Lady Hathaway's House Party (8 page)

“A nice room,” he said. “I like these oak-lined studies. Very homey. I have seen one like it somewhere.”

“There are dozens of rooms similar to this. One may see them anywhere. Papa had one quite like it at home, but smaller.”

“I have one similar at Belwood too, but larger. I have seen one just the same size somewhere. I wonder where it was.”

“Does it matter?” she asked with great indifference, and began to fan herself, for the heat emanating from the grate was strong.

“No, of course not. You are warm. Let us have a glass of wine,” he offered, and arose to open the champagne.

“More champagne! My, your cousin is doing herself proud. I have had just about enough champagne. I wish it were sherry.”

“I’ll get some!”

“No, no, I don’t really feel much like wine at all. Don’t bother.” But he had already poured her a full glass, so she accepted it and set it aside on the table and ignored it. “Well, we are here to talk. Let’s get on with it,” she said in a businesslike manner. She was agitated, but as she sat waving her fan the only emotion she showed was impatience.

Oliver had envisioned a cozy chat before the fire, idly picking up the books and leafing through them between sips of champagne. Some fond reminiscences of Crockett, some regrets that those best of all possible days were gone, and the final plea that they could be recaptured.

Yes, he had decided to plead to her to come back, a thing he had not thought he would ever do, but he had found her so much harder set against him than he had anticipated that he had decided to plead. But as she sat fanning herself, ignoring the wine, not recognizing the study for a nearly dead replica of Crockett, and looking at him with something akin to hostility, he saw his plan was failing miserably. The soft words died in his throat, and when he spoke he said, “I don’t approve of your coming here with Henderson,” in quite a sharp tone.

It was the tone that had used to set her trembling inside, to see she was displeasing him, but she had no duty to please him now, and very little desire to do so. “That’s too bad,” she answered pertly.

“It looked so very odd, and you notice that Dempster commented on it.”

“Yes, and if I’d come alone Dempster would have commented that I was too sly to appear in public with my beau. I don’t care what she thinks. I explained all that. He was coming from Amesbury, and I was coming from home, less than a mile away. It would have been foolish to bring two carriages, and two teams of horses. Besides, Papa wanted our carriage at home.”

“You have your own carriage sitting in the stables in London, gathering dust while the horses eat their heads off. And it’s probably a better carriage than his, too.”

“Sell them,” she said. “I can’t imagine why you’ve kept them all this time.”

“I kept them for
you.”

“I don’t want them. I never plan to use them. Sell them.”

“You will want them when you come up to London. To visit your aunt, I mean.”

“Aunt Rankin has a carriage. I don’t need yours.”

“It’s not
mine;
it’s
yours.”

“Let me make it perfectly clear, Oliver. I don’t want anything from you but to be left alone. I don’t want those hideous gowns, nor a fur-lined cape in May, nor your jewels that are far too ostentatious for my taste, or the high-perch phaeton you so kindly gave me that scares the life out of me. You gave me what you wanted your wife to have, not what
I
wanted. A gift that is inappropriate is no gift at all, but only a waste of money. Get rid of the lot of it; I don’t want any part of your gifts.”

Avondale had spent a good many hours selecting items he thought must please any lady of fashion, and to have it all tossed in his face as unwanted did nothing to calm his temper. “Then you have very poor taste,” he shot back.

“I can hardly argue with you when I chose to marry
you,
but my taste improves every day. It has improved so much I wonder I ever thought I could live with you.”

“Oh God yes, it has reached such a pitch of perfection that you can imagine Arnold Henderson a man, but you’ll not flaunt that underbred pup in the faces of my friends as your lover.”

“How typical of you! You don’t care that I
have
a lover, but only that he is underbred! If I were carrying on with some blue-blooded duke or prince I suppose you would be pleased as punch.”

“Then you admit he is your lover!”

“I don’t admit anything of the sort. I’ve told you a dozen times he is not.”

“Don’t try to tell me he’s trailing at your skirts without any encouragement from you.”

