Free The Secret Woman by Victoria Holt Page B

or something. He lost his ship.”
    â€œYou mean it was…sunk.”
    â€œSomething like that. They’re all talking about it up at the Castle. It’s something dreadful. And he’s miles away. And it’s some disgrace, but there’s something else, Miss Anna.”
    â€œWhat, Ellen?”
    â€œHe’s married. He’s been married some time. He’s got a wife in foreign parts. He must have been married when he came here that night. Who’d have thought it!”
    I didn’t believe it. He would have said so. But why should he discuss his private affairs? I must have misunderstood bitterly. I had thought… What had I thought? I was a simpleton. I was all Aunt Charlotte said I was. That evening had meant nothing to him. Two people could see the same event entirely differently. He had called on me because he had nothing else to do before he sailed. Perhaps he knew how I felt about him and was amused. Perhaps he had told his wife about that last evening. The meal by candlelight, the arrival of Aunt Charlotte. I suppose it could be seen as comic.
    â€œHow interesting,” I said.
    â€œI had no idea, had you, miss?”
    â€œOf what?”
    â€œThat he was married of course. He kept it dark. There’s trouble about that, too. Whoops! You nearly dropped that. There would have been trouble if that had been broken.”
    Broken, I thought dramatically, like my dreams, like my hopes. Because I had been hoping. I had really believed that one day he would come back to me and then I would begin to be happy.
    Captain Redvers Stretton was married. I heard it from several sources. He had married somewhere abroad, married a foreigner, so they said. He had been married for some time.
    When Aunt Charlotte heard, which she did inevitably, she laughed as I had rarely seen her laugh before. And from that day she taunted me. She never lost an opportunity of bringing his name into the conversation. “ Your Captain Stretton. Your evening visitor. So he had a wife all the time? Did he tell you that?”
    â€œWhy should he?” I asked. “People who come to look at the furniture don’t feel it necessary to acquaint one with their family history, do they?”
    â€œPerhaps people who come to look at Levasseurs might.” She laughed. She was better tempered than she had been for a long time, but spiteful and malicious.
    He came home I believe but I didn’t see him. I heard from Ellen that he was there. And the time passed—one day very like another, spring, summer, autumn, winter; and nothing to make one week different from another except perhaps that we sold one of the Chinese pieces which nobody seemed to want, for what Aunt Charlotte called an excellent price but which I believed was what she had paid for it. She was relieved to see it go. “You wouldn’t find another like that,” she said. “Carved red lacquer. Fifteenth century of the Hsüan Te period.”
    â€œAnd you wouldn’t find another buyer either,” I retaliated.
    We were like that together, constantly bickering; I was getting old and sour and so was everyone in that house. Ellen had lost some of her exuberance. Mr. Orfey was still waiting. Poor Ellen, he wanted the legacy she would get more than he wanted her. Mrs. Morton was more withdrawn than ever; she went off on her free days once a fortnight and we never knew where she went. She was mysterious and secretive in her ways. I was twenty-five—no longer young. Sometimes I thought: It is four years since that night. And it meant nothing to him because all the time he was married and he didn’t tell me. He implied… But had he implied or had I imagined it? Aunt Charlotte never forgot. She was constantly reminding me that I had behaved like a fool. I had been an innocent and he had known it. It seemed amusing to her; she would titter in an infuriating way when she spoke of it. It was the only subject she ever