Fates and Traitors Page 5

  “Yes, and yet I love you.”

  He seized her hand to press it to his lips, but she tore it from his grasp, overturning her basket. Instinctively they both stooped to pick up the spilled bouquets, but Mary Ann quickly rose, snatched the flowers from his arms, and dumped them roughly into the basket. “I’m sure you said the same to your wife when you kissed her goodbye this morning.”

  “Adelaide may be my wife, but you are my beloved, my soul’s companion.” When she laughed in scorn, he said, “Marriage has nothing to do with love, true and earnest love. It’s an iron yoke that crushes all who submit to it. I won’t defile what I feel for you by asking you to submit to lifelong enslavement. She has my name—”

  “And your child.”

  “And my child,” he conceded, “but you have my heart. If you’ll take it.”

  “Fine words from a husband who seeks a mistress,” she retorted. “If marriage would defile me, what would adultery do?”

  She turned and stormed away, but she had not gone far when he called after her, “Tell me you despise me. Tell me you don’t love me in return. Tell me this, and I’ll never trouble you again.”

  Slowly she halted, knowing that whatever she did next would alter everything that could be, and everything that would. She tried to form the sharp rebuke that would banish him forever, but the words faded from her lips, unspoken.

  She gathered up her skirts, tightened her grasp on the basket, and hurried away. But she could not speak the lie that she did not love him.

  Their imprudent argument had not gone unnoticed. All day as she sold her flowers, Mary Ann ignored the sidelong glances and curious whispers of the other vendors, fervently hoping that no one would carry tales back to her parents. Mr. Booth must have understood the need for discretion, for in the days that followed, he did not approach her in the market again, not even under the pretense of buying flowers. Instead, a few mornings later, a young boy came upon her, pressed a letter into her hand, and darted off without a word. Having nowhere to dispose of it safely, she slipped the letter into her pocket without breaking the seal. She was certain that the author was watching her, hoping to see her face light up in pleasure as she read his carefully composed lines, but she refused to give him that satisfaction. Yet she lacked the fortitude to throw away the letter unread. Later that evening, by the light of her dark lantern, she read it over and over, her heart warming to his tender apologies.

  The next day, the urchin brought another letter as she returned to her father’s shop with her empty basket, and the day after that, someone tucked another missive among her flowers while she was accepting coins from a customer. Every day the letters came, written in beautiful script on fine paper or feverishly scribbled on the backs of theatre handbills. Junius wrote of his sorrow that he had offended her, and of his sincere admiration and respect, and of his enduring hope that she would forgive him. He composed hundreds of lines praising her porcelain skin, ebony hair, ruby lips, and graceful figure. He addressed her as “Mary Ann, my own soul,” and signed himself “Your worshipper, Junius.”

  In more introspective moments, he wrote of his childhood in Queen Street, Bloomsbury, as the scion of Jewish silversmiths and lawyers on his father’s side and of strict Anglicans on his mother’s. When he felt more lighthearted, he amused her with stories of his early years as an actor, of tromping through the provinces with a company of players in search of an engagement, some coin, and a clean bed; of performing Macbeth for the Prince of Orange in Brussels shortly before the Battle of Waterloo; of his professional feud with the acclaimed actor Edmund Kean, who had been so jealous of his young rival’s popularity that he had hired mobs of ruffians to disrupt his performances. Though Mary Ann never favored Junius with a reply, with every letter she felt herself drawing closer to him.

  Then, a few days before Christmas, an urchin brought her a letter that was almost too painful to read, for when she broke the seal his wife’s name leapt off the page. “I will confess my history to you,” he had written, “my triumphs, my mistakes. There must be no secrets between us.”

  Junius was eighteen, he wrote, when he met Adelaide Delannoy while touring in Brussels. She was one of his landlady’s three daughters, and although she was more than four years his senior and not pretty, or so his friends had complained, she was well educated and had impressed him with her cleverness and keen business sense. When Junius and his company of players left Brussels to tour elsewhere on the Continent, Adelaide had followed him, taking upon herself the roles of his assistant, adviser, and closest companion. “You will judge me, and well I may deserve it,” Junius acknowledged. “Upon our return to England in May 1815, we married at St. George’s in Bloomsbury. Our daughter was born in October.”