“All right. I won’t try to tell you anything. It would be the height of futility. Think what you like.”

“I am less circumspect, madame. I tell you frankly I will not have my wife flaunt herself in public with any man, blue-blooded or otherwise. While you bear my name, you will behave with propriety.”

“It can be arranged for me to be rid of your name. Since you are here, and we are having this nice little chat, I might as well tell you I want a divorce.”

“No! There will be no divorce!” he shouted, jumping to his feet to tower over her, glaring menacingly.

“There will be no resumption of the marriage either, so don’t think it. I’m only nineteen years old, and I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life making up for one mistake. I will be happy to have a divorce, and let you get on with leading your own life. You will want a family, an heir for—”

“There has never been a divorce in the family, and I don’t intend to be the one to set the precedent.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Belle, you don’t know what it would mean. A trial, the whole country prying into our private affairs—”

“The whole country pries into them anyway, as far as I can see. They know we’re not living together. What is the harm in having the estrangement legalized, so that we can both make a new life for ourselves?”

Avondale, still on his feet, began pacing back and forth in front of the fire, one hand running through his hair in a gesture of frustration. It was strange to see him so agitated; even to see him with his hair slightly mussed was strange. His eyes fell on the books placed with care on the table, and he sat down to try to bring about a change of mood.

“A divorce is out of the question. Any life we make for ourselves must take that fact into consideration. Now it seems to me that as we are married, we ought to make some effort to get along. I apparently did something to displease you—”

“Ho—something!”

“All right—you didn’t like the gowns, the jewelry, the carriage. All that can be changed. Buy what you like.”

“I didn’t like the
husband.
That is what I want to change,” she said angrily. Why must he see marriage in terms of
things?

“That is what you will never change. Till death us do part, Belle, you’re stuck with me. While both of us draw breath, we are man and wife. Wherever you run off to, you are still my wife, and unless the puppy and you are willing to settle for cohabiting without legal sanction and raising a parcel of bastards, there will be no one else for you.” He spoke in a firm, conclusive manner that denoted nothing but stubbornness to his wife.

“Perhaps I should get me to a nunnery, and quickly too,” she replied, and took a sip of champagne, to show she was unimpressed with his tirade, though in fact its determination had set her reeling. She had thought Avondale must be eager for a divorce, but she had obviously misread him.

“It is not a matter for joking. I think you used me very badly, Belle. To sneak off in such an underhanded fashion, telling me you were going only for a holiday, then to have that Sangster write me—you could at least have
written
me yourself, explained why you did it. Surely I deserved at least that much consideration, some explanation for your
inexplicable,
as it seemed to me, behavior.”

This was the weakest link in Belle’s case, and she knew it. She thought she had ample justification for leaving her husband, but she should have told him why she did it. A dozen times she had sat at her desk, trying to put into words the reason for her deserting him, but she invariably ended up with such a jumbled, incoherent account that she could make no sense of it herself, and could not send off such garbled stuff. Her stomach tied itself into knots to remember that month in London—she felt the old familiar sensation now. To walk into a lady’s house and see your husband’s hat and cane resting on her hall table, and to be told by the butler that milady was busy, and could not be disturbed, was surely cause for estrangement in the most lenient household. One’s husband ought at least to hide his hat and cane when he went on a love tryst, and not leave them sitting in public view for his wife and the world to see. For Lady Hasborough to see, and point out to herself with a snicker. And she had
known
Oliver would be there. Had taken Belle to call on Mrs. Traveller for that very reason.

The memory of that afternoon invariably brought her blood to the boil. She had heard rumors, snide remarks regarding Mrs. Traveller, and had been induced to go to meet her out of a sense of rampant curiosity. She was a connection of Oliver’s, married to a cousin, so that the visit had a sort of a pretext, but the reason was to sum up the opposition.

