Chapter 34

34

Isabella was very anxious to leave Castle Irlam. The passage of time wasn't making it any easier to be in Leo's company, even if they barely spoke to each other. And she wondered how well he was concealing his distress at her continuing presence from his mother and his cousins; not well, she feared. If she could see that he was not at all in his normal state of mind, they surely must have noticed it too.

But when she was speaking to Lady Carston of her desire to go, she had experienced a sudden horrifying realisation that had almost overset her, and it took every shred of her self-possession to enable her to continue the conversation with any appearance of calmness. She had not been calm; she had been screaming internally.

When Leo had declared himself and she had formulated the design to depart as soon as possible, she'd known that not only courtesy towards her host and hostess constrained her movements. One did not – certainly she did not – plan to undertake a long and tedious journey halfway across England when one's courses were present, or soon expected. This was to be avoided if at all possible, for reasons that scarcely needed to be further considered. She'd had the vague sense for a while that her menses were impending, though now she stopped to think about it she could not feel their approach in her body as normally she did in a dozen little ways.

But they weren't. They were late. Several days late, in fact. While speaking to Jane, she had been frantically calculating dates in her mind, trying to make them fit. But they didn't. They couldn't.

She was with child.

She couldn't be, it was impossible. Unthinkable. But she was.

She wasted only a little time in attempting to persuade herself that she was merely late, a delay caused by the worries of the last few days. It wasn't true. Much as she might wish to believe it, she didn't see how it could be so. She'd never been late before, not even after Ash had died, not when she'd so desperately needed to persuade herself that she was carrying his child. If that appalling stress had not unsettled her monotonously ticking clock, it was hardly likely that this lesser upset would have done so.

It had never so much as occurred to her that she could find herself with child now. She'd had every reason to believe that that was quite impossible, or she'd never have allowed Leo to make love to her as completely and as frequently as she had.

There were many symptoms, she knew, that could indicate either condition: pregnancy or the ordinary approach of one's courses. She'd discussed all this with her mother once, long ago, when she was newly married and touchingly confident that she'd be in a delicate situation in a month or two and needed to prepare for it with some urgency, and then again later, a different and less happy sort of conversation, when it had become apparent that it wasn't going to be so easy for her. Her breasts were sore; they always were just before her menses. She was ravenously hungry, tired, a little tearful. None of this was unusual and could not be taken as proof of any kind. Did she feel a little unwell in the mornings, or was she merely convincing herself that she did? It was impossible to tell. But one thing was coldly certain – she didn't feel the horribly familiar dragging pain in the backs of her thighs and up into her belly that always preceded the arrival of her blood. It, and then the blood, should have come days ago, and there was not the least sign of anything.

She was in her chamber by now, and she jumped from her bed and stumbled to the mirror, pulling off her night-rail to stand naked in front of the glass. She looked at herself – did she appear any different? Would she, so soon? It was a ridiculous idea, surely. But she was almost sure that her nipples, and the areolae around them, were darker. Less pink, more brown. Bigger, even. She didn't normally look at herself that closely. Leo would know, she thought with a little hiccup of panicked laughter, but she could hardly ask him.

Perhaps this change was her imagination, there was no way to tell, but it didn't matter, because the truth was, she knew. She felt it, knew it in her body.

Oh God, how she wished she could talk or even write to her mother, or someone, about her situation, pour out her feelings and ask for advice. It would have been bitterly ironic if it weren't so serious. What a cruel, heartless twist of fate. All those months with Ash, trying. They'd not spoken of their failure – hers? His? – but it had been there between them all the same, growing with each month that passed. And so she had seen the doctors – secretly, without Ash's knowledge, hoping they could give her some remedy he needn't ever be aware of – and had been told that there was no hope. And now, when pregnancy wasn't happy news but a catastrophe, now when she'd thought it impossible in any case and so hadn't considered it at all… Now she was. There was no point wondering how it had happened – it was far too late for that, and the how of it was plain enough. The doctors had been wrong, pretending with masculine certainty that they had knowledge that in truth they did not possess. If they could have just been honest and said they didn't know, that these things were mysterious… Nature, she supposed, was cunning enough to find a way. Had it been the first night, the second time…? No point in any of that. Another distraction.

