Obsession (26 page)

It was clear to Brook that Felicity had a good knowledge of how men felt: that she appreciated the physical frustrations he must be suffering. As she pointed out to him, Harriet might not have betrayed him physically with another man, but she had cheated in a different way when she’d foisted another man’s child on him. Brook should have no conscience, Felicity maintained, if he were to break his marriage vows to be faithful to Harriet for their lifetime. If he did not wish to divorce her, he might find contentment again if he took a mistress. If Harriet was not her friend, she herself would have done anything to see him happy again.

He’d been shocked but also intrigued by Felicity’s outspoken implications. Yet, tempting as her voluptuous, inviting body was during the evenings they now often spent together in her private, comfortable sitting room, he had not pursued what he’d suspected was an unspoken invitation for further intimacies.

‘Dammit!’ Brook swore softly as he stepped into the bath Hastings had prepared for him. He’d altogether had enough of women, of worry, of shame for last night’s disgraceful behaviour. He would go away for a bit – spend a day or two with his father, to whom he’d not told the painful fact that Charlie was not, after all, his grandson.

His father, he thought unhappily, was besotted with the child: he rode over to see him every week without fail unless his recurring attacks of gout prevented it. He spent hours playing ‘soldiers’ with him, monopolizing the dining-room table. Old and young sat at either end of it setting out their troops ready for battle. Brook, who in the past had watched one or two of these games, noted that more often than not his father’s army were manipulated so as to lose the battle, the lead soldiers lying undignified in death with their feet and rifles pointing to the heavens. A group of Sir Walter’s men, Charlie’s ‘prisoners’, lay in neat rows in his camp.

Recently, Brook had pretended not to hear when the child turned to him for his advice on battle tactics. He had invented an excuse to leave the room.

There was no denying the fact that the little boy’s presence was a constant and bitter reminder of his own deeply unhappy existence: of all the joy that, without warning, had been taken away.

On the other hand, he decided, finding a mistress would not help to divert him. He would go to London instead and enjoy its many entertainments.

He rang the bell for Hastings and ordered him to pack a valise for a possible week’s stay in the capital. The coach was to be prepared for his departure in an hour’s time, he instructed, and Cook made aware that he would not be requiring meals until further notice; nor would he need food for the journey. They would stop and eat at a coach house on the way down to London.

With an effort, he disregarded his throbbing head and allowed Hastings to shave and dress him. Hastings was the first to speak when Brook’s dressing was completed.

‘Do you wish anyone else to be notified that you will be in London, sir?’ he asked.

Brook shot him a quick glance. ‘And do you have anyone in mind, man?’ he asked pointedly.

Unperturbed, Hastings said as matter-of-factly as he could, ‘I wondered if Mrs Goodall should be told, sir, lest she were to ride here to see you and be wasting her time.’

Brook flushed and said angrily, ‘I can do without impertinent remarks like that, Hastings. They are also ridiculous. Mrs Goodall’s visits here are primarily to see the mistress, not me.’

‘As you say, sir!’ Hastings replied, his disbelief quite recognizable on his face.

Pretending not to notice, Brook said sharply, ‘Find Bessie and tell her to inform her mistress that I will not be attending the Albermarles’ dinner party with her this evening as I have been called away on urgent business. And for God’s sake, Hastings, take that look off your face before I tell you to pack your bags and find a position elsewhere!’

Hiding a smile, Hastings only said, ‘Yes, sir!’ before turning to complete the finishing touches to Brook’s attire.

Felicity received the news of Brook’s absence from the groom when she dismounted from her horse in the cobbled yard in the Hunters Hall stables. Brook had arranged to ride into Melton Mowbray with her to purchase a new saddle. She had been looking forward to spending the morning alone with him – a pleasantly warm and sunny one as it happened, and anger merged in equal parts with her disappointment. Harriet had told her she would be going down to the village, to distribute some of Charlie’s outgrown clothes to the worthy vicar’s wife who ran the jumble sale at the church hall, so Felicity had jumped at the chance to be alone with Brook. Now that he was to be in London for a week, she thought angrily, it would be at least seven days before she would see him again.