Belle had seen her about here and there, sometimes with her husband, a dashing but dissipated buck, and sometimes with others, but had never met her. She wished to see how she behaved, to hear how she spoke, and to see at close range her charms, for she was not the sort of flirt she would have thought Oliver would favor. He was usually more discriminating. There was a trace of the second rate in Mrs. Traveller, or so Belle had judged from a distance. The woman was an incorrigible flirt, for one thing, and a woman who lavished her attention on just anyone was not particularly likely to appeal to Avondale. She might be called beautiful by some—a blond woman with a figure that would soon be too broad, but was at the time still hanging onto the edge of fulsomeness without passing the line into fat. She was considerably older than Belle; closer to Oliver’s own age. Not hagged, but not in the first blush of youth either.

But her impressions were all garnered from afar; she never had met Mrs. Traveller, never seen at close range how she appeared. The anger called up by all these old memories robbed Belle of any feeling of guilt at her behavior. She had acted badly perhaps, but not so badly as her husband. She was on the verge of telling him all this, but he went on to remove the possibility. His next words told her clearly enough his only concern was that he had been made to look foolish, and not that he had been hurt, as she had thought he meant.

“The whole town laughing at me,” he said. “And to have to go to Belwood without you, we not married much more than a month. It was an abominable trick to serve me.”

“Sorry if I inconvenienced you,” she said airily.

“It was more than that. It was
unjust!
An iniquitous thing to do to anyone, and an unforgivable thing to do to your husband.”

“Then I shan’t trouble to beg your forgiveness. I’m sorry if the world took it into its head to have a laugh at you, but you’ll get over it, Avondale. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I have heard a good many peels of laughter ringing about my ears, and am thriving still.”

“I can’t think why anyone should laugh at
you. I
am the one who was treated badly.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“I never treated you badly. There was
no
provocation for what you did. I treated you with respect always, with consideration. I don’t see that you had a single cause for complaint. What did I do to make you leave in that fashion?”

“It was the company you kept, Oliver. I didn’t care for your friends.”

“I never made you go out with my friends—well, except for a few dos we could not well avoid. A husband and wife are expected to appear together occasionally, you know, in public.”

“Oh yes, I know. Even more than once a week in some marriages, and in some bizarre cases they even spend some time
alone
together, but then we would not want to push eccentricity too far. There must be some limits to togetherness, after all, or husbands and wives will be taking the notion they own each other.”

“Are you telling me you wished for
more
of my company than you had? Is that it?” Oliver’s case too had its weak point, and he felt they had come to it now. With no more encouragement than a word or a tear from his wife, he would have admitted to guilt and promised to rectify his ways. He was overwhelmingly eager to do so, but her reply gave him no opportunity.

“At the time, I found the once a week more than enough.”

“Belle, this is no time to be facetious. I asked you to come to Belwood with me. We might have been quite alone there. You refused.”

“You could hardly wait to get away from Crockett Hall, where you were cut off from your friends for three days. You would have hated it alone at Belwood.”

“I enjoyed it at Crockett!” he said quickly, seeing some glimmering of hope yet for his scheme. His eye flew to the books, and his mind to the oak-lined walls so like Crockett, and he tried to think of a natural way to raise the similarities.

“You asked me ten times a day if I wouldn’t like to go back to London.”

“I thought you were bored.”

“You were the one who was bored. You were bored with
me,
and no other company but a bunch of old relics."

“Belle . . .” He reached out his hands toward her. “I
adored
it at Crockett. Come back with me to Belwood. We’ll start over."

But nothing had really changed, and his next speech told her so quite clearly. “You can get a new bunch of gowns, and any carriage you want.”

“I have plenty of gowns, and don’t want a carriage. I don’t see anything to be gained by going to Belwood,” she answered ironically, to let him know what she thought of his bribes.

“Come with me,” he insisted, brushing aside her objections. “I’ll give you anything you want.”

“You don’t have anything I want,” she answered, a little sadly, for it was not quite true. He had what she wanted—love, and time and companionship, but he just wasn’t offering them. Setting down her glass, she arose and walked slowly from the room.