“I’m afraid so. He will be calling again tomorrow morning.” She hoped that would be all. With any luck, Octavius Bamber would fall into the Thames overnight and drown, taking the letters with him. But fate would not be so kind.
***
That night, Alice climbed into bed, took out Thaddeus’s letter and read it for the dozenth time. The scorn, the mockery implicit in his words, in his description of the intimate act of her wedding night—her wedding night!—brought it all back to her. That night...
She’d been so young, so very nervous. She hardly knew him, after all—their entire courtship had lasted only a few weeks, and they’d never been alone together—but she’d thought she could fall in love with him, her new husband, so tall, not exactly handsome but very impressive. So worldly and knowledgeable compared with her country-girl naïveté.
She’d been just eighteen. Innocent, ignorant, hesitant, shy.
He’d been drunk. Rough. Crude. Hasty.
He’d ripped open her nightgown, the one she’d so carefully embroidered, anticipating the night she would finally become a woman, a wife. He’d stared down at her nakedness and made some disparaging comment about the sizeof her breasts, and then he’d shoved her legs apart and thrust roughly into her.
She’d had no idea of what to expect. She wasn’t prepared for the pain, the rough squeezing of her breasts, the shock of his brutal invasion of her unprepared body.
She endured it as best she could, and he finally rolled off her and staggered out of the room—he hadn’t even undressed, just unfastened his breeches. She lay for a long time, unmoving—in shock, she thought now, looking back—until finally the cold air chilled her bare skin enough to make her curl up and haul the bedcovers around her.
And then, finally, the tears came, slowly at first, then in great choking sobs.
Before the wedding, Mama had told her that it wouldn’t be pleasant the first time, but she’d added vaguely that it would probably get better with time.
It never had.
Her wedding night became the pattern for the rest of Alice’s married life. She never knew when Thaddeus would take it in his head to plant an heir in her—that’s what he called it. She was grateful not to have to think of it as “making love.”
He’d enter her bedchamber with no warning—sometimes in the middle of the night, often in the wee small hours, usually drunk—undo his breeches and pound into her. And leave as soon as he’d finished.
It got so that she would be wakeful half the night, waiting for him to come and get the business over with so that she could sleep. She’d doze off, but the slightest noise would startle her out of a sound sleep. It was exhausting.
The circles under her eyes were visible, but the few who ventured to comment on them did so as a sly joke, implying that her eager husband was keeping his pretty new bride awake far into the night. Alice never denied it. It was true after all. In a way.
One time, utterly exhausted and weary of wakingthrough the night in imagined fear, she’d locked her door to ensure she’d get some sleep. Enraged, he’d kicked the door down, and when he left, she was badly bruised and aching for days afterward.
But no matter how often—or how hard—he did it, he never managed to get her with child. “Useless, barren, cold fish,” he’d called her.
She’d had nobody to confide in, to talk about how difficult—unbearable, actually—she’d found it. Just days after her wedding, her parents had departed for the Far East—her father’s dream, to bring “enlightenment to the heathens.” Then, not a month after their arrival, Mama became poorly and in a short time had sickened and died. Papa passed shortly afterward.
Grandmama, with her painful arthritis, had become a virtual recluse, and Alice hadn’t wanted to distress her with things she could do nothing about. What was the point anyway? Marriage was “ ’til death us do part.”
Besides, though she knew it wasn’t logical, she’d felt too ashamed. She was a failure as a wife: she couldn’t please her husband, and she couldn’t conceive a child.
So having no other choice, she endured it. And having no desire to feature in society as a victim, she worked hard to give the impression that she was content in her marriage—not that anyone would believe her if she told them the truth: in public, Thaddeus could turn on the charm.
Eighteen years. Half her life trying to please a man who wouldn’t be pleased.
Now Thaddeus was dead—and if the manner of his passing was another source of shame to be endured, at least her marriage was finally at an end. He’d left her nothing but debts—the entailed property went to his brother, and he’d made no provision for his widow, only his mistress and his illegitimate son. His heir, but for Alice.
And then Grandmama—God bless her—had died and left Alice this house. A home of her own. Security.
Alice glanced at the letter in her hand. The last shameful legacy from her loving husband.
She put the letter aside, blew out her candle and lay in the dark, thinking. She wasn’t feeling sick and frightened now; she was feeling angry.
She hadn’t endured eighteen years of marriage, hadn’t maintained a public air of serenity—and Lord knew, there were times she almost couldn’t manage it—for the truth about her marriage to come out now.
Bamber’s demand was ludicrous, but that wasn’t Alice’s concern. At all costs she had to prevent the publication of those letters.
If only she’d had the presence of mind to snatch them from him and hurl them into the fire when he’d first brought them out. But she’d been in shock and hadn’t thought quickly enough. There was nothing to do now but carry out his wishes, introduce his dreadful daughter to society and try to find her a lord to marry.
