Joan Wolf Read Free Page B

day. Her mother and her brother sat with Mark and his aunt in the front of the church, and the grief that never appeared on her husband’s face was all too evident on theirs. Sir Giles, in particular, looked shattered. He and Mark scarcely spoke, except for a few minutes at the graveside. At that time Lady Maria caught something in Giles’s blue eyes that frightened her. Good God, she thought involuntarily, surely he can’t blame Mark for this tragedy!
    She stayed at Castle Dartmouth for several months after Caroline’s death, running the house and helping to look after the baby. During that time it was made perfectly clear to her by a few of the upper servants, whom she had known for years, that Mark and Caroline had not been happy together. Why that was, no one knew. Lady Maria disliked gossiping with the servants, but the issue at hand was hardly one she could ignore. And she simply could not talk to Mark. On the subject of Caroline he was unapproachable.
    They had not been happy. Mark, apparently, had always been scrupulously polite to his wife. But he had been distant. “He stayed away from her, my lady,” Mrs. Irons, the housekeeper, told her bluntly. “He kept up a show in front of others—especially his father. But once the old Earl died, it seemed as if he even ceased to make that effort.”
    “But what could have happened?” Lady Maria asked in great bewilderment. “He was so in love with her.”
    “I don’t know, my lady. But I do know that talk is circulating that it was his coldness that drove her to her death, poor lass.”
    “Oh, no!” cried Lady Maria on a note of pain.
    “I don’t like to repeat gossip, my lady,” said Mrs. Irons a trifle grimly, “but I thought you should know.”
     

Chapter Four
     
    Lady Maria stayed at Castle Dartmouth until the following April. She stayed mainly because she felt her presence helped in a small way to diminish the gossip about Mark. She had been alarmed and horrified by the extent and the malignity of that gossip.
    Where it came from or how it had started, she did not know. But people blamed him for the death of his young wife. It was there in their eyes whenever he entered a drawing room, a local meeting, the church. She felt that her presence was a demonstration of good faith on the part of his family and as such was necessary. She was not necessary to either the house, which was run most efficiently by Mrs. Irons, or to Robin, who was in the very competent charge of his nurse. She was needed, she thought, by Mark.
    It was in April that she received a second shocking communication containing tragic news. It came this time from Sydenham Damerel. She was sitting staring at her letter in obvious distress when Mark came into the morning parlor. “What has happened?” he asked instantly.
    She looked up at him. ‘‘What is it that Claudius says to Gertrude, something about sorrows coming not in single spies but in battalions? I’ve just received a letter from my old friend Louisa Dalwood. Her daughter, Laura, who is also my goddaughter, was married last year, shortly after you were. Her husband is dead of typhus. He was only thirty-four.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Mark. He came and sat down across from her on a rose-colored sofa. “It does not appear to have been a lucky year for marriages.” There was a note of audible bitterness in his voice.
    “No,” she replied quietly. “Not, at least, for you or for Laura.”
    There was a pause, and then he said, in quite a different voice, “I had a rather important letter myself, Aunt Maria. From the Admiralty.”
    “Yes?” She looked at him inquiringly.
    “They have offered me command of the frigate Glasgow. They want me to undertake a survey of the southern coast of Turkey.”
    “Turkey?”
    “Yes.” His golden-brown eyes, fringed by lashes many shades darker than his hair, were more alive than she had seen them in months.
     “The Turkish coast should be able to provide us with valuable naval