AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Miriam Clive’s first husband. Attacked, disappeared, and later declared dead. And she married Mr. Clive,” Monk explained. “Don
’t you think he might bear Clive some grudge? Miriam Clive is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, and if he is alive, he would clearly still be in love with her.”
Gillander’s eyebrows shot up. “Piers Astley…behind a plot now to ruin Clive?” His face was filled with disbelief, and laughter.
“One of the oldest motives in the world,” Monk explained, but there was unease rippling through him like a fast-rising tide.
“Piers Astley’s dead!” Gillander told him.
“Presumed dead,” Monk corrected. “There’s a big difference, a crucial one.”
Gillander sighed and suddenly looked stricken, as if the joke had evaporated as he watched. “He’s dead,” he said quietly. “I saw his body, riddled with bullets. Actually I was one of the two who buried him. If we were in California I could take you to the grave. It’s unmarked, but he’s there, God help him.”
Monk was stunned. “Then why was he only presumed dead, and his widow not told?”
Gillander rose to his feet—stiffly for a man so young, barely forty. “She was carrying a child.” His voice cracked as he said it. “With the shock, she lost it. That was when Aaron Clive slipped in to look after her. She was ill, vulnerable, in a very bad way. Piers Astley isn’t planning a revenge against anyone.” He looked across at Monk. “Perhaps she was too grieved to remember clearly exactly what she was told about Astley’s death. Perhaps a part of her was unconsciously living in a vain hope so that she then confused it with reality. I don’t know. But it’s not your jurisdiction. Stick to the Thames, Monk! This is deep water of a different sort. It doesn’t belong to you.”
Monk stood up also. Gillander was right. It was not his jurisdiction. If what Gillander said was true, and Astley was really dead, then he needed to begin again searching for whoever meant to harm Aaron Clive. If he was even right about that!
As he and Hooper got back into their own boat and set off downriver again it was Miriam Clive’s face he could not get out of his mind. She was beautiful, troubled, so filled with emotion she moved like a storm with her own energy. But was she speaking the truth? Did she even know it?
Or had her grief, and her lost child, turned her mind from reality to a nightmare that never resolved itself?
SINCE BEATA WAS IN mourning, there were few places she could go alone in public. Too often she walked in the park along the smooth gravel paths under the bare trees as she was doing now. The beauty of their stark branches against the sky pleased her. Their nakedness was not masked by leaves, and there was a unique grace to it.
She moved slowly, more because she was loath to return home than for any other reason. And yet dressed entirely in black, walking with a measured pace and not stopping to speak to anyone, she must have appeared to be the perfect, traditional mourning widow, solitary under a leaden sky. People did not approach her, treating her supposed grief with respect.
She felt no grief, except for the wasted years she had spent, hating Ingram and yet doing nothing about it. She had allowed him to convince her that there was nothing she could do. But was that true?
Had imprisonment been freedom of another kind? She could not make her own decisions, which meant she had not had to think, or consider, take any responsibility for the results. The excuse was perfect. “I had no choice. I couldn’t fail because I was not allowed to try!” If no success were possible, then equally, neither was any failure. As an errant wife if she had left him then the law would have brought her back, if he had wished it. Perhaps he would not have. She had not tried.
How childlike, in the ugliest way. It was not innocence; it was the abdication of responsibility.
She walked down the slight incline, past the shrubbery—now only the evergreens in leaf—and went over the bridge.
But she had a little longer to decide what she would do, and how. Ingram had left her very well provided for financially, so she had no need even to consider how she would live. Which meant equally that she had no need to marry again. But she wanted to marry Oliver Rathbone…didn’t she? It had been only Ingram’s stubborn survival that had kept them apart.
And the fear of another involvement in emotions, and in intimacy. Had she the courage to put all the pain and humiliation of the past behind her, and try again?
She stopped and gazed at the dark brown water.
She must stop this. It was ridiculous. Courage! Nothing worth having was gained without courage. Or if it were, then it was lost again the first time a hard wind blew. She despised cowardice, and yet here she was on the brink of it herself.
She turned and walked briskly back the way she had come.
—
THAT EVENING SHE WENT again to Aaron and Miriam Clive’s house to dine. The excuse for it was a further discussion on the chair that was to be endowed in Ingram’s name. That was if anyone should inquire—or worse, offer a criticism of her for leaving her home for a frivolous reason such as merely dining out.
It would be so much easier to boast a little about the endowment, rather than give them a freezing reply as to the impertinence of such a remark.
She dressed in black, of course, but in a different gown from the previous time. This one was more feminine, the silk softer and more becoming. She wore the traditional jet jewelry. Whitby, where the best jet was mined, must make a fortune out of bereavement!
She would rather have worn pearls; they were so much more flattering to the face than the jagged black facets of jet. But she was not in a mood for weathering the comments, spoken or imagined.
Actually it was only admiration she saw in Aaron Clive’s face as she was shown into the withdrawing room where he and Miriam were standing beside the fire, waiting for her to arrive.
Aaron bowed, smiling, and complimented her on the gown. Miriam, in deep burgundy herself, took both Beata’s hands warmly and bade her welcome.
