Chapter Seventeen
She departed with all the dignity she could muster.
For appearance’s sake, she pretended to have at long last received the letter from Georgina inviting her to come make a home in London.
After packing her meager inventory of belongings, she descended to take breakfast with the family—but the footman informed her they had all elected to take the meal in their rooms. She lingered at the table as Mrs. Chow called for the carriage, and then she waited in the doorway as Boyle packed her bag into the coach.
Lord Preston did not come down to make things right. He did not send a note of apology with Mrs. Chow. He did not even show himself to say farewell as the servants assembled to wish her a safe journey.
His absence made it easier to leave—frankly, made it easier to be angry instead of devastated as she climbed into his fancy carriage with his hundred-pound banknote sewn safely into the hem of her petticoat.
She had not asked anything of him. She had not accused him of anything. She had not done anything except bare her heart to him, and he repaid her by sending her away.
Perhaps everyone else was right and he was not the man he claimed to be.
As she settled onto the carriage bench—back stiff so as to demonstrate perfect posture to anyone looking—she got her final glimpse of Lord Preston.
He stood in the bay window of his study, just behind the gauzy window curtains that screened for privacy while letting in sunlight.
At the moment, the sky was steel gray and shedding a light, unpleasant drizzle of icy rain.
He was hardly more than a shadow behind that layer of white linen, a statue of a man with his hands frozen behind his back, his head bowed as if in prayer.
For the briefest of moments, their gazes collided, and Martha forgot to be angry, so desperate was she for him to make everything right.
And then the horses began to walk and the carriage began to roll and Martha was pulled away from him.
She allowed herself to cry in the carriage.
If he had died, she would have been allowed to sob in a bedroom without question, or at least keen with the village as they all mourned their lost lord.
But he was not dead; he simply no longer wanted to have anything to do with her.
And so this grief, unlike all her others, must remain secret.
When her tears became more audible, more like sobs, she pulled herself together, gasping in air until she was calm again, so that Boyle wouldn’t hear.
By the time they arrived at the Fox and Hound, Martha had tucked her handkerchief into her sleeve and returned to being the somber woman she had been before Northfield Hall. She secured a room for a week with her own ten shillings and bid Boyle farewell with a tip of a half crown.
“We’ll miss you around the Hall,” he said gruffly, tugging at his cap as if she were a great lady deserving of his respect.
“Everything has its season. Take good care of yourself.”
She wondered if Lord Preston would ask Boyle how she looked as he took his leave. Should she call Boyle back and leave some final words with him for Lord Preston to interpret?
But she didn’t know what she wanted to say, other than Take it back, please.
She made a routine for herself at the Fox and Hound as she endured the week.
Breakfast—bread, cheese, and actual tea—in her room.
A walk around the green, during which she allowed herself to stop in at one shop a day.
In the afternoons, she sat in the inn’s parlor with her embroidery hoop.
She took supper in the common room and then retired to her bedchamber, where she read by candlelight before forcing herself to at least try to sleep.
It wasn’t much of a life, but it afforded her a heartbeat within which to consider her options.
She yearned to return Lord Preston’s hundred pounds.
Even though she hadn’t heard from Georgina, she could go to Battersea and join the family of seven in a bed that might well be in the same room as those five children.
It was the proper place for an old widow, the only place where Martha could hope to have people take notice of her as she grew weaker and weaker.
Try as she might—and she tried especially hard that week—Martha couldn’t imagine herself in Georgina’s family.
She couldn’t see herself disappearing into a corner of chaos, nor could she summon excitement at the prospect of watching over all those children.
There would be so much life in that house, if it was even a house; Martha wasn’t sure she had the wherewithal to sustain it.
If she hadn’t been at Northfield Hall, perhaps she could have been happy with Georgina.
But she had gone to Northfield Hall; she had unlocked her heart to Lord Preston, for better or worse, and now the hopes and dreams and loves that had lain dormant inside her for years were awakened again.
Martha did not merely want to survive. She wanted to thrive.
She wanted to be as full and happy and flawed a person as she had been when Lucas was alive.
Which meant, she concluded as her days at the Fox and Hound drew to a close, that she needed to do what she had not done all these years.
She needed to say a proper goodbye to Lucas.
And to do that, she needed to accept Lord Preston’s bitter gift.
And so his life reverted to what it should be.
A quiet Northfield Hall, emptied of his children, who had seen fit to build lives very different and apart from his.
Plodding winter days full of correspondence and decisions.
Cold reviews of the estate to discover the latest problems sprouting on top of the ones just fixed.
It was the right thing to send Martha away.
It had been wrong to dally with her—wrong to kiss those fingertips, unbraid that hair, taste that delicate skin—and so it was right to tear himself away from her, though the rip was violent and painful.
When she left, he checked her bedchamber, fearing she had left him a final note that a maid might find, and took in his last breath of her scent.
There was only a lace glove, lost beneath the bed, which she had often worn to supper with his daughters in that last month.
Martin tucked it into his pocket, in case she wrote upon discovering its loss.
He didn’t hear from her, but he did keep the glove close.
He didn’t allow himself to think of her, but he did stroke those lace fingers when he was alone in his study.
He didn’t permit his thoughts to wander to Theale, but he did, every so often, press the lace to his nose and inhale the sensible scent of Martha.
She deserved a much better final chapter to her life than as mistress to a hypocritical old man.
He did his best not to think about his children, either.
Neither Ellen, who did not recognize him, nor Sophia, who did not accept his love, wrote to him after leaving Northfield Hall; he heard instead from their husbands that they had arrived safely home.
Caroline, citing exhaustion in her final months of expecting, remained in Thatcham instead of coming for Sunday dinners.
Nor were there letters from Benjamin in Ireland, and Nate wrote from Portsmouth to say his wife was too ill to travel to Berkshire for Christmas after all.
In other words, Martin had been rejected wholesale by all five of his children.
He had tasted this before, when they had rallied behind Caroline in her quest to marry Eddie.
The difference now was that he did not have the heart to fight his way back into their good graces.
Perhaps he was the hypocrite they accused him of being.
Martin could admit to himself that they might very well be right.
They must be, to decide he was so unworthy of their love that they could not forgive him.
This time, he would waste no energy trying to convince them he was not a monster.
For after all, he was! He was a lecher who took advantage of a poor widow.
He was a tartar who ignored his daughters in crisis.
He was a narcissist who only helped the needy in order to convince the world he was a good person.
He did not actually know each person living at Northfield—not even their names, when Maulvi could have told him at least two sentences about every soul!
—nor did he have the appetite to take meals in the dining hall to meet them all.
And after all those years that he had abandoned his family for the parliamentary season in London to work on abolition bills, British plantations still owned slaves in the West Indies.
Had Martin ever truly been willing to do what it would take to bring about abolition, or did he only give voice to the idea without forcing the change through his government?
If his children considered him a monster, Martin decided, then it was time to finalize his will once and for all.
He summoned his solicitor from London to finish it before Christmas.
The estate, entailed by law to Benjamin, would remain in the family.
The money would be put into a trust, to be used only for improvements to Northfield Hall.
His children, who wanted nothing from him, would be permitted to select any furniture or clothing about which they were sentimental.
It was, all in all, a simple will. His solicitor presented the final draft for him to sign in the late afternoon; Martin called in Mr. Chow as his witness; and the whole chore was completed by sunset.
Martin wondered why he had wasted so much time deliberating, why he had forced Martha to listen to his whining about how difficult it was to decide.