Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
It seems I was never married to Burnsby. Again. I would like to cleverly fashion the discovery into advice, but honestly, how many women experience this confluence of events?
Mima didn’t turn at the sound of her own name. She was tapping her fingers on the window seat, as detached as a sphynx watching a sandstorm scour the desert.
“You’ll never get a confirmation from that dunce, but yes,” Sophonisba said with a smirk. “She’s Bunny’s first wife.”
“That would make Mima my mother,” Lance said in a raw voice.
Colette clutched his hand. “I don’t believe it.”
“The wording ‘herein identified’ in the will does imply that Mima may have a different legal name. Yet the fact in itself does not confirm that she married Burnsby.” Godric walked over, plucked the heavy Bible from the podium, and came to sit beside me.
We all waited as he turned the pages.
“Miss Ainsworth appears to be telling the truth,” he said a moment later.
“Really?”
(Was my tone incredulous? Why, yes, it was.)
Godric had found the page titled “Family Record.”
“Granville Burnsby married Hattie S. Wray in 1714,” I read aloud, adding, “Their son Clifford was born twenty years later, on December twenty-fifth, 1734. Burnsby did always say his parents considered him a miracle.”
Everyone but Mima was watching me intently. “Clifford is recorded as marrying Lily Jemima Newell in 1773,” I continued. “Lancelot was born a year later, in 1774. No other wives are listed, and neither is Ophelia.”
“I looked for Ophelia’s name a few days ago,” Godric put in. “I didn’t pay any attention to the record of Burnsby’s first marriage.”
“Bunny would never acknowledge a bastard, would he?” Sophonisba said scornfully. “He had respect for his family name. That’s why he couldn’t have an addled wife. He owed more to his dignity and name. Lady Burnsby couldn’t have a head full of cobwebs.”
“Was Mima always so impaired?” Colette asked.
“Something happened when she gave birth,” Sophonisba said, throwing Lance an unfriendly look.
“Bunny told me that she woke up two days later, unable to move her right side and with the memory of a fruit fly. She still doesn’t remember anything for more than a day.
By all rights, he had no wife. It was pure kindness on his part to pay for her care. ”
No one responded to this cruel assertion.
“Mima is short for Jemima,” Lance said, looking at Mima gazing out the window, paying no attention to us. “But how can we determine whether Mima is Lily?”
Godric rounded on Sophonisba. “Miss Ainsworth, are you confirming that Burnsby’s first wife is in this room now?”
Sophonisba shrugged. “Her brain isn’t, but the rest of her is.”
“Mon dieu,” Colette whispered.
“Mima detests Burnsby,” I said incredulously. “How could she possibly have been married to him and retain no memory of the relationship?” I bit my lip. “She did call him Clifford. She was the only person other than Sophonisba who called him by his given name.”
Sophonisba stared at me, her mouth tight. The rage driving her demand for eight thousand pounds had burned out. As her eyes caught the candlelight, they seemed as flat as pennies, the ones used to keep dead bodies’ eyes shut.
(I know: absurdly fanciful.)
I turned to the one person who could (perhaps) clarify the situation, raising my voice. “Mima, did you ever marry?”
“Oh no, dear. I don’t like men. I’d never do that.”
I frowned, but then: “There’s the portrait!” I exclaimed. “Mima’s portrait.” I turned to Godric. “Tess dispatched it to the kitchen for cleaning.”
Godric nodded and left the room.
“If Mima was Burnsby’s first wife, that means he sent her baby—Lance—away at birth,” I said. “That might explain why she searches the abbey.”
Godric appeared, followed by a footman carrying the large gilt frame, now free of dust and grime. Lance stood and took the painting, dismissing the footman with a jerk of his head.
“Aunt Mima,” he said, bringing it over to her. “Is this your portrait?”
She peered at it. “Why, that’s my favorite dress. I got married in that dress.”
Lance flinched. “Who did you marry, Mima?”
“Oh, I didn’t marry. I’m illegitimate. Who would marry me?”
I felt a bolt of deep anger. Burnsby had taken advantage of his wife’s confused mind to obliterate the memory of her (married) parents, not to mention her own baby.
“Ophelia said that she is more likely to answer narrow questions,” Colette said. “Mima, does that portrait depict Clifford’s first wife?”
Mima peered at it again. “Yes, it does, dear. You know, Clifford pinned his will to the back of it. He said portraits were safe because no one looks behind them.”
Godric shook his head. “The portrait had nothing pinned to the back when we found it.”
Lance rose and went to kneel at Mima’s side. “Mother, I am your son, grown up and not lost.”
She patted his shoulder. “Oh no, Lance, dear. You are Lily’s child. My baby was taken away by my sister, and I never saw him again.”
Now they were so close together, I saw that he had her nose. More than likely, her white curls were once golden, like Lance’s. Colette made a stifled sound.
