The Wedding Night Affair--An Historical Mystery by L.C. Sharp (i have read the book .TXT) 📗

Chapter Sixteen

Back at the house, Ash took Juliana straight to his study and closed the door, ignoring the footman’s solicitous enquiries. They had left the cab at the other end of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and walked down the long expanse, the largest square in London, so the driver could not discern their address. They walked in silence all the way down the long side of the space. When she would have spoken, he held up one finger. “Wait.”

He closed the study door and motioned to a chair. She sat, resting her hand on the polished, scarred surface of his desk. Playing for time, Ash took the tinderbox from its place on the mantelpiece and lit a couple of candles. Then, instead of going behind his desk, he paced the floor restlessly. She tossed her mask onto a chair.

“La Senza is your sister?” She stared at him, incredulity in her gaze, demanding an answer.

He nodded. “Silence.” He was not bidding her to keep quiet. “That was her name.”

He avoided her gaze, staring down at the floor. He had never told anyone about her before, and he didn’t know where to start, what to say. “Silence is a year younger than me. As children we were close. But when she was sixteen, our parents—our mother—married her to a neighbor in the country. I had already left home to join my father in London and enter my legal training.”

He spared her a glance. She was sitting bolt upright, as she usually did. “She bore him two children, but she was not happy. He was a strict disciplinarian. I knew, because she wrote to me. What I did not know was that he read all her letters and controlled what she wrote. I could only infer her unhappiness, but I thought I knew her well. I thought she’d settle down, learn to cope with her marriage. I didn’t know the half of it.”

Being Ash, he noted Juliana’s flinch. “I didn’t find out until later how horrific her married life was. As bad as our life at home.” He stopped short. He had not meant to tell her that, only about Silence. “He never touched Silence in anger, but his punishments were draconian. Bread and water for a month. No speaking for a week, except for necessary instructions to the servants. Eight hours a day on her knees, praying for forgiveness for the smallest transgression. He demanded instant and unquestioning obedience. Silence’s days were mapped out to the minute. For the children’s sake, she endured until she could take no more.”

When the pause stretched to a full minute, she asked, “What happened?”

She deserved to hear the rest of the story. He’d never meant to tell her anything, but his agitated mood in the carriage had made him blurt out the truth. He couldn’t hold back now. “On the pretext of visiting our parents on one of my father’s rare visits, Silence brought the children to our house in Hampshire. Then she told us that she was not going back.” He tried to keep his account cold and dispassionate, but the same anger burned in his chest as he’d felt then. “My mother ordered her back to her husband. She was his wife, and she must obey him.”

Juliana said nothing. Of all people she would know what total obedience meant.

He fought the visions that came to his mind. There was no point living this through yet again. But he wanted to tell her. “When she refused, my mother sent for her husband. I appealed to our father, but he said the children were our mother’s concern, and he would not interfere. He spent his time in London, while my mother managed affairs in the country.”

He fixed her with a cold stare, daring her to protest. But she did not. “Our mother was cold, unfeeling, and she never lost her temper, which was in many ways worse than her carefully measured physical punishments. After I left home, she grew progressively worse. I did not know that until much later. But I should have.”

Her throat contracted as she swallowed. “Godfrey enjoyed his temper. He relished every minute of my shock. Would that had been worse if he had done everything in cold calculation?”

“I can’t say. They are equally reprehensible.” Given the choice, he would choose the cooler side, but only because the chances of his aggressor killing him would lessen. But Silence had said she wanted to die, would kill herself if she stayed. His sister was not given to hysterical posturing. She’d meant it.

He turned away on the pretext of returning the tinderbox to its place on the mantelpiece. “I offered to find a safe house in the country for her and her children, where she could live quietly. I was already earning money of my own, and I offered her everything I had. I gave her an alternative. I found a place, little better than a workman’s cottage, but it was a start.”

He sighed. “Her husband came and took her back. I could not bear it, but I had to. I was powerless to help her. I told her she must endure for now, for the sake of the children, but promised to help her one day. I was living in London, in this house with my father by then, training for the law. I felt sure I could find a way for her legally to leave her husband and keep her children. I did not.”

Silence’s suffering had torn him apart. Coming so close after another family tragedy, the death of his brother Matt, he’d been beside himself with grief. So he’d shut himself off from emotion. He’d had to.

Ash took his time walking around his desk to his customary place behind it. Carefully, he sat, avoiding her blank gaze. Tucking his hands behind his head, he stretched his legs out in front of him and stared at the ceiling, talking to it instead of to Juliana.

“After a month of unbearable treatment, she could stand no