Winter Is Past (20 page)

She merely looked down at her hands.

“It's funny,” she said at last in a low tone, “your words remind me painfully of my own conduct during my only two London Seasons.”

He raised his head towards her to hear her better. “Indeed? How is that?”

She was looking not at him but straight ahead at the wall, and did not answer immediately.

“I told you that my guardian did not reveal to me that he was in fact my real father until the eve of my coming up to London. In the space of an evening my entire world changed. I discovered I was the illegitimate offspring of a nobleman and a woman little more than a prostitute.” She kept her eyes firmly fixed ahead of her as she pronounced the last word. “Everyone knows—at least in the circles that I grew up in—that women on the stage lead scandalous and immoral lives.”

Simon realized as she continued to speak in a low monotone that her London Seasons might not be a matter of vague recollection but of painful memory.

She gave a strangled laugh. “You said once that I had run away to hide myself in the East End because of a sense of shame about my background.” She looked across Rebecca's sleeping form and addressed him directly. “You were only partly right. I didn't hide in a mission—that came about much later. But I did feel vastly unworthy here among the quality, from the time my father first revealed the truth to me.”

Simon waited patiently when she fell silent again. He could see it took great effort for her to speak. As the silence drew out, he wished he could beg her pardon, tell her he didn't need to know the painful facts—he knew how difficult it would be to have to stir up his own humiliating past—but he didn't say anything. He realized he needed to hear her story.

At last she gave a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of her. “So, although my coming out had all the trappings of respectability, I knew in fact that I was nothing but an impostor. I didn't deserve to enter the best houses of London. I had been brought up with the knowledge of my guardian's family name and fortune and had been taught to venerate his ancient lineage. And now, here I was, a blot on that crest.

“Do you know what my greatest fear was?”

She smiled sadly at him, and he felt as if she knew everything he had experienced that evening at White's. He shook his head.

“My greatest fear was that I should be discovered.” She gave a half smile. “For someone who was shy and retiring to begin with, I became positively reclusive. At every great house, every ball, every rout, I hung back, looking for the darkest recess, trying to pass as unnoticed as possible. Just as you, I felt I had to watch every word and gesture. But mine was the fear I would reveal my sordid past by a mere look or movement. I was terrified they'd somehow see my mother's connection to me.”

“What finally happened?”

She gestured with her hand and gave a choked laugh. “I was discovered, of course.”

Simon waited, breathless.

She put a hand to her mouth as if it was still painful to admit. After a moment she resumed her tale. “There was a man during my second Season. I shan't call him a gentleman, because he wasn't, although he passed for one with his family name and fortune. He was old enough to have known my father when he was in France. He put two and two together. He behaved exactly as I was afraid people would when they knew. He thought I would be just like my mother.”

Simon leaned forward, his body tensing.

After a moment, she continued. “The funny thing was, no one ever knew.”

“Are you saying what I think you're saying?” he asked in a careful tone.

She nodded her head, looking back at the wall as if reliving the scene. “I was raped.”

The stark words affected Simon more than tears or hysteria would have done.

He felt as if he had been punched in the gut. He covered his face with his hands, wanting to have the words unsaid.

“Have I shocked you, Mr. Aguilar?” The words were spoken softly across the bed.

He removed his hands and looked at her serene face. Knowing what effort it took to overcome the events in one's past, he could only stare at her. “What did your father do?” he asked after a moment.

“He never knew.”

“He never—? God, woman, what do you mean? Didn't you ever tell him?” At the shaking of her head, rage filled him. “You know what Lord Caulfield would have done? Your brother? They would have called him out! The swine wouldn't have survived a day. He deserved nothing less. Why in heaven's name didn't you tell your father the truth?” he ended in frustration.

“I was too ashamed. The man made me feel so dirty. At first he had only tormented me with the secret of my birth. He seemed to derive some sort of…of pleasure from seeing my fear of discovery. Then he began pawing and groping me during dances—” She didn't continue. “I was able to escape him…and I tried never to find myself alone with him, but he was obstinate and clever. He managed to lure me into an empty library or some quiet nook and begin taking liberties with me, telling me he would keep my secret in exchange for my favors. It got so I was terrified to go out, dreading to see him, yet he seemed to haunt every place I went.

“Finally, that old, lecherous man wasn't satisfied with a stolen kiss here or there. He—Well, he did the unthinkable.”

She gave a hollow laugh. “You remember I told you I had only one offer of marriage during my Season? Well, it was from a younger son, of a good family. His offer was a respectable one. My father urged me to accept it. My father was ready to draw up the betrothal papers—but how could I even consider it? I was not only a prostitute's daughter but soiled goods in my own right. I begged and pleaded with my father to take me from London. I told him I didn't wish to marry. I told him I'd do anything as long as he'd take me from London.”