However, she had no intention of wasting her entire morning. She needed to see Ellen, who she expected to bring her up to date with the ongoing relationship between Brook and Harriet. With Harriet absent in the village, she was able to do so without any delay. Ellen, however, had only bad news for her, namely that Brook had spent the previous night in Harriet’s bed. Knowing that marital relations had been resumed between the couple left her white-faced and shaking as she returned home.

Harriet’s few commitments in the village, meanwhile, did little to lessen her shock and unhappiness at Brook’s cruel behaviour the previous night. When she went up to the nursery to see Charlie on her return, Bessie, seeing Harriet’s white face, the dark rings under her eyes and her shaking hands, looked at her in dismay. Harriet said that she had not slept well, an inadequate excuse for her condition.

Bessie was not convinced and suggested that Harriet might be sickening with the onset of the dreaded influenza, which the baker’s boy had reported that morning was afflicting several people in the village.

When Harriet had gone downstairs for breakfast that morning, she had dreaded the thought of seeing Brook. It was a huge relief to her, therefore, when Fletcher reported that he’d been told to tell her that Brook had gone to London with Hastings ‘on urgent business’.

Harriet went into the morning room where she sank gratefully into one of the armchairs by the window. Try as she might, she was unable to put memories of the previous night from her mind.

Was it possible, she wondered, that Brook had left because he was ashamed of himself? Bessie had described to her how degraded she’d felt when she had been violated. She, too, now felt the same. Her whole body ached and there were bruises on her arms where he’d gripped them to subdue her struggle to free herself. Could he have intended to hurt her in retaliation for the way she had hurt him?

Harriet now relived the events which had led up to her decision to produce Charlie as Brook’s son. At the time, it had seemed as if Fate was determining she should do so to compensate Brook for the bitter disappointment of her past miscarriages. Even more compelling had been her need to have a living baby in her arms.

Not for the first time, Harriet wondered if Fate had predisposed the meeting with Mrs Bates, with a mother who did not want her baby. And at a time when it had been possible for her to establish that the baby was hers?

Harriet lent back against the cushions, her eyes closed as she recalled Una’s unquestioning assumption that she had given birth to Charlie. Nor had it been doubted by her old nanny, or Una’s children, who had been so thrilled with their new ‘cousin’. As she stared out at the cold, wintry garden, her thoughts were not on Hunters Hall but in Ireland. Without difficulty, she could recall the children’s questions:

‘What are you going to call your baby, Aunt Harriet?’

‘May I hold your baby, Aunt Harriet?’

‘Your baby looks just like you, Aunt Harriet!’

‘What have you called your baby?’

No one had ever suspected that Charlie was not her child.

Even before the time of her return home eight weeks later, she had almost come to believe the baby was hers. Her only doubt had been that Brook’s reactions might not be the same as hers. She had convinced herself that he would be thrilled with a son of his own, that he need never know that the baby was not of his conceiving. As she had hoped, he’d taken Charlie to his heart.

She was forced now to face the fact that she’d had no justification for deceiving him in so vital a matter: to lie to him, to let him love another man’s child believing it to be his own. Her actions, she now saw, had been in answer to
her
need, not his. She’d known from the start that if she’d asked him to let her keep the baby, he would never have permitted her to do so.

Harriet now rose from her chair and paced the room restlessly as she tried to marshal her thoughts. Brook loved children and would almost certainly have told her that she must place the unwanted baby with some kind, motherly person – someone in the village, perhaps; someone with whom the child would have been well cared for, that he would pay for his upkeep had that been necessary. But … he would not have let her keep Charlie and pass him off as theirs.

Close to tears, Harriet was now thankful that Felicity had not called to see her. Good friend though Felicity was, she could not bear to tell her how humiliated she had been by Brook’s assault upon her. She knew Felicity was a very great admirer of Brook.

