“I had no need to. They wanted him destroyed as much as I.”

“But why?” James shook his head in disbelief and stared at his son. It was so hard to understand. Here was Oliver, a passenger in life, reading in this pleasant library which was fitted up like the best gentlemen’s libraries that James had seen, gilded spines gleaming in the light from the oil lamps. A portrait of King George III hung over the chimneypiece, and an inlaid desk sat between the bookshelves on the long wall. What could be nicer? An oasis of civilization in the city. How different from the ragged, crumbling, threadbare setting of his own youth. And what had Oliver done to earn it? Nothing. But was he ever satisfied, ever happy, ever even content? “So you deliberately went all the way to Manchester just to find something, anything, that would damage Mr. Pope in my eyes?”

“Yes.” Oliver did not see much point in obfuscating now.

James was bewildered. “Why would you want to ruin a man who has never done anything to you?”

“Never done anything to me?” Oliver repeated the words in a tone of wonder. “He has stolen my father and is in the process of stealing my fortune. Is that nothing?”

James snorted with indignation. “It’s nonsense.”

But this time Oliver had decided to say it all. His father wanted to know what was behind his hatred of Pope. Very well. He would tell him. “You lavish him with your attention, this newcomer, this outsider, this upstart! You give him your money and your praise without stinting!”

“I believe in him.”

“That may be.” Oliver was almost sobbing. He felt himself starting to shake. “But, by God, you don’t believe in me, and you never have! You’ve never supported me, never cared for me, never listened to anything I’ve said—”

James could feel a fist of anger forming in his chest. “May I remind you that I have gone out on a limb, endangering my friendship with the Cubitts, men I respect more than anyone living, in order to make a career for you? And what is my reward? To see you miss every meeting, cut every appointment, to go riding, to go shooting, to go walking in the park! Am I not allowed to be disappointed? Am I not allowed to feel that my son is not worthy of the trouble I have taken?”

Oliver stared at his father, this undignified, insignificant man, with his red face and his tight coats, who knew so little of the finer things in life. It was odd. In one way he despised the man. In another he craved his respect. Oliver could not really understand the situation or himself, but he knew he could not keep silent anymore about what troubled him most. “I am sorry, Father, but I cannot change places with Sophia, which we both know is what you would have wished. I cannot place myself in the grave and set her free. It is out of my hands.”