Chapter Five

 

I woke twice that night. The first was to Mr. Markham moving against me, his shaft seeking entrance to my cleft, and I sleepily parted my legs, resting one on his hip as my breasts pressed against his chest. I felt lips on my back—Silas was kissing me there—and for several long minutes, there was nothing but slow dreamy thrusts and the press of Silas’ erection against my ass and the sound of skin rasping on fabric. When my orgasm came, it was gentle and sweet, and I was drifting back into sleep even as Mr. Markham shuddered and released into me.

The second time I woke, the floor-length curtains had parted and the blue-black light of early morning limned the window frame and the balcony outside, along with a tall figure. I knew without looking that the man still in bed with me was my own Mr. Markham, but the warmth of the room made the pre-dawn air look cool and attractive, and so in a moment, I was standing next to Silas, wrapped in Mr. Markham’s dressing robe.

He’d pulled on his trousers but nothing else, leaving his ridged and slender torso exposed to the open air. He leaned against the railing, surveying the street below, seeming amused by the early morning bustle of food delivery wagons and street vendors and sporadic hansom cabs.

“Too warm?” he asked, not looking at me.

I affirmed that I was and leaned against the railing as well. The world was a different place in the early morning, when the debauched had finally gone to bed and the industrious were barely awake.

“He’s in love with you, you know,” Silas remarked, still not looking away from the road.

I flushed, wheeling around to make sure Mr. Markham was well asleep and couldn’t hear us talking about him. Satisfied that our conversation was not being eavesdropped upon, I turned back to Silas. “I know.”

Now he turned and braced his back against the railing, folding his arms across his chest. On any other man, the gesture might have seemed hostile or aggressive, but Silas made it seem friendly. Casual. “Do you really?” he asked.

Defensiveness rippled along my skin like invisible chain mail, but I couldn’t refute Silas. It had only been a couple of months, and by any standards, that was too short a time to claim to know someone, however intimately. I barely knew him and I now barely knew myself—I’d always been the girl who had done whatever she wanted, sure, but how could I know that marriage to Mr. Markham wouldn’t cage me instead of free me? I wanted to be next to him always…but what if the institution of marriage, the boundaries that came with it, the expectations…what if they poisoned that love for me? For the first time, the ring on my finger felt more like a shackle than a promise.

Yes, I wanted to say. I knew that he loved me. But there was so much complication surrounding it all that I couldn’t actually find the right words.

Silas and I didn’t speak for a long moment, staying quiet in the breeze.

“He married his first wife in the York Minster,” Silas finally said, nodding his head toward the cathedral towers spiking up above the other buildings. “He loved Arabella, you know. People often think he didn’t, because it was arranged between their parents, but he did. He was wrecked after her death.” He sighed.

I thought of Arabella, of how Mrs. Harold had accused Mr. Markham of intentionally moving her to a climate that would force her death. I wanted to know more about her, about their marriage. “Did he know her before they married?”

Silas nodded. “Her family is well-known in the county—moneyed and connected—and she was the inevitable match for him from her birth. The right breeding and the right dowry. But they had a genuine connection too. They exchanged letters while he was at Oxford and even while he traveled…I think he found something refreshing in her. Something sweet. I would say it was her innocence, but I think it was something slightly different. Rather, I think he felt like she would accept his worldliness, his jadedness, knowingly, and still remain as she was. Much how he feels about you, I suspect.”

I glanced back into the dark room, where the long, languid form of Mr. Markham still stretched across the bed.

“But I’m hardly innocent,” I said, gesturing between me, Silas and the bed. “Certainly not in the unspoiled, untouched way that Arabella must have been.”

Silas shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean that your sense of self—your ability to love and experience and live—it can persist, despite proximity to darker things. Women like Molly, they can get hard. Cynical. They stop trusting and eventually they stop opening their hearts. They calcify, slowly, into living stone. Your cousin was much the same,” Silas said, drawing my thoughts away from Molly. “She was also the opposite of Arabella. Passionate and strong, or so she seemed. And in you, I think Julian has finally found everything he was looking for, the synthesis of what he worshipped about Arabella and craved from Violet. The passion and also the ability to remain unsullied by the world.”

I should say thank you, I should feel flattered. My brain fumbled looking for the appropriate response, all as my heart sank under the weight of this expectation.

