for the embarrassment and guilt she feared was written in her eyes.
‘Adam is very busy,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘I… I… don’t like to bother him, and besides… Well, I… if he is involved in some kind of speculative purchase, it’s bound to be confidential, isn’t it?’
‘I’m sure you’re wrong,’ Lord Stanton replied. ‘If he is… but I doubt very much that you need have any fears for the house’s future if Adam is involved with it,’ he assured her. ‘I was pleased to hear, by the way, that he has been escorting that pretty young daughter of George James’s around recently. It’s high time he found himself a wife. I can’t think why he hasn’t done so before.’
‘Yes, Lily is very attractive,’ Fern agreed in a small, quiet voice.
‘Are you all right, my dear?’ Lord Stanton asked her with some concern. ‘You look quite pale. Let me ring for Phillips and you can have that glass of sherry. It isn’t very warm in here…’
In the end, it was over two hours before Fern actually left, having given way to Lord Stanton’s insistence that she have a glass of sherry and having waited numbly while Phillips was summoned to pour it and to bring the essential sweet biscuits.
‘You’re a very kind young woman,’ Lord Stanton told Fern when she finally stood up to go. ‘And that husband of yours is a very lucky young man.’
Was he? Fern reflected as she walked home. She doubted that Nick himself thought so.
After all, if he had, would he need to lie to her, to deceive her, to tell her that he needed her as his wife with one breath, while with the next telling another woman that she was the one he wanted?
What hurt her the most, she wondered miserably: his infidelity or her own feeling that it was because of her, because of some failing, some lack of something within her?
Her heart started to beat faster with apprehension and misery, her unhappiness quickly wiping out the pleasantness of the time she had spent with Lord Stanton.
Was Nick being unfaithful to her with Venice, or was she simply imagining it? And if he was having another affair…
She tugged at her bottom lip, worrying at the soft inner flesh.
She had tried her best to make their marriage work, to put the past behind her, to forget… to love him.
She had loved her parents, too, and had wanted to please them out of that love… Had not wanted to disappoint their expectations of her.
And yet once she had come perilously close not just to doing that, but to breaking every moral law they had taught her.
A commitment made to another person was a commitment made for life, they had taught her. Marriage was the ultimate commitment, a vow made that should never be broken. And yet she had broken hers… And was still, within herself, breaking it?
Nick had once accused her of driving him into the arms of other women; of rejecting him not just with her physical inhibitions, her inability to arouse him as they could, but by not loving him.
And yet in almost the same breath he would then announce that she did love him, and that he loved her, that their marriage was important to him; that she was important to him.
How important? Certainly not important enough to stop him from having an affair with Venice.
If he was having an affair with her.
Fern shivered a little, knowing that she could not let the present situation persist for much longer without confronting him with her suspicions, and yet knowing that she was afraid to do so, afraid of the emotional trauma that would follow… afraid not just of his anger, but of her own guilt, the guilt she knew he would throw back at her.
Justifiably?
Tears stung her eyes and she half stumbled against an uneven piece of pavement.
There was no escape for her from the truth, certainly not within her own thoughts or conscience. She had been guilty of the ultimate marital sin. She had broken faith with him, with her marriage vows.
The evening was giving way to dusk. She paused to watch some house-martins sweeping up into the eaves of a house on the other side of the road—nest-building, no doubt.
A small, sharp pain caught at her heart, making her chest and throat feel tight with hurt. Quickly she turned away, bending her head so that she wasn’t tempted to look back at them.
* * *
‘Adam… My dear chap, what a pleasant surprise.’
Adam shook the hand the older man extended to him, noting as he did so the frailty of the bony wrist.