“Is the character of Lord Morvino truly a faithful portrait, Mr Fane?”
“How does it feel to have your bedchamber secrets in every lending library in England?”
“Mr Fane, do you regret marrying your wife?”
That last question rang loud and shrill and pernicious, like a poisonous arrow. She thought she might be ill right there on the carriage floor.
Then they were moving.
“I thought you were sending me alone,” Viola gasped, near tears again from the sheer relief that he was not banishing her, that he was coming with her.
“Nothing will hold me in town now.” He lowered the blinds. “The best course of action is to remove ourselves before all hell breaks loose. As it seems it already has.”
Several fists knocked against the door, but the carriage pressed on through the crowd, and after a while, the clamour fell away behind them.
Flee the scandal. Flee the curious whispers, the penetrating stares, the sneers, the giggles. The journalists and pamphleteers who would haunt them. The fingers that would point at them wherever they went. Utter ruination.
He was joining her in the banishment.
It did not seem he’d forgiven her. But at least he was not sending her away alone.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The electionsin June proceeded without Sebastian. The Tories carried the day, and a new Chief Secretary for Ireland was installed. As Josephine had prophesied, Sebastian’s name was absent from the polls. He had not stood for re-election, and for the first time in nearly a decade, he held no office and no seat.
Westwood Hall was just as she remembered it: dark and quiet and with the sense that time stood still. Her godmother, Lady Regina, of course, was no longer there; and Viola missed her presence with a fierceness that robbed her of her breath.
Sebastian was there, yet oddly absent simultaneously. He spent hours in his study; she could see the correspondence piling on the table in the hall, letters arriving daily that he haphazardly collected without comment.
He was polite but distant when they met, and far too courteous. Sometimes, he would touch her stomach, gently, with a wondrous expression flitting over his face, as if he still could not quite believe that they were expecting a child, but then he’d enquire after her health as politely as though they were acquaintances, then nod in quite the avuncular fashion when she said that she was very well, thank you, followed by himmurmuring something about matters requiring his attention before disappearing into his study again.
It was rather vexing, Viola thought, well aware that she could hardly blame him. He walked the grounds alone, frequently, in all kinds of weather. Viola watched from the window of her drawing room as he strode toward the forest in the middle of a downpour, and she resisted the urge to run after him, shake him and tell him to snap out of it. Instinct told her he needed solitude, even as she craved company and felt lonelier than ever. She’d taken a walk to the ruins alone, a fond smile on her face as she remembered the auspicious day they’d met. She’d pretended to be so cross with him that day, when she’d lost her heart to him on the spot.
And now?
They no longer shared a bedroom. He occupied the suite on the far side of the corridor, the rooms traditionally reserved for the lord of the house, while she had moved into her godmother’s chambers. She did not feel comfortable there at all, and tossed and turned the entire night in the enormous bed, missing his warmth beside her. Sometimes, she fell into a fitful sleep when the first rays of dawn shone through the room, and then she dreamt of George, and Nana, and Sebastian, and how he was walking away from her, and how she could never quite catch up with him.
Viola wondered whether it was to remain like this for the rest of her life, this strained coexistence in which they were married, yet each alone. The situation reminded her of those first weeks after they had met, when she had felt like the sole occupant of this vast mansion, when the servants cast pitying glances her way and took it upon themselves to console her.
When, one day, even the scullery maid approached her to comfort her, and to assure her that her stories were the best and that there was no better storyteller than her, and she shouldtake heart, for surely things would look better soon, Viola knew things must look dire indeed.
“Thank you, Mary,” Viola had said after her impassioned speech, which had touched her.
Back then she had at least had Nana to tend to.
Now she had no one.
Well. That was not entirely true. Her hand crept over her swollen belly. There it was, ever so faintly. A flutter, and then a kick.
She spent hours like that, sitting quietly, marvelling at the miracle growing inside her. And because she had no one else to talk to, she told the Little One stories. And because she had so much time on her hands, she wrote those down, too.
Peregrin wrote euphorically, saying her book was outselling everything she’d ever written, combined.
Viola closed her eyes painfully. While it was wonderful to be successful, she couldn’t help but feel a desolate sense of guilt and wished she’d never written the book to begin with. She knew Sebastian was finally reading her books because she’d seen the butler carrying them from the library, a tower of damning volumes stacked on his arm, crowned by that ominous pamphlet that had printed her letters. She herself hadn’t been able to bring herself to look at it yet.
Viola paced the corridor outside his study, biting her fingernails to the quick. When the butler approached her to suggest that dinner be served, she shook her head.
“Bring me a chair,” she requested. The butler did so immediately and brought her a cushioned armchair with a footstool and a blanket. She appreciated that he did so without pulling a face or lifting an eyebrow or showing in any other way that her request was odd, unreasonable, or plain strange. He even set up a little table with a lamp, a hot pot of tea, and a platefull of shortbread, freshly made only for her. Clearly, the cook was pitying her, too.