Simon could feel the blood pounding in his temples. He didn't want to know any more. He'd never dreamed he'd be hearing what he had heard from her lips. He had always imagined her a pure, untouched young woman who'd chosen not to marry because of her religious convictions.

But she, like him, had her past. How she had needed a defender in those treacherous waters of society. And she had had no one.

“Where was Tertius?” he asked curtly.

“He had gone to the West Indies by then. As a second son, there were not many opportunities open to him here. Father sent him there, hoping it would be the making of him.”

“Yes, I remember now. And your older brother?”

“I couldn't tell him, any more than I could tell my father. I was too ashamed. I had never been close to my brothers. They were so much older than I, and when they were home, were aloof. I realized afterwards they must have suspected something about my birth, and it would have been natural to resent me for their mother's sake. I could not blame them.”

Simon longed to cross the space that separated them and gather her in his arms. He wanted to erase all that, even the memory of it. But she spoke before he could put thought into action.

“That's when I left London for good. I retired to my family's country estate in Hertfordshire after that second Season, vowing to my father that I'd take care of him for always if only he didn't make me go back, or ever marry. Poor man, I think he believed I was suffering a broken heart over some suitor.” She smiled. “He thinks that's why I've never married, that I'm still pining over some long lost love.”

Simon wanted to tell her that not all men were dishonorable, but he stayed seated, his hands gripping the arms of his chair. If he loosed his hold, he was afraid of what might happen. That way lay only danger. He told himself that the best way to show her that not every man was like that blackguard was to prove it to her. As long as she was under his roof, she was under his protec
tion, and he would do all in his power to see to it that no man ever hurt her in that way again.

Without thinking, he said gently, “Not all men are so despicable. It doesn't have to be awful…in marriage…” he ended awkwardly. What was he trying to tell her?

She didn't meet his eyes. Instead, she brushed off some imaginary particle from her skirt and said nothing. After a few minutes, she looked up with a smile, as if to put the past behind her. “The Lord didn't let me continue to live in fear for long. It was not long after I returned to Hertfordshire that I had an encounter with my Lord and Savior, and my life took a completely different turn. When I came to accept Jesus as my Savior, He set me free of fear.

“Your words tonight reminded me how I used to live in fear of what people would think of me,” she finished.

He should have known the conversation would invariably lead to religion. Hadn't he known that when he'd come up here? What kind of a glutton for punishment was he? And where had her God been when she'd needed Him?

A
fter Althea's revelations to him, Simon began to avoid her again, afraid more than ever of his growing attraction to her. Now compassion was added to admiration and need. Instead, he turned toward Lady Eugenia, haunting her salon almost every evening. When she invited him to call her Eugenie, he knew he had crossed an invisible line and entered into her most intimate circle.

Nothing inappropriate had yet been spoken by either, but every look and word was fraught with meaning.

Simon did not know what held him back from accepting the invitation in her eyes. He continued weighing every angle. He knew that he wouldn't be the first with her, nor did he delude himself that the lady's sentiments would be engaged. It would be a liaison of pure sensuality and mutual gratification.

But he also took his father's advice seriously and knew the most sensible thing to do was to fall in gracefully with the elder Aguilar's plans and wed some nice, respectable debutante.

Why, then, did he have this urge to cast all caution to the winds and let himself be led down this treacherous path of intrigue and
vice? As the weeks went by, Simon often felt caught in a frenzy not entirely of his own making. Half his day and evening was spent in parliamentary debate, where he performed a balancing act between the rights of the workers and the interests of the owners and financiers, trying to satisfy both the demands of his conscience and the demands of his backers.

His evenings were a series of social engagements where he'd navigate a game more hazardous than any found at White's. Finally, when he'd had his fill, he'd go home to sit by his daughter's bedside. Every night he seemed to wage an internal battle—whether or not to seek Miss Breton out in her sitting room. More often than not, he'd lose, drawn to her for reasons he couldn't understand. He sometimes thought of her as his conscience, put there to torment him, and yet he couldn't escape his need to hear what she had to say. Perhaps it was because he sensed she would always tell him what she thought, without fear of his approval or disapproval.

They often talked politics or theology, and she was forever quoting to him from that Bible that should be in tatters by now from the amount of time she spent poring over it. Many were the times he'd deliberately put a hypothetical situation before her, which mirrored what he was in fact facing, and ask her mockingly what her God would say about it. Many were the evenings he would lose patience with her replies, realizing afterward that he was more angry at himself for caring what she thought. He realized, too, that she never gave him the answers he wanted to hear. Everyone else would understand and advise him in a logical, sensible way. Even his father would offer good common sense. Althea would quote some verse that made no sense in his world. Other times she would just promise to pray for him without giving him her opinion, and yet he had a sneaking suspicion he knew what she was thinking.

