The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith Page B

ebullient figure with acorona of white hair around his well-shaped head, clean shaven, with muttonchop sideburns, high cheekbones, thin-lipped. He had watchful light blue eyes, taking everything in, observing everything, and when he looked at you it was as if he had a special relationship, a secret, with you.
    On one of their rambles on the beach, he walked alongside Marian apart from the rest of the group, and he told her about his friendship with Coleridge, who’d just died. He and Coleridge were quite close, he said, with a modest smile, and Coleridge had sent him an excerpt of his revised
Biographia Literaria
, asking for his opinion. Coleridge had also confided to him, he said, his awful struggles with opium. He’d tried to help him but had failed and the great man had died, profoundly depressed, his life in ruins.
    Dr. Brabant was no longer practicing medicine, he said, but was writing a book on theology. It would be a very long work, he said. He was friends with the theologian David Friedrich Strauss. His book would be on the same lines as Strauss and his future son-in-law Charles Hennell’s work, questioning the facts of Jesus’s life as presented in the Gospels. “I think it will be epoch-making,” he said, “the final destroyer of all theological dogma.” She’d read some Strauss herself, she told him, as her German was quite good now. She was looking forward very much to reading his work.
    A few weeks after they returned from Tenby, one autumn morning, when the first frost covered the ground, she arrived at Rosehill to find Charles looking unusually serious. “I’ve got some news, Marian,” he said. He drew her into his study and shut the door behind them.
    He stood there, his hair hanging roughly over his forehead, his face florid with excitement.
    “Cara and I are going to have a child,” he said.
    She was dumbfounded. All along — what she hardly dared to imagine — he and Cara had still been intimate.
    “We’re going to adopt a baby girl.” So it wasn’t what it seemed.
    “But … how wonderful,” she said. “I’m so happy for you.”
    He didn’t smile, but continued watching her face, as if collecting himself before he delivered the next words. “The child is mine,” he said. He was silent, pausing for her response.
    “Yours?” So there
were
others. That possibility had remained unspoken between them, something she wanted to ignore because of her need for him, the gaiety he brought to her life, the distraction, the kindness.
    “Yes, mine,” he said.
    Her voice faltered. “But who is its mother?”
    “Hannah is the mother. Hannah Steane.”
    Her face burned with anger. Hannah, the cook, full-breasted, round-bodied Hannah, with her high color and dimpled wrists, who smiled sweetly and brought them their meals and lived with her mother and sister nearby on Radford Road. But right under her nose? And she hadn’t noticed it. She thought back. Hannah had grown plumper recently, her eyes were somehow deeper and shining. And, she realized, she hadn’t seen her at Rosehill for several weeks.
    “You knew,” Charles said, warning her as if to forestall her anger. “You knew that we’d agreed, Cara and I. I told you from the beginning. We had an agreement.”
    “But somehow I thought that I —”
    “Marian, I never told you you were the only one,” he said flatly.
    She felt tears threatening to burst through her. He was right. And she had chosen to ignore it. She couldn’t answer.
    “Oh, Marian. I was honest with you. I made it a point of honor.” He came around and sat beside her on the green velvet divan, the place where it had all begun. He drew her to him and kissed the top of her head. “You knew that Cara and I have given each other the freedom to love other people …”
    Her head was swirling. All this time she’d so needed his love and affection that she’d chosen not to think about the fact that he could still share a bed with Cara, and … with