Debt of Honor (23 page)

“Enough!” he roared. “How dare you sport with me and my feelings in such a callous manner?”

“How dare you accuse me, basing your argument on some flimsy nonsense a child would see through? Do
not
touch me!” She raised her voice when he moved in her direction. Instinctively, she began to move toward the door until he blocked her exit.

“I have no intention of touching you ever again, ma’am.” His face, contorted with fury, loomed right above hers, but to her great relief, his hands stayed by his sides. “Flimsy nonsense, you say? Oh, I do not think so. Sarah had always wanted children, and I disappointed her. Perhaps she would be now a happy mother and I would never know the difference, had I not discovered them. Perhaps she would have left me for Burdett. But she could not lie about something like that when she was on the verge of taking her own life, whether I was able to prove it or not.”

“And, therefore, I must lie since I am not planning to kill myself. What happened to your brain? I will not ask what happened to your heart. I am beginning to believe that you do not have one where I am concerned.”

“And I am beginning to believe that what was spread about you in town might not have been entirely without foundation. Like you, I never put much store in gossip. I might have been wrong in your case. Had I been more careful, I might have spared myself the anguish of dealing with your duplicity!”

“My duplicity! How dare you! I have done nothing to earn the contempt you, in your madness, so liberally bestow upon me!”

Percy laughed. It was an ugly, angry sound.

“No, nothing indeed, besides begetting a child outside the marriage bed!” He leaned closer and his words froze the air between them once more. “You should have heeded my warning. I have no intention of tolerating your betrayal. Enough has been said already. Now, get out! This is no longer your home. Sadly, there still will be the spectacle of a divorce, no matter how much I might wish to keep it quiet, but I shall accept that humiliation more readily than your presence in my life.”

With each word that sliced like a razor, Letitia’s fear subsided, while her fury grew to match his. Until it exploded.

“I hate you!” she spat. “I hate you with all my heart! What is this? Some sort of a game for you? A trap to test my loyalty? You have a foul mind, Sir Percival Hanbury, if you think you proved anything beyond the rabid condition of your thoughts. You want me to leave? Do you think I would stay a minute longer with someone whose chief feelings toward me are distrust, suspicion and hatred? Never!”

And with that, she marched to the door, yanked it open and then slammed it behind her so forcefully even the massive doorframe shook from the impact. Through the haze of gathering tears, she noticed one of the footmen who had failed to become invisible at the right moment and now straightened up at attention, pretending he had not noticed a thing.

“Traveling carriage!” she almost shouted. “Run to the stables and have it ready
immediately!
”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It seemed his feet had sprouted roots in the carpet in the middle of the library, or at least that was how Percy felt once the library door slammed with such finality on his life. His muscles still trembled from the aftershocks of Lettie’s none too quiet exit, as well as, or especially from, the blow she had dealt him.

Percy slowly eased the fists he had clenched in order to make sure he kept them to himself. He would have never hurt her, but extending such consideration to the objects on his desk had not been easy.

Only last night, she had said she loved him. And he’d walked into that trap like a hungry animal, wanting to believe her. Luckily, it had been a short-lived delusion on his part. By God, he should have known better than to trust a woman again. Apparently, he had not learned his lesson the first time.

More the fool he.

Percy took a few labored breaths until his lungs returned at last to their normal functioning. Unfortunately, his heart refused to follow suit and probably would not for a very long time. Or maybe he needn’t worry about his heart; Lettie had accused him of not possessing that particular organ. He wished it were true; otherwise, the next forty or so years of his life seemed perilously close to banishment in hell.

For a man without a heart, he could feel an astonishing amount of pain, though. Lettie’s announcement found its way to his most vulnerable spot, wherever that was.

It surprised him somewhat that he did not really care about the identity of her child’s father, even though he had asked her that question. It would eventually be revealed anyway, once the criminal conversation case was underway. But the name, or the man himself, was only a formality. What counted, no, what
hurt
the most, was that, like Sarah, she’d consorted with another man. Although, unlike Sarah, she could not have known about his shortcoming, his
incompleteness
, until he told her. Of course, Sarah had not known with any certainty until the very end either.

Not only he had not seen it coming—again—but he was still in shock at this newest betrayal. He had been deluding himself that Lettie loved him, for God’s sake. And those three little words—
I missed you
—had opened the floodgates he kept firmly locked and swept him along with the torrent of his rushing emotions. Emotions that churned onward with such force he could hardly breathe for a few moments.

She missed and loved him. The heart he did not possess had exploded then into pieces, and he had sunk into the warmth of her words, had let his hope that there might be happiness after all open and blossom. Those few precious words she had whispered with such conviction nourished this hope like the spring sun. And Lettie—his beautiful, intelligent and, yes, he had believed until yesterday, loving wife—had been her wonderful self, unrestrained and unselfish.