There was also something restful about her presence, no matter how much she might anger him at times. The more he paced and gestured with his hands, the more quietly she sat with that Bible on her lap.

One time she tried to explain the similarity between his fam
ily's religious rituals and those of the Church of England. According to her, both had become empty of real significance and become merely efforts to justify their adherents before God through their good works. She tried earnestly to make him see that no good work would ever be good enough to wipe away man's inherently sinful nature.

Her eyes lit up. “You gave us Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, all the great prophets. You gave the world Jesus!”

Simon stared at her, caught for a moment, not by her argument but by her genuine love for his people. He studied her. “You are the first Christian I've ever met who has had anything admiring to say about my race. Normally you come across as a little mouse, quiet and demure, always in your gray, but when you speak of your Jesus, you reveal a passion within you that nobody would suspect. Your eyes light up first, then your whole face. You become beautiful.”

She made no reply, and the two continued to regard each other until he became aware of the danger. As if sensing the same, she cast her eyes downward.

“If you see any beauty in me, it is but Jesus in me. It is His beauty coming through.”

“My wife, Hannah, was beautiful,” he said absently, receiving for an instant an image of her fresh young beauty and childish ways. It had been a long time since he had been able to picture her.

“Was she?” Althea asked softly.

“Yes,” he answered shortly, remembering for an instant how little he had had the privilege of enjoying a wife. He brought his attention back to the woman sitting before him. Suddenly he contrasted her with his young wife. Hannah had been a child-bride, still a little girl living more with her mother than with her new husband. Althea, on the other hand, was a fully mature woman, used to being on her own for many years. “You are nothing like her, you know.”

She said nothing. He knew he should stop talking before the conversation became impossibly awkward. He sighed, raking a
hand through his hair. Before giving them either a chance to say anything more, Simon wheeled about and went to stare out the window. He heard Althea leave the room, quietly shutting the door behind her.

Simon continued to spend his nights at Rebecca's bedside. He'd finally doze fitfully until dawn, when the maid Dot came up to relieve him. He then would retire to his own bed to sleep until noon. He would spend the early afternoon with Rebecca, making her laugh and doing everything to hide his fear at her growing weakness. She hadn't recovered her natural buoyancy since the fever.

Rebecca was visited regularly by the new surgeon, a serious, intense young fellow whom Simon formed an immediate antipathy toward. He told himself it was because he wasn't a doctor, not even an apothecary, but a crude surgeon, probably the son of a butcher. Simon eyed him sourly when he spoke to Althea, with whom he exhibited a friendship and respect. His conversations with Althea as she escorted him down the hall and stairs reminded Simon that Althea had had a life of her own before she'd come under his roof.

The surgeon told him frankly that the illness was following its natural progression; if anything it had delayed its inevitable end. The cases he had witnessed or read about succumbed in a matter of months, not to the illness so much as to other infections, which attacked the weakened body. He told him the only thing Simon could do to prolong Rebecca's life was keep her as isolated as possible so she wouldn't be exposed to any other illnesses. Her body was now too weak to resist any further battles.

Russell gave him a final sharp look and said only an act of God would change his daughter's fate.

Simon cursed and shut himself in his library. God must be laughing at him. Well, He wouldn't have the last laugh, he vowed.

So often of late he felt as if his life were caught in a piece of the
factory machinery he spoke so eloquently about, but he was powerless to extricate himself from its never-ending, frenetic motion. If anything, he stepped up the rhythm, almost as an act of defiance.

Whenever he rose stiffly from his chair by Rebecca's bedside at dawn, he knew by then Althea was on her knees praying. He had gone to the door of her sitting room one morning and had heard the muffled sound of her voice.

He had lifted his hand to knock, but then dropped it again, realizing that she was praying to her God.

 

Althea almost dreaded seeing Simon. It seemed as if they could never enter into a meaningful conversation without Simon's lashing out at her faith. He couldn't understand how much it hurt her—not because of herself, but because she knew how much he was hurting himself by rejecting the only One who could save him.

When it was time for Simon to come up to Rebecca's room for his afternoon visit, Althea always found an excuse to go into the connecting sitting room or downstairs to the pianoforte. One afternoon as she sat reading in the sitting room, she heard him come in and speak to his daughter. A moment later, he knocked on her door and poked his head in.

“What are you doing there all by yourself? I promised Rebecca a treat. Please come in and partake with us.”

Althea closed her book, flustered at his sudden cheerful tone.

He had brought them each a strawberry tart. He was helping Rebecca to sit up against her pillows. “I went out especially to get you this, so you had better eat it all up.”