  A daughter? Junius and the theatre manager had mentioned only a son. Mary Ann read the passage again, and counted the months, and at once she understood why Junius and Adelaide had been obliged to marry.

  The child, Amelia, had died at nine months of age, and grief had driven Junius into fits of melancholy and madness. “Now you know the reason for the mad and bad behavior of those days of years past,” he wrote, “although most of the fantastical tales you might have heard were greatly exaggerated.”

  Mary Ann had heard no such tales, young and sheltered as she had been—a lifetime ago, or so it seemed.

  Junius’s sorrow had been assuaged, he wrote, though never entirely forgotten, by the birth of his son, Richard, in June a year past. Since then Adelaide had devoted herself entirely to the boy, and to her family in Brussels, whom she often visited.

  “Whatever passion I felt for her as a lad of eighteen has since faded,” Junius wrote, his regret evident in every dark stroke of the pen. “As has hers for me, or so her nightly indifference proves. For years I believed I would plod through life a proper, dutiful husband, accepting that true love and beauty and the quenching of desire were lost to me forever. But then I discovered you, my darling angel, and having discovered my heart’s desire, I must pursue it.”

  The next day he came to her in the market. He did not speak, but his eyes burned blue fire as he took her hand and folded it around a small piece of stiff paper. Her heart raced at his touch and she trembled, not trusting herself to speak. Only after he bowed and departed did she open her hand and discover a single ticket for that evening’s performance at the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand.

  It was opening night of a new melodrama in three acts, Zamoski, or, The Fortress and the Mine, but Mary Ann saw almost none of the performance. Soon after the curtain rose, Junius slipped into the empty seat on her right, laced his fingers through hers, and when the hero first appeared onstage, he quickly led her away under the cover of the audience’s cheers. He took her through a side door and into the backstage labyrinth, past players in various stages of undress, men gargling lemon water as they awaited their cues, ladies peering into looking glasses and carefully applying rouge with rabbit’s feet brushes.

  Junius pulled her after him into a cramped, windowless dressing room and shut the door behind them. A heartbeat later she was in his arms, his lips warm and hungry upon hers. “I love you,” he breathed in her ear, and when he kissed her again, she sighed and felt herself melting into his embrace. “I adore you. I worship you.” Again and again his mouth found hers. “Come away with me.”

  For the briefest of moments she glowed with joy, imagining herself strolling by his side through some distant European capital, attending the theatre on his arm or applauding him from an ideal spot backstage, spending every night in his arms—but somehow she found the will to push him away. “Where would we go? Your life is here, in London, upon the London stage.” And remaining in London was out of the question. Even if she thought she could endure the scorn of everyone she knew, theatergoers were a fickle lot. Charges of adultery could ruin Junius’s career.

  “My life is where I make it, and with whom.” He took her gently by the should
ers, his eyes urgent and pleading. “I’m welcome on any stage in the greatest cities of the world. Early in the New Year, my wife plans to take our boy to Brussels to visit her mother. In the meantime I intend to go on tour on the Continent.” He seized her hands and pressed them to his lips. “Come with me. I cannot bear the thought of being apart from you for so many long, lonely months.”

  “And what would we do after your tour? Shall I go home to my mother’s house, while you return to your wife’s?”

  “I don’t yet know what we’ll do, but a way will be made clear for us. Perhaps we’ll go to America.”

  For a moment Mary Ann felt a thrill of anticipation—but then, with a sudden, sharp pang, she remembered Adelaide and Richard. “Junius, we can’t. You’re too good a man to abandon your wife and child.”

  “I would do anything not to hurt them,” he said, “anything but abandon true love, anything but suffer the torment of a lifetime without you. I won’t forsake my responsibilities. I’ll provide for them. They’ll never go hungry. They’ll never know a day of want.”

