The day he learned his wife loved him, Neil realized the law suit to separate them no longer mattered. His father was nothing more than a brutal child kicking down sand castles, out of spite and malice. His father had never been anything more than that. But his father could not destroy what Verity felt for him, nor even what he felt for her. He felt safe in her arms; he was even beginning to feel at home in them. If they had to remarry, she would do so with joy, and he would do so with confidence. And at that point, his father would have no more ammunition against them, no more circumstances or weaknesses to exploit, nothing he was able to kick down. His father would recede to a cold and dark distance, where he could be forgotten, if never forgiven.
So for Neil, the last of summer, and the first of Autumn, passed in a golden haze of contentment. He no longer bothered with the letters his lawyer sent him, but merely signed them and sent them back. When villagers, reading the gossip of the case in the papers, commented on it, he smiled and diverted the conversation. He enjoyed his wife, and his society, and his house without sparing a glance for the cloud that hung over them all: it was only a storm, and it would pass.
In mid-October, the court case concluded, and the storm broke. He attended the London Consistory Court with his lawyer Colbert to hear the verdict:
The wedding had been unlawful, and the marriage was null and void.
Returning to Verity to tell her was more awful than hearing it himself. She came out onto the front steps as his carriage arrived, and when he jumped down and ran towards her, she turned white and still as porcelain.
"They did it..."
He folded her in his arms.
"I'm afraid they did, my dear."
Colbert, who had travelled with him from London to sort out the last details of the event, came up behind and said, sincerely,
"My deepest apologies and commiseration, Miss Baker."
At the sound of her old name, Verity went slack in his arms, and he lowered her, shaking, to sit on the steps, his arms still around her.
"Has she fainted?" Colbert said helpfully. "Should I fetch my smelling salts?"
For not the first time, Neil cursed his lawyer, who was so clever with law, and so stupid with people.
"Do go away, Colbert," Neil said roughly. "Go and wait in my study."
It was only the lawyer had gone away that Verity raised her pale face again.
"I had still hoped otherwise."
He kissed her. "Colbert says we may marry again after your birthday. Don't fret."
She leaned her head against his shoulder, and slumped against him, her warmth like fire compared to the chill of the stone steps beneath them. "People will talk. They will judge me."
"As they did before, I know." He patted her shoulders. "Perhaps you should return to your grandmother's house, for a short while. Just until we can marry."
She gave a weak laugh. "I'd rather stay with you. If I have committed sins unknowingly... I did honestly enjoy them, and would knowingly repeat them."
He kissed her hair. "I've even been thinking, on the drive over here, that I might spend the winter in France, with Prothero... I can return in time to be decently married."
"No!" She twisted and clung to his coat. "Neil, please, please... I'd rather be judged. I'd rather be with you, and judged. Please. Stay."
She was shivering, he realized, with both cold and emotion. Perhaps she was even taking ill. In damp weather, he had noticed her old cough seemed to return. He pressed a hand to her cheeks, and found them burning.
"We'll discuss it later," he promised. "Come on, let's get inside, and have something to eat."
But after persuading her to hot tea and a few nibbles of toast, Verity herself decided to go to bed. She took his coat lapels in her hands on the staircase.
"Come with me."
But Neil, suffering under some reluctant ideal of preserving her honour, sent her to bed alone, and ordered his housekeeper to make the second bedroom ready for him later that night.
He had been serious about returning to France. It had seemed to him one way to lessen the scandal blowing about them – there was so much scandal in a small village – and one sure way, too, to lessen the temptation to touch her, and hold her, and kiss her, and do all the things to her that only truly married couples were supposed to do. He wanted to treat her like a lady. He wanted other people to see her as one. That certainly would not happen if she lived, unmarried and unchaperoned, in his house with him.
He went to his study to start the letter to Prothero, and on entering was surprised to see his lawyer sitting by the fire, looking impatient and tired. He had forgotten he had told Colbert to wait.
There were some last minute matters to deal with, various errata to settle the dust on the battle they had lost. Colbert brought out the papers and signalled where Neil was to sign. When it was over, he went over to the reading chairs by the fire and sank down expectantly into one of them.
Sighing, Neil went to the sideboard. "A drink, then?"
"I'd be very grateful for a brandy, Sir."
