His One Woman (14 page)

J
ack wrote his first love letter to Marietta as soon as he arrived in New York, even before he had used the letter of introduction to John Ericsson, which he had been given by the Secretary of the Navy. It asked that Mr Jack Dilhorne should be allowed access to the building of the iron-clad, now known as the
Monitor
, so that he might report back to Washington as an unofficial, but skilled, observer, giving his assessment of the efficiency of the craft.

He had spent several days in Baltimore on the way, since he needed to speak to some of the engineers at Butler and Rutherfurd's, which had a shipbuilding factory on the quay there.

Jack paused before he went on to write of his longing to see her again soon, and of his hopes that the Senator would agree to as early a wedding ceremony as could be arranged. His one regret had been that the Senator had been absent on business when he had been called to New York so that he had been unable to ask for Marietta's hand in person.

‘My letter will serve to reassure you of my love,' he ended, and the one which he wrote to the Senator was done so from a full heart, with his love for Marietta plain in every word of it.

Before he retired for his first night in the United States' financial capital he took the letter, and its en closure, down to the desk, and saw that the clerk put it with the other mail due for collection.

As it happened, the mail was not picked up the next day, and it was to be a week before his love letter arrived in Washington.

By chance, as she at first thought, Marietta had fallen ill with a sickness of the stomach shortly after her afternoon with Jack. She awoke one morning feeling dizzy and disorientated, and, on trying to rise, was overcome with faintness and a dreadful desire to vomit. She rang for Aunt Percival, who took one look at her drawn yellow face and sharply ordered her to stay in bed for the day.

On her way downstairs Aunt Percival met Sophie on the first landing. She was looking sullen and annoyed. Her parents had left her in Washington again with Marietta, whom she now hated beyond reason. Not only did she loathe her for making off with Jack, but Marietta's stern treatment of her during the retreat from Manassas had given Sophie an almost manic determination to hurt Marietta in any way she could—and as soon as she could.

‘You have no occupation, I see,' said Aunt Percival reprovingly to her. ‘Marietta is unwell this morning. You may make yourself useful by sorting and opening the Senator's mail for her.'

‘Must I?' pouted Sophie. ‘I know she does it for him, but why should I? He's my uncle, not my father.'

‘He's your host and your senior and you owe him a duty on both counts,' said Aunt Percival so severely that Sophie shrugged her shoulders and unwillingly made her way to the Senator's study where a fire was always kept burning, even in summer, so
that unwanted papers and correspondence might be immediately destroyed.

A neat pile of letters and parcels had been stacked on the Senator's desk. Sorting through it, Sophie came upon a thick envelope with a New York postmark which was addressed to Marietta. Sophie knew at once that it came from Jack Dilhorne. She had seen his un-American writing often enough on her dance programmes, and as she held the letter in her hand a wave of hatred for Marietta passed over her.

It was, without doubt, a love letter from Jack, who had had the audacity and the bad taste to prefer Plain Jane to beautiful Sophie. Well, here was one letter which Marietta would never receive. Almost without thinking, Sophie walked over to the fire and pitched the letter into its heart before holding it down with the poker to help Jack's loving message burn more quickly and more efficiently.

Only when the deed was irretrievably done did a worm of fear gnaw briefly at Sophie's heart. Jack would surely write again, or Marietta would write to Jack and its loss would be discovered.

Goodness, she told herself, it's wartime and letters are likely to go astray so the US mail will take the blame. She had barely had time to comfort herself with this thought than an even better one occurred to her. Might she not take over the ingoing and outgoing mail from Marietta? She would be killing two birds with one stone. She would gain praise from Plain Jane and Aunt Percival for taking a more se
rious view of her life and duty, and at the same time she could destroy all Jack and Marietta's correspondence without anyone being aware of what she was doing.

The whole idea gave her a sense of power quite apart from the destruction of the correspondence itself. It might be very revealing to discover what the Senator's mail consisted of.

She began to sing quietly while she opened the letters and arranged them in neat piles, and when Aunt Percival arrived to find her so busily engaged, she said approvingly, ‘There, child, even a small occupation brings its own rewards.'

Sophie smiled up at her sweetly, before saying, ‘Oh, yes, dear Aunt, it does, it certainly does,' hugging to herself the knowledge that she was striking a major blow at her detested cousin while gaining the reputation for being a reformed character.

Despite her physical distress, for her wretched weakness did not leave her, but grew daily worse, Marietta looked eagerly through her mail each morning. She knew that Jack intended to visit Baltimore on his way North, so she did not expect a letter for at least a week.

So at first she did not worry when none arrived, but when the week became a fortnight, and then three weeks, she began to fret a little. After a month she became quietly frantic.

Something which should have happened, had not
happened; this was rare. Her courses were usually as regular as clockwork. She pushed the slight fear occasioned by their first non-appearance to the back of her mind, but when the second month passed without them, she faced the unpalatable truth. Even then her real misery lay in Jack's continuing silence.

She remembered the delights of their last afternoon together, and the tenderness on his face when he had spoken to her of marriage, and had told her that he would write to both her and her father when he reached New York.

