New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [134]
“He’s the image of my father, actually,” James replied.
“Oh,” she said sadly. “Is that it?” And she put little Weston down, without enthusiasm, so that James could only wonder whether she had affection for either him or for his son.
It was shortly after this incident that James encountered Benjamin Franklin in the Strand. When he introduced himself and explained who he was, the great man was friendly. “Come back to my lodgings,” he said, “and let us talk.”
As always, Franklin was enlightening. They spoke of the Patriot cause, and James related the conversation he’d had with young Hughes.
“I confess,” he told Franklin, “that I have often pondered his words since, and wondered whether he may be right. Perhaps a fundamental agreement between the British government and the American colonies can never be reached.”
But Franklin was more sanguine.
“I cannot fault your young friend’s logic,” he said cheerfully. “But the political art uses negotiation and compromise rather than logic. The question is not whether the British Empire makes sense, but whether men can live together in it. That’s the thing. I am still hopeful that we can, and I trust you will be too.”
It was in a happier mood that James walked back from the Strand to Piccadilly. Turning up into Mayfair and arriving at the house, he was let in by the butler, who informed him that his wife had a lady visitor, and that they were in the small drawing room. Ascending the stairs, James came to the drawing-room door, and was just about to let himself in when he heard his wife’s voice.
“I can scarcely bear it. Every day under this roof has become a torture.”
“It cannot be so bad,” he heard the visitor say gently.
“It is. I am trapped in a marriage with a colonial. A colonial who wants to drag me to his cursed colony. I tremble that if we go there he might want to stay.”
“Stay in America, when he has the chance to live in London? I cannot think it.”
“You do not know him. You cannot imagine what he’s like.”
“You told me that as a husband he is …”
“Oh, I do not complain of his manhood. For a time I even loved him, I think. But now … I cannot bear his touch.”
“These things are not so uncommon in a marriage. They may pass.”
“They will not. Oh, how could I have been such a fool, to trap myself with him? And all because of his cursed child.”
“Do not say such things, Vanessa. Does he know your feelings?”
“He? The colonial? Know? He knows nothing.”
James turned silently from the door. He knows now, he thought grimly. Going downstairs, he told the butler that there was no need to mention to his wife that he had been there, because he had just remembered that he had an errand to run. He did not return for over an hour.
In the year that followed, James went about his business as usual. He watched carefully for signs from his wife—either of the loathing she had concealed, or of any improvement in her feelings toward him. He could detect neither. Knowing her feelings kept him, for the most part, from her bed, and she made no complaint of this. Occasionally she gave indications that she expected his attentions, and as she was an attractive woman, and he a vigorous man, he was able to satisfy her when she wished. For the rest, he patronized a certain discreet establishment in Mayfair where the girls were reputed to be clean. And truth to tell, he sometimes wondered if he would even keep up the miserable pretense of his marriage, if it were not for little Weston.
As news of one outrage after another came from the American colonies, as the cause of the Patriots rose, and the Congress met in Philadelphia—and as the British government remained obtuse in meeting every challenge—James often thought of his dear family in New York, and his little son in London, and wondered: Did he really want little Weston to be part of his mother’s world, or to live in the cleaner, more simple world in which he had been raised himself?
How he longed to take Weston over to meet his grandparents.