"In your book, maybe. Not in mine. Committing yourself to a person is no different from committing yourself to a belief. Why, if you couldn't bear to impregnate your wife, were you so unconcerned about impregnating your mistress?" Two spots of colour flared high on her cheekbones, and she turned away abruptly. "Let bygones be bygones. I don't want to talk about it any more."
"Why not?" he said. "I'm having a hell of a good time." He linked his hands behind his head and grinned at her rigid back. "You've put me through hell these last twelve months. You yank me out of London without a 'by your leave' or a 'do you mind?'. Stick me in the middle of nowhere with a 'take it or leave it, Jack, you're only my shit of a husband.' " His eyes narrowed. "I've put up with Cock Robin Hewitt strutting his stuff about my kitchen, leering at you and treating me like something the dog threw up. I've smiled while mental midgets pissed on my work, because I'm just the bum who likes nothing better than scrounging off his wife. And on top of all that I've had to listen to Keith Smollett lecturing me on your virtues. In all that time only one person, and this includes you, ever treated me as if I were human-and that was Mathilda. But for her, I'd have walked out in September and left you to stew in your own complacent juice."
She kept her back towards him. "Why didn't you?"
"Because, as she kept reminding me, I'm your husband," he growled. "Jesus, Sarah, if I didn't think what we had was worth something, why would I have married you in the first place? I didn't have to, for Christ's sake. No one held a gun to my head. I wanted to."
"Then why-?" She didn't go on.
"Why did I get Sally pregnant? I didn't. I never even slept with the horrible little bitch. I painted her portrait because she thought I was going places after the Bond Street dealer clinched my one and only sale." He gave a hollow laugh. "She wanted to hitch her wagon to a rising star, the way she's hitched it to every other rising star she's ever met. Which is what I painted, of course-a lazy parasite with pretensions to greatness. She has hated me ever since. If you'd told me she was claiming me as the father of her unwanted baby I'd have set you straight, but you didn't trust me enough to tell me." His voice hardened. "You sure as hell trusted her, though, and you didn't even like the bloody woman."
"She was very plausible."
"Of course she was plausible!" he roared. "She's a fucking actress, and I use the word advisedly. When are you going to open your eyes, woman, and see people in the round, their dark sides, their bright sides, their strengths, their weaknesses? Dammit, you should have let your passions go, clawed my miserable eyes out, slashed my balls-anything-if you thought I'd two-timed you." His voice softened. "Don't you love me enough to hate me, Sarah?"
"You bastard, Blakeney," she said, turning round and raking him from head to toe with glittering eyes. "You will never know how unhappy I've been."
"And you have the nerve to accuse me of being self-centred. What about my unhappiness?"
"Yours is easily cured," she said.
"It damn well isn't."
"It damn well is."
"How?"
"A little massage to ease the stiffness and then a kiss to make it better."
"Ah," he said thoughtfully, "well, it's certainly a start. But bear in mind the condition's chronic and needs repeated applications. I do not want a relapse."
"It'll cost you, though."
He eyed her through half-closed lids. "I thought it sounded too good to be true." He dug in his pocket. "How much?"
She cuffed him lightly across the head. "Information only. Why did Mathilda have a row with Jane Marriott on the morning she died? Why did Mathilda cry when you showed her your painting? And why did Mathilda leave me her money? I know they're all related, Jack, and I know Cooper knows the answer. I saw it in his eyes last night."
"No massage if you don't get the answer, I suppose."
"Not for you. I'll offer it to Cooper instead. One of you is bound to tell me in the end."
"You'd kill the poor old chap. He goes into spasms if you touch his hand." He drew her down on to his lap. "It won't make it any easier if I tell you," he warned. "In fact it'll make it harder. I know you too well." Whatever guilt she felt now, he thought, would be nothing compared with the agonies of wondering if she had unwittingly conned Mathilda into believing she was adopted. And what would it do to her relationship with Jane Marriott? Knowing Sarah, she would feel duty-bound to tell Jane the truth, and push the poor woman away with a surfeit of honesty. "I made Mathilda a promise, Sarah. I really don't want to break it."
"You broke it when you told Cooper," she pointed out.
"I know, and I'm not happy about it, any more than I was happy about breaking my promise to Ruth." He sighed. "But I really did have no option. He and the Inspector were convinced the will was the motive for Mathilda's murder and I had to explain why she made it."
Sarah stared at Mathilda's portrait. "She made it because she was buying her rite of passage into immortality and she didn't trust Joanna or Ruth to deliver the goods for her. They would have squandered the money while she trusted me to build the "something worthwhile in her memory.'" She sounded bitter, Jack thought. "She knew me well enough to know I wouldn't spend a bequest on myself, particularly one to which I felt I had no right."
"She wasn't that cynical, Sarah. She made no secret of her fondness for you."
But Sarah was still absorbed in the portrait. "You haven't explained," she said suddenly, "why you went to stay with Sally that weekend?" She turned to look at him. "But that was a lie, wasn't it? You went somewhere else." She put her small hands on his shoulders. "Where, Jack?" She shook him when he didn't answer. "It had something to do with Mathilda's weeping and, presumably, her will, too, though you didn't know it at the time." He could almost hear her mind working. "And whatever it was required your absence for that weekend without my knowing where you were going." She searched his face. "But for all she knew she would live for another twenty years, so why tell you something now that wouldn't have any real impact until after she was dead?"
"She didn't intend to tell me. I was a very reluctant recipient of her confession." He sighed. Sooner or later, he realized, Sarah would find out that he had stayed with her father and why he had gone there. "A year or so after Joanna was born, she had a second daughter by Paul Marriott, whom she put up for adoption. For all sorts of reasons she persuaded herself that you were her lost daughter, and she told me she'd changed her will in your favour." He gave a wry smile. "I was so shocked that I didn't know what to do. Say nothing and let you inherit under false pretences? Tell her the truth and shatter her illusions? I decided to put the decision on hold while I went to see if your father had something I could show her." He shook his head ironically. "But when I got back Mathilda was dead, the police were searching around for a murder motive, and I was the only person who knew Mathilda had left you a fortune. It was a nightmare. All I could see was that you and I would be arrested for conspiracy unless I kept my mouth shut. We couldn't prove I hadn't told you about the will, and you had no alibi." He gave a low laugh. "Then out of the blue you offered me my marching orders and I realized the best thing I could do was grab them with both hands and leave you thinking I was a miserable bastard. You were so hurt and angry that, for once in your life, you didn't try to hide your emotions, and Cooper received a hefty dose of transparent honesty. You showed him everything from shock about the will to complete bewilderment that I'd been able to paint Mathilda's portrait without your knowing." He laughed again. "You got us both off the hook without even realizing what you were doing."