CHAPTER NINE #4
“He won’t, trust me,” Adam promised. “Or trust in Betsey, if you prefer.”
Verena did prefer it. But she knew Betsey alone could not prevent Nathaniel from taking Mama away.
She reached up and touched Adam’s hand. “I trust you.” Then, before she could change her mind and rush back upstairs to burst in on the conference in the parlour, she hurried down and let herself out of the house.
She walked on an automatic course towards the common, hardly looking where she went, her mind filled with distressing pictures of the past. She did not hear her name called, nor the footsteps running after her, and she was already on the common, taking a well-worn path, when Denzell caught up with her.
“Verena, wait!” he called, seizing her arm to halt her.
She stopped, unable to take in that she was waylaid. She saw the face, and knew it, and spoke its name without thinking, blurting out the confusion of her brain as if she was fully conscious she might safely do so.
“Oh, Denzell, she is alone with him! He says he will not hurt her, and perhaps he will not. But he will say such things … and she will believe him. She always did. And it will be nothing but black lies.”
“Verena, calm yourself,” Denzell commanded, taking her shoulders and holding her fast. “Come, don’t speak yet.” He smiled. “Where is that famous control I have had so much reason to deprecate? What, snow maiden, have you thrown away your mask?”
An involuntary gurgle of laughter escaped her, bringing her back to the present. The confusion lifted a little. “My mask has rather deserted me,” she offered shakily.
“Never!” Denzell declared, and putting an arm about her, led her off the path and into the shade of a tree, for the sun was hot. He stripped off the olive-green coat and laid it down, instructing her to sit.
Glad to be relieved of the necessity to think for herself, Verena sank down, the pale yellow muslin spreading about her, and watched Denzell settle before her, his attitude relaxed as he sat in shirt-sleeves, his hat at one side, the queue of his tied-back fair hair falling over his shoulder to lie upon the subdued green of his waistcoat.
There was an expression of tenderness in the blue eyes as they looked her over with that smoky glow that had the effect of ruffling her breath a little, but her heart and mind were still too full to leave room for what this might mean.
Denzell’s own thoughts were all for her distress.
He had found himself unable to go all the way home, his concern for Verena’s safety causing him to dally in the square of open ground.
When he had seen her leaving the house, he had been glad of his own irresolution, and had hurried after her at once, for it was obvious from her demeanour she was greatly overset.
When he had stopped her, the distraught look in her face and the trembling outburst of that hurried speech had gone straight to his heart.
He wanted only to comfort her, to alleviate her distress by any means in his power.
She was looking at him with more openness than she ever had before.
Expectantly almost, as if she trusted in him to deliver her.
He smiled warmly. “Now, my princess, tell me the whole.”
Verena noticed nothing amiss in this form of address, nor in his assumption that she would confide in him. She fetched a sigh, and shrugged.
“What am I to tell? I am in dread he will succeed with Mama. He will cozen her with his pleas and promises, for she is in no condition to resist him.”
“You mean your stepfather?”
“Nathaniel, yes.” She sighed again. “I have been persuaded to let them alone — that is why I came out. I could not abide the waiting. It was too reminiscent of earlier times.” She threw her hands up to her face, pressing them to her cheeks, closing her eyes.
“If you knew the dreadful, unkind things he said of her. All to give himself reason to inflict upon her the vicious punishment of his heavy fists.”
Despite the fact that he had understood this must be the meaning behind the little she had told Unice, Denzell found himself shocked and distressed by the picture these words painted.
Almost he shied away from asking further, from hearing any more, for, to himself — and he was persuaded, to those of his intimates whom he knew almost as well as he knew his own mind — such a shameful use of a man’s strength was not to be tolerated.
No gentleman would strike a lady, never mind administer this kind of beating.
Deuce take it, but that was for prize-fighters!
Were such a thing known in his circles, the perpetrator would be shunned by society — and rightly.
But here was Verena, whom he loved, and who had memories she must long to eliminate from her heart. He had no mind to hear them, but he would share them, for her sake.
“What sort of things, Verena?” he asked. “What would he say?”
Verena’s shoulders shifted, as if the burden of the memory was too great to bear.
But she answered, her hands dropping down to pluck aimlessly at her muslin petticoats.
“Oh, that Mama did not love him. That she had an eye to some other man. That she was his alone, despite her desires for others — despicable lies! Mama never looked at another man. She would not have dared to do so, for fear of such consequences as must ensue.”
“And then?” Denzell urged.
Verena shivered. “And then, when she denied it all, when he had driven her to a quarrelsome frenzy, he would hit her. When she cried out, he would do so again. He would say he must demonstrate his mastery this way, if she would not permit him to do so — the other way.”
Denzell went cold. But Verena was still speaking, her eyes unseeing, her mind far away, receding into the memories that haunted her.
“When he was satisfied — when he had punished her enough for his temper to begin to cool, he would leave her, slamming himself from the room.” Verena drew a shuddering breath.
“That was the moment when I used to find the courage to creep in. I had to, for Mama was incapable of tending to her own hurts. Either myself or Betsey had to do it.”
She did not notice the tears that slipped down her cheeks, tears that rent Denzell in pieces as he forced himself to remain still, and to listen while she talked on, moving into the present tense as if the events she related were happening this moment.