Seated, with brandy, Colbert circled the intended conversation like a buzzard – or, thought Neil, like a lawyer. Neil did not sit, but stood facing the fire, twisting his own glass in his hand. He had no desire to drink it.
"The lady is very young, isn't she?"
"Older than her years, I think. She has endured much."
"Of course. Her father. And her upbringing." Colbert sipped brandy. "I suppose you felt sorry for her."
"In a way, I still do."
"You intend to marry her when she is of age then?"
"Yes. As I've told you."
Colbert ran his finger along the lip of the brandy glass. "If you'll forgive me my personal opinion, Sir, deviating from the legal, if I were you, I would not."
"Not marry her?"
"No." Colbert took the rest of the brandy in one gulp, as though bracing himself for what he was going to say. "If you forgive me, she is not of your class."
Neil raised an eyebrow. "No. I often find myself looking up to her," he said, in a tone so agreeable that Colbert, who knew him well, could not have failed to take it as a warning. Heedlessly, however, he plunged on:
"If you were to put aside, say, two hundred and fifty pounds a year for her income..."
"Ah, I take it you suggest I make her my mistress?"
Colbert blushed delicately.
Neil found he could no longer pretend to be amiable about the matter. He poured his brandy slowly into the fire, watching it flare.
"This is where the law fails and morality succeeds," he said, when the fire had stopped fizzing. "I'll make no argument to you about morality. You're a lawyer and you've got none. It would take more than two hundred and fifty pounds a year to make that woman a mistress. She never was, and never will be my mistress. She is my wife."
"But as a matter of law..."
"Didn't you hear me? The law has failed. Morality dictates my answer. Colbert, she is my wife."
* * *
The letter was sent the next morning, and Neil told Verity that he was arranged to sail on the seventh of November. It gave her three more weeks with him – three more weeks to be the woman who was no longer his wife, living in his house with him. They were a party of three: He, She, and Scandal.
Lord Albroke had proven quickly true to his foul word, and ten thousand pounds had been placed in the tremulously grasping hands of her father. It made Verity ill to think of how her father would spend the money, how it would be more a poison to his life than poverty ever had been. However, it was true he had at least the presence of mind not to spend all of it on alcohol: he had a new horse, and a new coat, of a green and red check, and, above all things, a female admirer, indeed, at least a dozen, of the very low types with whom he was acquainted. It was chiefly through Mr Baker that Houglen first learned the suit of annulment had been successful: he was very proud that night, and thought it such a clever thing. The gossip spread upwards and outwards. When the newspapers from London arrived a week after the fact, it only confirmed matters.
Nobody asked Neil and Verity to confirm things. Verity supposed it was too indelicate a question for most to brave asking. Indeed, nobody mentioned the annulment at all, except, of course, Jane Walthrope.
She came over the day the newspapers arrived, though Verity was sure she must have heard the gossip beforehand. Embracing Verity as she entered, she had cooed,
"Oh, you poor, poor dear! That wicked Lord Albroke! He was always such a brutish, horrible man! What on earth are you going to do now?"
"I don't know." She went with Jane into the drawing room, angered by the sympathy, and suspicious of it, but too wary to show it. They sat down, and she rang for tea. "I just don't know. Have you come to commiserate, or was there something more important?"
"What can be more important?" Jane said. "I want to help you in any way I can. People are talking you know. I've heard such terrible things. Mrs Kimberly is very distressed that you are still residing in Neil's house. Are you going to return to Lady Duvalle's house? But if you do, you might never leave. You might become an old maid there."
"I should think," Verity said icily, "That it must be obvious to everybody in the village by now that at the very least I am not a maid."
Jane smiled, with a trace of stiffness. "I had made no assumption."
"That is not only most generous of you, but really quite becomingly innocent," Verity said, with more than a trace of irony.
The tea came. It interrupted what might have, with little more provocation, become a verbal battle. Verity poured, and Jane picked a sandwich delicately between her forefinger and thumb.
"No," Verity said slowly, her guard dissipating suddenly under the overwhelming need to talk to someone – anyone – who wasn't Neil. "It is Neil who is leaving. He is going to France for the winter."
"France?" Jane put the sandwich back on her plate. "Why – he is abandoning us."
Us. Verity's guard returned, like a steel vice clamping down over her heart.