It had always made Harriet proud to think that other women found her husband as attractive and loveable as she did, and she had no wish to disillusion Felicity as to Brook’s unfailingly kind, courteous behaviour. Were Felicity to have visited today, it would not have taken her long to extract at least some of the details of the previous night’s horrors. Moreover, knowing of the reason for the current rift between her and Brook, Felicity had started to suggest that it might be best for them both to live apart. Harriet had been finding it harder and harder to explain to Felicity that despite Brook’s indifference, his coldness towards her, the withdrawal of his love and now, awful as it had been, last night’s drunken assault, she knew she would rather bear it all than have to live apart from him.

‘I know Brook can’t forgive me,’ she had said often enough to Felicity, ‘that he may never be able to love me as he once did, but whilst he allows me to go on living here, I can still hope, can I not? There are times when I raise my head and see him looking at me as if … as if he didn’t hate me … as if … it’s silly I know, but I think he does need me, needs things between us to be as they once were. He would have told me to leave long ago, would he not, if that was what he wanted? I cannot leave him, no matter how unhappy I am.’

Whilst Harriet was grappling with these distressing reflections, Felicity had been riding home with her groom. She, too, was trying to come to terms with the fact that, according to Ellen, Brook had spent the night in his wife’s bed and the couple were, presumably, reconciled. The thought was intolerable and was followed by another – Brook still loved Harriet; he still wanted to make love to her. Why else would he have suddenly returned to her bed if he had not forgiven her?

By the time Felicity reached home there was a cold, hard place where her heart should be. This was the first time in her life that she had not been able, by some means or another, to get what she wanted. As a child, she’d only have to name it for her doting father to provide it whether it be a gown, a toy, a party, a horse – even her own phaeton. She had been allowed to eat only the foods she liked, attended only the lessons that interested her, to rise or to sleep only at the times she wanted. Even her brother, Paul, had come second in her father’s adoring eyes. Finally, although Paul thought the man she had married, Matthew Goodall, was unsuitable in many ways, not least because the fellow was even older than their father, the marriage had seemed to be a happy one, doubtless because the man indulged her in the same way her father had done. His untimely death had left Felicity an extremely wealthy widow with most of the world’s pleasures at her disposal. Thus it was that throughout the years of her life, she had had every desire fulfilled. All but one – she had not been able to get the man she wanted.

Throughout the ensuing long afternoon and evening, Felicity gradually came face-to-face with the fact that, despite her patience and her efforts to become part of the couple’s lives, her employment of Ellen to spy on them and report any discord to her, Brook and Harriet were now reconciled. If she were not to face final defeat, she must risk one last chance of success.

It was long after midnight when Felicity Goodall was ready to go to bed, by which time, she had finally devised a way to achieve her desire to win Brook Edgerton for herself.

‘I
t has to have been something in the food she’s eaten, Mrs Barker,’ Harriet said to her cook when it had been reported that Annie, one of the maids, had been vomiting all night. The sixteen-year-old girl had, even more worryingly, lost control of her bowels.

‘If she is not better by teatime,’ Harriet continued, ‘I will ask Doctor Tremlett to call after surgery. It sounds to me very much like food poisoning.’

The cook’s cheeks grew red and she drew in her breath before saying indignantly, ‘If that good-for-nothing girl stole something she wasn’t supposed to, it wouldn’t be anything I’ve cooked, madam. I’m most particular as to my cooking and …’

‘I know, Mrs Barker, nobody is questioning the hygiene in your kitchen,’ Harriet broke in quickly. ‘It’s just that I was wondering if Annie had found something leftover that you had put aside for Cripps to use for compost.’

Slightly mollified, Cook said, ‘If’n she did, madam, she didn’t oughta have. She ate two helpings of the leftover cold veal-and-ham pie we all had for our tea yesterday, and then two slices of bread and treacle after. Eats like a horse, she does!’

Harriet nodded. ‘Maybe it’s not food which has caused her upset,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you can get one of the maids to take up a jug of cordial for her, Mrs Barker. The doctor always recommends fluid to stop his patients becoming dehydrated.’

She did not stay long enough to explain the meaning of the word, but hurried up to the nursery to reassure herself that Charlie and Bessie were in good health. She need not have worried, for they were putting on their outdoor clothes ready to go down to the lake to feed the swans.