‘Good morning, Albert,’ she said as she got close to him. ‘I would like a word with you.’
He didn’t turn to her, but carried on pulling out the brambles.
‘Stop that,’ she said firmly. ‘I expect you to look at me when I’m speaking to you.’
He turned then, but his expression was wooden. ‘Yes, m’lady?’ he responded with unconcealed insolence.
‘I want you to tell me the truth about the day Hope left,’ she said. ‘I am not satisfied with the explanation you gave at the time.’
‘Aren’t you now!’ he said, looking her up and down as if she were a common housemaid. ‘But then you’ll have had it hard without a maid. No one to pin up your hair or fill the bath.’
That he saw her as a pathetic creature who felt nothing more than resentment that she had to take care of herself now her maid was gone was another source of shame. ‘She didn’t leave me, she left you,’ she retorted, trying to keep her voice from shaking. ‘Sadly I was unable to keep her on while you were still here. I know you hit her, and Hope too. Men who hit women are cowards.’
‘Is that so?’ he said, taking a few steps closer to her, his jawjutting out threateningly. ‘You’ve had a lot of experience with men, have you?’
Anne’s stomach contracted with fear, not just at the way he was looking at her, but at the barbed question.
‘It is my intention to go back to the police and ask for a new investigation into her disappearance,’ she said more bravely than she felt. ‘I’m giving you the chance now to tell me the truth before I go to them.’
‘You don’t want to go talking about me to the police,’ he said, smirking at her. ‘You’ve got too much to hide yourself.’
‘I beg your pardon!’ she said with some indignation.
‘I know who you were carrying on with,’ he said. ‘You make trouble for me and I’ll do the same for you. But let me tell you I’ve got proof, you ain’t.’
Anne’s bowels contracted with fear. It was a very long time since Angus had called here, and no one but Baines remained who knew about those visits, so maybe she could just call Albert’s bluff.
‘I haven’t any idea what you are talking about,’ she said archly. ‘You are mistaken. You’d better show me this so-called proof.’
‘I ain’t got it on me right now,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got it safe right enough. A letter from Captain Angus Pettigrew, Royal Hussars, no less. He’s been sniffing around you for years.’
A cold chill ran down her spine, for she suddenly realized how and when he’d got the letter. He must have caught Hope with it while she was away burying her father.
‘That’s knocked the stuffing out of you,’ he said dryly, his eyes glinting with malice. ‘Still going to the police?’
Anne turned and fled back to the house.
During the next three or four days she berated herself constantly for showing Albert her guilt by running away from him. What was she to do? Now that she’d threatened him with the police, he might tell William just to spite her.
She couldn’t eat, sleep or sit still, her heart seemed to be beating too fast, and when William did come home, she had to make out she had a headache so she could shut herself away in her room.
The following morning she saw William talking to Albert out in the garden, and she waited, expecting that at any moment her husband would come running in angrily because he knew.
But that didn’t happen. William was quite jovial when he came in, and all he wanted to talk to her about later that day was the possibility they might have to sell some of their more valuable pieces of furniture to raise some cash. But in the days that followed, each time Albert walked close to the windows, he would look in at her, smirk, and wave a piece of notepaper which could only be Angus’s letter.
The strain of it, along with not eating or sleeping, made her shaky and clumsy. She knocked an ornament off the mantelpiece, twice she knocked over a teacup, then finally she caught the heel of her shoe in the hem of her dress while coming down the stairs, tumbling right to the bottom.
She had banged her head and arm, and William called the doctor, assuming she was in terrible pain because she couldn’t stop weeping.
The doctor told her that she would be fine, that she was only shaken up. But she knew he’d said something more to William, for as soon as the doctor had left, William came back to her room and sat on her bed.
‘Tell me what’s really troubling you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been nervy ever since I came back from London. Baines told me you haven’t been eating.’
It was ironic that he’d chosen to revert to being the gentle, kind-hearted man she’d married, purely out of anxiety for her, and that made her cry even more. He stroked her hair back from her face and told her he knew he was responsible for her distress.