She had never made him feel inadequate in any way. To the contrary, she’d restored his self-esteem as a man. She was a marvelous lover. And she was his
friend
.

How could she go to someone else? Somehow, it never even occurred to him that Lettie might be so conniving. By God, she had covered her tracks well. He could not think of anyone who might be her lover. Of course, it just proved his lack of foresight. He would have never suspected Burdett if he had not walked in on him and Sarah by accident.

Percy stared, unseeing, while anguish weighed him down even more. In three short months, Lettie had singed him with a permanent mark. He could never wander around Wycombe Oaks without seeing her inside its crumbling walls, animated with the idea of restoring his castle. He would never look at the old oak without thinking about their first kiss. And the orangery. Damn it, he could not go about his life demolishing every part of the house that contained memories, good or bad. He might just as well become a hermit in some remote corner of the woods.

Even the very room where he was now, his library, was no longer just his. He would always see her here, sitting on the sofa at the opposite end, near the back window, facing his desk, her feet tucked under, the inseparable notebook in her lap. Every time from now on, whenever he sat at his desk, he would see that indentation in the cushion that marked her little lair within his own. It was going to remind him that happiness and love were nothing but empty words, phantoms not worth chasing if one wanted to live in peace. It would make him see himself for what he really was—an incomplete man who could not make any woman happy. Wasn’t the guilt of being the cause, even unknowingly, of the death of an unborn, innocent child enough torture already?

How was he going to live with
himself
after what just happened?

Losing Lettie would be far more difficult than losing Sarah. In truth, he had lost Sarah years before she died. And Sarah had never been his friend.

When he walked in on her and Burdett, he had been assailed by surprise, discomfort, anger, humiliation and, yes, some pain too, but not by that overpowering agony that held him now by the throat while he was still trying to absorb what just transpired. He had no longer loved Sarah after years of cold indifference, the only feeling she had never tired of showing him. He had been furious about her betrayal, but the fury had not reached so deep inside him as Lettie’s words this morning.

The budding hope that happiness was within his reach was dead. He must be even more deficient than he thought.

By the summer of Ethel’s house party, he and Sarah had lived almost like two strangers under the same roof. For a long time after her death, he could not get rid of the feeling that it had been his fault. He had never recognized how much Sarah needed him. He had allowed her to retreat inside her impenetrable cocoon. If he had tried harder, perhaps she would have been happier. Perhaps she would have not resorted to an affair with Burdett, hoping to find with their guest what she could not find with her husband.

He did not murder her with his own hands, but the responsibility for her death weighed him down like a millstone suspended from his neck.
He
was the cause of her death. She had written so in that note. Somehow, he had helped her transform from a vivacious, lovely girl—a girl who fell in love with him, just as he did with her, the moment they saw each other—into a disillusioned, unhappy woman who preferred to take her own life rather than continue on with him. And he certainly felt a millstone’s weight in his heartless chest whenever he thought of the child she had chosen to kill along with herself.

No, Lettie was entirely wrong about it. Sarah could not lie about being pregnant.

In his mind, Percy had eventually excused his inability to make Sarah happy. He had shifted the blame to her. She had barricaded herself behind coldness and indifference that greeted him every time they spoke with each other. But how could she not if he had failed to give her what she wanted most–children? He understood—too late—that she had resorted to an affair for that one thing only. No wonder she fell in love with Burdett in the end.

Ironically, at the time, Percy had been very glad Burdett agreed to stay at Bromsholme. At least Burdett would drive Sarah to Pythe Park every day, making sure she joined other guests. Naïvely, he had even congratulated himself for coming up with such a stratagem. Sarah had seemed relaxed and had smiled for the first time in years.

Had Lettie pretended her passion? Could she?

Sarah at least never did. She bore their physical contact like a dutiful wife who found the demands of the marital bed distasteful, but necessary. She had never reciprocated anything he did to her, and he had soon learned that the less he did, the happier he left her afterwards.

In the blackest moments, he had even considered visiting a brothel during one of his solitary visits to London, but he had shed that idea as soon as it crossed his mind. What would he prove to himself? That he was capable, after all, of satisfying a woman? A whore would pretend anything for the money. Besides, he could not bring himself to bed some stranger. He had vowed to love one woman.

Percy clenched his fists and grimaced. Damn it, he was steeped in self-pity again. He had been there before and for long enough to know that it was a blind alley leading nowhere. It would not offer him the cure for his failed marriage, and especially not for the underlying cause. He looked around the silent library. Except for the chair laying on its back in front of the fireplace, nothing had changed.

And everything had changed.

He had to go out. The house felt suffocating in its solid quietude, so supportive of and yet so indifferent to the passions of those who inhabited it.

