Chapter 18

“I brought the calendars.” Tait strode across the library, a satchel in hand. “I have no idea why you’d want to see them after all these years, but a farmer keeps records almost as religiously as a clerk tends his ledgers.” He extracted a stack of documents and passed them to me.

He looked hale, windblown, and worried. He’d galloped cross-country, in other words, rather than sedately hacking about on the lanes or impressing the grazing livestock with his majestic coach.

“The calendars are appreciated,” I said, putting them on the reading table, “and Evelyn’s diaries are on the sideboard. Care for a drink?”

“Lemonade would do. I’m not in the mood for spirits.”

I poured him some of Mrs. Gwinnett’s meadow tea. “Try this. I adore it. Has a touch of sweetness, very refreshing. The honey blends well with the mint and the whisper of black tea. Mrs. Gwinnett says reused tea leaves are the secret.”

He sampled his drink. “A fine libation. My compliments to your kitchen, but, my lord, what the hell am I doing here? Have you news that cannot be entrusted to a messenger?”

“You are hearing a report I would not set down in writing because letters can be intercepted or misinterpreted. I visited Hasborough Cottage yesterday, though it might soon be renamed Mainwaring Manor.”

Tait wandered to the French doors with his drink. “Evvie’s farm. A lovely place. Every few months, I ride over that way and have a gander at it. They pay their rents to the penny, and the land prospers. I wish I could tell Evvie that.”

I poured myself half a glass and took a seat at the reading table. “You don’t drop in on the tenants?” I searched through the calendars until I found the year Evelyn had gone missing.

“The Mainwarings are not my tenants,” Tait said. “They are Evvie’s tenants, and she was very protective of that place. It was hers, or soon will be.”

“And she, or somebody impersonating her, has arranged to sell it to Mainwaring for a very tidy sum. With that money in hand, she’ll be able to live comfortably in Paris for all the rest of her days.”

“Paris?” Tait pushed away from the doorjamb. “You think she’s in Paris? My French is awful, but harvest is going well, and the packets from Dover run nigh daily anymore.”

“Tait, I do not know what Evelyn plans to do with the proceeds of the sale. I do know you’ve been lying to me.”

“About what?” He was annoyed, a man who’d been at the end of his tether too long, and for our audience to hear just how far he’d been pushed was a good thing.

“You were faithful to your wife. Those widows and jaded women and bed-hopping countesses were actresses in a drama you put on for Evelyn’s benefit. I’ve spoken with Mrs. Probinger, and she said when she tried to so much as kiss your cheek, you all but climbed the nearest oak tree to get away from her.”

“Bold little thing.” He was affronted that one of his fellow performers had had a script of her own. “I couldn’t very well plant her a facer for taking liberties. A little gallantry to another woman was all it took to get Evvie fuming, but I never meant… There are more lonely women on this earth than one rural bachelor can fathom, my lord. In any case, my tactic failed. Evvie stopped noticing with whom I exchanged flatteries, and then she just got quiet.

“I hated that,” he went on. “When she grew indifferent. That’s the worst. We talked about everything at first, and then we couldn’t talk about anything. As if I could ever be with another woman after speaking my vows to Evvie. She spoiled me for all others, and then she wouldn’t have me. She got it into her head that I was straying, and I got it into my head that she needed to see that others would have me even if she wouldn’t. The quintessential marital impasse, and I still don’t understand how it happened.”

With any luck, that was about to change. “If you could speak to your wife now, what would you say to her?”

Tait sighed, closed his eyes, and tilted his head back. “That’s easy. I’ve had five years to consider what I will say if providence should reunite us. I would tell her that I love her, that I’m sorry. I am just so perishing sorry, and I miss her until I ache with it, and please come home. If she won’t come home, I simply need to know that she’s well and happy. If she wants an annulment, a separation, to live in Town or Paris or Cathay… I cannot dwell in uncertainty without her anymore.”

From the mezzanine above, I heard a stirring, but Tait, so far gone in his lamentations, apparently hadn’t.

“What about that business with Mrs. Ingersoll?” I asked. “You were dishonest with her, and you appeared genuinely interested, according to the lady.”

Tait opened his eyes and sent me a quizzical look. “Damnedest thing, that. She reminds me of Evvie, in a way. She’s not as grand as my Evvie, not as fashionable, not quite as sharp-tongued, but she gives as good as she gets, and she’s devoted to that child. Evvie longed for children, and I sometimes think…” He resumed his tragic post at the French doors. “All that’s neither here nor there. I suppose I’d best pack for Paris.”

A substantial tread set the metal frame on the spiral staircase shaking. Mrs. Ingersoll, looking like the Avenging Angel of Wronged Womanhood, descended the steps and stalked across the room to the French doors.

“A fine speech, John Tait, but you did not know your own wife when you attempted to kiss her.”

