Page 31 of What the Lady Wants
She still wanted the child. Oh God, but she did. It wasn’t – she’d realised this some while ago – just Ash’s child that she had wanted, a son, an heir for Northriding. She’d wanted a child of her own to love, entirely regardless of everyone else’s expectations. Those expectations had been a weight on her once, but she could have disregarded them much more easily if they hadn’t chimed so closely with what she so deeply wanted for herself. A child, a baby of her own. Lady Carston had felt the same overpowering impulse, she knew, and she could fully understand it. Had been jealous, though she had suppressed the feeling as she suppressed so many unwelcome feelings, as they had talked on the subject. No need for jealousy now.
But she, unlike clever Jane, was in desperate straits. Unmarried. Reputation gone, when this came out, as it must. Carrying a nameless bastard.
She had, she thought, two choices only. It was another list: a very short one. She could tell Leo, and he would marry her. Of course he would. That was number one. It was – she knew – theobvious choice. Most people wouldn’t consider it a choice at all, but her only option, and she lucky to have it. It would be a great betrayal of Ash, to set another in his place, and it was precisely the opposite of what she had intended, going into this ridiculous scheme of hers. Blanche had told her, she remembered now, that Ash would have wanted her to marry again, to be happy. She could see that that might be true. But he couldn’t have wanted this. The hideous irony that there might have been in truth no problem, that she just hadn’t been patient enough – or, much worse somehow, that if there’d been a problem it had been Ash’s and not hers – she couldn’t contemplate any of that now. Such dark, roiling thoughts drew her towards the edge of an abyss that she’d struggled out of with enormous difficulty and couldn’t afford to fall into again. Not now there was to be a child.
She had to think sensibly about her choices. One was marriage, and betrayal. It horrified her, even though it was the conventional and obvious path. Two was much chancier. She could go away somewhere, when her condition was on the point of becoming obvious – in two months’ time, or three, or four, she wasn’t an expert, not yet – and set herself up as a widow, a recent widow, an anonymous Mrs Somebody, a person of no importance at all, and have her child. She’d have to tell her parents; that would be hard. Horribly hard. But then, if she were lucky and clever, she could reappear in Yorkshire, with a child she had adopted. Women adopted babies. Widows did; spinsters, even. She could concoct some plausible tale, if her parents helped her, which she was almost sure they would. Eventually, perhaps grudgingly at first, they would not be able to deny her this, however bewildered, hurt and disapproving they might be when she broke it to them. She’d have her child then, the child she’d never thought to hold. They’d have the longed-for grandchild they had given up any hope of having. This baby would be loved, wanted, cared for and well-provided-for. Herfather’s heir, and hers, whether it be boy or girl. She had money, a loving family – if any woman could pull off this difficult feat, she could.
But she’d be doing a terrible thing to Leo. A much worse thing than she’d done to him already. He’d have a child and never know it. Never be able to give a son or a daughter all the love he had to share, because she’d deliberately deprived him of that chance. His mother, though this could hardly be her chief concern, would never know her grandchild. It would be a wicked, cruel thing to perpetrate on him, this deception, and cruel to the child too, who would never know a father, by her selfish choice. She’d have to start with lies, and build a whole structure of more lies, one atop another. She would have to lie to her child when he or she asked who his or her father, his or her birth mother was. Deny her own blood. And what if one day the child suspected some part of the truth, and said, in justifiable anger,Was my father a brute, a wicked man, that you fled from him and hid my very existence from him, and his from me? Because I cannot imagine any other reason why you would make such a dreadful choice.She couldn’t say yes. It would be the worst of all lies. He wasn’t any of those things.
But if she married him, if she made that hard choice, what then?
What then?
35
The two largely sleepless nights that succeeded her discovery left Isabella still very uneasy and divided in her mind. She had given herself another day, imagining that her courses might magically come then and solve her dilemma for her, to her regret but also her relief, but they did not, and as the hours passed it had become clearer and clearer to her that she didn’t really have a choice. All the world would say so, and in this case, all the world would be right. She had to tell Leo. Anything else would be unfair. He hadn’t deserved such treatment from her. She couldn’t lie to everyone, deceive him above all and one day deceive her child, their child, and still face herself afterwards.
She had to tell him. If Ash was looking down on her, she hoped he would be able to forgive her. She had to tell Leo, and to marry him.
