Regency Christmas Wishes(52)

That winter’s abominable weather had paled to insignificance beside the shocking and very public failure of the Neville marriage. A terrible scene had been conducted in full view of Lady M’s multitudinous Christmas guests, and soon the entire monde had gossiped about it. Before long society’s servants had the juicy tale as well, and for all he knew Lady M’s odious one-eyed pet magpie, Jack, being the most impudent, inquisitive, iniquitous, invariably inebriated member of the feathered tribe he’d ever come across, had also broadcast the story over the treetops. The whole of creation had condemned Sir Charles Neville, not his lovely spouse. “And with good reason, you fool, with good reason,” he chided himself sadly.

To this day he didn’t really know why he had strayed from the wife who meant the world to him. There was no excuse, no mitigating factor to grant him even a morsel of justification. It wasn’t that he had fallen out of love with Juliet, quite the opposite in fact, for he adored her more each day. Simply because his friends were still enjoying their wild, unattached youth, he had begun to resent a marriage that had hitherto brought him happiness. He became convinced that because he and Juliet had married so very young—at their 1811 wedding they had been eighteen and twenty respectively—he had been unjustly denied the wild oats that was every young man’s right. Taking it into his puerile head to sow those oats anyway, he had not merely indulged in some fleeting meaningless amours, but had taken a mistress.

The first infidelity with the actress Sally Monckton might possibly have been pardoned, for it had been the result of too much champagne, and too much greenroom revelry with his old comrades from Oxford days. With her flirtatious smiles, comely charms, and saucy brown eyes, she made it very plain that she was his for the asking. His resistance had been abysmally conspicuous by its absence. He recalled feeling deeply ashamed when next he faced Juliet, but she sensed nothing and their life continued as before.

Then, quite by accident, he met Sally again. He’d been in a sulk because he and Juliet had a stupid quarrel over nothing. His male vanity being a little bruised, he petulantly chose to be unfaithful again. His arrogant, immature reasoning had been simple; he’d done it once without discovery, so he could do it again. And he did, for almost the whole of 1813.

He made excuse after excuse to explain his absences from his and Juliet’s Grosvenor Square home, and like so many husbands before him he had been so sure of his wife, so certain that she would always be there for him, so convinced that she would never find out anyway, that he deemed himself above suspicion.

How wrong could he have been? Due to that thrice-cursed magpie—aptly named after Jack Sheppard, the infamous thief hanged at Tyburn in 1724—his sins had been uncovered. Juliet had not been able to accept such deliberately prolonged unfaithfulness, and in the six years since she rejected him he had yearned over and over to repair the damage to his marriage. Also during that time he had devised many a novel way of disposing of the diminutive plumed Cyclops responsible for his downfall.

He lowered his glance, knowing full well that it was wrong to blame the magpie. Juliet had not been as unaware of her husband’s misdeeds as he imagined, for his inner guilt had been displayed in his outward manner. Increasingly Juliet had known that something was wrong, and her suspicions could not help but center upon the likelihood of another woman in his life. To then discover that he had gone to the length of actually keeping a mistress was too much betrayal by far. So he’d lost the only thing that really mattered to him. And it served him right.

Charles sighed as the chaise rattled along the wide gravel drive toward the brilliantly illuminated Thames-side mansion. Overhead there was a barely discernible lacework of naked branches that in summer provided a cool bower of leaves; he and Juliet had driven here through sun-dappled shadows on their June wedding day. They had laughed and held hands, and the air had been sweet with the fragrance of the rose garlands on the open landau and the lilies-of-the-valley in Juliet’s bridal posy. The memory stung tears to his dark blue eyes. Just to be here at Marchwell Park again was sufficient to unman him. Suddenly he was assailed with doubts. He should have stayed away and begun a new life in some remote corner of the realm . . . yet even in India the yearning for Juliet had remained fresh and poignant. There wasn’t a place in the entire universe that was far enough away to free him from her spell.

He drew himself up sharply. It was Christmas, the season of goodwill and hope, and he would never forgive himself if he didn’t strive to mend his marriage. Maybe it would never be possible, maybe Juliet had given her heart to someone else now; maybe so many things . . . But they were still wed, and he desperately wanted to be her husband again. In every way.