A Fall from Grace, Maggie Ford [best english novels to read txt] 📗

done for me,’ he continued, misinterpreting her outburst. ‘I have held off for so long but it now seems time I made an effort to grant you your wish.’

He stopped to regain his laboured breath, a sound that would usually have pierced right through her, though not this time as she sat tense with self-recrimination, wondering how long he had known.

‘I can’t say they will be successful,’ he finally continued, slowly now. ‘All I can say is that we can but try, my dear.’ Was he talking about her and Anthony?

‘I don’t understand, James,’ she said.

His hold on her hand again tightened a little. ‘I’ve decided to try and trace your daughter for you, my dear. The firm I have in mind has a fine reputation of being very successful tracing missing persons. And if they do prove successful, and I pray for your sake that they are, I will rest content knowing you’ll not be left entirely alone when I’m no longer here.’

There flooded over her an intense sense of relief together with another of overwhelming joy. Quite overcome by the gratitude he was trying to show, all she could do was half collapse in his arms, weeping stupidly.

‘I’ve done nothing to deserve this,’ she whispered almost incoherently as she wept.

‘But you have,’ he said quietly, patting her shoulder. ‘You have filled an elderly man’s lonely life, and this is the only way that I can thank you.’

Recovering enough to sit up, Madeleine made no reply, her earlier joy melting away to be replaced by her own weight of guilt and the deceit that she and Anthony had practised so cruelly and for so long.

She realized that he was still speaking, so quietly that it seemed to be from a great distance. ‘But for you,’ he was saying, ‘I might well be sitting here, alone, dwelling on a beloved wife taken from me, wanting only for my illness to take me so I could be joined with her again. But you changed all that and I need to see you happy and not left on your own when my time comes. Helping you find your daughter is the only way I can thank you.’

Madeleine made no reply as his voice died away, but her sense of guilt continued to mount. If only he knew how she really felt about their marriage. She hadn’t really wanted him to die; had only wanted a solution to present itself so that she and Anthony could be together without causing him hurt. But that had been impossible, trapped in a marriage to a decent man she liked but couldn’t love.

And now he was prepared to do this thing for her, this one thing she wanted above all else, other than to be with Anthony always; she felt weak with guilt and gratitude in equal measures.

‘You mustn’t think so highly of me,’ she said in a small voice.

But he had already closed his eyes like a weary soul looking for the chance to drift away from the heavy weight of living.

She’d not told Anthony what his uncle had offered to do. Somehow she felt, maybe foolishly, that it might affect what the two of them had together. Once, when she’d mentioned there being a baby somewhere, he had gone silent. She learned then that it was better not to mention it ever, lest it caused a rift in their relationship. Bad enough that James’s illness during the winter kept them apart more often than they’d have wanted, Anthony terrifying her on one occasion by saying, maybe without thinking, that if James’s ill health continued indefinitely, he couldn’t see what future there was for them.

She had burst into tears that had deteriorated into sobs, crying that she wouldn’t want to live if he left her. He’d immediately cuddled her to him, saying he hadn’t meant it, apologizing too for his lack of feeling towards his uncle. But she knew how he felt deep down inside for she felt the same.

‘We can’t let it come between us,’ she cried, sobbing against his shoulder. ‘I want to be with you but I can’t just walk away from him when he’s so ill.’

She would never do that she told herself, yet when James had gone down with pneumonia, a tiny insidious voice inside her head had posed the same question over and over: what if pneumonia eventually took him, and the answer: she would be free to spend the rest of her life with Anthony.

Hating herself, she had consequently felt such a gush of relief to see him recover, sparing her the anguish of believing that those terrible thoughts in her head might have contributed to his demise. But now came a sense of impatience at the length of time his recovery was taking; disrupting her life almost as much as it had that winter, causing her plans for her Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve parties – said to be the ones to be seen at in London – to be cancelled. He’d needed peace and quiet and although recovering to some extent by then, her heart would not have been in it; he needed her and she wanted only to be with Anthony.

So she had seen 1922 in quietly, her days taken up helping to nurse him, seeing the year ahead as the same old water flowing under the same old bridge – a repeat of last year. Now suddenly it had all changed.

The coming of spring had helped aid his recovery to some extent apart from the bouts of bronchitis, his health still threatening to deteriorate. But the coming of warmer weather was helping to some extent, and true to his word, he had promised to have a firm of investigators try to trace her baby.

‘It might take some time,’ he’d said, ‘maybe months, even years. She will already be seven or eight now – no longer a baby. Do you still want me to carry on with it, my dear?’

Yes, she did. But