Louise, no doubt, would tell me that he had.
Louise would insist that from the first encounter with Ambrose, two years before, she planned to marry him, for money.
And when he did not give her what she wanted, planned his death.
There was the legal mind.
And she had not read the letter I had torn to shreds.
What would be her judgment if she had?
What a woman had done once without detection, she can do twice.
And rid herself of yet another burden.
Well, the letter was torn; neither Louise nor any one else would ever read it.
The contents mattered little to me now.
I did not think so much of them as of the last scrap that Ambrose wrote, dismissed by Rainaldi, and by Nick Kendall too, as being the final utterance of a brain diseased.
“She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment.”
I was the only one to know he spoke the truth.
I was back again, then, where I had been before.
I had returned to the bridge beside the Arno, where I had sworn an oath.
Perhaps, after all, an oath was something that could not be foresworn, that had to be fulfilled, in its own time.
And the time was come…
Next day was Sunday.
Like all the Sundays past, since she had been a visitor to the house, the carriage came to take us both to church.
The day was fine and warm.
It was full summer.
She wore a new dark gown of thin light stuff, and a straw bonnet, and carried a parasol.
She smiled good morning at Wellington, and at Jim, and I helped her into the carriage.
When I took my seat beside her, and we drove off through the park, she put her hand in mine.
I had held it many times, in love, before.
Felt the small size of it, turned the rings upon the fingers, seen the blue veins upon the back, touched the small close-filed nails. Now, as it rested in my hand, I saw it, for the first time, put to another purpose.
I saw it take the laburnum pods, in deft fashion, and empty out the seeds; then crush the seeds, and rub them in her palm.
I remembered once I had told her that her hands were beautiful, and she had answered, with a laugh, that I was the first to tell her so.
“They have their uses,” she said.
“Ambrose used to say, when I was gardening, that they were workmen’s hands.”
Now we had come to the steep hill, and the drag was put upon the rear wheel of the carriage.
She touched my shoulder with her shoulder, and putting up her parasol against the sun she said to me,
“I slept so sound last night, I never heard you go,” and she looked at me, and smiled.
Though she had deceived me for so long, I felt the greater liar.
I could not even answer her, but to keep up the lie held her hand the firmer, and turned away my head.
The sands were golden in the westward bay, the tide far out, the water sparkling in the sun.
We turned along the lane that led to the village, and to church.
The bells were ringing out across the air, and the people stood around the gate and waited for us to alight from the carriage and pass in before them.
Rachel smiled and bowed to all of them.
We saw the Kendalls, and the Pascoes, and the many tenants from the estate, and we walked up the aisle to our pew as the organ played.
We knelt in prayer for a brief moment, our faces buried in our hands.
“And what,” I thought to myself, for I did not pray, “is she saying to her God, if she acknowledges one?
Does she give thanks for success in all she has achieved?
Or does she ask for mercy?”
She rose from her knees and sat back on the cushioned seat, opening her prayer book.
Her face was serene and happy.
I wished that I could hate her, as I had hated her for many months, unseen.
Yet I could feel nothing now but this strange, terrible compassion.
We stood up as the vicar entered, and the service began.
I remember the psalm we sang upon that morning.