The Colonel's Heir Was Never Mine

I was on my knees on the cold stone of the entry hall when my husband came home to say goodbye. The house on Dane's Point was lit up like a wedding, chandeliers blazing in every window, cars stacked three deep along the gravel drive. His staff had been running for two days. His mother had sent over a case of champagne. Everyone in Halloway Bay, it seemed, wanted a piece of Colonel Julian Vane the night before he shipped out overseas. A coat tree by the door held three hats that were not his. Someone had left a glass on the side table, lipstick on the rim. Music leaked from the drawing room, something with strings that did not belong to a goodbye. I kept packing. Wool. Tin. Photograph. My knees hurt. I did not stand. I had spent the afternoon packing his kit. Three pairs of wool socks, folded flat. A tin of the cough drops he liked. A photograph of the two of us at the lighthouse on our first anniversary, which I had slipped into the lining of his shaving case, because I am sentimental, and because I was seven weeks pregnant, and because I thought he would find it somewhere on the other side of the world and think of me. The socks smelled like cedar from the drawer. My knees had gone numb on the stone. I kept folding anyway, because folding was a job with an end. When the front door opened, I looked up. Julian stood in the frame with the cold wind behind him, and for a moment he was exactly the man I had married two years ago: tall, dark-haired, a soldier's stillness in his shoulders. He looked down at me and something in his face softened. "Get up, Alice," he said. "You'll ruin your dress." I stood. He crossed to me, took my face in both hands, and kissed my forehead. His mouth was warm. His hands were gentle. And in the flicker of his eyes above me, over my head, past my shoulder, I saw it. Not love. Something else. Something decided. "Julian?" He stepped back. He looked at the two men behind him, the ones who had come in with him and were now closing the front door and setting their backs against it, and he gave a small nod, as if to say, go ahead. Then they had me by the arms. I did not understand at first. I thought it was some kind of joke, one of the unit rituals the wives complained about, the ones where the men came home covered in flour and bad beer. I laughed. It came out wrong. "Julian, what..." A third man came out of the library with a glass in his hand. Dark liquid, thick, the color of tea left out overnight. He handed it to Julian and stepped back. Julian took it. He looked at me with something that was almost tenderness. "I'm sorry," he said. "This is the only way I could think to do it." "Julian. What is that." "Constance came home last month," he said. "She's been recognized. Officially. The lawyers finished it on Tuesday." I knew who Constance was. Everyone in Halloway Bay knew who Constance was. Julian's first love, his cousin's daughter, the girl who had been sent to Europe at nineteen for reasons the family never explained and had come back at thirty with a famous name and a fortune she had married into and then buried. Constance Ashby-Vane. The one Julian had never quite stopped looking for. "She's fragile," Julian said. "She can't take any more upset." "What does that have to do with me." "She can't have children," he said. "The doctors are certain." The room tilted. I looked at the glass. I looked at his face. "No," I said. "Alice." "No." He sighed. It was a small, patient sound, the sound a man makes when his wife is being unreasonable about something that has already been decided. "Your child will come before hers," he said. "Do you understand what that means? The estate. The title. My mother's trust. All of it goes to your baby, and Constance gets nothing, and she has already lost enough." "She can't have children, so I have to kill mine?" "I'm not going to kill you." "You're going to kill my baby." "I'm going to end the pregnancy," he said, evenly. "You're seven weeks. It's early. You'll be well by Monday and the family will never know." "I'll know." "You'll be reasonable," he said. "You've always been reasonable, Alice. It's one of the things I loved about you." The man on my right tightened his grip. I tried to pull away and got nowhere. I tried to scream and my throat closed up. Somewhere far off in the house, the caterers were still laying out trays of canapes for a party that was supposed to start at nine. His mother's champagne was on ice. Every window was lit. Julian put his hand on the back of my head, the way he had when I was sick with the flu last winter, the way you hold someone you're about to help through something hard. "Don't make me force it," he said. "It's easier if you drink." "No." "Alice." "No, no, no-" They pinched my nose and pried my jaw open and I choked. The liquid was bitter and it burned and I coughed half of it back onto my dress and onto his shoes. Julian stepped back and watched me with mild annoyance, the way he watched a dropped glass, and he waited while the men held me down and poured the rest. I stopped struggling when I couldn't breathe. I remember the chandelier. I remember the sound my heels made on the stone as they hauled me toward the stairs. I remember Julian saying, from somewhere behind me, his voice patient, his voice almost kind: "Thank you, Alice. This was the harder thing, and you did it." I woke up alone in the guest room at three in the morning. The house was quiet and dark. The party had happened without me. There were dirty glasses on the hall table and someone's silk scarf on the banister and a faint smell of smoke in the air, cigars in the library, the men toasting the colonel off to war. My body hurt. I lay there for a long time with my hand on my stomach, feeling for something I could not name. There was nothing to feel. I was seven weeks along. The doctor had told me he wouldn't be able to hear anything for months. I had already picked out a name. I'd been practicing saying it in the car with the radio off so I could hear it plain. I had told no one. I got up. I walked down the back stairs to the kitchen. I drank a glass of water. I stood at the sink and looked out at the water of the bay, black and still, and I made a decision. I did not call my mother. My mother would have called Julian. My mother had been telling me for two years how lucky I was. She would not have believed me, and if she had believed me, she would have told me to forgive him. She would have said the family was too important. She would have said, in her soft, reasonable voice, that a man like Julian did not marry a woman like me out of nowhere, and that I had known what I was getting into. I had not known. I had known he was above me: the Vane name, the Vane house, the Vane trust, three generations of soldiering and banking and marrying up. I had thought I was the one he came down from the mountain for. I had not understood that I was the one he came down from the mountain to use. I could not go to the police. Halloway Bay is a company town of sorts, and the company is the Vane family. The county sheriff was at the party. So was the family lawyer. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I went to the study and found the household accounts. I found the envelope his secretary had left on his desk for the trip, marked with his name and the amount. I took a third of it, which was more than I needed and less than I was owed. I wrote a note in the tone of a woman who was going home to her mother for a few days and would be back before he landed. I placed it on the hall table. I put my wedding ring in the pocket of the coat I put on, and I walked out the kitchen door at four in the morning and got into my car and drove west, away from the water, toward the highway, toward a place I had never been and where nobody knew my name. The sun came up somewhere south of Marbury. I pulled over at a rest area and sat in the car and cried until my chest hurt, and then I stopped, and I cleaned my face with a paper napkin, and I drove on. By nightfall I was three hundred miles away, in a motel off the highway with one bag of clothes, a coffee maker, and no one to explain myself to. I did not know what I was going to do. I only knew I was not going back.