But the Senator had now returned from Boston and had not received a letter from him, either.

It could not, it must not, be that he had merely taken his pleasure with her and, having done so, had deserted her: that he had changed his mind once he had left Washington. Could it be that, despite all the loving compliments which he had paid her, he did not want a plain woman for his wife?

She had a slight remission from her sickness, but she still felt, and looked, extremely ill. Aunt Percival, watching her, said one morning, ‘Marietta, I think that we ought to ask the doctor to take a look at you. You have been ill quite long enough.'

‘No,' she said quickly, too quickly. ‘It is nothing. Merely the sickness which occasionally afflicts Washington. I am over the worst.'

Her aunt said, ‘Let us trust that you are, but if this persists much longer I shall insist that you do as I ask.'

The last thing Marietta wanted was a doctor examining her. She still hoped that Jack would write, and that they might be married quickly so that the child which she was now sure that she was carrying could be given a name. She made up her mind that she would sink her pride and write to Butler and Rutherfurd's in Baltimore, asking them to forward a letter to Jack in New York, seeing that she had no knowledge of where he might now be living.

Sophie saw the letter, Marietta's first to him, in the outgoing mail. She had been conscientiously destroying Jack's letters to her which had been arriving at the rate of two a week. She was by now quite hardened and thought no more of burning Jack's letters than of destroying the Senator's unwanted papers for him—it was simply one of Marietta's duties which she had taken over during her cousin's illness, part of her day's work.

After another week of silence Marietta wrote again. She was astonished at her own fortitude, her strength of mind. No one watching her could have guessed either her secret, or the dreadful misery which Jack's seeming desertion, now quite plain, was causing her.

She was so composed, indeed, that Sophie was almost angry. She would have liked to see Marietta show distress or some emotion. But as Marietta recovered a little from her illness and began to escort Sophie around Washington again, she almost seemed
to vindicate Sophie's actions. If she cared so little for Jack, then burning their letters was no sin.

Inside, however, Marietta was shrieking, and she did not know which pain was the worst, that of desertion, or the awful knowledge that she was undoubtedly pregnant. When she arrived at her third month and there was still no letter from him she became increasingly desperate.

At first Jack was not worried that no letter had arrived from Marietta. He was well aware that the post, owing to the War, had become erratic. But as time passed and still there was no word from her, loving or otherwise, he began to worry.

His days were so busy that he had little time to concentrate in anything other than the building of the
Monitor
, particularly once the keel had been laid down, but at night it was a different thing.

He seemed doomed to relive, again and again, the flight from the battlefield of Manassas and their last passionate afternoon. As the weeks passed, which then turned into months and still no letter came for him, he began to ask himself bitterly whether that afternoon had meant so little to her, however much it had meant to him. He could scarcely believe that the woman he had come to know and to love could betray him so easily.

Perhaps their lovemaking had disgusted her after all. Perhaps she was ashamed of it, but he had asked her to marry him, and had written to the Senator
asking for her hand. The only conclusion he could draw was that she had changed her mind and had destroyed the Senator's letter so as not to trouble him.

One evening he met a pretty woman journalist—one of a new breed—at a reception given by Ericsson. She reminded him a little of his lost love. She made what he could only describe as a determined set at him. Three months had passed since he had written his first letter to Marietta and still he had received nothing from her. He was beginning to accept that he had lost her.

On the way home he decided that if no letter came in the morning he would write to her for one last time, and then, if she still didn't write to him, he would put her behind him. He had to face the fact that their afternoon of love had been but an interlude for her, unbelievable though that might once have seemed to him. She could have no notion of the grief he felt, of the passions which tore at him whenever he thought of her.

Yes, he would cut loose from the happy past and try to rescue himself from the slough of despond into which he had fallen, he would forget her, and every thing between them.

On the next afternoon he wrote his last letter to her, and posted it with a heavy heart before setting out to begin his new life without her.

And then he added one last despairing plea— ‘Oh, write, please write, if only to release me from the pain of not knowing. Jack.'

She was the one woman and he had lost her: it had, perhaps, simply been an illusion that she might
have been his to call wife. Their brief interlude had merely been that for her, but it would be with him for ever, even if he met another woman. For he could never love anyone else as much as he had loved Marietta.

He, who had always been ebullient, always cheerful, was thought to be a silent, sombre man by his new colleagues, a man who attacked his work frantically and seemed to live for little else.

‘Have you any notion why Marietta should not have heard from young Dilhorne once he arrived in New York? I was sorry to be away from home before he was called to New York. Is it possible that they quarrelled before he left?'

Senator Hope might be old and ailing, but he was still astute: the keen mind which had helped him to accumulate his millions and then build a major political career was still as sharp as ever, able to note the changes in those around him.

He loved his daughter dearly, had always lamented that she had never married, and the arrival of John Dilhorne had seemed to him to be a belated blessing. He liked the clever young man, had made discreet enquiries about him and was satisfied that he was in every way a suitable husband for Marietta.