SEVENTY-SEVEN

I did not even give him the chance to remove his coat.

“We must talk,” I said, meeting him at the door, leading him to the room that had formerly been John’s library, shutting the door firmly behind us.

“You are always eager enough to suit me, but I have never known you to be this eager.” He kissed my neck—how I longed to give in, to lose myself within the seduction of that kiss!—and moved to put his arms around me, on his face an expression of sheer delight that I knew instinctively I should not see again for a very long time, if ever. “Hadn’t we better at least remove your skirts first?”

“No!” I pushed him away.

“Emma?” Now his expression was puzzled. “What has happened?” Not “What is the matter?” but “What has happened?” It was as though he, in turn, instinctively knew that for me to ever physically turn from him, the cause had to have come from outside myself.

“Constance has been here today,” I said.

I saw him look at me with the open expression of love I had come to expect as my right from him, followed by a thoughtful look as though he were weighing two similarly weighted things in his mind. But then that passed too and his face hardened slightly into a look of caution. “And?”

“And she wants money.” I wrung my hands, ran them through my hair. My gestures were very un-Emma-like, but I no longer felt like Emma, not when my world might be on the verge of collapsing. “Well, of course, she wants money. Surely, we had to have seen this coming. She has remembered where she saw you before and now she wants money in exchange for her silence. Otherwise, she will tell everybody we knew each other before John’s death, she will tell them we were lovers!”

“And?” There it was again.

“Surely, you must realize how disastrous that would be!”

“To your reputation, of course.” He shrugged. “To mine as well, I suppose. But people have survived worse scandals than having affairs of their hearts exposed.” He shrugged again. “We will undoubtedly survive. If need be, we can always move.”

I knew my voice was growing strident, did all I could to lower at least the volume, so the desperate screech that lay within my words would not reach the servants’ ears. I stood up close to him, unflinching, whispering the shrieking words that had never been spoken between us before. “But what if people figure out that you and I killed John?”

As I spoke, his features hardened completely. Now his expression of full-blown shock and outrage—finally!—matched my own.

“I didn’t kill John!” Unlike me, he did nothing to modulate the volume of his voice.

It was as though the world had begun spinning around me, as though I were standing in the middle of a hurricane that had come up with no warning, engulfing me in sound and fury.

“What?” I nearly shouted back at him, as though I needed to shout to be heard above the pounding in my own ears.

He put his hands up in a gesture I had not seen before, as though to ward me off.

“You killed John?” he shouted again.

“Please, what are you talking about?” I asked, taking another step toward him.

Once more, he retreated from me. “But I thought it was some sort of highwayman, perhaps the same one who robbed your acquaintances the Palmers before John’s death. That’s what the police concluded.”

“But you and I—”

“—killed John?” he finished for me, a question where my statement of certainty would have been.

“Of course we did,” I said.

Seeing the look of astonishment that yet remained on his face, my mind raced through the past.

“When we met in Sommers Tea Room, the day Constance came upon us, you said there was a simple solution to our being together.”

“Of course,” he said. “I assumed then it was just a matter of time before you would see the only real way for us to be together was for you to divorce John, despite the hardships that might follow.”

“When we met together that night in the park, you asked if I wanted to be like that with you all the time, you said we should be together like that all the time.”

“Of course,” he said again. “Our love for each other was tremendous and I believed we should be together like that all the time…once you divorced John.”

“That day we walked in the street, I remember it was starting to snow, and you asked me if I wanted your help—”

“In finally divorcing your husband, not killing him.”

“You said if my husband were no longer in the picture—”

“Yes.”

“You said I deserved more.”

“Yes, and you did. Certainly, you deserved to be with a man who loved you properly. But I never said anything about killing John.”

“You told me to make it look like a robbery. You said my husband must die.”

“No! I never said any such thing.”

“But I remember—”

“And are you sure you are remembering things correctly? Do you also remember me once writing to you that there came a point when I did not know what we had said aloud to each other and what we had yet kept back for ourselves?”

“Yes, but—”

“Before John’s death, his…murder, I remember you being increasingly distraught. I had no idea what was going on with you at the time. And then after John was…murdered—”

“Which we did together!”

“—you seemed to get so much better. And yet somehow it never occurred to me that it was your hand that had done the deed. Worse, that you had somehow built up some idea in your mind that this was what I wanted too.”

“But you were there! You were with me!”

He backed to the door, reached one hand to the knob and turned it, securing his own escape, on his face a look of horror, as though he had perhaps never known me at all. “I don’t know what you are talking about, Emma.”

It was as though a God with a giant foot had kicked at the round toy ball of his own Earth: The world beneath my feet had dropped away.