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His tone was grave, but his eyes gleamed with amusement as he unstoppered one of the thick glass beer bottles. Kate smiled.
‘Very noble indeed. Mr Goddard has long held that the White Hart is a den of the utmost iniquity. A couple of years ago he dismissed two footmen when he discovered they’d been seen in there. Two footmen, gone at a stroke! Poor Thomas had to do the work of three men until we eventually managed to find a replacement.’
‘Big houses usually have no trouble in filling places,’ Jem remarked idly, holding out a bottle. ‘They’re the jobs we all want, aren’t they? Why is it so different here?’
‘Because it’s not like other houses, is it? Too cut off and stuck in the past. Until now, anyway, with all Sir Randolph’s modernisations.’ Taking the bottle, she shook her head in wonder. ‘You’ve thought of everything.’
‘If I’m honest, I didn’t really think at all.’ He cut the flan, dividing it into small pieces, easy to eat with their fingers. ‘If I had, I would never have come to find you. I would have talked myself out of it and come up here alone.’
The parapet that ran around the edge of the roof was high enough to ensure that the attic windows couldn’t be seen from below, wide enough to sit on. She leaned her hip against it and half turned to look at the undulating outline of the ancient hills. Silence stretched for the length of one sighing breath, and then she said quietly, ‘Perhaps that would have been better.’
‘For you?’
‘For us both.’ She hesitated, summoning courage. ‘Jem, about what happened earlier—’
‘You don’t have to say anything.’
Her laugh was harsh in the soft evening. ‘We can pretend it never happened?’
‘If that’s what you want. You don’t owe me anything—no explanations—nothing. You don’t have to tell me where you came from or how you ended up in this place, or what happened to make you scared to be alone here on a summer’s afternoon.’ He tipped the bottle to his bruised lips and added, almost absently, ‘I don’t need to know any of those things to know that you were made for a better life than this.’
‘This isn’t such a bad life. There are worse places to live.’
‘There are better ones too.’
‘Such as?’
‘A home of your own. Filled with fine things, and a housekeeper to look after them. A husband to love you.’
‘I don’t want those things.’ She took a cautious mouthful of beer, the bottle feeling unfamiliar against her lips. There was no point in pretending, not now he had seen her with the mask ripped off. ‘I had them before—or most of them. I had a fine house and expensive furnishings. I had a cook-housekeeper and a between maid.’ She hesitated, realising she was about to cross a line. ‘I had a husband too. But he didn’t love me.’
His voice was rough. ‘Then he was a fool.’
She sighed, perhaps as much with the relief of speaking the truth as the pain of confronting the past. ‘He was ambitious. Clever. He’d come from humble beginnings, in Glasgow, and worked his way up—by skill and determination, he used to say, though that was only half the story. He was no fool. But he was also… not a good man.’
‘Why did you marry him?’
A moth flitted palely through the dusk. She watched its progress until it was swallowed by the blue.
‘Because I was the fool.’
And bit by bit, the light drained from the pastel sky as she told him about a naïve eighteen-year-old girl, desperate for romance and excitement, who had fallen for the charming stranger who had crossed the Assembly Ballroom to seize her dance card and tear it up so he could have her to himself all evening. Darkness spread across the park like ink bleeding into a blotter as she described his artful show of amazement when, at the evening’s end, she’d told him her name, and he’d pretended to be horrified at having been so bold with the Haven Master’s daughter, as if he hadn’t known who she was all along. As if he hadn’t planned everything.
There was only a pale strip of gold left above the hills as she admitted how easily she had fallen for his lies and charm and flattery.
‘He was the most exciting thing to happen in my sheltered life. My father saw through him, of course. He knew his stories didn’t add up. He tried to stop me, but it was too late; I had already… compromised myself. I believed that he’d fallen in love with me.’ Her voice hardened with self-mockery. ‘He told me he wanted to marry me—that he couldn’t wait. I was too infatuated to spot the warning signs. I didn’t even think it strange that he didn’t invite any family or friends to the wedding. He told me his parents were dead, and he was so far from home… I felt sorry for him, being so alone in the world. He said I was all that he needed.’
‘What happened?’
Jem’s face was impossible to read in the velvet dusk. They had moved, so they were both sitting on the stone parapet now, their backs to the dusk-veiled park, their knees almost touching. Only crumbs remained of Mrs Gatley’s flan. Kate took another mouthful of beer before carrying on.
‘It was harder for him to maintain the pretence once we were married. It became clear that my father was right—his business was built on illegal trade and gambling big amounts of money with ruthless men. He took back the diamonds he’d bought me as a wedding present the week after we returned from honeymoon, and the piano he wanted me to play at his business soirées was removed by the bailiff. He wanted to entertain and impress the right people, but he would go into a rage about me spending too much. The first time he hit me was because I had borrowed money from my mother to pay the dressmaker’s bill for the fine clothes he expected me to have. After that it happened more often, and more easily.’
She heard Jem’s soft exhalation of disgust.
‘He was always sorry afterwards, but only because he regretted the loss of control. He wanted to think of himself as better than that, and he hated that I saw him for what he was. I knew what he was capable of, and in the end that became dangerous.’
‘Dangerous?’