Her body, with a child in it. A child, good God, so desperately wanted once. A child she'd thought she never would have, had been resigned never to have. She had her hand on her belly, still looking at herself intently in the cheval glass, as she stood naked and cold – it was softly rounded, and it was easy enough to imagine it more rounded still. She was weeping, and as she became aware of it she chided herself for folly and clambered awkwardly back into bed, pulling her robe back on. No use catching pneumonia to add to all of her other worries.

She still wanted the child. Oh God, but she did. It wasn't – she'd realised this some while ago – just Ash's child that she had wanted, a son, an heir for Northriding. She'd wanted a child of her own to love, entirely regardless of everyone else's expectations. Those expectations had been a weight on her once, but she could have disregarded them much more easily if they hadn't chimed so closely with what she so deeply wanted for herself. A child, a baby of her own. Lady Carston had felt the same overpowering impulse, she knew, and she could fully understand it. Had been jealous, though she had suppressed the feeling as she suppressed so many unwelcome feelings, as they had talked on the subject. No need for jealousy now.

But she, unlike clever Jane, was in desperate straits. Unmarried. Reputation gone, when this came out, as it must. Carrying a nameless bastard.

She had, she thought, two choices only. It was another list: a very short one. She could tell Leo, and he would marry her. Of course he would. That was number one. It was – she knew – the obvious choice. Most people wouldn't consider it a choice at all, but her only option, and she lucky to have it. It would be a great betrayal of Ash, to set another in his place, and it was precisely the opposite of what she had intended, going into this ridiculous scheme of hers. Blanche had told her, she remembered now, that Ash would have wanted her to marry again, to be happy. She could see that that might be true. But he couldn't have wanted this. The hideous irony that there might have been in truth no problem, that she just hadn't been patient enough – or, much worse somehow, that if there'd been a problem it had been Ash's and not hers – she couldn't contemplate any of that now. Such dark, roiling thoughts drew her towards the edge of an abyss that she'd struggled out of with enormous difficulty and couldn't afford to fall into again. Not now there was to be a child.

She had to think sensibly about her choices. One was marriage, and betrayal. It horrified her, even though it was the conventional and obvious path. Two was much chancier. She could go away somewhere, when her condition was on the point of becoming obvious – in two months' time, or three, or four, she wasn't an expert, not yet – and set herself up as a widow, a recent widow, an anonymous Mrs Somebody, a person of no importance at all, and have her child. She'd have to tell her parents; that would be hard. Horribly hard. But then, if she were lucky and clever, she could reappear in Yorkshire, with a child she had adopted. Women adopted babies. Widows did; spinsters, even. She could concoct some plausible tale, if her parents helped her, which she was almost sure they would. Eventually, perhaps grudgingly at first, they would not be able to deny her this, however bewildered, hurt and disapproving they might be when she broke it to them. She'd have her child then, the child she'd never thought to hold. They'd have the longed-for grandchild they had given up any hope of having. This baby would be loved, wanted, cared for and well-provided-for. Her father's heir, and hers, whether it be boy or girl. She had money, a loving family – if any woman could pull off this difficult feat, she could.

But she'd be doing a terrible thing to Leo. A much worse thing than she'd done to him already. He'd have a child and never know it. Never be able to give a son or a daughter all the love he had to share, because she'd deliberately deprived him of that chance. His mother, though this could hardly be her chief concern, would never know her grandchild. It would be a wicked, cruel thing to perpetrate on him, this deception, and cruel to the child too, who would never know a father, by her selfish choice. She'd have to start with lies, and build a whole structure of more lies, one atop another. She would have to lie to her child when he or she asked who his or her father, his or her birth mother was. Deny her own blood. And what if one day the child suspected some part of the truth, and said, in justifiable anger, Was my father a brute, a wicked man, that you fled from him and hid my very existence from him, and his from me? Because I cannot imagine any other reason why you would make such a dreadful choice. She couldn't say yes. It would be the worst of all lies. He wasn't any of those things.

But if she married him, if she made that hard choice, what then?

What then?