Page 16

It was a painful truth that this idyll could not last, and he thought they both knew it. But Bianca had no reason to leave Venice, or Italy, and he most assuredly did. He had a son waiting patiently for him at home, and now he was better, now that travel had done for him all that it was supposed to do and more, he should return. He knew it, and yet here he still was, in the heat of the summer, as the days cooled into autumn, locked in Bianca’s arms, unable to tear himself away.

In the end, he didn’t need to, but he could hardly claim to be grateful for it. She most definitely had not put an end to their liaison herself because she had any intention of sparing him distress. The way she left him was not merciful.

One day he’d been expecting to meet her, in their usual place on the quiet canal, overlooked only by blind, windowless walls, but the unlovely Alvise came instead, and gravely passed him a note. There was no rolling of the eyes, no mockery, no incomprehensible but undoubtedly derogatory comment; the youth merely bowed, in a way that Xan was later to recognise to be expressive of pity and perhaps even sympathy, and then whisked himself away. Plainly the youth had no desire at all to be there and to be questioned when Mr Challender had absorbed the contents of the missive, and once he had read it, he could not blame him. In his place, Xan would have done the same, and possibly even left the city, post-haste, for his own safety.

She began normally enough:

Dear Xan,

I am sorry to let you down today, but over the past week or so I have been reflecting on our connection, brief as it has been, and I have reached the sad conclusion that it should come to an end without delay, and that I must be the one to do it. If you are honest, you will admit that I am right, and that soon enough you would have been obliged to leave me and go back to your family and home in England, and above all your son. I fear you will be angry with me nonetheless, and I did not tell you as much to your face because I could imagine you trying to stop me, and perhaps making rash promises that, on sober reflection, you would have realised you did not really mean and must soon deeply regret. It has been a pleasant interlude for both of us, but no more than that. I do not refine too much upon it, and nor should you. Our real lives must always lie very far apart. I wish you good health and good fortune, sir, and a safe journey home.

Addio,

Bianca Rossi

Xan gazed at the letter in stupefaction, and read it a dozen times before he could be sure that it was real. Our connection… a pleasant interlude… It had been far more than that for him, and he had thought that she felt the same, though in sober truth they had never spoken of it. It seemed he had been right in his unwelcome suspicions all along, and her love for her husband had never waned; he, Xan Challender, had been nothing more than a passing distraction. A brief one. An unimportant one, plainly. He should not refine too much upon it. Lady Wellbeloved had said as much before it had all begun, hadn’t she? An affaire. Nothing more than that. Really quite a trivial thing, and soon forgotten. Certainly by her, Bianca.

He stood by the dank little canal and swore at length, the vilest words he knew, and if anybody had been there to hear him, in that moment he would not have cared, and if they had commented on his foul blaspheming, it might have gone ill for them.

But there was a post-script.

I know I can depend upon you to show this letter to no one. I would instead be grateful if you destroyed it, for both our sakes. Goodbye, Xan, for I am sure we shall never meet again, and you must agree that it is better so.

Destroy it? Sweet suffering Christ, and so he would, without hesitation. Mr Challender, with ridiculous care, because for some reason his hands were shaking and his vision was strangely blurred, ripped the thick paper into a dozen pieces, then a dozen more, and flung it into the canal, where it lingered for a short while, like fallen blossom, and then absorbed the dirty water and swirled slowly from view. It scarcely mattered, because every hurtful word – even the true ones – were graven upon his memory in letters of fire, and always would be.

The eccentric English gentleman dismissed his Swiss courier the following day, to Mr Beauregard’s eternal puzzlement, and left Venice the day after that, in great haste and a certain amount of confusion, heading south. If he never saw the place again as long as he lived, he should not be sorry. It was not real, as he had first suspected. It was both astonishingly beautiful and appallingly false, just like her.

24

LONDON

Soon after Bianca made her escape from his house in Berkeley Square, Lord Fairmount went for a solitary ride in the park. He barely heeded the curious glances he received, from the groom who saddled his bay and from acquaintances who happened to see him passing through the streets; it was neither the early-morning ride favoured by serious equestrians nor the appointed hour at which the fashionable set showed themselves and their expensive horses off to society, but an awkward sort of in-between time, and also the hottest part of the day with the sun directly overhead. It was the hour for the leisurely Bond Street strut, or for sitting in a comfortably cool club and reading the papers in a desultory fashion while chatting with friends. But let him be thought eccentric. He was far past caring.