“Mother,” Lance said, his voice wrenchingly sad. “You are Lily.”
Colette rose and went to him, tugging him to his feet and wrapping her arms around his waist.
“You’re all so serious,” Mima remarked. “As if someone had died!” She got up and shambled away without another word. Her footman wrapped her in a cloak, and they disappeared into the twilight.
Lance turned on Sophonisba. “How dare you keep my mother hidden from the world, pretending that she was dead? Unknown to me, her own son?” Lance’s voice throbbed like that of a Shakespearean actor.
(I hope you’ll forgive the jocose observation; I am very fond of Lance, but drama isn’t in my soul. Lance and Colette are of a different breed in that respect.)
“I had no idea who she was,” Sophonisba spat. “On Christmas night, Bunny told me I wasn’t his wife—I’d never been his wife—because his first wife was still alive. He knew I wouldn’t have come back to England without him promising marriage. He falsified our marriage certificate because he had to.”
“Were you ever known as Lady Burnsby?” I asked.
Her face momentarily crumpled and smoothed out again. “I prefer to be known as the opera singer Sophonisba Ainsworth,” she replied, with a flare of her former bravado.
Burnsby had never acknowledged his mistress in public.
“I didn’t have to return to England,” Sophonisba shrilled. “My voice was celebrated. All Paris lauded my performance of Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro. Bunny had no need to commission my portrait, because Batoni begged to paint me.”
That solved another nagging question: I had been surprised that Burnsby commissioned his mistress’s likeness, but I had put his uncharacteristic generosity down to adoration.
More likely, he had told me the truth (for once) when he claimed never to have loved her.
What did he say about her? Burnsby’s words resurfaced in my mind: Such a woman has uses that you could not understand.
I could understand those “uses,” as could other wives of despicable gentlemen engaging in extramarital dingbangling.
“Neither a madwoman nor a mistress was good enough to assume the title of Lady Burnsby,” I summarized.
“He dumped my mother in an institution until he returned from Europe, bringing you with him,” Lance said to Sophonisba.
“I didn’t know my wedding was a fake, did I?” Her fingers clenched into a fist. “He told me that we’d be living in the Highlands with his addled bastard sister, and then he just left me with her!”
“I presume it was too dangerous for Burnsby to leave my mother in an institution once she learned how to speak again,” Lance said. “His reputation would have been dented if anyone had discovered that his wife was confined to an asylum.”
Sophonisba tossed her head, demonstrating that she had no need of plumes. “I shall move to London.”
“You may go wherever you wish,” Colette said cordially. “Take your ermine coat and whatever rubbishing jewels Burnsby gave you.”
“You leave me no choice but to sell my story!” Sophonisba hissed, her face empurpling.
I slowly registered her words. My former husband had consigned his wife to an asylum, engaged in three bigamous marriages, fathered an illegitimate daughter, and deceived his mistress with a false wedding certificate.
His life had played out in deception, which would be irresistible for curious minds.
I’d give her story a full week on the front page of the Times. But the scandal would never fully die out, and even once it had run through the press, one of my favorite novelists was sure to write a roman à clef, replete with ghosts and a haunted abbey.
There went Godric’s judgeship. My heart sank. If we hadn’t married that morning, his career might have been saved.
What’s more, Sophonisba would not hesitate to identify Ophelia as Burnsby’s illegitimate daughter. Most, if not all, members of polite society would see her as naught but another rotten limb on a diseased family tree. Ophelia would be unable to debut, no matter how generously we dowered her.
My mouth turned dry. “Godric,” I breathed, my fingers curling around his forearm. “I’m so sorry.”
Sophonisba’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction and rage, her lips curved in a half-moon. “I’ll take all of you down,” she promised. “The stories I tell will find their way from London to Paris. To the court of Napoleon himself!”
“You would betray your true love by dragging his reputation through the gutter?” Lance asked.
She let out a sharp laugh. “Now I am the traitor? My mother wouldn’t see me before her death, even after I wrote to tell her that I was now Lady Burnsby. She said—” Sophonisba bit off the sentence.
We could all guess what her mother had said.
She rose abruptly and left the room, leaving the black veil behind her.
“Sophonisba Ainsworth doesn’t really want to sell her story,” Godric said, looking unperturbed. “She wants money, not infamy.”
“Then we’ll pay her,” Lance said grimly. “She’s a selfish, cruel woman, but my father treated her very badly.”
I turned my head and brushed my lips against Godric’s jaw, because it was there. Waiting to be kissed.
Despite all the chaos—a wretched husband, a jealous mistress, a secret wife, and the constant redefining of who I was and to whom I belonged—Godric was still here. He was still mine. For the first time since I’d arrived at this fateful place, I fully understood who I was, and where I stood.
He glanced down at me, and his eyes drooped. “Evie.” His lips shaped the word, but without sound.
“Bedtime,” Colette said, getting up. “Come along, Count Marmont.”