He embraced me warmly and I felt a sudden thrill of happiness. I determined that in time, when I had recovered from this lassitude which had been with me since my miscarriage, I also would have a son.
Carleton noticed at once. “You’re better,” he said. And swung me up and held me against him.
“I’m glad you are home,” I said.
We walked into the house arm in arm. I said to him: “We have an addition to the household. Harriet’s child has arrived.”
He was silent for a moment and I went on: “It’s a son. Trust Harriet to have a son.”
“Yes,” he said slowly, “trust Harriet.”
I went with him to her room to see him. She was in bed; her Benjie was in his cradle and Sally hovered.
Harriet held out her hand to Carleton. He took it and it seemed to me that he held it for a long time.
She withdrew it and said: “Sally, give me Benjie. I want to show him off. I tell you this, Carleton, he is the most beautiful baby in the world. Sally will bear me out.”
She sat there. How beautiful she was, with her magnificent hair falling about her shoulders, her face serenely happy, her lovely eyes soft as I had rarely seen them.
I was deeply aware of Carleton. He was watching her intently. I thought again it was like one of those tableaux, full of meaning.
Benjie thrived. Sally said she had never seen a baby with a finer pair of lungs. When he bellowed, Priscilla watched him in wonder. He showed a determination to get what he wanted from his earliest days. He was beautiful with big blue eyes and dark tufts of hair. Priscilla liked to stand and watch Sally bathe him and to hand her the towels.
I had never seen Harriet so contented before. Her maternal instincts surprised me, but I told myself cynically that she loved her baby partly because he consolidated her position here. Of course as Toby’s widow she had a right to be in the house, but the fact that she had borne one of the heirs to lands and title made her position doubly assured.
But even so I was aware of growing tension all about me. I fancied that Harriet was alert, that she was engaged in some secret adventures. Perhaps it was my imagination, I told myself. Perhaps I could never really forget.
I sometimes wandered to the edge of the gardens to the arbour in which Edwin had died. It was such a gloomy place, and the shrubs about it were becoming more overgrown than ever. It looked eerie, ghostly, as the scene of a tragedy can become when people hate to go there and build up legends about it.
Chastity had let out that the servants said it was haunted. Haunted, I thought, by Edwin. Edwin who had been cut off suddenly with his sins upon him, caught in the act by Old Jethro the reformer. I wondered what Harriet felt when she went past it. She had participated in that death scene and must remember, but she never said anything when the arbour was mentioned. Harriet, I believed, was the sort of woman who in an adventuring life put unpleasant events right out of her memory.
For the last few months there had been complaints about the pigeons and the damage they were doing to the fabric of Eversleigh Court, and the grooms and menservants were constantly taking potshots at them. Ellen said that everyone in the neighbourhood was getting tired of pigeon pie and pigeon stews, or roast pigeon and pigeon cooked in pots.
“I tell them,” she said, “they should be glad of good food whatever it is.”
Carleton had said the boys might shoot at them. A moving target would give them good practice. I often heard them boasting together of the number they had shot. Then they would take them along to the cottage people.
It was one summer day. I was in the garden picking roses and I thought suddenly of another occasion when I had been similarly engaged and when Carleton had come upon me there and how we had talked and bantered and he had asked me to marry him.
The scene of the roses brought back memories of that day vividly and the excitement I felt even though I had pretended not to want him. Then I went on to think of our marriage and the sudden awakening of what was new and exciting in our relationship. What had happened to that now? Perhaps it was impossible to keep passion at such fever heat. Perhaps there had been nothing deeper than that. I kept comparing my relationship with Carleton to that which I had shared with Edwin. How romantic my first marriage had seemed, how perfect! And how foolish of me to think it was so! It has been a sham from the beginning. And yet I could not forget it. It had done something to me. People were affected by experiences, naturally. They became warped and suspicious. That was how I had become with Carleton.
The scent of roses, the heat of the sun on my hands, the buzzing of bees, and memories carried on the warm summer air … and then suddenly … it happened. I was not sure what it was. Except that I fell towards the rosebush and the sky began to recede further and further away. I had put my hand to my sleeve and touched something warm and sticky … I was aware of looking at my hands … They were as red as the roses in my basket. I was lying against the rosebush, slipping silently into the grass. It seemed to take a long time and then there was nothing.
I was in someone’s arms being carried. Carleton. I heard a child’s voice screaming: “I didn’t do it. I didn’t. I didn’t.” Vaguely I thought: That is Leigh. Then a voice—Jasper’s. “You godless imp. You’ve killed the mistress.”
After that the darkness was complete.
I was aware of Carleton all the time. Carleton talking, Carleton bending over me, Carleton angry. “How could this have happened? By God, I’m going to find out …” Carleton tender. “Arabella, my darling, darling Arabella …”
And awakening suddenly, a small figure at my bedside. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t. I didn’t. It came right over my head. It did. It did.”
The light was dim. I opened my eyes.
“Leigh,” I said. “Little Leigh?”
A hot hand seeking my free one. I seemed to have lost the other.
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t. I didn’t.”
Then: “Come away, Leigh.” That was Sally’s voice, gentle, understanding. “She knows you didn’t.”
“Leigh,” I said. “I know.”
Sally said softly: “Poor mite. Brokenhearted he is. They think it was him taking potshots at the pigeons.”
I knew then that I had been shot. As I had put up my hand to pluck the red roses the pellets had entered my arm.
The doctor had removed the pellets. They had been deeply imbedded it seemed, and that was why I had been so ill.
It was a blessing, they said, that they had struck me in the arm.
Carleton was often at my bedside and I felt a great comfort to see him there.
It was three days before he told me. Then I had recovered from the fever which the operation of taking the pellets away had caused.
“I shall never forget it,” he said. “Leigh screaming and running and seeing you there on the grass. I was ready to kill the stupid boy … but I have my doubts now. Do you remember what happened?”
“No. I was picking roses. It was warm and sunny and now and then I heard the sound of shooting. There is nothing exceptional about that. Then it happened. … I didn’t know what it was at first. I heard the shouting and I realized there was blood …”
“So you saw no one?”
“No one at all.”
“Not before you started picking the roses?”
“No. I don’t remember.”
Carleton was silent. “I’ve been very worried, Arabella.”
“Oh, Carleton. I’m glad. I’m so glad you care enough to be worried.”
“Care enough! What are you talking about? Aren’t you my wife? Aren’t I your loving husband?”
“My husband, yes. Loving … I’m not sure …”
“Things have been difficult lately, I know. I expect it’s my fault. All that fuss about the child we lost … as though it was your fault.”