‘Any children?’
‘We have one boy.’
‘A boy.’ Her lips quivered as she stole a glance at her husband. ‘And what, pray, is his name?’
‘Felix. He’s almost five.’
‘Five?’ For a moment Marguerite seemed to lose the thread of her own thoughts. ‘A wonderful age.’
This torture was mercifully interrupted when a servant appeared carrying a shawl and handed it to Marguerite.
Taking it gratefully, she turned to face them. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I was about to take some air.’ A lantern fixed to the wall illuminated her face and it struck Pyke that she may have been crying. The skin under her eyes looked sore and puffy and her eyes were bloodshot.
‘Really, my dear. It’s a beastly night. Can’t it wait until the morning?’ It was hard not to detect the tension in Morris’s tone and briefly Pyke wondered whether ‘it’ simply referred to her desire to take the air.
‘I’m quite sure you gentlemen have some pressing matters to discuss.’ She turned on her heels and said, almost as an afterthought, ‘It was nice to make your acquaintance, Mr Pyke. Please pass on my regards to your wife.’
Watching her depart, Pyke started to pick through the jumble of contrary thoughts her unexpected appearance had produced.
‘She’s had a rather hard time of it recently,’ Morris confided after Marguerite had left. ‘I’m just hoping she’ll regain her joie de vivre soon.’
Pyke wanted to ask precisely what Morris was referring to but restricted himself to an innocuous question about their marriage.
After the butler had brought them champagne, Morris raised his flute and said, ‘Yes, I suppose it’s difficult to fathom why a woman like Marguerite would even notice, let alone agree to marry, a plain old man like me, isn’t it?’
A rich old man, Pyke wanted to say, but held his tongue. He raised his glass and smiled. Maggie had always been attracted to rich men, just as she’d always been able to turn a hand of twos and threes into aces and kings.
Later, after Pyke had bid Morris goodnight, he instructed the coachman to pull in by the side of the driveway and wait there until he returned.
The rain had ceased and the clouds had cleared, the darkness lifted by an almost full moon that hung low and heavy in the sky. Pyke eventually found her standing alone in a field about half a mile from the house, not moving, the woollen shawl wrapped tightly around her shivering body.
She seemed to sense his presence before turning around to face him. ‘I don’t want you here, Pyke. Of all places I don’t want you here.’ Her voice was close to breaking.
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness now and he saw that she was standing next to what looked like an open grave.
He walked across and was about to peer into the hole when she pushed him away with her hands. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? I don’t want you here.’
‘Is that why you insisted that your husband buy a country estate bordering on land belonging to my wife’s family?’ He glanced across at the hole. It wasn’t large enough for a full-sized body.
This time her expression softened a little. ‘It’s eerie, isn’t it, that we’re both living off our respective wives and husbands.’
‘I don’t take a penny from my wife.’
‘But you get to play the country gentleman.’
‘Except I hate the countryside. I’ve always preferred the city.’
‘But you’re here, aren’t you?’
He waited to see whether she was going to explain where ‘here’ was but she just threw her head back and laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘It’s funny you’re here with me. It’s funny we’re neighbours. It’s funny because we’re both such a long way from St Giles.’
‘Neighbours,’ he said, carefully. ‘Except that isn’t a coincidence, is it?’
She looked at the house in the distance, silhouetted against the starry sky. ‘Do you sometimes think that people like us don’t actually belong in places like this?’
‘I don’t know. You seem to have adapted well enough, Marguerite.’
‘Think what you like, Pyke. I’m not the same person you once knew.’
He watched her face twitch in the darkness. ‘I’m not sure I knew that person very well in the first place.’ He waited for her to respond, and when she didn’t, he added, ‘But you’ve married a good man. That tells me something.’
A bitter laugh spilled from her. ‘And I find out you’re married, as well.’ The moonlight played over her features. Her dimples vanished together with her smile. ‘Perhaps we should all play happy families one of these days.’
‘And I’m meant to think it’s just a coincidence, you turning up here after all these years?’
‘Work it out for yourself, Pyke. You never did trust other people’s logic.’
‘Are you going to tell your husband we knew each other in the old days?’
‘Are you going to tell your wife?’ When Pyke didn’t answer her, she added, in the same tone, ‘Eddy knows about my past. He’s under no illusion about the kind of woman I am. I hope for your sake your wife is robust enough to take you for who you are.’
‘And who’s that?’ he asked, feigning amusement.
Briefly their eyes met and a tiny spark of attraction passed between them.
‘It’s good to see you after all these years.’ She wound her finger around a coil of her curly blonde hair. ‘I was nervous when Eddy first mentioned your name and told me you lived close by. He said that he’d recently moved his account to your bank and that he planned to invite you for dinner. I knew I’d have to see you again and I didn’t know how I might feel.’
‘And how do you feel now you’ve seen me?’
‘That’s just it,’ she said, turning around to face the house. ‘I don’t feel a thing.’
‘Then nothing much has changed, has it?’
Pyke had never been able to tell what colour Marguerite’s eyes were; they seemed to change with her mood. But when she turned to confront him they were as black as coal, and for a few moments she struggled to contain her indignation.
‘You always did know how to make a lady feel good about herself.’
Pyke let her walk off towards the house but shouted after her, ‘The Maggie Shaw I remember wasn’t a lady.’
Pyke always woke early, a product of the many years he had lived in the vicinity of Smithfield Market, where the bleating and lowing of frightened creatures being herded through narrow streets by drove-boys and their dogs could have roused a dead man. For a while, he watched Emily while she slept next to him. Her skin was the smoothest he had ever seen and her cheekbones were prominent and finely crafted. Under her nightshirt, he could just about see a birthmark in the shape of a strawberry above her breast, and her silky chestnut hair fell around her face on the pillow. But as beautiful as she still was, it wasn’t her looks he had fallen in love with. As the only child of a deceased aristocrat who claimed lineage as far back as Tudor times, she had inherited none of her father’s traits: his cruelty, meanness, vanity and greed. Perhaps because she’d learnt to despise him from a young age, she’d wilfully set out to create a different life for herself and had succeeded in doing so, beyond her wildest imagination. Pyke could say that, without any doubt, she was the kindest, most intelligent woman he’d ever known. This didn’t mean she was incapable of selfishness but rather that hers was a morality where the ends always justified the means. Having conspired with Pyke to see off her father, she’d used the income accrued from his estate to fund the charitable causes that she had devoted her life to supporting.