Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [97]
There was horror in Caroline’s eyes, but denial was slowly being replaced by the beginning of pity.
“You always said . . . you said you loved him . . .” she began. “He was so . . . such a wonderful man . . . you said you were so happy!”
The old lady felt the bitter heat of shame in her cheeks. “What would you have said?” she asked. “The truth?”
“No . . .” There were tears in Caroline’s voice. “Of course not. I don’t know . . . I don’t know what I would have done. I can’t imagine it . . . I can’t . . . I don’t know. It . . .” She did not say it was not true, but it was there in her voice, her face, the stiff, tight angle of her shoulders.
“You can’t believe it!” It was a challenge, laying bare her own humiliation and her cowardice all those years. No one would believe that Alys left, her courage, her dignity, and Mariah remained, to be used like an animal.
“I . . .” Caroline stopped, lifting her hands helplessly.
“Why didn’t I go . . . as Alys did?” The words were torn out, like barbed wire. “Because I am a coward.” There it was, the lowest ugliness of all, the loathing, the self-disgust, not just that she had been reduced to bestiality, her human dignity stripped from her, but that she had stayed and allowed it to go on happening. She made no excuses. There were none. Whatever Caroline thought of her, it could not equal the contempt she had for herself.
Caroline looked at the old woman’s face, tight and crumpled with pain and years of bitterness. The self-hatred was naked in her eyes, and the despair.
She rejected the idea. It was obscene. And yet it made a hideous sense. Part of her believed it already. But if it was true, it shattered so much of her world, the ideals and the people she had trusted. If behind the self-composed manner, the smile and the Sunday prayers, Edmund Ellison had been a sexual sadist, submitting his wife to humiliating cruelties in the secrecy of their own bedroom, then who, anywhere, was what he seemed? If even his familiar face hid ugliness so appalling her imagination refused to grasp it, then what was safe . . . anywhere?
And yet looking at the old woman in front of her, she could not push the truth of it away. Something terrible had happened to her. Something had precipitated the years of anger and cruelty she had exercised on her family. The hatred she seemed to feel for the world, anyone and everyone, was really for herself. She saw the worst in others because she saw it in her own heart. And for years she had despised her inability to fight against it, to defend her humanity from degradation and pain. She was a coward, and she knew it. She had submitted, and endured, rather than run away into the dangerous and unknown as Alys had done, alone, penniless, with nothing but her courage and her desperation. No wonder Samuel admired his mother so profoundly.
Mariah had stayed with her husband, living with it, night after night, putting on a brave, smooth face every day, then going up to her bedroom knowing what would happen . . . and it had, year after year, until he had finally died and set her free. Except that she was not free, she was as much imprisoned as when he had been alive, because the memory and the loathing were still there, locked inside her.
“Did you really think Samuel would tell anyone?” Caroline said gently, not knowing why these words came to her lips.
There were tears in the old lady’s eyes, although no one else would ever know whether they were grief, rage or self-pity.
“He knew . . . at least . . .” Suddenly her eyes were hollow with doubt. “I think he did. He might have told, but I couldn’t live with the uncertainty . . . if he . . .”
Caroline waited.
The old lady sniffed. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. You didn’t deserve that. I . . . I wish I hadn’t.”
Caroline reached forward and very tentatively touched the ancient hand lying on the black skirt. It was stiff and cold under her fingers.
“There