Letitia’s head came up. Her lovely eyes were full of unshed tears, but she had been shocked into horrified silence. “Who told you that?” she whispered.
“You know how servants gossip,” Sarah excused herself.
“They couldn’t… He’s never been to the house before! They’ve never even set eyes on him!”
Sarah didn’t remind her that her maid had known him well. “But you have been seeing him elsewhere, haven’t you?”
“No! Certainly not! That would be immoral. I’m a married woman. I mean I was! I was a married woman. Now, of course, I’m a widow, and it’s perfectly proper for an old friend to call-”
“Mrs. Blackwell,” Sarah said, out of patience, “you don’t have to make excuses to me. I have no wish to judge you. But it’s obvious that you must have been seeing Mr. Dudley. He most certainly is the father of your child.”
She gasped in feigned outrage. “How can you even suggest such a thing? He couldn’t be. I haven’t seen him in years! You heard him, he only saw the notice of Edmund’s death in the paper and came to offer his condolences.”
Her porcelain cheeks were splotched with red now, and her eyes were wild. She wasn’t a pretty liar.
“I’m not the only one who will suspect that he’s the baby’s father,” Sarah said. “One look at your child… I assume your father knows what Dudley looks like. He’ll guess immediately.”
This time Letitia practically wailed, sobbing uncontrollably into her now-soggy handkerchief.
Although she could not condone adultery, Sarah also couldn’t bear to see such misery, and Letitia was her patient. She took the weeping woman into her arms. “There now, there’s nothing you can do about the past. You can only do something about the future.”
This made Letitia cry even harder, but Sarah patted and soothed, and after a few moments, with no encouragement at all, Letitia began to bare her soul.
“We never meant for it to happen,” she insisted between sobs. “Peter left after the accident. My father had him discharged from his job, and he had no choice but to leave town. He found work here in the city, and we never saw each other again until… until I was already married to Edmund.”
“That must have been a shock, seeing him again,” Sarah suggested tentatively, worried about saying the wrong thing and stopping the flow of confidences.
“He came… he came to one of Edmund’s lectures. He’d seen my name on the poster, and he came to see me. Just to find out how I was,” Letitia added, and Sarah nodded her comprehension. “You have to understand, I was hurt when we… You see, Peter and I eloped one night. I knew my father would never allow us to marry, so what else could we do? But my horse stumbled in the darkness, and I was horribly hurt.”
“So your father ran Peter out of town, and then Dr. Blackwell came to cure you,” Sarah said, hurrying the story along. She already knew this part.
“But Peter saw my name on the poster, and he just wanted to make sure I was well. He still loved me, you see, and he hadn’t been able to make any inquiries about me without drawing my father’s attention to him. He only wanted to make sure I had recovered!”
Sarah nodded again. “Of course he did.”
“When I saw him in the audience, I almost fainted. I could hardly finish my speech. He told me later that’s when he knew I still loved him. I was desperate to see him privately, but I had no idea how to find him. But I didn’t have to worry about that because he was able to find me.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t too difficult. Dr. Blackwell was famous.”
Letitia ignored the mention of her dead husband. “Peter sent me a note and asked me to meet him somewhere. He just wanted to talk to me, to find out if I had forgiven him. He’d felt so guilty for leaving me and for having caused my accident. Or at least he always blamed himself, even though it wasn’t really his fault.”
“And so you met him. Weren’t you worried about being seen?”
“Of course! That’s why we…”
“Why you what?” Sarah asked when she hesitated.
“I couldn’t risk Edmund finding out, and it was the only place we could meet without being seen,” she said defensively.
“And where was that?”
“The… Mr. Fong’s establishment,” she admitted reluctantly.
“An opium den?” Sarah asked in surprise.
“They’re very discreet,” Letitia insisted.
“I’m sure they are,” Sarah said.
“After that…” Letitia began, but her voice broke again.
“I know you must have been very lonely and unhappy,” Sarah said, remembering what the nurse had told her. “I understand that Dr. Blackwell was very busy and was hardly ever at home.”
“It wasn’t that. He just never loved me,” she informed Sarah indignantly. “Not at all! He only married me so that I would have to keep speaking at his lectures.”
“He told you that?” Sarah asked in surprise.
“Not in so many words, but I’m not completely stupid. It was obvious. He never even… after the first few months he didn’t… I had my own room, you see, and he didn’t ever come to visit me…”
“I understand,” Sarah said, trying to imagine how a man could neglect a wife as lovely as Letitia. And there was one other thing she didn’t understand. “If that was the case, wasn’t he the least bit suspicious when he found out you were with child?”
Her face twisted with a grief Sarah could only imagine. “That’s what proves how little he cared for me! I was so frightened for him to find out. I was certain he would know the truth and that he would throw me out of the house in disgrace. But he didn’t even suspect! He had no idea how long it had been since he’d shared my bed or that he couldn’t possibly be the baby’s father. He was only annoyed because my condition would make it impossible for me to appear at the lectures for several months. That was the worst part of all! He never even dreamed I’d been unfaithful to him!”
Sarah found herself sympathizing with Letitia a little, although she knew many women who had far more unhappy lives and who still didn’t feel the need for either morphine or adultery to escape them. Sympathy would get her more information, however, so she allowed herself to feel it.
“Were you just going to allow Dr. Blackwell to believe the baby was his and go on as you had been, seeing Dudley secretly?” she asked doubtfully.
“I didn’t know what else to do!” she wailed, dissolving in tears again. “I was afraid Edmund wouldn’t divorce me. He still wanted me to speak at the lectures, and if he knew I wanted to leave him… Well, if we’d divorced, he could have kept the baby, even though he wasn’t the father. Or at least he would have used that threat to keep me from leaving him. I know he would, just to punish me and force me to do what he wanted.”
Sarah was very much afraid he might have. The law certainly allowed him to. A woman could be divorced and put out in the street, with nothing but the clothes on her back, and never allowed to see her children again. At the very least, Blackwell could have used the child as leverage to keep Letitia in line. He believed he needed her to promote his cures, and he wouldn’t have let her go easily.
Letitia was sobbing again, and Sarah didn’t have the heart to press her any further. She’d already learned what she needed to know anyway.
When the sobs died down to sniffles, Sarah asked, “Would you like me to call your maid?”
“No, I… Let me get myself under control first,” she said, dabbing at the last vestiges of her tears. “Oh, Mrs. Brandt, what am I going to do now?”
“Well, as you pointed out, you are no longer a married woman. You are free to do whatever you wish, and if you wish to marry Dudley, there is nothing to stop you.”
“But my father would never allow-”