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“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.”
“Theyplanned 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.”
“Disgusting. Disgraceful. Distasteful. Despicable.”
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 preciousHarryis not the man you thought,” Joshua said, irritably.
It was on the tip of her tongue to say thatPhyllismust 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 it was not already inside him.
“They told me they were swept away by passion,” she said. “I don’t know if we had much passion, Harry and I. I thought we were in love but I’m too sensible for passion.”
“Not much passion?” He snorted. “You just hurled a chair across the room, woman.”
It was so ridiculous she had to laugh. “You say the sweetest things.”
He laughed too, and she thought that this was nice, chatting with him by the fire, curled up comfortably, warm inside and out. Maybe they could be friends some day.
“Harry and I were only engaged for a week before Charlie died, and I suppose I wasn’t good company after that,” she said. “He did visit me a few times, but I didn’t have much to say.”
Because her heart was so broken. Three years on, and still it hurt, the memory of the night when Charlie’s friends brought him in, sweating and bleeding from the knife wound between his ribs, yet making jokes all the while. She was not long home from a ball, where she and Harry had danced twice, and Harry had kissed her and said he’d always hold her in his heart. Papa was up in Scotland, and Mama had to be sedated, and so Cassandra helped the doctor, her white ballgown smeared with her brother’s blood, and she nursed Charlie for three days until he died.
“I liked Charlie. Everyone did,” Joshua said. “And you were better off not marrying Bolderwood if he couldn’t stand by you during a bad time.”
“Did your marriage have bad times?”
A bleak look passed over his face. How he must miss his wife.
“Nothing in particular,” he said, and added nothing more.
* * *
So this is brandy,Cassandra mused, as the silence stretched between them. It put several thick panes of glass between her mind and the world. Her emotions were curled up in a little ball, like Mr. Twit sleeping at the end of her bed.
She missed Mr. Twit.