I could be Mr. Markham’s lover and I could be his wife…but could I be his moral anchor? Could I bear the weight of another’s heart and mind leaning on mine?

And what if I didn’t remain unsullied? What if I grew hard like Molly or Violet? Despite my determination to never see him with Brightmore, I had never deluded myself into thinking Mr. Markham would remain physically loyal to me for our entire marriage—everyone knew that husbands strayed, even those who were less sexually rapacious than my future spouse. But if he did, could I remain unhardened by that? Could I even remain with him? I wasn’t, after all, bred to endure quietly the way most women were. When things grew painful, my instinct was to flee.

And Silas had mentioned Violet, and that brought to the surface the most pain, the most powerful urges to flee.

“What’s wrong?” Silas asked. “You’ve gone pale. I can see it even in this light.”

I knew that this was one of those situations where I should demur, say something polite and reassuring, but there was no girlhood grooming to take over when my mind and tongue failed, and so the truth came out instead. “There are times when I doubt…when I doubt us. Our future. One moment, I think I can stay next to him forever, and the other moment I feel trapped by it. I feel terrified of him sometimes, that he’ll wound my heart or betray me or—” Or kill me. And grooming or no, I absolutely knew I shouldn’t voice that last out loud, not to his closest friend.

But I couldn’t not stay my tongue either—not completely. I had no one to talk to about this, no one to seek advice from. “The night he proposed,” I said, keeping my eyes on the shadowed bedroom, worried that Mr. Markham would overhear, “he made me promise never to ask about the night Violet died. Why would he do that, Silas, if there wasn’t something awful that he’d done? That he had to keep hidden from me?”

“Ivy,” he started, but I cut him off, pacing.

“I should have said no. I can’t agree to that; I can’t not know. Because what if the rumors are true? What if he did kill her? And what if he kills me?”

Silas stared at me for a long moment, his face creased with deep unhappiness. His characteristic smile was absent when he asked, “Did I ever tell you I was at Markham Hall the night Violet died?”

It took a moment for his words to sink in. When they did, I turned and stared at him. “I didn’t know. Nobody ever mentioned…”

“There were a lot of well-known people there that night, but Julian and the local police very thoughtfully excluded our presence from public knowledge to spare our reputations.”

“I can’t believe Mrs. Harold didn’t tell the entire village,” I said, more to myself than to Silas, thinking of Mrs. Harold’s calculating gossip.

“Mrs. Harold?”

“The rector’s wife?” I prompted. “Young with blonde hair? Slender? Talks incessantly?”

His eyes widened with recollection and something else—something that flashed all too briefly in those blue depths and then vanished. “I remember now,” he said. “You know, she’s grown up in the county too. She always had a thing for Julian, even after he married. Even after she herself got married. She’s always finding excuses to hang around Markham Hall, I suppose hoping that Julian would finally notice her and give her all those things in bed that her feeble pastor cannot.”

“Anyway, what I wanted to tell you,” he said, steering the conversation back to his revelation, “was that night, I saw how deeply unhappy Violet and Julian made each other. He had almost completely reformed himself for her—celibate while he courted her those three months, swearing off any other women. But she didn’t care. She wanted only to be back in London again, to be the belle of the town again.”

“And she was pregnant,” I blurted. I hadn’t meant to tell him, hadn’t meant to bring it up at all, but it was such a shadow at the back of my mind, a shadow that changed everything.

Silas didn’t look surprised. “I know,” he said darkly. “I learned it that night.”

“You did?” I knew it couldn’t have been common knowledge, or Mrs. Harold would have told me all about it.

He nodded. “They fought at the dinner loudly, angrily. He wanted a divorce, she threatened to kill herself if he tried to sue for one. It was quite uncomfortable to listen to, so I suggested the other guests and I move into the parlor, farther away from them, and we all did, to give them more privacy. I was the last to leave the room, and so I believe I was the only one who heard her tell him.”

“About the baby.”

“Yes,” he said, looking troubled. “About the baby.”

“How could she threaten to kill herself when she knew she was pregnant?” I asked. “Even Violet is not that selfish.”

“You know what I think? I think she was desperate. Think about it—both she and Julian knew the child couldn’t be his. If he divorced her and let that be known, the shame would have destroyed her. Her life would have been over, and while I know Julian would have provided for her, she would never be able to show her face in society again. But if she remained married, she’d still have the status of Markham Hall in addition to providing—what the world would believe to be—a firstborn heir. She could still find a way to escape and go back to London through more polite, traditional means.”