  “They will,” she countered. “Even if every material need is satisfied, they’ll still suffer the absence of their husband and father.”

  “I travel so much already, I’m sure their suffering will be very slight indeed.”

  “I can’t believe that’s true.” Fighting back tears, she clung to him, resting her cheek against the lapel of his fine wool coat. “I couldn’t possibly give you my answer now. I need time alone to think. We should both carefully weigh the consequences.”

  “I’ve never been more certain,” he declared, but he assured her that she could have all the time to reflect that she needed.

  If she eloped with him, the repercussions would be vast and far-reaching. Not only would she deprive Adelaide and young Richard of a husband and a father—his presence and affection, if not his income—but she would ruin her own good name and break her parents’ hearts. She would be denounced as an adulteress, a whore, and if she bore Junius any children, they would be called bastards. They would be entitled to neither their father’s name nor his property. If Junius were to tire of her, to abandon her as he meant to abandon Adelaide—

  But no. He never would. His every word, his every glance and gesture, convinced her that she had ignited a fire in his soul as intense and eternal as the one he had kindled in hers. He would never cast her aside.

  Junius honored her request for time apart, but he wrote to her more frequently and more passionately than before, sometimes several letters a day, full of tender words about his love, the adventures they would share, the higher obligation they owed to true love than to any other mortal consideration. For Christmas he gave her a beautiful, leather-bound collection of Lord Byron’s poems that must have cost a small fortune. It was no simple matter to smuggle the ten volumes up to her bedchamber, but it was worth the risk to keep them nearby rather than leave them with her friend Molly for safekeeping. Byron’s provocative verses thrilled her, intoxicated her, and she perceived in each stunning, magnificent line the terrible beauty Junius wielded on the stage. When she dared not risk lighting the lantern she would rise in the middle of the night and read at the window by moonlight, committing entire poems to memory, climbing back into bed and reciting them in whispers until she fell asleep.

  On the second day of the New Year, her heart leapt when she spotted Junius watching her from across the Covent Garden square. She nodded to him, then lifted her chin to signal that their time apart had come to an end. It took him five minutes to make his careful, peripatetic way to her side, and as he offered a perfunctory nod and studied the contents of her basket, she said, “I have not yet decided. I only wanted to thank you for the wonderful gift.”

  He smiled briefly, bending to smell a rose, newly cut, nurtured tenderly from bud to blossom in her father’s greenhouse. “You said as much in your letter.”

  “My letter could not express all I wished to say.” She was mindful of her clumsy way with words, her lack of even a small fraction of the genius possessed by Junius, by Byron. “When I read Byron’s poetry, when I see you on the stage, I feel—as if I am awake for the first time, and I live in despair of falling asleep again.”

  “I will tell Lord Byron you said so.” He straightened, his smile turning ironic. “Without offering your name, of course, for propriety’s sake.”

  “You’re acquainted with Lord Byron?”

  “Certainly. He’s on the board of directors of Drury Lane. He counts himself among my admirers.” Junius spoke without so much as a hint of a boast. “Not long ago, as a token of his esteem, he sent me his portrait, a watercolor miniature on a small oval of ivory.”

  “Oh, my,” Mary Ann gasped. “I should love to see it.”

  “I should love to show you.” His smile faded. “I embark on my tour in a fortnight. Tell me I won’t travel alone. Tell me you believe in free love, and that there is no greater sin than suppressing one’s passions, that there is no greater good than to pursue truth and beauty and love. This is what I believe; this is what Lord Byron believes. What do you believe?”

  “I believe—” Mary Ann’s voice faltered. “I believe I cannot so easily steal another woman’s husband.”

  “No, Mary Ann,” he said earnestly, shaking his head. “Don’t adhere to that old, moribund doctrine that laws are holier than love. I’m not Adelaide’s to steal. Possession is not love. If I belong to anyone, it’s to you.”

  “One more week,” she implored, “and I’ll give you my answer.”