Tait’s mouth opened. He raised a hand a few inches from his side, dropped it, shut his mouth.

Hyperia came down the steps more quietly as I rose from the table, and Tait studied the lady before him.

“Evvie’s hair was curly. People’s hair doesn’t change.”

“Damn you, John Tait. I used the rubbishing curling tongs nigh daily to look pretty for you.” A world of despair lay in that admission and queendoms of hurt and anger. “I know I’ve lost a good deal of weight. Between worry and penury, a body forgets to eat. But I am still your wife even if you can’t recognize me, and I want an annulment. I will have an annulment.”

“Evelyn.” Tait was smiling at her as if he beheld salvation itself rather than a woman at her wits’ end. “You are well. You are alive, and you are well.”

“An annulment,” Hyperia said quietly, “means Merri becomes illegitimate.”

“That can’t be true,” Evelyn spat, though Hyperia had voiced a simple, legal fact.

I collected the calendars from the reading table. “It shouldn’t be true, but that’s how an annulment works. Might I offer you some libation, Mrs. Tait?”

“I don’t want any wretched libation, and I don’t want to be married to this… this rural rogue. I’m selling my farm to get away from him once and for all.”

“Evvie,” Tait began, “please don’t be so angry. If you love another, you can tell me. Something went awry between us, and I don’t like it—I hate the very notion, in fact—but if Merri’s father is your choice, then I will reconcile myself to that reality.”

I’d never heard Tait speak so plainly, so quietly. “Look at the calendar from five years ago, Tait. You’ll find an X marked about every twenty-eighth day for the whole year until September. No X in September. Merri is your daughter.”

Tait blinked, and then the farmer in him handed the sense of my statement to the husband. “Evvie? Is his lordship correct?”

“You won’t believe me if I say yes.” Evelyn was no longer fuming. Instead, she’d taken on some of Tait’s martyred resignation. “I know you won’t believe me, but yes, she’s your daughter. No other candidates in the running. Plain, overly tall women running to fat don’t get those sorts of offers.”

“You’re not plain,” Tait said. “You were never plain. You were never fat or overly tall. You were grand and robust, and now you are positively striking. Curse me all you like, Evelyn, but don’t say a single word in self-denigration.”

She sank into a chair at the reading table. “Spare me your gallantries. You will need them for every other woman in your ambit. I heard all that blather about keeping your vows, John. You kept your pants on, possibly, but you betrayed me just the same, and you will never change.”

I understood in that moment why a sensible village would have a designated spot for remonstrating with scolds, inebriates, and reprobates. We had no Chiding Stone at Caldicott Hall, but we didn’t need one.

We had Lord Julian Caldicott, who now, apparently, included the resolution of marital discord among his varied talents.

“It seems to me,” I said, joining Evelyn at the table, “that you, madam, are the party who is overdue to mend her ways. You need to stop listening to that pair of harpies you call your sisters and uphold the vows you took on your wedding day.”

A younger Evelyn might well have slapped me for that bit of pomposity. This one regarded me with glittering, hurt-filled eyes.

“I did not imagine John’s behavior,” she said with considerable dignity. “He’s the consoler, flirt, and cajoler at large.”

“He’s friendly,” I retorted, “not too high in the instep, and you used to love that about him. But allow me to speculate. Mrs. Margery Semple kindly passed along to you some incident she claimed to have observed, where John had his hand on a lady’s person, or was whispering in some belle’s ear behind the livery. In a fit of pique, you took to locking your bedroom door.”

Evelyn’s ire drained into puzzlement. “How could you know that?”

And thus was my theory of the case confirmed. “Just as you were talking yourself into forgiving John,” I went on, “for a slight that was, I suspect, entirely imaginary, Margery would come up with a gentle warning about John bantering with some sweet young thing. Ardath would pass along an on-dit from some source she never named, though John was always painted as the villain. This spite was reluctantly poured into your ear with the best of sororal intentions, of course, or so they claimed. You could have told them both to shut their mouths and leave you in peace, but instead, you locked your bedroom door.”

“I unlocked it,” Evelyn retorted, “any number of times. I told myself I had to try again, to be patient, to look for the good. Then Margery said John had nearly compromised Ardie, and unlocking my door became harder and harder.”

“Me? Compromise Ardath?” Tait sank into a chair opposite Evelyn’s. “That is rank… Ardath threw herself at me, Evvie. She was your little sister, like my own sister, or so I thought of her. I didn’t realize she had designs on my person until I was all but peeling her off of me. I told Margery that Ardath needed a husband before the blasted chit attempted the same behavior on a less gentlemanly victim.”

“And now,” Hyperia murmured, taking a seat at the foot of the table, “Ardath blames John for precipitating a less-than-satisfying union.”