‘We used to be such close friends,’ he reminded her. ‘Remember how we used to laugh so much together? We told each other everything. Can’t we try to be like that again?’
She so much wished for that too, but she couldn’t tell him the truth however much she wanted to, for it would hurt him too badly.
Days went past and still she lay in bed, wrapped in misery. But William didn’t turn back to drink; he brought her meals to the bedroom and even fed her tenderly. Again and again he apologized for his drinking and losing their money and even admitted that he’d been nasty to her and her sisters when her father died.
He did owe her apologies for all these things, but her own wrongdoing was burning away inside her, and because she still couldn’t bring herself to admit that, she attacked him.
‘You’ve never been a real husband to me,’ she sobbed. ‘We’ve been married for nearly twenty-seven years but you’ve laid with me fewer than six times. Do you know how that makes me feel? It makes me feel ugly and undesirable.’
William’s face crumpled and he began to cry. She felt sorry then and enfolded him in her arms to comfort him, shocked that he had taken it so hard.
As he continued to sob, Anne felt obliged to tone down her accusation. She said that it was almost certainly her fault, that maybe he thought she didn’t welcome his advances. She wasn’t even thinking about what she was saying; all she wanted was for him to stop crying.
‘Don’t make excuses for me,’ he blurted out eventually. ‘The fault is all mine and I wish more than anything else in the world that I wasn’t the way I am. Don’t you understand what it is, Anne? I have no desire for any woman. Only other men.’
For a few brief moments she thought she’d misunderstood what he said. But when he looked up at her like a little boy caught with his fingers in the jam, she suddenly realized it was true.
‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘That can’t be right. Not you!’
She was beyond shock, beyond even horror. It was too outrageous to take in. No one could be married to a man for all those years and not find out such a thing.
All she knew about men with this problem had been learned from Bridie. Shortly before Anne was to marry William, Bridie had told her a tale of a butler and groom at her previous position. They were dismissed when they were found in bed together. Bridie called them ‘nancy boys’, but explained such men were often called sodomists. Anne had often wondered what prompted her old maid to tell her such a thing, but now it looked as if Bridie had sensed William might be one and she wanted to warn her.
‘I have been so unfair to you,’ William cried. ‘I swear to God I didn’t know when we got married, but I soon realized I wasn’t right. I couldn’t speak of it, though, not to you or anyone. I truly loved you; I still do, so I beg you not to doubt that. But after I’d managed to give you Rufus I thought it would be all right to go my own way.’
In an odd way Anne felt a kind of relief. Whether that was because what William had told her gave her some justification for her own behaviour, or because it finally made sense of all those questions about her marriage for which she could find no answers, she didn’t know. But all at once she didn’t feel quite so hunted.
She listened in horrified fascination as he poured out that he’d been seduced by another man at a card party in London just a year after their wedding.
‘I loathed myself for giving in to it,’ he sobbed. ‘But I couldn’t help myself.’
Maybe if Anne hadn’t experienced illicit ecstasy herself she wouldn’t have understood that explanation. But William’s explanation was exactly how she would have described her own infidelity.
She had often raged to herself about the unfairness of a society which not only accepted a man taking a mistress, but almost applauded it, while an adulterous woman was seen as a harlot, and damned by everyone. It was a man’s world. Men could rape servants, go with prostitutes and bring diseases home to their wife; they could even deflower children and not be punished. Yet absurdly, a man could not have a preference for his own sex without being considered a perverted animal, and if he was exposed, he would be an outcast in society.
She didn’t want William to be an outcast. She didn’t like what he’d told her, yet it seemed to her that it wasn’t his fault he’d been made that way. But if he had had normal desires, then maybe she wouldn’t have been unfaithful either.
In a way, it was like shining a light in a dark corner, for suddenly she was remembering how he was when they first met and married, and seeing that there had been many pointers to suggest he was different from other young men.