“She lies there, swollen and bleeding at the mouth. Her eye half closed — you can see the bruise beginning there already. I take the basin and bring some water, and gently — very gently, for she is hurting so — I clean away the blood and press the cold flannel to her bruises.” One hand came up and her fingers dashed at the wetness on her cheeks, and she sniffed, shaking her head.
“So many, sometimes, I could not do them all in time. She suffered them on her back and her neck, for she must have turned from him to save her face. Then I had to hurry, for you see he would always come back — in due time.”
“Come back?” The protest was drawn from Denzell out of the confusion of compassion and revulsion warring in his breast. “How could he dare to come back?”
Without thinking, he plunged his hand into the pocket of his buckskin breeches and brought forth a handkerchief.
He thrust it into her restless fingers, and Verena held it, her eyes focusing on his face as the tears gave way to the stirrings of that rage he had seen in her countenance when she met Nathaniel earlier in his presence.
“Oh, yes, he dared. He would come back all right, with a mouthful of apologies, a heart — so he claimed — full of remorse, speaking of his great love for her.” Her face twisted as she repeated with an inflection of sickening disgust, “Love — oh, how often have I heard him use that word and wished I might cut it on his skin with a blunted knife!”
Denzell heard the vicious wish with a surge of emotion.
If he had known with what a legacy he had to deal when he spoke to Verena of love!
Small wonder she reacted as she had. He watched her dab at her eyes with his handkerchief, and his chest tightened.
But his heart stilled as she spoke on, for there was worse to come.
“I should not have heard these things,” she said, and her voice was hard again.
“Only there were occasions when I was not quick enough to escape before he would re-enter the room. I used to hide under the bed, and be forced to listen to him begging forgiveness, saying he had not meant a word of it, mingling his false tears with her own. And then … and then he would…”
She could not go on, her fingers wrestling his handkerchief into a ball. Denzell, quite appalled by the implication, reached out a hand and seized her fingers, handkerchief and all, almost crushing them in his anxiety to relieve her mind.
“Say no more. I understand.”
What a hideous fate! That a child should have been obliged to witness such scenes and learn of lovemaking in this crude manner.
The thought crossed his mind that he had taken on an impossible task, but it was overborne by the need to give Verena what comfort he might.
To let her begin to know that what she had been so unfortunate as to experience was the exception rather than the rule.
He relieved her of the maltreated handkerchief and took her other hand, holding both together in a strong clasp between his own.
“Verena, this is not love as most men know it, my poor girl. Only look at Unice and Osmond. You cannot imagine that anything of the kind might occur between them. They are the fondest couple I know.”
Verena made no attempt to remove her hands, but they lay limply in his grasp, and her voice was bleak.
“Those that saw Nathaniel and Mama together would never have imagined it of them either. They hid it well between them. Even I did not know until I was eight. Mama was thought to be sickly, that is all, for she was indisposed for days at a time. That is why I chose Tunbridge Wells, so that it might be given out, when it became known that we had gone, that Mama was here for her health.”
“Verena, you delude yourself. One does not live on an island. Such things as you have spoken of are the stuff of servants’ gossip. Can you truly believe that the matter was unknown in your circles? I frankly doubt it.”
She nodded. “Yes, so do I. But that does not mean that people were able to observe it in their public conduct.” A tiny smile came and went.
“Only look at me. I am a past master at my company mask, as you call it. Mama was almost as good. It is only since she has been here she has given way to her misery.”
There was silence for a while. Denzell would have given anything to show her how mistaken were her views, how narrow. How, he knew not. But this was not the time. She was calmer now, and he must keep her so, not risk distressing her anew.
“How was it you were able to come here at all?” he asked, for he had long pondered the question of how mother and daughter could be supporting themselves.
“Grandpapa Whicham — my mother’s father — left me money in trust,” she answered. “I had only to wait for my majority, by which time I had resolved how I would use it.”
The answer threw the whole matter of the Chaceleys back into his mind. Tentatively, in a casual tone, he tried a subtle probe. “What of your father’s family?”
A shadow flitted across her face, and a slight reserve entered her voice. “I know nothing of them. Mama married above her station, and they did not wish to recognise her.”
Deuce take it, this was too painful. Poor princess.
Abandoned by one family, only to be crushed by another.
But life had not always to be so. Love had not always to be so.
How could he show her that? Unless she could be brought to see for herself — by his own conduct towards her.
Or did she already know it? He eyed her.
“Why have you allowed me under your shield, Verena? Why, if not that you trust me?”
His grasp had slackened a little, and Verena removed her hands from his, looking away. “I trust you as a friend.” A smile flickered again. “Besides, I was overwrought, and you were by.”
“Is that all?” he uttered, and knew the disappointment sounded in his voice.
Her pulse quickened, but she turned and met his eyes. “Denzell, can’t you see? Have you heard me say all this, and not recognised the impossibility of what you seek of me?”
She saw in his face that he had, and her chest tightened. But he reached out again, and took her hand, drawing it into his lap.
“I recognise your fear, Verena, and I see upon what premise it is based. But it is a false premise. Your experience is one in a million. I could cite you story after story to refute your fears.” He smiled.
“But I will not waste my time. You cannot know it, Verena, but there exists a purer love than this — a love that has nothing to do with pain and brutality.”
Verena’s fingers shifted within his grasp. “If I could only believe that!”
His hand tightened. “If I could only convince you!”