To realise this was one thing, but it was not by any means easy to find a way to be alone with him. Not in the daytime. This was another irony. At night it would have been simple enough – she could have crept to his chamber as he had so often come to hers, but she didn’t want to do that, didn’t want to have any misunderstandings between them, not even for a moment ortwo, as to why she was there. He’d think she was coming to his bed to start again. Would he be glad or furious? She couldn’t bear it, either way.
At last, she was reduced to an unpleasant stratagem: she required Lady Carston to pass a message to him, to tell him that she would be alone in a certain room at a certain hour, and very much wished to speak to him on an urgent matter. Luckily, she was a guest in a castle; there were many rooms in which one could in privacy tell one’s recently spurned lover that one was carrying his child. Jane had raised an eyebrow when approached but nobly refrained from asking her anything at all, and she was grateful for the forbearance. Her composure was a very fragile thing.
He came at the hour she had appointed, to a small panelled Tudor sitting room that nobody ever appeared to use, down an obscure corridor that seemed to lead nowhere in particular, and stood in the doorway in silence, frowning a little as he looked at her. He was pale, holding himself under rigid control, as he had been ever since their estrangement, and she was aware that she must look much the same.
‘I think you should sit down,’ she said. She was sitting in a faded tapestry chair, her back very straight and her hands clasped in her lap.
‘I can’t imagine what you can have to say to me,’ he replied as he obeyed her with every appearance of reluctance, his countenance set and grim. ‘I cherished some brief hope that you might have changed your mind, or discovered that you were mistaken in your feelings, but that hope died when I saw your face. It is not such happy news, is it? Have you summoned me to tell me that you are leaving? You need not have troubled, for I had assumed as much, and wonder in truth that you are still here.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it’s not that.’ She felt an impulse to call him Bear, to recall the intimate moments they’d shared, but there was no point to any of that now. He was looking at her with a kind of weary patience, and she knew she must speak, before all her courage deserted her or before he rose and went away. ‘I’m with child.’
He didn’t appear to understand her, so she repeated it. ‘I’m with child, Leo.’
He sat as one frozen. At last, he spoke. ‘How can you know?’
It was a reasonable question, if a cold one, and she hadn’t expected him to be pleased, after all. ‘I’m late. I’m never late. I’ve never been late in my life. But I realised I am, and several days at that. I had lost track, not believing it to be possible. My courses are not coming; I’d know if they were. I know it is very soon, but I could not be mistaken. I feel… different.’
‘You told me such a thing was quite impossible,’ he said blankly.
‘I thought it was. I was told it was. It was one of the worst moments of my life, when I heard that. And I believed that to be true, or I never would have…’
‘I don’t suppose you would. And good God, Isabella, nor would I!’
His words pierced her with sudden fierce pain, though she could not accuse him of cruelty. Of course he was horrified. How could he not be? She could not afford to regard it. ‘I know you would not have done. I feel I should apologise to you, but indeed, indeed, I did not know.’
She could not hope to separate out the emotions that were warring on his face. ‘Why are you telling me?’
She reared back as though she had been struck and tears started in her eyes, though she had with a great effort preserved her composure up till now. ‘Who else should I tell? For heaven’s sake, what kind of a question is that?’
He swore, and rose to his feet, coming over to her chair and dropping down awkwardly to kneel by her side. He took her hands in his, clasped them tightly and said urgently, ‘That’s not what I mean! Good God, I’m sorry, my dear Isabella! No, I meant… I meant to ask, to say, curse my clumsiness, I must assume you’re telling me this because you are resolved to marry me. You don’t think to go away, to… I don’t know.’
‘You haven’t asked me to marry you,’ she replied, suppressing a foolish desire to burst into sobs.
‘I was about to, the other night,’ he said in low tones. ‘You know I was.’
She was a hopeless mess. ‘I did think of going away,’ she said with painful honesty. ‘Not giving up the child, I could never contemplate that, but – not telling you. Doing it in secret, under an assumed name. Devising some ridiculous scheme by which I could later adopt it. Her. Him.’ She saw the horror on his face and hastened to add, ‘I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be fair to you, or to the child. To deny you both…’
‘No, it wouldn’t,’ he said. A little silence fell between them. It wasn’t pleasant. He broke it by saying drily, ‘So, Isabella, Lady Ashby, will you marry me?’
