Chapter Fifteen Every Sin She Ever Committed #2
The gardener lie had become fact by repetition. The gamekeeper affair was presented as proof of appetite. Ambrose’s legitimate engineering contract had been turned into payment for sex.
The household knew within the hour, although nobody admitted knowing.
Mary Beth could hear it in the excessive normality of the corridors.
Doors closed a fraction more quietly. The footman announced callers who never arrived.
A maid carrying fresh towels nearly collided with Ambrose, flushed scarlet, apologized to the wallpaper, and escaped down the stairs.
Mary Beth had lived with gossip long enough to recognize the difference between curiosity and fear.
Curiosity whispered. Fear became careful.
The servants were wondering whether Blackthorn itself might be dragged into whatever came next—whether suppliers would refuse orders, whether wages would be delayed, whether respectable households would stop hiring anyone who had worked under Mary Beth Blackthorn’s roof.
That possibility angered her more than the broadsheet.
She sent word through the house that wages were secure, the estate accounts were sound, and no servant was expected to answer questions about her private life from anyone. She added that any reporter or stranger asking for household information was to be shown the drive without refreshment.
Ambrose listened from the library doorway. “Refreshment was the part that frightened them.”
“Blackthorn has standards.”
“Savage ones.”
For a moment she nearly laughed. She wished she had. The sound might have made the day feel less like a room steadily losing air.
Mary Beth read the paragraph standing beside the library desk while Ambrose remained very still near the fire.
“That part is clever,” she said.
“Which part?”
“The contract. If they call you a lover, I am immoral. If they call you a lover I hired with estate money, I am corrupt.”
Ambrose took the paper from her. “You hired me before I had ever touched you.”
“I am aware.”
“The survey recommendation came through your steward. My estimate predates the bridge. The quarry savings alone exceed—”
“Ambrose.”
He stopped.
“I know what happened.”
His hand crushed the edge of the broadsheet. “Other people may not.”
That was the problem. Facts were sturdy things in ledgers and engineering reports.
In drawing rooms they became oddly soft.
A date could be shrugged away. A recommendation could be called convenient.
A woman with a reputation did not receive the ordinary presumption that a contractor had been hired because he could build a wall.
The next blow arrived before tea.
It came after a caller was turned away at the door.
The woman had once served with Mary Beth on a church subscription committee and had lately resumed speaking to her in public.
She did not come inside. She remained in her carriage long enough to send a note saying she had called only to return a book and thought, under the circumstances, it would be kinder not to visit.
Mary Beth had not lent her a book.
She tore the note in half and then, annoyed by the theatricality of the gesture, put both pieces in the wastebasket rather than the fire.
Blackthorn’s local bank sent a clerk with a request that Mary Beth meet the manager at her convenience concerning the estate’s seasonal credit line.
The wording was courteous enough to preserve insult beneath stationery.
Mary Beth had no intention of appearing alarmed, so she sent back an appointment for Thursday morning and ordered tea.
Ambrose did not touch his cup.
“I can show them every invoice,” he said. “My original estimate, the quarry calculations, the labor books, the reduction in stone cost. Everything.”
“If they ask, we will show them.”
“They should not have to ask.”
“No. But they have.”
He stood and went to the window. Outside, the north field lay wet and orderly beneath a pale afternoon sky. The rebuilt wall showed as a clean gray line above the cottages. Ambrose had left Blackthorn safer than he found it. That ought to have been the simplest fact in the world.
Mary Beth joined him. “Do not start deciding for me.”
He turned his head. “I have not said anything.”
“You have a particular silence.”
“That is an alarming claim.”
“I know your silences now. This one has plans in it.”
He almost smiled, but the humor did not survive. “My being here gives them something to point at.”
“Your being here gives me you.”
“And gives the bank a story about why estate money went to Tavener Civil Works.”
“Estate money went to Tavener Civil Works because the north wall collapsed.”
“I know.”
“Then stop saying it as though you don’t.”
He faced her fully. “I am saying people who want to hurt you do not need the truth. They need a shape that resembles it from across a room. We have given them one.”
Mary Beth’s temper rose. “We?”
