Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
A secret passage is just as delicious and entertaining as you might imagine.
Ifelt a thrill of delight as Godric reached up to take a lantern from a hook above the alcove. “If I remember correctly, this leads to the kitchens,” I said, following him into a narrow, brick-lined corridor.
“It does.” He caught my hand and turned up the lantern wick so that light flooded the passage. After a few moments of walking, the hallway bent to the left in the direction of the kitchens.
Then he slung the lantern on another hook, illuminating a generously sized alcove fitted with a cushioned bench. “It would be best to allow your husband to calm down before you encounter each other again. May I offer you a seat?”
“This abbey has so many intriguing secrets,” I said, sitting down and tipping back my head to admire the arched brickwork above. “Did you and Lance play here as children?”
“All the time,” Godric said, joining me on the bench. “We fancied the abbey a refuge for persecuted priests and this alcove a bed for a diminutive clerical. We didn’t know that Queen Elizabeth had ignored Scottish Catholics.”
“Based on the brickwork, the alcove doesn’t date back to the 1600s.”
The side of his mouth quirked up. “Did you learn about brickwork in a novel?”
“No. My father has a copy of Sir John Soane’s Designs in Architecture. In the middle of one particularly boring Season, I kept myself awake at balls by reviewing Soane’s drawings.” Since he seemed puzzled, I added, “In my head, obviously.”
“Soane, the architect of the Bank of England?”
I nodded. “Taking into account what I know of brickwork, the abbey was renovated in the 1730s.”
“The abbey was in bad shape when Lance’s grandfather bought it. He rebuilt this passage, presumably because it’s the only way for food to arrive from the kitchens without a blanket of snow.”
“Why the bench?”
“Burnsby requires footmen to stand ready against the dining room walls. They take turns resting their legs during long meals.”
I wiggled on the plump cushions. “It’s comfortable.” My arm was almost touching his—which wouldn’t matter, except for the temptation to lean to the side and rub my cheek against his sturdy shoulder, like an affectionate cat.
“Did you overhear the entire conversation with my husband?” I asked.
The lantern was casting delightful shadows on Godric’s cheekbones as he searched my face for some emotion he didn’t find. Fear, perhaps, given Burnsby’s threats?
“I arrived while you were declaring your eagerness to testify in the House of Lords. You have taken a terrible risk, Genevieve.”
I frowned. “Is that why you drew me away so quickly?”
“You not only thwarted Burnsby, you humiliated him, which is worse. In my experience, he won’t regain his composure for hours. He might grow even more enraged, depending on whether or not Sophonisba goads him.”
“He humiliated me first,” I noted, refusing to regret a single sentence.
“I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it,” Godric said. Still, his dark eyes were troubled.
“What could he do, hand me a poisoned potpie?”
“I trust not,” Godric said slowly.
I felt giddy. After seven months of following a “dutiful wife” script, I had discarded it. Telling my husband the truth had been a heady pleasure.
Now that I’d stopped fibbing, who knew what other conventions I’d defy? I felt free, truly free, for the first time since my mother died.
Godric shook his head. “No poisoned food, since everyone in the kitchen adores you. But that doesn’t mean your husband won’t take revenge.”
“You’re being absurd!” I said, giggling.
“You’d be surprised how quickly barristers come to accept the absurd.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
He leaned closer. “Damn it, I’m afraid for you, Genevieve. I know you’re intelligent and beautiful, but did you have to prove yourself brave as well?”
My smile turned into a grin. An impudent grin, not unlike Colette’s. “No need to worry. I can take care of myself.”
He cleared his throat and looked away from my mouth. “As Burnsby told you, English laws do not parallel French decrees with regard to a mistress moving into the family domicile. You cannot divorce your husband on those grounds.”
“I guessed as much, but I knew the threat of embarrassment would terrify Burnsby. Why do you think he’s kept Sophonisba Ainsworth in the Highlands instead of establishing her in a house in Covent Garden, the way other gentlemen do with their mistresses?”
“Her flamboyancy?”
“Precisely. Burnsby told me himself that Sophonisba was vulgar and attention-seeking. Her babyish vocabulary alone would earn her a weekly mention in the gossip columns.”
Godric put an arm around my shoulder and drew me closer until our legs touched.
I swallowed, startled by a hot, sweet feeling in my stomach. My mind became attuned to my body pressed to his, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, until all other sensations were pushed aside. It was as if the rest of me went numb, and all I could feel were the parts of my leg that were touching his.
