Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [164]
“It is my error,” he went on, looking not at her but at his plate. Neither of them could eat. “I married Fanny’s mother when I was twenty and she seventeen. We thought we loved each other. She was so very pretty, full of life and laughter …” For a moment his face softened. “Like Fanny herself.” He sighed. “For four years everything was happy; Fanny was born, and then James. Then when James was still a baby, Lucy changed completely. She became infatuated with a dance teacher, of all things. I suppose I was absorbed in my work. I was an aspiring lawyer then, trying to take all the cases I could, and finding it hard to make sufficient money to keep us well—and I was ambitious.”
Charlotte took a bite of her meal, but her attention was undivided.
“I left her too much alone, I accept. And I was not yet in that place in society or income where I could offer her the pastimes she wished.” He shrugged. “She left her home and went off with the dancing master, taking the children with her.”
Charlotte was stunned. She knew the law regarding errant wives and their children.
“Did you not require that she at least leave the children in your custody?” she asked in surprise. “Even if you did not wish her back.”
He blushed. “No. I thought of it—and the embarrassment of admitting that my wife had run off with a dancing master. It hurt that I should lose my children, but what could I offer them? A nurse to care for them while I was working. She loved them and was a good mother.”
“And the dancing master?”
“It did not last.” There was pity both in his face and in his voice. “In two years he died of typhus, which was perhaps less cruel than if he had deserted her. She was living in the house off the Kennington Road, which he owned, and it became hers.” He colored with awareness of guilt. “Of course I should have divorced her, but I was ashamed of the scandal. And since I was in law, my friends would have known and I could not bear their pity. I could not afford to entertain, and with two nursing children Lucy had not had the inclination to accept invitations which we could not return. They did not know I was married, and so I simply said nothing.”
“What about her parents?” Charlotte asked.
“Lucy was an orphan. Her guardian, an elderly uncle, had nothing more to do with her personally after our marriage. He considered finding her a husband a discharge to his duty towards her.”
“And you did not take her back? Or your children?”
“Neither Lucy nor I had any desire to live under one roof anymore. And it would have been cruel and pointless for me to demand the children. I had no wife at that time who could raise them, and as I have already admitted, I did not wish the world to know of my unfortunate relationship.” He looked up at her, his eyes soft in spite of the misery in them. “And by then I had met Regina, and learned to love her in a way I had not loved Lucy. I was desperate she should not know of any earlier marriage. Her parents would never have looked upon me favorably. It was hard enough to persuade them I could provide for her adequately as it was …” He stopped, looking up at her.
It was not an attractive story and he was painfully aware of it, yet she could very easily understand how it had happened. Told in the space of a few minutes it was bereft of the shock, the sense of humiliation and loneliness; the young man fall of overwhelming inadequacy, fearing ridicule, coming home tired to the house where so shortly before he had been met by wife and children, now finding only servants, polite, distant and unsympathetic.
At last he had simply denied it, pushed it from