The glass was at her lips and she remembered she meant to stop. Two more sips: One each for Mama and Papa.
“I thought I would have that, one day,” she said. Instead, she was married and had no husband. “My whole life stretched in front of me, and I was looking forward to living it. Then one day Papa received a letter telling of Harry’s elopement—and my future was gone. Can you imagine what that’s like?”
No answer. He gazed at the crackling flames. She pulled her feet up onto the seat under her, tucked her nightclothes around her knees.
He was quiet so long that when he finally spoke, she jumped.
“I imagine it is like staring into blankness,” he said. “Each day, you have to get up and face that blankness, and try to carve out another future even while you’re grieving for the one you lost. I imagine that each day you remind yourself to concentrate on what you have and never hope for anything else, and in time, that becomes enough.”
He knew.
Because of course: He had loved Rachel. Loved her and lost her. His loss was even worse than hers.
No sacrifice, he had said the day before. Marrying Cassandra and putting her out of sight made him safe. And made her the perfect wife for him. Because his idea of the perfect wife, was a wife who was no wife at all.
Chapter 10
The brandy had failed: Her heart ached for what they had both lost. Cassandra wanted to hate him, but that was not fair. She had agreed to a marriage in name only, back when she was too young to understand how long life could be when you had to live it alone.
Besides, she didn’t want him either. If she could choose her husband, he would be nothing like Joshua DeWitt.
“I never had an affair with Bolderwood’s wife,” he said, stretching and reverting to his usual briskness. “I’m not much of a husband to you, but I can promise to be honest, and that is the truth.”
The empty snifter was heavy in her hands, the reflected flames dancing in the cut glass. She replaced it next to the full one, saw how the flames swam in the rich color of the liquor too. She lifted the glass to admire it.
He had no reason to lie. What was the worst she could do to him? Go back to Sunne Park and never speak to him again? Take a lover so he could divorce her and cast them all out?
“Then why does Harry think you did?” she asked.
“I think this is a scheme to raise money and get revenge. I think they planned it.”
“They planned it?”
“It’s all I can think of.” His gaze flickered to the glass in her hand and up again. “Assume that I’m innocent. Now, consider that they are in severe financial straits, they blame me, and I make an easy target.”
“But to say that about his own wife! He must know that transcripts of crim. con. trials are published in full and sell in the tens of thousands. Her reputation…”
He shrugged, sighed. For a man who said he never got tired, he seemed weary tonight. “That’s why I think she must be involved also. Other ladies have weathered worse, even emerged from such scandals with a certain cachet; she could brazen it out too, so long as he doesn’t divorce her. The aristocracy is renowned for such behavior; people almost expect it now.”
“They hardly seem on the brink of divorce. If you had seen them at the rout last night, all smiles and touches and looks and…Oh. Oh.”
“What? What?”
“They said something about taking justice into their own hands. But this is…Heavens, Joshua, this is disgusting.”
It was all of those things and more. She tried to comprehend it. How smug they had been last night, knowing they had planted a powder keg under Cassandra’s family: not only Joshua, but Cassandra and her sisters by association.
“No,” she said. “Harry would never do that.”
“Perhaps your precious Harry is not the man you thought,” Joshua said, irritably.
It was on the tip of her tongue to say that Phyllis must have been a bad influence, and she was ashamed of her willingness to blame the woman rather than the man. She recalled Harry’s cozy triumph when he met his wife’s eyes. He could not have been influenced if