"He believes it would evoke the least scandal this way. When he returns, we will be married again almost immediately."
"I see." Jane took up the sandwich again, and examined it as though it were a strange sort of bug. "Chivalrous. He was always chivalrous. I will miss him."
And how do you think I will feel? Verity thought. With a burst of anger, she snapped, "Are you going to eat that, or just ogle it!?"
Jane's mouth opened in surprise. She gave a burst of laughter, and then took a great, wrenching, unladylike bite of the sandwich, her teeth snapping.
When they parted later that day, Verity was more acutely aware than ever of the strange place Jane Walthrope held in her life. She was both friend and enemy, kindness and cruelty. And the trouble with Jane was that she could be both all at once. There were no moments with Jane where she was ever entirely the one or the other. Even when she was being kind, she never let Verity forget that there were steel barbs under her golden tongue, and when she was at her cruelest, her words were never so sweet, her expression never so friendly.
It was two weeks before Verity saw Jane again, at the dinner Neil threw the night before he was leaving. It was perhaps the hardest dinner of Verity's life. She had never been at ease in high society, or what passed for it in Houglen. Now, in the wake of the annulment, she felt more like an imposter than ever. She had avoided society as much as she could. Tonight, she could not.
Perhaps the other guests felt the same way. It was a subdued evening. Even Jane's constant, idle prattle, always a relief at an awkward dinner party, was sparse and uninspired tonight. Verity even caught her repeating statements, as thought she knew not what else to say.
"Those lovely orchids – did you see the orchids, Mrs Simpson?" she said, at least twice.
It was a relief for the women to withdraw to their own room after dinner, and leave the men to their drinks and snuff.
Mrs Simpson took the piano and began to play one of Scarlatti's sonatas. Already moribund in tone, it was not improved by her missed notes and rheumatic movement. Verity moved about the room, fiddling with the flowers over the fireplace, straightening a picture frame on the other wall, braiding the tassels of the curtains. The other women talked in a soft sort of hush, occasionally falling back into silence, to pick at their nails, or idly flap their fans.
The sonata ended. Mrs Simpson started another.
"Cards?" someone suggested feebly.
Cards was a good idea, everybody agreed. Nobody moved.
"I'm a little tired for it, after all," Jane said, yawning. "I might read a book."
And Jane buried herself in a corner of the settee with a novel. From then, the conversation was even sparser.
It was a relief for Neil to appear at the door at last. One by one, the men filed in. Conversation came with them. The alcohol had loosened their tongues. Verity rallied herself to the cause, and even Mrs Simpson managed to break away from Scarlatti and play something merrier.
But it was a relief, Verity believed, to everyone, when the clock struck midnight and everybody began to disturb themselves in the effort of leaving. No longer host of her own home, Verity slipped away without a word, and waited hidden by a pillar on the mezzanine as Neil said goodbye to the guests in the hall below.
Jane was to be the last to leave. Verity could hear her voice trilling in the hallway, after the other carriages had disappeared down the drive.
"They're awfully slow tonight – Neil, darling, tell me how to keep my servants from cheating me with their slovenly behaviours and manners."
"If I knew! Should we wait outside? They cannot be much longer."
"Oh no. It's far too cold. We will see them when they come."
They fell into silence. Verity waited awkwardly in the shadows, feeling suddenly and embarrassingly like an an eavesdropper.
"Jane?"
"Ssh. Quiet."
At that, Verity stopped feeling like an eavesdropper, and twisted around the pillar to look.
They were standing very close. Jane had her hand on his cheek.
"I'll miss you, if you go to France."
Neil said nothing.
"I've been missing you for years, Neil."
Still, he said nothing.
Slowly, Jane drew closer. Verity's stomach seemed to turn over inside her body as first the woman, and then the man, closed the distance between them by hesitating inches.
Neil's shoulders hunched over the woman. Slowly, he raised his hands to her arms. In the distance, horse hooves could be heard, rounding the drive. As they approached, she raised her head, and he lowered his to receive her kiss.
Feeling sick, her hands trembling, Verity twisted on her heels and stumbled blindly to her room.
~~~~~
A/N: Is this? Is this? Could it be? An update? The next three chapters are written already, if you're in a panic about that. I'm not panicking about writing chapters. I never panic about writing chapters. No. Never.