Page 30 of What the Lady Wants
‘I agree with you, Mama. But I have no option but to respect her decision. It is not my place to tell her that her feelings are somehow false. I don’t believe they are, in fact, though I think you may be right that she is still in a state of shock. But many widows choose not to marry again, as you did.’
‘I had a child to consider. And although I did have an offer or two – did you know that, Leo? – nothing that temptedme sufficiently to upturn my life and yours, and follow a man halfway across England. There were plenty of men, of course, who would have been quite willing to come and live in your house, at your expense, and have the running of it. But I’d never have wed one of those. Hal’s father was my trustee, and wouldn’t have let me marry such a man even if I’d been foolish enough to want to.’
‘You don’t regret it?’ He was distracted from his misery for a moment.
She smiled at him. ‘No. Not at all.’
‘So you are counselling me to wait? Perhaps to try again in a year, two years?’ It seemed very far off, but he could do it.
‘I suppose I am. You should have told me, Leo. I wouldn’t have encouraged poor Susannah to set her cap at you.’
‘Just as long as you don’t do it again, Mama. I didn’t enjoy it. Though I know you did.’
She rose, came over to him, and took his hand. He squeezed hers in return, and they sat for a little while in silence.
After a while, she said, ‘Do you mean to go home? You might find it easier, I’d have thought, not being here where her presence is a constant reminder to you.’
He sighed. ‘I’ve thought of it. I feel it would be less painful, it is true. But then I consider that if I leave the Castle I do not know when, or if, I will ever see her again, and I find I do not have the strength to do it.’ His unspoken addition was that Isabella would in any case surely be leaving soon enough herself. It was plain that being here was now making her deeply uncomfortable.
‘You can go to see her in Yorkshire; you might make a plan to do it,’ said his mother encouragingly. ‘Perhaps next spring or summer.’
‘I can. I will. But I still don’t want to deprive myself of these last few days with her, difficult though they are.’
‘You do not feel you could suggest a correspondence between you? She is no debutante; she can receive letters from male acquaintances without any particular appearance of impropriety, I believe. Perhaps it might be considered a little odd, but nothing more. She is her own mistress, or should be.’
She might be, but she was also his and always would be – as far as he was concerned, at least. Clearly, she no longer felt the same. ‘I can try, but I doubt she’ll agree. I would expect her to say that it would lead me to have false hope. Which it would.’
His mother agreed that this was probably true, and had no further suggestions to ameliorate his distress. He did not feel his situation to be greatly improved by their conversation; he was as unhappy as he had been, and now his mother, who loved him, shared in some part of his misery. There had been no relief in talking about it, or none that was apparent to him now. But he supposed he could console himself a little with the reflection that at least his mama’s attempts to marry him off to one or other of the young ladies of Hampshire, and to Susannah Peters in particular, would now cease. That was something, but not much.
Leo would not have imagined that he could well be more unhappy than he currently was: a common belief among suffering humans, and, as he was soon to discover, a mistaken one.
34
Isabella was very anxious to leave Castle Irlam. The passage of time wasn’t making it any easier to be in Leo’s company, even if they barely spoke to each other. And she wondered how well he was concealing his distress at her continuing presence from his mother and his cousins; not well, she feared. If she could see that he was not at all in his normal state of mind, they surely must have noticed it too.
But when she was speaking to Lady Carston of her desire to go, she had experienced a sudden horrifying realisation that had almost overset her, and it took every shred of her self-possession to enable her to continue the conversation with any appearance of calmness. She had not been calm; she had been screaming internally.
When Leo had declared himself and she had formulated the design to depart as soon as possible, she’d known that not only courtesy towards her host and hostess constrained her movements. One did not – certainly she did not – plan to undertake a long and tedious journey halfway across England when one’s courses were present, or soon expected. This was to be avoided if at all possible, for reasons that scarcely neededto be further considered. She’d had the vague sense for a while that her menses were impending, though now she stopped to think about it she could not feel their approach in her body as normally she did in a dozen little ways.
But they weren’t. They were late. Several days late, in fact. While speaking to Jane, she had been frantically calculating dates in her mind, trying to make them fit. But they didn’t. They couldn’t.
She was with child.
She couldn’t be, it was impossible. Unthinkable. But she was.
She wasted only a little time in attempting to persuade herself that she was merely late, a delay caused by the worries of the last few days. It wasn’t true. Much as she might wish to believe it, she didn’t see how it could be so. She’d never been late before, not even after Ash had died, not when she’d so desperately needed to persuade herself that she was carrying his child. If that appalling stress had not unsettled her monotonously ticking clock, it was hardly likely that this lesser upset would have done so.
It had never so much as occurred to her that she could find herself with child now. She’d had every reason to believe that that was quite impossible, or she’d never have allowed Leo to make love to her as completely and as frequently as she had.
There were many symptoms, she knew, that could indicate either condition: pregnancy or the ordinary approach of one’s courses. She’d discussed all this with her mother once, long ago, when she was newly married and touchingly confident that she’d be in a delicate situation in a month or two and needed to prepare for it with some urgency, and then again later, a different and less happy sort of conversation, when it had become apparent that it wasn’t going to be so easy for her. Her breasts were sore; they always were just before her menses. She was ravenously hungry, tired, a little tearful. None of this wasunusual and could not be taken as proof of any kind. Did she feel a little unwell in the mornings, or was she merely convincing herself that she did? It was impossible to tell. But one thing was coldly certain – she didn’t feel the horribly familiar dragging pain in the backs of her thighs and up into her belly that always preceded the arrival of her blood. It, and then the blood, should have come days ago, and there was not the least sign of anything.
She was in her chamber by now, and she jumped from her bed and stumbled to the mirror, pulling off her night-rail to stand naked in front of the glass. She looked at herself – did she appear any different? Would she, so soon? It was a ridiculous idea, surely. But she was almost sure that her nipples, and the areolae around them, were darker. Less pink, more brown. Bigger, even. She didn’t normally look at herself that closely. Leo would know, she thought with a little hiccup of panicked laughter, but she could hardly ask him.
Perhaps this change was her imagination, there was no way to tell, but it didn’t matter, because the truth was, she knew. She felt it, knew it in her body.
Oh God, how she wished she could talk or even write to her mother, or someone, about her situation, pour out her feelings and ask for advice. It would have been bitterly ironic if it weren’t so serious. What a cruel, heartless twist of fate. All those months with Ash, trying. They’d not spoken of their failure – hers? His? – but it had been there between them all the same, growing with each month that passed. And so she had seen the doctors – secretly, without Ash’s knowledge, hoping they could give her some remedy he needn’t ever be aware of – and had been told that there was no hope. And now, when pregnancy wasn’t happy news but a catastrophe, now when she’d thought it impossible in any case and so hadn’t considered it at all… Now she was. There was no point wondering how it had happened – it was far too late for that, and the how of it was plain enough. The doctors hadbeen wrong, pretending with masculine certainty that they had knowledge that in truth they did not possess. If they could have just been honest and said they didn’t know, that these things were mysterious… Nature, she supposed, was cunning enough to find a way. Had it been the first night, the second time…? No point in any of that. Another distraction.
Her body, with a child in it. A child, good God, so desperately wanted once. A child she’d thought she never would have, had been resigned never to have. She had her hand on her belly, still looking at herself intently in the cheval glass, as she stood naked and cold – it was softly rounded, and it was easy enough to imagine it more rounded still. She was weeping, and as she became aware of it she chided herself for folly and clambered awkwardly back into bed, pulling her robe back on. No use catching pneumonia to add to all of her other worries.