Evelyn tidied up the stack of calendars until they were perfectly aligned. “Ardath said John all but ravished her. That was my first clue that my sisters were not exactly impartial where John was concerned. John wasn’t that fond of Ardath. He spoke of her as a pest, giddy, foolish… He might have bussed her cheek or put an arm around her shoulders, but near ravishment was an exaggeration at best. Even I knew that, or I eventually figured it out.”

I was at the head of the table, not by design. “Ardath overplayed her hand. Did anything else in your sisters’ behavior give you pause?”

Evelyn twisted the ring on her fourth finger, a simple gold band like a thousand others, much plainer than the hoard she had sold.

“When I left,” she said, “I was furious. John had forgotten our anniversary. Margery warned me that husbands do that, but I thought John would be different. He’d always remembered before… but Margery was right, and I was exhausted and out of sorts. Breeding, though I didn’t know it at the time. I have a temper. It’s a failing. But I could not take another excuse, another apology. I presented myself on Ardath’s doorstep, and she was so welcoming…”

Evelyn removed the ring and peered at the inside. “Love conquers all. That’s what’s inscribed here. In Latin, because John knew I love my letters. Amor omnia vincit.” She put the ring back on. “Ardath said she didn’t know how I’d lasted as long as I had under John Tait’s roof, and in the mood I was in—then—that sounded like sympathy and understanding. I craved sympathy and understanding.”

“That wasn’t all she offered,” Hyperia muttered. “Her sympathy came at a cost, didn’t it?”

“Of course. Not much at first. Ardath claimed having me in her household meant she had to increase her staff, spend more at market, do more laundry… She hated to ask me, but I did have ‘all those pearls,’ and ‘money doesn’t grow on trees.’ I never liked Grandmama’s pearls. Pity pearls, I called them. We should have split them up and given them to our granddaughters, but no. I was to parade around in the lot of them.”

Why hadn’t Dante fashioned a circle of hell for jealous, conniving siblings? “Then you realized that you were with child,” I suggested, “and the situation became more complicated.”

Tait, who had been silent for some time, regarded his wife with utter seriousness. “Merri is our daughter? Your word on that?”

Evelyn’s gaze roved from the shelves marching along the inside wall, to the spiral staircase, to me, to the calendars.

“I have already given you my word, John. Ardie and Margery insisted you would not believe Merri is yours. I refuse to spend the rest of my life begging you to accept that truth. Do you believe she is our daughter?”

The fate of the marriage hung on that one quiet question, as did the potential happiness of one small, innocent child.

“Your sisters told you that you were plain,” Tait said gently. “They were wrong about that, Evelyn. They were wrong about a lot of things.”

Evelyn sat up very tall. “But?”

“But nothing,” Tait replied. “If you say Merri is my daughter, then she’s my daughter, and there’s an end to it. You need to know I will not consent to have my offspring made illegitimate just so you can be free of me. Living apart will be scandalous for such as us, though the nobs consider it fashionable, but if that’s what you want, then we’ll dwell separately.”

Evelyn stared at her hands, mannish in their breadth and strength and trembling slightly. “And Merri? Will you take her from me? Ardath and Margery insisted you would, that it’s your right, and they aren’t wrong about the law.”

The sheer meanness of Margery and Ardath’s scheming would have shamed Old Scratch himself.

“That pair of hissing vipers,” Tait muttered. “God pity their husbands and children.”

“Merri is your daughter in fact and by law,” Evelyn said, voice low. “Will you take her from me?”

We had finally reached the part of the investigation that answered the why questions. Why not come home, negotiate a truce, and resume life? Why not write to the estranged husband and demand terms? Why not pursue the annulment? Why such desperate measures for so long? The explanation was simple.

After years of longing for a child, Evelyn Tait had one daughter. Her worst fear would be losing that child to an angry, vindictive husband. A husband who grew more entitled to his bitterness with each passing season. She’d spent too much time in the company of siblings intent on exploiting that fear as only siblings could. Then too, her conscience had whispered that her precipitous flight had been a mistake, compounded by the further mistake of trusting her sisters.

Evelyn was guilty and afraid but, above all, determined.

“Why can’t Merri have you both?” I asked. “If an annulment is off the table, and separation means the child remains a stranger to her father, why not consider the remaining, sensible option?”

Tait looked at me as if I’d burst forth with a Basque drinking song. “And that would be?”

Hyperia stated the obvious. “You can reconcile. No annulment, Merri has two parents, and Margery and Ardath have nothing to say to anything, ever again.”

The silence that sprang up was complicated. Then Evelyn began to cry. Tait came around the table, took the seat beside her, and passed her his handkerchief.

“We’d like some privacy,” he said, patting Evelyn’s shoulder. “Please, we’d like some privacy now.”

Hyperia nearly raced me to the door, slowing only so I could open it for her. I’d barely set foot in the corridor before she was in my arms, sniffling against my shoulder and holding on to me for dear life.