The maid had indeed waited up, and declared that no sound had come from upstairs where the children and their nanny were evidently sleeping soundly.
‘Mr Sampson has been called elsewhere, Jane,’ Aurelia said, contriving to explain her return alone, ‘but I’m sure he won’t be too long. There’s no need for you to wait up. Please go to bed. I’ll brew myself some tea before I go up.’
‘Let me do it, ma’am,’ Jane felt obliged to offer out of sympathy, for she was well aware that all was not as it should be between her mistress and master, and that Aurelia was getting the worst of it. ‘There’s hot water in the kettle on the range. It’ll soon boil up again.’
Aurelia smiled appreciatively. ‘No need, Jane. Please do as I say. I prefer to do it myself this time. I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘Very well, ma’am. Did you enjoy the wedding, ma’am?’
‘Yes, Jane, thank you.’ Aurelia smiled again, indulging the maid, content to recall the pleasant incidents and the conversations that had peppered it. ‘It all went off very smoothly and we had a lovely time. And the bride looked radiant.’
‘’Tis good to know, ma’am.’ Jane returned the smile and bobbed a curtsey before duly scurrying up the stairs to her bed in the attic.
Aurelia made her way to the scullery and lifted the kettle to assess how much water was inside. There seemed sufficient, so she swung it over the glowing coals, hanging it from its gale hook, and then located a teapot.
In that large house, although peopled also at that moment by a maid, a sleeping nanny and her two sleeping children, she felt acutely her loneliness. She sat and looked absently at the fading coals slipping in the grate that were gradually, degree by slow degree, heating the water in the kettle towards boiling point.
Then she heard a sound conveyed via the chimney, unmistakably carriage wheels scrunching over gravel again. Soon after, a door opened and closed at the other side of the house.
Benjamin.
Maybe he would like some tea as well. He failed to appear in the scullery, however. Instead, he went upstairs, and she hoped he’d gone directly to bed. A floorboard creaked above her. She looked upwards as if she might be able to see through the plastered ceiling, then picked up the poker and gave the coals a stir, disturbing the kettle’s equilibrium. It swung gently on the gale hook and sighed, eliciting a thin gasp of steam through the swan-neck spout. Upstairs, a door opened and closed noisily. More creaking floorboards. Eventually, footsteps on the stairs again. Benjamin was on his way down. Was he looking for her? She braced herself. Why couldn’t he simply go to bed and leave her be?
The door to the scullery opened and Benjamin, hand on the doorknob, his hair looking as if it had been freshly brushed, stood regarding her, expressionless.
‘So you ain’t gone to bed yet.’
‘I’ve not long got back,’ she replied. ‘I sent Jane to bed and decided to make myself some tea. Would you like some?’
He closed the door, took one of the chairs at the other side of the table and sat facing her.
‘Thank you. I could do justice to a cup of tea.’
Thank you. Glory be, he’d offered a thank you. What had she done to deserve such consideration?
‘Kettle’s nearly boiling. I’ll get two cups and saucers.’
‘Have we got any cakes or biscuits? I’m starving.’
She found two jam tarts, put them on a plate and handed them to him. He devoured them avidly.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Aurelia,’ he said as he put the plate on the table and rubbed his fingers free of crumbs.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. And I’d like a truthful answer.’
‘If it’s something I know about,’ she said, reaching into a cupboard, ‘then I’ll give you an honest answer.’ She retrieved a couple of cups and saucers, turned and placed them on the table. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘I’ve had my suspicions about you for some time – since before Christina was born,’ he said calmly.
‘Suspicions?’ Her heart thumped. As she spooned tea leaves into a ceramic teapot, her back was towards him, so he could not see the consternation in her expression or her reddening face. ‘What sort of suspicions?’
‘Well…’ He hesitated; trying to formulate his thoughts into words that he was determined to deliver in a tone of reasonableness. With any luck she might respond rationally, without argument and resentment. With reasonableness, he’d be more likely to get to the truth. ‘You left me, not so many months ago, Aurelia,’ he went on smoothly. ‘Why?’
‘You know very well why,’ she answered, likewise tempering an inclination to haughtiness. ‘Because of your affair with Maude Atkins. I failed to see why I should put up with it.’
At last the kettle began to bubble and steam so she lifted it from the gale hook and poured the hot water into the teapot, her back still towards him.
‘And yet you came back.’
‘Because I was carrying a child.’ She gave the tea a stir, placed the lid on the pot, then reached for a tea cosy and covered it. ‘I realised within a few days after I left that I was with child. It was my duty to come back. I could hardly rob you of your own child. I could hardly rob the child of its father.’
‘Yes, I remember the occasion well enough. What I can’t remember, for the life of me, is the two of us coupling at the time you must have conceived.’
‘Oh, don’t be absurd, Benjamin.’ She poured milk into the two cups ready for the tea, which was steeping. ‘I agree it only happened occasionally, but of course we coupled. I suppose it was one of those times you’d had too much to drink and don’t remember.’
‘My suspicions are that somebody else fathered Christina,’ he declared.
Their eyes met, but neither husband nor wife gave anything away in that expressionless, emotionless glance.
‘That’s a serious allegation, Benjamin.’
‘So it is. So come on, Aurelia. Out with it. Why else would you have left me in the first place, unless you’d had a better offer?’
‘I left you because I was desperately unhappy, because of your affair with Maude Atkins. As a matter of fact, I still am. I know you’re still very much involved with her,’ she added scornfully. Now seemed as good a time as any to let him know she was not as blind as he would like her to be. ‘I also know you fathered a child with her. I imagine you’re keeping them both somewhere. I suppose that’s where you’ve been tonight.’
‘Where I’ve been tonight is not in question,’ he replied dismissively, for keeping a mistress and fathering a bastard was his absolute right. ‘But I reckon there’s more to it than what you claim. You see, I reckon you’d been having an affair yourself, got pregnant and decided to leave me so you could go and live in sin with this person. But when this person realised you were pregnant he decided he wanted neither you, nor the responsibility of a bastard child, so he dropped you like a hot brick, leaving you no alternative but to come back here.’
‘That’s preposterous,’ she replied, with an aloofness that was becoming harder to maintain. It occurred to her that if that’s what he was really thinking, he was being very reasonable about it – quite unaccountably.
‘Aurelia, all I want is the truth.’ He was maintaining an unnerving calmness. With an open gesture of the