“It looks delicious,
Abba.
Thank you ever so much.”

He spoke to his daughter about some of the parties he had attended. Althea could see the effort he made to keep her mind amused. He gently urged her every so often to take a bite. When she had at last eaten three-quarters of it, she pushed it away, saying she could absolutely eat no more.

Simon took her plate away from her to set it on the table. He stood for a moment by Althea's chair.

“They are trying the men involved in the Blanketeers march,” he told her quietly, referring to those that had been arrested in the march from Manchester earlier in the spring.

“It doesn't look good for most of them,” he said, answering the question in her eyes. “I think there will be at least half a dozen executions.”

She put her hand to her mouth in a silent exclamation.

“Can nothing be done—from Parliament?”

“No one will listen to reason. They're all afraid of revolution and think by snuffing it out, it will disappear.”

He looked at her ironically. “Can nothing be done by the religious community? I don't see the churches protesting. And those like your mission are too poor to have any voice.”

“We don't need the world's wealth.”

“Oh, come, Miss Breton, isn't that somewhat hypocritical? At least we Jews are not ashamed of our wealth. If offers us one of the few protections against the world.”

“At least I have lived among the people I aim to help,” she countered. “How can you champion the factory worker from Parliament, when you know so little about him, when your world is so removed from his?”

“I don't have to live among them to sympathize with their suffering,” he answered dryly. “Unlike you, it doesn't mean I want to share it. I have enough of my own suffering,” he added under his breath.

She bit her lip, ashamed of her accusations.

Over the next few days she puzzled over Simon's behavior. Everything she told him seemed only to exasperate him, and yet he continued seeking her out and bringing up controversy. He seemed to delight in provoking her, making it a point of telling her of his latest exploits in society, when he came in the evenings and found her reading or knitting by Rebecca's bed or in her sitting room. While he rarely mentioned
Lady Stanton-Lewis directly, she could sense her presence in every sentence.

These late-night conversations reminded Althea of Nicodemus, and she told Simon so one evening.

“Who was he?”

“I thought you knew all there was to know in the Bible.”

“Nicodemus must have slipped my recollection,” he said, stretching his legs out lazily before him as if in preparation for a good story.

“Well, Nicodemus was a very respected man in Judea, intelligent, well-versed in Scripture, a leader, wealthy….”

Simon smiled. “He sounds better and better. Go on with your tale.”

“It is no tale. Anyway, despite everything he had, Nicodemus was drawn to the rabbi Jesus.”

“Jesus styled himself as teacher of the Jews?”

“Oh, yes, that was one of his principal ministries, among prophet, preacher, miracle worker and redeemer of Israel.”

“Yes, yes.” He waved a hand impatiently. “So what did this Nicodemus see in Jesus?”

“He knew for one thing that Jesus must be a prophet. He knew only one sent by God could perform the miracles Jesus performed.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, it was a tricky thing for an upstanding man, a leader in the Jewish community to go openly to this Jesus. So he visited him by night.”

“Ah.” He looked up at the ceiling, his fingers forming a pyramid. “So you see me as secretly seeking out this Jesus? I'm afraid I shall have to disappoint you, Miss Breton. I doubt I'll prove so apt a pupil as your friend Nicodemus.”

“Perhaps you haven't so able a teacher.”

“Oh, I find you able enough. Your pupil just isn't interested in the material.”

Then, why do you keep coming back to hear?
she silently asked in vexation.

 

One evening before Simon had come in, Althea sat knitting by Rebecca's bed.

“Miss Althea, I'm afraid to die.” Rebecca's large brown eyes stared at her through the dim light.

Althea looked up, startled. “I thought you were asleep.”

“What if I'm still alive when they bury me? Do they ever make a mistake?”

Althea immediately knelt by the girl. She clasped Rebecca's hand in hers and held it up to her cheek.

“Don't be frightened. We each have to face that moment when we depart this earth. God knew we would be afraid because we weren't certain what we would be going to. So, do you know what He did?”

Rebecca shook her head against the pillow, her dark eyes never leaving Althea's face.

Althea smoothed the girl's forehead with her other hand. “God sent His most special emissary to show us the way. Do you know what an emissary is?”

Again she shook her head.

“It's a messenger. God sent us His most trusted messenger, His most beloved one, so there could be no mistakes. He sent us His very own Son, a part of His very Self, to show us the way.

“And do you know what that messenger was supposed to tell us?” Rebecca shook her head. “He was supposed to tell us about eternal life. You see these bodies of ours?” She moved her hand clasped with Rebecca's closer to the girl's face. “They'll get old and worn. Yours feels a little weak right now, doesn't it? Sometimes it hurts?” Rebecca nodded. “Well, these bodies are like suits of clothes. Someday we are going to shed them for better ones.