  She needed only half the time she had requested to make up her mind. She and Junius served the greatest cause of all—true love. She deeply regretted hurting anyone, but she believed—she had to believe—that the grief and outrage her parents and Junius’s wife and son would suffer would be the birth pangs of a glorious new creation.

  On a cold, windy evening in the middle of January, Mary Ann quietly packed her trunk, wrapping the precious volumes of Byron in dresses and petticoats for protection, concealing her purse with her modest savings in the back, taking cloaks and shawls and stockings suitable for both fair weather and cold. Then she descended the stairs to kiss her mother and father good night, fighting back tears when they told her they loved her and would see her in the morning. She knew that it would break their hearts to find her bedchamber empty the next day, but she prayed that God would forgive her and comfort them.

  As she stood before them, struggling to speak, to disguise her torment, her mother rested her knitting on her lap, her brow furrowing in concern. “Mary Ann, my dear child.” Her black hair was plaited in a long braid, with only a faint trace of silver threaded through the glossy mass. She had been a great beauty in her youth and could have had any man of the borough she had wanted, and she had married Mary Ann’s father for his kindness and piety. “Is everything all right?”

  “Of course,” she lied, forcing a smile. “I’m merely tired.”

  “Sleep is the best cure for that,” her father said, setting aside his Bible and regarding her fondly. “Remember to say your prayers.”

  She promised him she would and hurried upstairs before they glimpsed the tears in her eyes.

  Alone in her bedchamber, she doused the lamp and lay beneath the coverlet fully clothed, listening to the faint sounds of her parents retiring for the night, starting at every banging shutter and creaking windowpane. Shortly after midnight, Junius’s signal came; the scratching of a long branch against her window. She threw back the covers, lighted the lantern, straightened her dress, smoothed her hair—and, lastly, fastened her lovely new brooch to the throat of her dress. The exquisite piece of jewelry was a gift from Junius; when she had pledged him her love, he had taken Byron’s miniature on ivory to a jeweler, who backed it in gold and set it for a brooch, a beautiful, unique ornament in lieu of a wedding ring.

  She crept down the stairs and opened the door to her beloved Juniu
s. He kissed her before following her inside and up to her bedchamber to retrieve her trunk, which he carried downstairs and outside to the waiting carriage. Her heart thumped at every creak of the floorboards; her ears strained for the sound of her parents sitting up in bed, lighting a candle, her mother sobbing, her father following in pursuit.

  The house was silent. She heard a baby cry next door, a dog bark several blocks away, but her parents slumbered peacefully on.

  When Junius settled her into the carriage, she gasped, suddenly remembering something precious left behind—Junius’s letters, nearly one hundred of them hidden at the bottom of her wardrobe, sorted according to the week and bound with ribbon left over from tying bouquets. “I’ve forgotten something.”

  “What is it?” Junius caressed her cheek tenderly. “Wait here. I’ll fetch it for you.”

  “No, it’s too great a risk.” If her parents woke and caught her in mid-flight, her resolve would crumble. “Let’s go.”

  He nodded, and a moment later, the carriage swiftly carried her away from the only home she had ever known.

  Let Junius’s words remain behind as a testament to true love. Perhaps after her parents read them, they would understand.

  They traveled first to Deal on the southeastern coast of England, giddily celebrating their escape by taking a room at a seaside inn and arranging for supper to be sent up to them, bread and potatoes roasted with leeks and rosemary. Junius cherished all living things, he told her, and he refused to eat the flesh of any beast, fish, or fowl. “Man was not intended to make Earth a slaughterhouse of innocent animals,” he said, making her deeply regret suggesting the pheasant.

  He had signed the register “J. B. Booth and wife,” which sent a frisson of anticipation through her even as a pang of remorse reminded her that it was not and never could be true. It did not matter, she told herself later as they prepared for bed, as he tenderly undressed her, as her skin warmed beneath his touch. She had him. She had his love. She did not need his name or a paper from the church to confirm either.