Aurelia lifted the tea cosy, took the lid off the pot and gave the liquid another stir, then began to pour. The offer of a divorce was inordinately tempting. Only in her wildest dreams…She would be free of Benjamin Sampson, free of his cold indifference, free of his soulless house. But in return she would have to give up little Benjie, and that she was not prepared to do. Nor would she, or could she, reveal and embarrass the father of Christina.
‘Even if there was somebody else,’ she replied coolly, handing him a cup and saucer with false aplomb, ‘do you honestly believe I would give you the satisfaction of knowing who it was? No, Benjamin, if it’s divorce you want, then the only way you’ll get it is by deserting me. Go and live with your precious lie-by and I’ll divorce you for desertion. That way I’ll stand a chance of keeping my children.’
‘Shall I tell you what I think, Aurelia?’ He sipped the hot tea circumspectly, and then put the cup down. ‘Shall I tell you what I firmly believe?’
‘Do I have a choice?’ she replied with a huff of frustration and indignation. His manifest contempt for what he believed she had done, yet his utter lack of self-condemnation of his own extramarital transgressions outraged her.
‘I believe you had an affair with Algie Stokes, but only the Lord above knows what you saw in him. Furthermore, I believe you not merely had an affair with Algie Stokes, but that he also fathered Christina.’
‘Benjamin, how can you possibly think such a thing? It’s a ludicrous suggestion.’ She was trying desperately to remain unruffled.
‘I can think it because I watched the two of you together today in close conversation. You spent more time with him than was decent. You acted like clandestine lovers. You looked like clandestine lovers. I actually saw you kiss him. I saw the way you reacted to each other, your familiarity. Your movements, your gestures when you were together spoke louder than any words could.’
‘That’s preposterous, Benjamin, and you know it. Algie Stokes is my half-sister’s husband. You don’t for a minute think I’d cross her do you?’ It might be just the sort of reasoning that would satisfy him, she thought.
‘Ah, but…how long have you known Marigold to be your half-sister?’ he asked, prompted by a remarkable notion that suddenly struck him, but which he considered highly plausible now that it had.
Aurelia shrugged. ‘I’ve known her from the day her daughter was born.’
‘Which was when?’
‘April last year.’
‘And how long after that was Christina born?’
‘In the August.’
He recited the names of the months in turn, counting them on his fingers. ‘Five months.’ This was an enlightened argument and he intended to press it ruthlessly. ‘This means you conceived Christina about four months before Marigold’s brat was born. During that time, Algie Stokes had lost contact with her. Isn’t that so?’
‘My goodness, Benjamin,’ Aurelia exclaimed, unable to control her reserve, her anger rising. ‘That doesn’t prove a thing. You’re clutching at straws if you think that proves anything at all. You really do sound desperate for a divorce.’ She sipped her tea and replaced the cup in its saucer with a clatter.
‘But it makes sense,’ he proclaimed with an exuberance that suggested he might have just stumbled upon the meaning of life. ‘So, when Marigold was then reunited with Algie, you were left with little option but to wish the couple well, in a reunion that was rather untimely as far as you were concerned. Your only option as a result was to pass off the child you were carrying as mine. Maude has often reported to me that the days and nights I was away on business, you went out and didn’t come home till the next day.’
‘How would she know?’ Aurelia protested vehemently. ‘The nights she normally had off were the same nights that you were away on business. So she was in no position to claim any such thing. I’m not stupid, Benjamin. I know she was with you at least on some of those nights. I can only assume she must be a whole lot of fun in bed. Is she?’
He did not reply.
‘Yet this is all about me and your accusing me of being unfaithful. So it is perfectly acceptable for Maude to have borne you a child – out of wedlock – yet you try and berate me because you think I committed the same sin as you. You’re a hypocrite, Benjamin Sampson. A hypocrite through and through.’
‘Hypocrite or no, I don’t see why I should be expected to keep a child that I haven’t fathered. Christina is not mine, Aurelia. Algie Stokes is Christina’s father as far as I’m concerned.’
‘You’ll never be able to prove that, Benjamin.’
‘Oh, won’t I? We’ll see…And when I do, Algie Stokes can pay for her keep.’
* * *
For the first time in ages, Benjamin Sampson was thinking about his wife and not his mistress as he steered his horse and gig through Brierley Hill’s slurried streets. He was on a mission, a vital mission, and he drove resolutely, winding between steam tramcars and carts laden with the goods from the earthenware and glassware manufactories thereabouts. While the people and the people’s traffic went about their business, he was pondering angrily his wife’s betraying him. His soured reflections were scrutinising the deterioration of his marriage like separated souls drifting over the scene of a fatal disaster in which their bodies had been destroyed.
Unfortunately, Benjamin, wrapped up in this extramarital adventure, was too blind to see the equivalent circumstances Aurelia shared with her late mother. He failed to see what Aurelia saw; that her situation was the same as her poor late mother’s; that of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to an unrepentant philanderer. Benjamin could not comprehend that she had no desire to live her life in the gloom of marital misery as her mother had; that she would do all that an aggrieved woman could do to improve her lot, to find a way out. He failed to grasp her reasoning, that what was good for the gander was also good for the goose…and that the quest for revenge might also have driven her to do what he now believed she had done.
The failure of their marriage was undoubtedly Aurelia’s fault. Her failure to tolerate his harmless little intrigue. Her perversely taking a revenge lover and having that lover’s child in consequence, purely out of vindictiveness, was the catastrophic result.
Well, now it was time to expose that lover and make plans for divorce, for it was vital that he rid himself of his wayward wife. Then he could be free to pursue a more contented life.
* * *
To the clip-clop of his horse and the creaks of straining leather, Benjamin drove past the Silver End station of the Great Western Railway on Brettell Lane, past a brickworks and a glassworks. Soon he arrived at an untidy smattering of ancient red-brick buildings, randomly built on the weed-infested earth decades ago. Two of the buildings had slate roofs, one of which sported a smoking red-brick chimney with a skew-whiff pot. A rusting tin roof crowned the third building, which was larger than the other two. A sign nailed over one of the doors read, ‘Ranger Cycles, Prop. Algernon Stokes, Esq.’.
So this was the unimposing centre of Algie Stokes’s empire. Could such a paltry collection of shacks be the genesis of those bicycles that were also giving him cause for envy and grief in business? Algie Stokes had a great deal to account for where Benjamin Sampson was concerned. Not only had the man evidently made a cuckold of him, not only had he lured some of his best and most reliable workers away to work in this trio of shanties, but he was also stealing business from the bicycle manufacturing division of the Sampson Fender and Bedstead Works. It was time Algernon Stokes, Esq., proprietor of this forlorn mess,