“Just so you know, not every man desires a wife and a mistress, although it might appear that way to you,” he said.
“No, it feels as if I have rotten taste in men,” I admitted.
He turned his head, pressing his lips to my forehead for one forbidden moment.
(My heart leapt. A cliché but apt.)
“You would appeal to the House of Lords for a private act for release ex vinculis matrimoniis. ‘From the bonds of matrimony.’”
“Then that’s what I shall do.”
“You’d essentially be asking for annulment on the grounds of impotence and nonconsummation. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
My eyes rounded. “Burnsby would hate being considered impotent.” I considered it some more. “No wonder he turned white when I said he was flaccid and had no balls.”
“Alice’s lack of children could be submitted as evidence,” Godric said, sounding like a prosecutor. “I would consider it a long shot, but possible.”
“Did Burnsby know that my argument for divorce would be on the grounds of impotency, when I was babbling about Sophonisba and Ophelia?”
“Without question. Divorce pleadings are rare in the House of Lords, but at seventy, he must have witnessed several. Do you understand your danger, Genevieve?”
“You are suggesting . . . that’s what he meant by saying it would be easy to invalidate my divorce plea? Rape?”
Godric nodded calmly, as if husbands threatened their wives with such violence every day of the week.
Horror crawled up my spine. “When he said that I would bear his next heir, that’s what he meant?”
(The evidence for my foolishness has already been proven, don’t you think? But honestly, young women aren’t told anything.)
“Yes,” Godric said. “Your virginity—as proof of his insufficiency—puts you in danger. A second son would invalidate your claim to dissolve the union.”
I smoothed my gown with trembling fingers.
I sucked in a breath so deep that it hurt my ribs.
I couldn’t get my head around it. Burnsby had threatened to violate me.
“He can’t have really meant it.” It was one thing to break the rules of polite society involving mistresses and wives, but abuse of that nature?
Godric had the severe look of an avenging angel. “On first encountering Sophonisba, Hecuba announced a lifelong ban from her bed that was heard by everyone in the household—yet Ophelia was born some nine months later.” His voice was gravelly and definite.
“Surely not.” My voice wasn’t convincing even to my own ears.
“Burnsby did not seduce his wife into compliance. Hecuba was never the same after that.”
His comment went through me like a blade. I could see in Godric’s eyes his utter certainty that Ophelia was the product of a brutal rape.
“Poor Hecuba,” I whispered.
Logic forced me to accept Godric’s account. Marriage, after all, is governed by the husband’s desires—and his wife’s safety lies solely in his adherence to codes of conduct.
“Lord Burnsby is not a good man,” Godric stated. “As I said, your virginity would be crucial evidence in a divorce plea—unless it no longer existed.”
“That’s terrible,” I whispered. My younger self, the hopeful eleven-year-old who gobbled advice books, was weeping, but I wasn’t. I felt dry and airless, like a barren desert. That big breath I had drawn in was gone; now there was no air in my lungs.
“I’m sleeping in Burnsby’s former room just on the other side of the wall from you,” Godric said. “Our bedchambers are connected by a door behind one of the wall hangings.”
I was fighting a wish to run screaming into the snowstorm.
I said I wouldn’t be a silly heroine who dashes into the dark, but that was before. The idea that Burnsby might commit violence against me simply to spare himself embarrassment before his peers was stunning.
“Make the faintest cry, and I’ll come to you,” Godric promised.
I suddenly remembered all the rumors. “Did Hecuba take her own life?” I asked, my voice grating.
He shook his head. “She died here in the abbey, while Lance and I were on holiday from Eton for Christmas. Still weakened from giving birth, she caught an influenza. Mima nursed her, but Hecuba passed away.”
“I married Burnsby because I believed he was kind, but in reality, he is unprincipled and violent,” I whispered, stunned once again by my own lack of judgment.
“I wish I could comfort you by saying violence is unlikely, but my experience as a prosecutor suggests otherwise. Had a betrothal been announced in the Times, I would have stopped the marriage, Genevieve. I promise you that.”
Godric’s free hand, the one that wasn’t around my shoulders, slipped to my cheek in a caress that made me gulp air. “I will not allow him to do you any harm.”
His touch was caring. Even me—a virgin wife married to an ogre—grasped that.
“Thank you,” I whispered. My heart and stomach were twisted into a knot.
For a long moment, we sat silently, he with one large, warm hand curving around my cheek, me with my hands clenched in my lap, because otherwise I would have drawn his mouth down to mine.