He couldn’t stay in the house and speak to people – his aunt and his son – and the last thing he wanted was to seek out any kind of masculine company. (Women, in his present mood, he must shun.) His few close friends were quiet, respectable men like himself – men who took their family responsibilities seriously: progressive landowners, earnest lawyers, serious-minded politicians. Not rakes and libertines, because he deliberately avoided intimacy with such persons, which probably made him a dreadful hypocrite. At any rate, he couldn’t tell his strait-laced companions about this. They’d look at him as though he should be locked up in Bedlam. And perhaps they’d be right. He felt as though his head was about to explode. And not just his head.

There could be no good time for such a catastrophe to happen and overset the fragile calm of his life, but why must it be now? The new Earl had only just got back to Town after an extended stay on his estate in Somerset, where he had been working with some success to put right the neglect it had suffered in the last few years. He could hardly leave London again so soon, much as he might wish to. He needed to spend time with his son, who was happier in Town than near his maternal grandparents, who were not easy company for a sensitive child, made selfish as they were by their own terrible loss; he needed time to rebuild the relationship with Adrian that his extended stay on the Continent had damaged. He knew this.

But actually, that wasn’t true – the nature of the damage. He’d been distant from Adrian long before he’d abandoned him. After Louise’s death, perhaps even before it, a grey pall of misery had sunk over him, and though he had been physically present for his child, had informed him in halting words of his mama’s passing, had held him when he cried and done his best to answer his bewildered, heart-breaking questions in the long days afterwards, he had felt that there was a thick pane of glass between them all the while, and that whatever he said to anybody, even his dear son, it couldn’t properly be heard or understood.

It was corrosive guilt, he thought, that was to blame for it. If Louise had died in childbirth, died because of his actions, his lust – he could not in honesty call it love – that would have been entirely unendurable to him. As it was, she’d been seized by a terrible affliction of the throat and lungs – not consumption, something far faster in its effects – which no medicine that currently existed could touch, and everyone told him over and over that it couldn’t possibly be considered his fault.

Everyone, that was, except her aged, broken parents, Lord and Lady Wyeth, who looked at him even now with reproachful eyes as if to say, We trusted you with our only treasure and you could not manage to keep her safe. Lady Wyeth, he had been told, could no longer be left alone for even a moment, lest she harm herself. How could he, worthless, heartless Xan Challender, be alive in the world when her precious Louise was dead?

It was worse, not better, though, than death in childbed, in one sense, because they knew as well as he did that he hadn’t loved her, rather than loving her or even desiring her too much. They could probably have more easily excused an excess of ardour on his part – she had been so beautiful, after all.

It hadn’t been that way at the start, this bitter disappointment in him. The old Baron and his wife had been as keen on the arranged match as his father had – the prospect of their precious angel very likely being a countess one day had seemed only right and proper to them – but they’d also thought, he’d later realised, that he, her lucky husband of all people, was bound to fall head over heels in love with her, because everybody did. It wasn’t even a topic for discussion, so inevitable was it. Never had a girl been so adored by everyone who met her, like a princess in a fairytale. And that must make him the villain who’d come to ruin her perfect world. He certainly wasn’t the hero.

He’d cared for her, had treated her as well as he knew how, but the marriage had not been of his choosing and though he had never thought to blame her for it, because it was not her fault any more than it was his, there’d been a substantial barrier between them in his mind from the very beginning, and she had realised it over the months and years. He could not doubt that she had complained of him to her parents, who were wealthy, doting, and up to that point had been able to give her every single thing that her heart had desired. But they couldn’t give her Xan’s love. Painful scenes had ensued. Fierce, useless arguments, and cold, days-long silences.

When his wife had first charged him with not loving her as he should, not all that long after Adrian’s birth, he ought to have lied. He had lied – but not fast enough. That fatal second of surprise and hesitation had done for him, and could never afterwards be recovered. It was the first of those most painful confrontations, but by no means the last.

As she’d said with justice one day when she forced him back to the topic as she always did, tears streaming unregarded down her exquisite face, a man who loved a woman, his lawful wife, would have told her so in the first place of his own free will, not waited to be asked. When they’d first made love, when she’d revealed she was with child, when that child, a precious son, had been placed in his arms – all of these were moments when such a declaration should with propriety have been made. Xan had not done so, and a woman of sensibility could not fail to notice it.

‘I do not love another,’ he had told her honestly, so many times. ‘I have never lain with or loved another woman, and never shall. Louise, you are everything and more that a man could want. The fault is in me. Perhaps I do not have the capacity for love as you understand it, and the loss is mine as well as yours. Certainly I have never seen such a thing at close quarters in my own family, though I know you have, for which I must always envy you. You know my parents loathed each other by the end, and fought bitterly, not much caring if Philip and I witnessed it. We must never be so callous and indifferent to Adrian’s feelings, my dear, I am certain you agree.’

‘You are abnormal!’ she had screamed at him, heedless of everything else. ‘I give you everything and you give me nothing in return!’

‘I give you all I have to give, Louise.’