Mistress And Mother

The silence behind her lingered a long time.

‘It’s hard to picture Sholto getting married because he has to get married,’ Lena conceded heavily.

‘Yeah, well…it is kind of hard,’ Nigel muttered in grudging agreement. ‘I mean, let’s face it, there’s nothing cool about a shotgun do, is there? But it doesn’t seem right. I’m glad I didn’t know about this yesterday. I would’ve felt I had to say something to him…and I don’t think I would’ve had the nerve.’

Molly’s tension evaporated. It would be easier just to allow her family to believe that Sholto hadn’t even considered marriage. They would never understand how she felt. He didn’t love her, he didn’t need her and he would never have dreamt of asking her to marry him if she hadn’t been pregnant. All Sholto wanted was her child. And that wasn’t enough.

It was after nine when she returned to Templebrooke. Ogden greeted her with the news that Sholto was no longer there. Late that afternoon, he had flown out to Italy.

‘Italy?’ Molly queried weakly, an intense sense of disappointment filling her.

‘A major fire in one of his late father’s companies, madam,’ Ogden explained helpfully. ‘Suspected arson. A caretaker and a security guard were injured. I should think Mr Cristaldi will be away for several days.’

And yet he hadn’t left her a personal message or phoned her even though he’d known where she was. Nor had he asked her to accompany him. Molly went to bed, gutted by her own misery. Sholto was angry with her and she could cope with that when he was around but not when he was away. Still, at least the fire hadn’t taken place in New York, she found herself thinking. Then she felt little and mean and selfish for that thought when innocent people had been hurt.

The following evening, he phoned her from Milan, his deep, dark drawl cool and polite. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know when I’ll be back. The police need all the help they can get.’

‘How are the men who were hurt?’

‘The security man is in Intensive Care but he’s young and strong and there’s a good chance he’ll make it…the old caretaker died.’ Sholto’s voice roughened tellingly. ‘His family’s devastated and I’ll get the bastard responsible for this if it kills me!’

Travelling back to the town house the next morning, Molly thought over that conversation and a curious sense of shame engulfed her. At twenty she had been in awe of Sholto, had seen the looks, the wealth, the sophistication… the polished outward image. But how well had she ever got to know the man she loved? she asked herself now.

She had already been shaken by the kindness and tact with which he had handled Nigel and Lena. Somehow he had got down to their level to explain everything in terms they could understand. He had controlled his famous impatience and his intellectual intolerance for stupid questions, and to crown those virtues he had actually admired their home to make them relax and feel more comfortable with him. Her brother’s house was a towering monument to very bad taste.

Furthermore, few men of Sholto’s standing would devote so much time and attention to the injury of one employee and the death of another. Oh, they might pay lip-service—visit the hospital, speak a few words to the bereaved—but they would stop short of really caring or becoming personally involved because there would always be some other employee available to take charge of that onerous responsibility. But Sholto hadn’t gone by that route, hadn’t reached for that excuse. And all those actions spoke louder than words. Underneath that surface of cool detachment lurked a male worthy of far more respect than she had been giving him.

Two days later, Sholto rang her to tell her he had just flown in to Heathrow but that he had to head straight into the office because a lot of work had piled up while he had been out of the country. A man had been arrested for arson. He didn’t have the time to tell her the whole story, he said. His voice had that distant edge it got when he was already ninety-nine per cent thinking about something else and yet it was the first time he had spoken to her in over twenty-four hours. Molly came off the phone feeling frightened.

Late afternoon, Ogden knocked on the door of the sitting room where she was reading and announced with an air of deeply approving satisfaction, ‘The Reverend Mr Seaton, madam.’

Molly shot out of her armchair with a look of guilty dismay. Donald advanced with a troubled light in his frank eyes.

‘I was planning to call and tell you where I was…I was!’ Molly told him, squirming with embarrassment.

‘You would’ve waited until I came back from New Zealand,’ Donald forecast with mortifying accuracy as he took a seat. ‘But when Lena chose to confide in me—’

‘Lena did what?’ Molly broke in.

‘I don’t think she meant to tell me but she was worried about you and the news that you were…er…“in the family way”, as she put it, slipped out,’ Donald revealed wryly. ‘So naturally I felt that I should go and have a word with Sholto…’

Molly cringed. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Donald.’

‘And I hadn’t been with him five minutes before I realised that you had been less than honest with your own family. Sholto asked you to marry him and you turned him down yet you are still living here. I doubt that he will make that offer again, Molly.’

‘He doesn’t love me…I’m not prepared to marry him just because…well, just because I’m pregnant,’ Molly countered in a stifled undertone, never having felt more uncomfortable with Donald in her life.

‘That’s false pride…and I think you’ll lose him completely if you persist with that attitude.’

Molly paled, her stomach clenching.

Donald sighed heavily. ‘My reading of Sholto is that when he doesn’t gain the result he expects he tells himself that he never wanted it in the first place. He has a much more dangerous temperament than you have, Molly. He doesn’t let the anger out, he broods.’

‘What did he say?’ Molly pressed uneasily.

‘He was grimly amused in not the nicest of ways and he kept his own counsel right to the end. He said that marriage would best meet the baby’s needs but that if you didn’t want it that was fine by him. He was cold, dismissive as he said it…’ Donald’s brown eyes were perturbed. ‘I received the impression that Sholto is extremely bitter, Molly…and if you’re saying no to marriage in the hope that he will inundate you with all the reasons why you should say yes I’m afraid you may well be waiting for something that isn’t going to happen.’

Sheer cold fear filled Molly because she had always respected Donald’s perception. Long after he had gone, she paced the floor. Had she been doing that? Had she been hanging out for persuasion and reassurance? But what entitlement did she have to that hope after some of the things she had said to him that morning? She had thrown his proposal back in his teeth with malicious pleasure, indeed hadn’t even allowed him to make that proposal.