Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [182]
She blushed. ‘I like London,’ she said, ‘and my position. I’m very happy with the Morgans. I didn’t want to be an old maid in Fowey.’
‘I doubt if you would remain unmarried for long,’ Boswell said gallantly.
‘Mary would understand,’ Dolly said, looking to her sister for support.
‘Do you, Mary?’ Boswell asked.
‘I do,’ she said, giving her sister a wry smile. ‘All the years I’ve been away I’ve always imagined you married with a parcel of children. That was what you wanted as a young girl. But whatever the reason you left, you’ve made a good life for yourself. To go back would be like burying yourself alive.’
‘That’s just how it would be,’ Dolly agreed earnestly. ‘I couldn’t change my station in life just because Father had money. We might live in a bigger house, have better clothes and food. But who would I have as friends? My old ones are poor. They would avoid me. The rich people would turn their noses up at me.’
Mary nodded in sympathy. She thought this was very likely. But there was also the question of fortune hunters. Dolly would want a man to love her for herself, not for her money. Mary guessed it could be quite difficult to be certain of a man’s real feelings until well after the wedding.
‘You don’t ever intend to go back?’ Boswell asked Dolly. He wondered if there was already a man in her life. Castel clearly had designs on her, but Boswell didn’t think the attraction was mutual.
‘Maybe in a few years,’ she said, then looking at Mary she smiled. ‘But I think Mary should go. At least to see our folks. They will be so overjoyed to know she is safe and well.’
Mary asked if she was sure their parents didn’t know about what had happened to her.
‘They certainly didn’t when I heard from Father last year. You see, he mentioned you, and said he hoped it was a husband and children which had prevented you returning from Plymouth.’
Mary thought on this for a moment. It seemed almost laughable that her parents had imagined her just forty miles away in Plymouth, when in fact she had been right round the world. If she were to go home, how on earth was she ever going to be able to explain everything she’d done and seen? It was hard enough to deal with her memories, the contrasts, and the sheer distances she’d covered in her life, herself. She didn’t think her mother, who’d never been further than twenty miles from Fowey, could possibly grasp it.
‘Might Father have discovered about me since the letter he sent you?’ she asked.
‘Maybe,’ Dolly said with a frown. ‘Mr Castel told me there was much about you in the newspapers. But if I didn’t hear about it, here in London, why should they, so far away?’
Mary sighed. ‘Perhaps it’s better that they never know about me, Dolly. It’s too shocking.’
‘Better to be a little shocked than to go through life believing their daughter deserted them or is dead,’ Dolly insisted.
Boswell left with Castel and Dolly later, and the two sisters arranged that Dolly would come again on her day off. After they’d gone Mary went off to her room, for she very much wanted to be alone.
She sat by the open window, looking out into the darkness. Sounds of carriage wheels, chatter, laughter, babies crying, and the tinkle of a distant piano wafted up to her on the still, warm air as it had on many an evening since she’d been with Mrs Wilkes. It was the sound of family life going on all around her, and until tonight she had always felt terribly alone when she heard it because fate had estranged her from her own.
Sometimes she had even had cynical thoughts about her freedom. She had thought that although she could walk around the town, she was still shackled mentally by guilt, shame and grief. She knew too that she was utterly dependent on Boswell, and that made him another gaoler of sorts. A kindly one, of course, but he decided everything, where she would go, who she would meet, and provided for her too. Until now she hadn’t been able to see any way that she