“So she had to stay married to him. No matter what.” I chewed on the pad of my thumb as I pictured it all—Violet’s fair face alight with fear and rage, Mr. Markham’s rigid with anger and rejection.

“But she hated him,” Silas reminded me. “Had it simply been a question of accepting his wife’s sin—a sin that happened before their nuptials—then I have no doubt he would have accommodated. Raised the child as his own. But she made him acutely miserable, made it clear that she hated him and hated being married to him. She called him names I’ve never heard—even at school—not to mention she’d been sleeping with his valet, Gerald.”

“Gareth,” I corrected. “Why on earth does Mr. Markham keep him employed? Surely that would be grounds for letting him go?”

Silas gave me another smile, rueful this time. “I suppose there was a sense of brotherly suffering. You never saw Violet in her prime, did you? She was relentless and devastating and the mistress of the estate. No gentleman could have refused her. Certainly no servant in her employ. I think it was apparent from fairly early on that he had been coerced by the nature of his position to capitulating, and Mr. Markham felt sympathetic to that. Given that Violet had seduced and hoodwinked him as well.”

It was all so complicated, this mix of loyalties and betrayals. I couldn’t keep track of who deserved my sympathy and who deserved my disregard, and I certainly couldn’t keep straight how much fear I should allot to Mr. Markham.

And as much as I wanted to trust Silas, as much as I instinctively liked him, he was Mr. Markham’s oldest friend. They shared a bed and they shared women—would they also not share and keep each other’s secrets? How could I be certain that Silas wasn’t deluded—or worse, lying to protect my future husband?

The sun was truly dawning now, pink and orange streaks radiating past the pitched roofs and gables of the city. More people crowded the streets, the din of wheels and voices beginning to soar above the paving stones to mingle with the birds chirping and the wind blowing past swinging signs and creaking branches.

“I am telling you this,” Silas said, as if tuned into my thoughts, “because most people don’t know, but I think you deserve to. And Julian deserves your trust. See, after that horrific fight, she vanished. Disappeared. Julian joined us in the parlor, saying that Violet had gone to her room to rest, but would be down shortly. She never came.”

“Did you look for her?”

“Yes. He didn’t want to highlight her absence, so he waited until the guests had left, and he and I searched the house and grounds. The housekeeper helped too. That’s when he told me that Violet had taunted him about her and Gareth, threatened to sleep with Gareth that very night to prove Mr. Markham’s impotence when it came to following through on his threats of divorce. He was furious, expecting to come upon the two in every corner, and also terrified, because Violet had really sounded hysterical enough to hurt herself, and he worried for her safety.”

“How could she say such things?” I wondered. “About Gareth, I mean, when her position was so tenuous? Surely she would be more calculating than that.”

“She was like a cornered animal, ready to lash out at anything and anyone. For what it’s worth, it deeply wounded Julian. Fidelity is something he prizes himself on—don’t look so surprised, Miss Leavold—and he was unfailingly faithful to both Arabella and Violet.”

“It’s not hard to be faithful for a month,” I said, more to myself than to Silas.

He heard anyway. “Don’t be so suspicious. He would have been loyal to both of them until the end of his days. But it cuts both ways: he expected the same loyalty of Violet and she so blatantly refused. Yes, this understandably hurt and angered him very much.”

Silas might have been trying to reassure me, but I felt anything but reassured in that moment. All he had conjured in my mind was the image of jealous wrath, of a black bitter hurt that might not have thought twice about cutting a strap on a saddle.

“What I’m trying to say is that despite his anger and jealousy, Julian still searched everywhere. He still worried about her. And when we couldn’t find her, he sent a servant to Scarborough to notify the constables and mobilize a larger search. We agreed to sleep for a few hours, and then resume looking at dawn.”

“But she was dead by dawn.”

“Yes.”

Mr. Markham was stirring now, and the sound of his long limbs moving in the sheets made me drop my voice and step closer to Silas. “So you were apart from him for part of the night?”

“Yes, but Ivy, he couldn’t have murdered Violet. What man searches for a woman in the frozen dark for hours, sends for the police, and then decides to kill her a couple hours later? What kind of man would do that?”

I didn’t know. Because part of me didn’t know what kind of man Mr. Markham was at all.