The Love Child by Philippa Carr

Author:Philippa Carr
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A Visit to London

NOW OUR LIVES HAD set to a pattern. Leigh continued in the army and we waited eagerly for those times when we could be together. The children were growing up. Damaris was six years old; Carlotta, thirteen. I was twenty-eight years old.

“There is plenty of time to have more children,” said my mother.

She was contented. My father was at home and she was glad that he was getting old.

“Too old for adventures,” she said with a chuckle.

But my father was the sort who would always be ready for adventure, as Leigh was. My mother and I were closer than we had ever been. We shared each other’s anxieties. She told me what a comfort I had always been to her. “Though when you were born,” she said, “I was disappointed because you weren’t a boy. But only for your father’s sake, of course. He always wanted boys.”

“I know,” I said, with a trace of bitterness, “he made that clear.”

“Some men are like that,” replied my mother. “They think the world is made for men … and so it is in many ways. But some of them can’t do without us.”

I felt very tender towards her. Beside her, I felt worldly beyond imagining. She had lost her first husband when he was very young and had lamented for him over many years, deceived into thinking that he was the perfect gentle knight when, all the time he had been professing devotion to her, he had been Harriet’s lover. Yet my mother had overcome that to walk into a lifelong romance with my father. In a way life had protected her as it never had me. I had loved and borne a child out of wedlock; I had been caught up in intrigue and had spent such a night with a man who seemed to me like a monster of iniquity; and now I was living the quiet country life like a matron who has never strayed from the conventional paths. There was so much which I could not explain to my mother.

But now we both feared for the men we loved and that brought us together. There were times when I almost told her what had happened to me, but I restrained myself in time.

So, there were those occasions when Leigh came home and we planned for the future, but although I longed for him while he was away, when we were together we never quite reached that blissful contentment which I knew should have been ours. Always the memory of Beaumont Granville would be there to torment me, to jeer at me, to remind me of my humiliating submission. If I could have disguised this from Leigh I should have been happier, but he was aware that something was between us and deeply hurt by it; and I began to fear that in time it could corrode our relationship and ruin our marriage.

Damaris was a quiet, reflective child. She was clever at her lessons and Emily’s favourite. I was glad of that.

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