He’d been almost pretty with his blond curls and smooth, hairless chin. He was always more comfortable with women than with men. On their wedding night he’d admired her beautiful nightgown, yet shown no real enthusiasm for what lay beneath it. In truth they had been more like two girl-friends than husband and wife, lying in bed together giggling or chasing each other up and down the stairs. If she hadn’t met Angus and found out what real men did with their women, and William hadn’t found someone like himself in America, they might have stayed in that untroubled, passionless friendship for ever.
‘Poor William,’ she said, hugging him to her breast. She could afford to be magnanimous now for she had discovered the beauty and ecstasy of normal passion.
Encouraged by her sympathy, William bared his soul, telling her how he’d found there were many men like him, forced to search one another out in secret, always in fear that they would be discovered and denounced.
‘You accused me once of going to a brothel,’ he said brokenly. ‘I wish that’s where I had been for there is terrible danger in consorting with other men like me. Most are as sad and bewildered as I am; we wish more than anything we had not been cursed with such desires. But there are some who delight in their depravity and prey on the weak, bending us to their will. We cannot escape their clutches for they hold us fast by blackmail and intimidation.’
Anne sensed this was what had happened to him, for she’d often felt that when he verbally abused her when he’d been drinking, the words coming out of his mouth were not his.
That was what made her strong enough to tell him about Angus. It wasn’t fair to let him pour out all his hurt and shame believing that he alone had destroyed the happiness they once had together. And, as always, she remained self-centred enough to think that once William knew, Albert would have nothing to hold over her.
She poured out her adultery in a torrent, telling him how she was attracted to Angus right from their first meeting, but that she held her feelings in check right up until William left for America.
‘It wouldn’t have happened if you’d been here,’ she said brokenly. ‘But you went away without me and I couldn’t stop myself.’
She went on to tell him that she’d had Angus’s baby, and how she’d been told by Bridie that the infant was stillborn.
William had remained surprisingly calm throughout her revelation. He looked stunned, bewildered, but not angry. He didn’t interrupt her once with recriminations or even questions.
‘But the baby didn’t die. Nell took her home to her parents. The baby was Hope!’ she sobbed out. ‘I never knew. She came here and played with Rufus, but I never guessed she was mine. Nell didn’t tell me until that awful day she said Albert had killed her.’
William’s calm vanished then. He sat up straight on the bed and looked at her with steely eyes. ‘Hope was your child?’ he asked, his voice suddenly louder and harsh. ‘You must have known the baby was alive. How could you let it go to someone so close? Was that so you could still see her?’
‘No,’ Anne insisted, a little bewildered that he was more upset by the child of her union with Angus than the love affair. ‘I believed Bridie when she said she was dead. I was exhausted after the birth, and I didn’t know anything about babies then. Bridie showed her to me and she wasn’t moving or crying. Besides, you were due home from America any day and I was so scared. It just seemed to me to be God’s way of dealing with my problem.’
William put his head in his hands and made a kind of wailing sound.
‘I’m so sorry, William,’ she sobbed. ‘I have no idea what I would have done if I’d known she was alive. I suppose I would have asked Bridie to find a home for her, I couldn’t have done anything else, could I? Imagine the disgrace!’
William remained with his head in his hands.
‘How could I tell you about it?’ she pleaded. ‘It was such a terrible time, all alone here with Bridie, for all the other servants had gone to the London house by then. All I could think about was getting strong enough for the drive to London to join you. I did my best to forget it ever happened, and you made it easier because you were so kind and considerate.’
He looked up then, his face pale and haggard. ‘Only because I was burdened with guilt too,’ he said in a small voice. ‘You seemed distant, preoccupied, but I thought you were angry because I hadn’t taken you with me to America. Oh, Anne! If only you’d told me all this before.’
‘How could I?’ she asked. ‘And what point would there have been in telling you when I thought the baby was dead?’
William nodded as if seeing her point. ‘But did you tell Angus about it?’
Anne shook her head. ‘His regiment left before I even knew I was with child,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see him again until some time after Rufus was born. You were here when he called. Don’t you remember he came upstairs to the nursery with us to see Rufus? He brought him a little wooden horse. You made us all laugh by galloping it along the edge of the crib.’