“You told me you didn’t have any children.” Cressida studied her trembling hands. What had started as vague uneasiness had taken root and was fast growing until Madame Zirelli’s next words banished that fear. “My daughter is eighteen years old now and her father, Robert, was the love of my life.”
With a sigh of relief, Cressida understood that this must be just the start of a painful tale. Justin had been helping Madame Zirelli as an old friend, not with a vested interest. This business of discovering the identity of Madame Zirelli’s daughter was what had preoccupied Justin the past three weeks—coupled, of course, with Cressida’s erratic behaviour.
“I’m listening,” Cressida prompted in a murmur, feeling the first surge of pity for the woman as Madame Zirelli closed her eyes and smiled, as if remembering happier times.
Cressida’s fears had been laid to rest but Madame Zirelli needed to tell her story now and the least Cressida could do was listen.
“Robert was the youngest son of a well-connected family in the local village, where my father had brought us to live from Spain when I was ten, after Robert’s father had employed him as singing master to Robert’s sisters. Though I knew Robert by sight, it wasn’t until I was sixteen that we spoke for the first time, after he offered me a lift in his carriage in the midst of a snowstorm.” The older woman opened her eyes, the joy of that memory transforming her face. “After that, we found many opportunities to meet. We were in love, but Robert was only nineteen and we were both too young and powerless to direct our own lives. Robert wanted to marry me but of course his father refused, while mine was furious at what he considered my trying to rise above my station.” As Madame Zirelli glanced at Cressida, her gaze falling to the smooth silk of Cressida’s gown where it contoured her belly, her expression became bleak. “I tell you this to bolster the case that I was more than qualified to speak to you of the miseries we women face when we cannot control our ability to have children.” Her voice wavered. “For the sake of my father and, I believed at the time, Robert, I was coerced into not revealing to Robert that I
was carrying his child, and I was sent away. Under directions from his mother, I told Robert I was taking up a position as a governess.” She clenched her fists and her voice thickened with emotion. “Robert swore that in two years’ time, when he was twenty-one and of age, he would gallop into the grounds of my employer on a great white charger and whisk me off to the nearest church to get married. He said, if I loved him enough to be patient for just two years, all would be well.”
Cressida bit her lip. “But all was not well. You were carrying his child.”
Madame Zirelli’s voice became bitter. “Robert’s mother arranged everything. I had no mother who could even tell me what to expect, much less to forewarn me of the consequences of intimacy with Robert, and my father was the great family’s minion.” She took a painful breath. “For five months I was all but imprisoned with a cottager and his wife, who gave me food and who had clearly been directed to monitor all correspondence. I wrote to Robert, begging him to help me, but I knew my letters never reached him and that his would never reach me. We were both minors and powerless against the will of his parents.”
Weary resignation replaced the bitterness as she went on, “My daughter was removed from me when she was a few days old. Once again, Robert’s mother arranged everything. When I returned home to nurse my father, who was now very ill, from the trauma of my disgrace, no doubt, Robert had joined his regiment on the peninsula. I never saw him again.”
Cressida shook her head. She’d heard tales of heartbreak like this before and she knew the impossibility of a single woman keeping her infant under such circumstances, yet she had to ask the question. “You did not seek your child’s return before this?”
“Why torment myself when I had no means to support myself, much less an illegitimate child?” She threw up her hands. “My father was very ill but his employer graciously agreed to let him remain in the cottage they’d rented for him, on condition I found my own way in the world on account of my fall from grace. Father died three months later.”
Cressida glanced at the few meagre possessions around the room, contemplating a woman’s vulnerability when she had no protector. Women like she did not tend to dwell on such matters but rather to dismiss fallen women like Madame Zirelli as arbiters of their own fates, she thought, guiltily.
“After struggling to support myself through my singing,” Madame Zirelli resumed, “I found myself, several years later, in the power of another man. Lord Grainger was my employer, to whom I gave myself willingly and recklessly one night, which meant”—she gave a small, ironic laugh—“that I was now to bear his child. The thought of being forced to give up another child I could not support was intolerable. I sought the offices of a woman who apparently—” her mouth quivered as she uttered the word—“dealt with such matters. A woman whose brutal butchery nearly killed me and left me scarred and infertile. An irony, since Lord Grainger made me his wife shortly afterwards, then divorced me nine years later because of my inability to provide him with an heir…compounded by his fury at learning of what I had done.”
Cressida gasped.
Madame Zirelli gave an eloquent shrug. “For years I have lived alone, accepting that my daughter was lost to me until, by chance, three months ago I saw her. The resemblance to the Castilian side of my family was remarkable. So certain was I that I had seen my own daughter, and so horrified by the circumstances, I sought out your husband in the hope he would be able to trace her background and confirm my suspicions.”
Wearily she indicated the table in the corner of the room by the window. Upon it was a small portable writing desk. “All the answers to your questions are there,” she said. “You are free to examine any correspondence…anything at all…if it will satisfy you that your husband’s relationship with me has been purely on a business footing.”
Cressida did not argue. The hour was late and Madame Zirelli wanted the catharsis of knowing Cressida believed in and trusted her.
“Take the whole box,” Madame Zirelli directed. “There is other correspondence which little Dorcas slips in when it arrives, but the document prepared by your husband and various letters pertaining to the matter are all in there.”
When Cressida was halfway to the door with the writing box under her arm and the interview at an end, Madame Zirelli stopped her. “Lady Lovett, your husband severed contact with me eight years ago…the very day after he first set eyes on you, in fact.” Her smile gained warmth. “Few women have the power over their husbands you seem to wield, yet it would appear you do not know what to do with it. Go to him, my dear. Use the knowledge I have given you. And be happy.”
* * * *
Cressida was borne home by a very weary looking John the coachman and let into the house by a rather crumpled looking housemaid. She’d never been out so late on her own but, while she felt guilty, she felt not the least bit tired.
Nervous energy and anticipation bolstered her. She hurried up the stairs and, at the landing, hesitated as to whether she’d turn right to Justin’s apartments or left, to hers.
She was still clutching Madame Zirelli’s little writing desk. She needed to put that down somewhere. Also, she wanted to make some discreet improvements to her appearance because…
It mattered.
The details of Madame Zirelli’s story were not important. Not right at this moment, because Madame Zirelli’s tragedy had occurred in the past and neither Justin nor Cressida could help her, though Justin had done what had been asked of him. Cressida was saddened and moved by the woman’s story and grateful, too, that Madame Zirelli had shared it with Cressida in order to help her. Now it was time for Cressida to help herself. Madame Zirelli had given her the tools.
Cressida moved the candlestick that her maid had lit beside her bed to her dressing table. She’d told the girl not to wait up for her, assuming when she left for the night that Justin could perform the necessaries of undressing the lady of the house.
Though there’d been a hitch in proceedings, he still could, she thought with a fizz of exultation as she sank onto her dressing table stool, reflecting on the fact that she had all the joy she could wish for ahead of her while Madame Zirelli had only a dried up future to look forward to and a daughter she could never acknowledge.
Just up the passage Justin lay sleeping. He’d been crushed by her disloyalty earlier that evening but Cressida had to think past that to all the ways she could atone.
Two hours ago, Madame Zirelli had seemed the incarnation of the evil that could come between a husband and a wife. Now Cressida had to acknowledge the huge debt she owed the woman.
And act on it.