“Yes, we. I stayed. I came back through your front door. I slept under this roof after the contract ended. I kissed you on the steps where the staff could see. I would do every one of those things again if the cost were only mine.”
“And because it is not only yours, you intend to become noble and unbearable?”
“I intend to think.”
“Think beside me.”
His eyes closed briefly. “Mary Beth—”
“No. You do not get to love me and then retreat into a private committee of one whenever the consequences frighten you.”
“I am not frightened for myself.”
“That makes it worse.”
He said nothing after that, which was unlike him enough to frighten her more than anger would have.
The following morning brought another anonymous packet.
This one contained two pages copied from Ambrose’s original Blackthorn estimate. Beside the amount for survey and emergency shoring, someone had written in ink: GENEROUS FOR A MAN ALREADY ENJOYING THE MISTRESS’S FAVOR.
A second sheet reproduced a fragment of a note Mary Beth had sent Ambrose during his Wakefield job: I still want you to return through the front door.
The rest of the letter was missing.
Placed beside the estimate, the sentence seemed transactional in a way the full letter never had.
It omitted the hospital, the merchant, the tenant’s daughter, the entire conversation about whether they could live openly.
What remained could be read as an invitation from a wealthy widow to a contractor whose bill she had paid.
Ambrose read the two pages again, more slowly than before.
“My Wakefield letter was private,” Mary Beth said.
“So was mine.”
“Yours?”
He touched the copied estimate. “The full itemized version was in my case. The estate has one copy. I have another. My clerk in Leeds has the office copy.”
“Are any missing?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Mary Beth felt something colder than embarrassment settle through her. Gossip was one thing. Private correspondence, copied estimates, old letters purchased from people who had possessed them—those required effort. Someone was not merely repeating scandal. Someone was assembling it.
Ambrose picked up his coat from the chair.
“Where are you going?”
“Leeds. I want to know whether my office copy was touched and who has been asking questions.”
“You can go tomorrow.”
“I can go now.”
“Ambrose.”
He stopped with one arm in his coat.
Mary Beth lowered her voice. “Come back for dinner.”
A pause stretched between them.
“Yes,” he said.
She believed him.
That was why she did not understand until eight o’clock.
His place was set in the morning room. The soup went back to the kitchen untouched. At a quarter past eight, Mary Beth sent to the blue room. His valise was gone.
At half past, she crossed the wet courtyard herself and opened the carriage-room office.
The drafting table had been cleared. His rulers and measuring chain were gone. The spare plans had been rolled and tied. On the desk lay Blackthorn’s final account, every figure settled, together with the key to the blue room.
There was no letter.
She searched once anyway, because disbelief makes fools of competent women. She opened the desk drawer. She checked beneath the final account. She even lifted the blotter, as though Ambrose might have hidden an explanation beneath a sheet of drying paper like a guilty schoolboy. She found nothing.
The absence was more offensive than any argument they had ever had. He had not trusted her with the chance to stop him. Worse, he had known she would try.
Mary Beth stood in the doorway with rain blowing cold against one side of her face.
For several seconds she simply could not make sense of the absence.
Ambrose had promised dinner. He had told her he loved her.
Less than a day earlier he had argued that she must not edit unpleasant truths to protect him, and now he had edited himself out of Blackthorn without allowing her a sentence in reply.
She went back to the house slowly.
At the kitchen passage she heard laughter and stopped before anyone saw her.
It was ordinary laughter, two servants sharing some small joke at the end of a long day.
Mary Beth stood in the dark corridor until it passed, absurdly grateful that the house could still contain a sound that had nothing to do with her.
Then she continued to the hall.
On the hall table, beneath the lamp, another envelope waited.
This one was addressed in an unfamiliar hand. Inside was a single copied page from the old gamekeeper’s correspondence and a brief unsigned line.
A lady may survive one indulgence. Repetition becomes character.
Mary Beth read it once.
Then she fed it to the fire.
The paper curled black at the edges, and for a moment she imagined Ambrose somewhere on the road to Leeds, convincing himself that leaving was an act of love.
She was going to make him regret that argument when she found him.
But first she wanted to know who had decided that every sin she had ever committed could be gathered into a file and used to choose her life for her.