Some dim sense of her meaning now reached him and a fissure began to appear in the new world he had created for them both. Perhaps she sensed it, for she went on without awaiting his reply. ‘I do not wish to be your mistress. I do not wish to be any man’s mistress. It suited me, I believe, for a time, and perhaps I allowed you to convince me that it was in my best interests, or that it was, in fact, my only option. It is not. I can return home a free woman, unencumbered, and that is what I wish to do.’

The fissure widened and a tiny trickle of his life blood spilled into it.

‘I love you, Verity,’ he said simply. ‘It is a love that consumes me. It has changed my life. Changed me. Do you not see it?’

He had imagined, many times, saying these words to her, and in his imagination they came, always, as a triumphant culmination. They were not like this: an entreaty, a beseeching.

Verity struggled to sit up, her face level with his, and her face was like that of another woman entirely.

‘I believe I have grown to despise you,’ she said. ‘I do not know how much more plain I can be. If I have deceived you in this, then I say you have deceived yourself. I despise the role you have created for me, second to your wife, whom you would desert in a moment but to whom you would remain married. And I despise this place.’

She looked about her at the ward and the prostrate people in it, but her look stretched far beyond the hospital.

‘It is a savage and uncivilised place and its people strut about as though they have the most magnificent city in the world when most have never set foot in London or in any great capital. They think their city is paved with gold when it is thick with sheep and flies and the children of convicts. It is as wretched a place as ever I saw.’

Each word struck its blow and Alasdair did not move. The words nailed him, without mercy, to the chair.

They rained down on him and he was powerless to deflect them.

She despised him, and this was as wretched a place as she ever saw. He did not know which revelation shook him the most. If she had told him night was day and the sun was the moon he might have been less astonished. Less destroyed.

He rose from the chair. He nodded stiffly at her and turned away, and as he left the ward a nurse looked up and smiled at him hopefully but he did not see her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: THE BABY FARM

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

THE BABY FARM