The hallway was mercifully empty. He walked briskly to the stables and saddled his horse himself. He would find his new Bromsholme steward, Farley, and immerse himself in his duties. He would not think about the turn his life had taken. Until later.

A life of lonely, sleepless, torturous nights loomed ahead of him.

But the ghosts, once released from the cupboard, resisted being locked away so soon again.

The sight of Sarah’s naked figure straddling Burdett’s body in a wild race to fulfillment—her head thrown back and hands splayed on his thighs, his hands cupping her buttocks—forced itself into Percy’s mind again.

He had stood in the doorway, unable to move or say anything, for an eternity-long fraction of a second before the two of them noticed his presence. And then, without moving off her lover, Sarah had reached for the water carafe on her nightstand and thrown it at him. The sound of the glass breaking against the wall, as he had somehow avoided the direct hit, mixed with her shouting, shrill with fury.

“Get out! I hate you! I always have!”

All this time, she had made no attempt to move, but Burdett had lifted her off him, rolled from the bed and scoured the floor for his discarded clothing.

“Sorry, old chap,” he had murmured, fumbling with the buttons of his breeches.

Meanwhile, Sarah, now clutching a sheet to her bosom, had grabbed a candlestick and heaved it at him. It had crashed the picture behind him, missing his head narrowly as he had ducked at the last moment and finally had woken up from the stupor of surprise.

“Tomorrow at dawn,” he had said to the half-dressed Burdett. “Your second?”

“My valet,” Burdett had mumbled, his chin raised as he worked on his collar. “Yours?”

“Tom Wilkinson,” he had replied. “Your choice?”

“Pistols.”

“Very well. Now leave. You no longer have the hospitality of this house.” Percy had walked to the door leading to the corridor and opened it to the accompaniment of Sarah’s gasps of indignation.

“I am well aware of it, Hanbury,” Burdett rejoined, hastily stuffing something into his coat pocket as he took the hint and headed for the door. “I shall say my good-byes at Pythe Park and spend the night at the inn. Good-bye, darling,” he added, turning to cast Sarah a glance. “Do not worry about anything.”

He ran down the stairs while Sarah, still naked and covered only with that clutched bedsheet, rushed toward the door and began to pound Percy’s chest with her free fist.

“Get out, you…you,
half
man!” she screeched, following him as he tried to exit the room, then slammed the door behind him.

For a moment, Percy hadn’t known what to do with himself. The enormity of what had just transpired had only begun to feel real. But standing outside Sarah’s room would not help. He had moved toward the stairs. As he had turned on the landing, Burdett’s kneeling figure intruded on his sight. What was he doing on the floor by the commode?

Burdett had jerked his head and glanced at him over his shoulder, alarmed, his hand stuck in the coat pocket.

“You have trouble finding the door?” Percy had growled.

“Something fell out of my pocket,” Burdett had growled back, scrambling to his feet and almost running for the door.

And then he was gone.

Sarah had locked herself in her room for the rest of the day, ignoring Percy’s very existence. There was no point in forcing her to confront him. She would have to do that sooner or later. Assuming, of course, that he survived Burdett’s bullet on the morrow. And if he did not, well, then it did not matter.

He couldn’t know he would never see her alive again.

When he had finally broken down the door to her room the next afternoon, the rigor mortis had already set in.

She had seemed grotesque through the tears welling in his eyes. He had cursed his clumsy fingers for their ineptitude in untying the scarf she used. Once he managed, with the help of her hysterical maid, to lay her on the bed, he had propped the pillows under her head to justify the angle of her chin. Then had replaced the chair she used, to at least quell the suspicions about the nature of her death.

The image of Sarah, lying calm and cold on the same bed where only a day earlier she had been consumed by passion and life, would stay with him forever. Her eyes were closed, her long, black hair spread on the bedcovers. Even though her face was slightly purple, all Percy could see was the laughing girl he married. Now a flower nipped in full bloom. The ribbon on her neck had been creased where the scarf pressed it below her jaw. He pulled on it to smooth the crease and found a locket stuffed inside her bodice. It held Burdett’s miniature.

A folded piece of paper with his name on it, propped against the book on the nightstand, caught his attention. He opened it with shaky fingers. It was filled with Sarah’s small, round handwriting.

Yesterday I promised myself never to suffer your presence again for as long as I lived. I prayed all night that Tony would return for me. Your return this morning means I cannot live any longer. I could never forgive your killing the only man I have ever loved. You may think you avenged your honor, but you are no less than a murderer to me! You murdered my dearest Tony, and I will not let you rejoice in front of me. I am going to be true to my word and never again face you. And know this: you have taken more than my life alone, for with me dies Tony’s child I carry. God had mercy on us all by taking from you the ability to have children. He will see to it that you are punished for your murders.
Adieu!
I’d rather suffer for eternity than suffer another moment with you.