Marry in Haste by Jane Aiken Hodge

Author:Jane Aiken Hodge
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Published: 2012-06-14T04:16:57+00:00

CHAPTER 8

September passed, the sun came out to shine on hills that were green from recent rain. The heather on the plain below them was in splendid blossom, and Camilla and Chloe, in their afternoon rambles, were delighted to find enormous pink and white lilies blooming among the wild moss under the cork trees of a nearby valley. But all the sunshine could not warm Camilla, who continued chilly and wretched, shaken by alarming fits of nausea and faintness. It was Chloe, one golden afternoon, when Camilla had been compelled to sit for a time on a mossy bank to recover from a giddy spell, who suggested an alarming explanation of her state.

“Can it be that you are breeding, Camilla?” she asked, with her devastating schoolroom frankness. “How delighted Grandmamma would be.”

Camilla, with a sinking heart, pooh-poohed the idea. She was merely suffering, she said, from nerves and the intolerably greasy Portuguese food. She convinced Chloe easily enough, but convincing herself was another matter. More and more, as September darkened towards October, she began to fear that Chloe was right. If so, what should she do, how break it to Lavenham that she was to bear his child? How bitterly, now, she regretted that she had not told him the whole story of their night together when he first recovered his senses. And yet, in the face of his total oblivion, his almost unbearable return to the old formal relationship, how could she have? Would he, even, have believed her? Wary as she knew him to be of female guile, might he not have thought she was taking advantage of his admitted forgetfulness? No—it would have been impossible to tell him—and yet, now, how she wished that she had. If it had seemed impossible, before, to tell him that he had broken through a lifetime’s suspicions and slept with her, how much more so, now, when she must tell him, as well, that in that one ecstatic, forgotten night, he had got her with child.

How could she hope that he would believe her? Distrustful, always, of women, he must inevitably think this a ruse on her part to conceal her own unfaithfulness. As she grew, morning by morning, increasingly, despairingly certain of her condition, her one, pitiful consolation was that there was no one else, after all, whom Lavenham could possibly suspect of being the father.

But even this forlorn consolation was snatched from her, one mild October morning, by an unexpected visit from Dom Fernando. Chloe, to whom Camilla had allowed increasing liberty since the departure of the French mission, was out gathering arbutus berries on the nearby hillside, and Camilla, welcoming Dom Fernando with apologies for her husband’s absence, found herself, alone with him, unaccountably ill at ease.

As always, they spoke French, and it was in that language that he assured her that he had known Lavenham was still at Mafra, had, in fact, left him there that morning to return to his own house in Lisbon. He had not been able, he told her, to pass so close to her villa without calling to find out how she did.

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