A False Mirror - Charles Todd [17]
“You should have thought of that before you got me into this muddle.”
“But Nan had seen you. I couldn’t pretend you weren’t here. She’d have told them everything she knows and made up the rest. You don’t know her. All I could think of was that Nan must surely have heard you say you still loved me. It’s all they needed to be told, Bennett was already saying at the surgery that you and I—” She stopped. “What have I done?”
“I don’t see any way out of this.” He glanced toward the revolver. “It would solve everything if I just went into the garden and ended it, and let them think what they like.”
Felicity was out of her chair, picking up the revolver and shoving it into the desk drawer again, turning the key and then putting it in her pocket.
“No, don’t ever say that again. We’ll find a way. Matthew’s man of business—we can ask to speak to him, and tell him the truth.”
“He’s never liked you, Felicity. You know that as well as I do.”
It was true. Mr. Caldwell had had his hands on Matthew’s fortune for years, managing it while Hamilton was out of the country. He blamed Felicity for the fact that Hamilton had retired early and demanded an accounting. She’d always wondered if he had made free with the funds from time to time, when his own accounts were in arrears. If that was true, he’d covered his tracks by the time Matthew resumed management of his money.
He would like nothing better than to watch Matthew Hamilton’s wife begging him to defend her former lover. And then refuse her pleas.
“Where else can we turn?” She considered the rector and the vestry members, rejecting them one by one. They would hardly defy the police on her account.
For the first time she realized how foolish she’d been to antagonize the people Matthew had tried to cultivate in his new circumstances. Unaccustomed to the narrowness of village life, she’d been quickly bored by the people here, and with them, and had told herself that soon enough Matthew would be as well. That this would become their country house for the summer months, not their year-round residence. In which case they needn’t concern themselves with Hampton Regis’s dull pretense at Society.
She had slowly come to understand that he liked this part of England, that he intended to live here because it was where he’d hoped to live in his retirement. It had been too late then to undo the first impression she must have made, and her pride kept her from acknowledging her error to the likes of Miss Trining. But she should have swallowed her pride and made the effort, if need be she should have walked on hot coals barefoot for Matthew’s sake. Instead, Matthew’s charm had become the key to her acceptance here, and she had no illusions about that now, when she was in need of kindness.
The Restons and Miss Trining and the others would relish watching her being dragged through the mire. It was what happened to older men who lost their heads and married unwisely, they would say. A beauty, perhaps, but look what such beauty came to, in the end. So sordid.
Desperate now, she added, “Someone in London, do you think? Friends of your uncle, the bishop?”
But his uncle the bishop had died in the autumn.
“No, they’d be useless.” He paused, then said with obvious reluctance, “Scotland Yard.” Even as he did, Stephen Mallory knew what Dr. Beatie would tell him: Don’t open that wound again. You aren’t healed yet, you can’t take the risk.
He got to his feet, unable to sit still.
He wouldn’t have to deal with the man, surely?
He could just put his case to the Yard, and they’d send someone.
No, they wouldn’t, not when they heard what Bennett had to say.
He could feel his body tighten and his mind shut itself away. Even if he sent for the Captain, the man wouldn’t come, not when he realized who was asking for help. Yet where else could they turn, he and Felicity, after what he’d done and she had compounded this day?
But not the Captain—please God, not the Captain!
He stood there looking down into Felicity’s face, despair sweeping him with