Eden checked the door and returned to stand by the chair, gripping it for support. Spencer would not go to such elaborate lengths unless what he had to tell her was bad indeed. And he had nothing to lose.
“You should not upset yourself, Spencer,” she said. “Can we not make peace—”
“Peace? I shall be quite at peace soon enough, provided there are whores and card games aplenty in hell.” He wheezed a laugh. “But you, my dear, shall have your reckoning here in this world.” His thin, pale hands moved restlessly over his sunken chest. “Blast it, where is that letter? No matter. You… sit, my loving wife. I would not have you swoon.”
Eden’s fingers pushed deep into the padding of the chair. “Please, Spencer.”
“Very well.” He turned his head slowly, until he could look into her eyes. “A most interesting piece of information came my way not long ago. I debated for some time whether or not to tell you… but it would be cruel to take it with me to my grave.” He smiled. “You had a son, Eden. One you and your father failed to mention.”
Eden had mastered the tonnish art of hiding her true feelings. Denial was pointless. “You knew when you married me that I was not untouched.”
“Oh, yes. You were no weeping virgin, more’s the pity. But I did not know of the child.”
“The child—” My son. “It would have made no difference. The child did not survive.”
“Oh, but he did. Your son is very much alive.”
All at once the rejected chair seemed essential if she wished to remain upright. “Alive?”
“Indeed. It seems that he has been—” He sucked in air, as if it were becoming harder and harder to fill his lungs. “He’s been living all these years with peasants in some… filthy hovel.”
“But how—” She closed her mouth and struggled for control. How can that be?
“You’re an… excellent actress, Eden, but I can see through you. How can a… a child’s own mother not know he is alive?”
Because Papa told me. And I believed.
“Lies… and… deceptions—” Spencer broke into a fit of coughing that became dry, barking heaves, though he could not have anything left in his stomach to bring up. She hadn’t been able to make him eat in days. She knelt by his side and held him until the fit passed, but it seemed to have torn something inside, letting all the force of his life leak out of his body.
“How… tender you are,” he said. “You want more. But I… have no more to give.”
“Spencer,” she said, leaning close. “I beg you. Where is my son?”
His laugh became a rattle. Eden sprang to her feet and stumbled to the door.
“Doctor,” she cried. “Mr. Reynolds. My husband—”
The two men, who had been waiting at the end of the landing, hurried to join her. The doctor swept past her into the room, but the clergyman paused to take her hand.
“Be not troubled, my lady,” he said. “He is in God’s hands.”
She murmured the appropriate response and stood aside to let him follow the doctor. Spencer’s breathing was too labored to permit speech. The drone of Mr. Reynolds’s voice drifted through the door, extolling the joys of life everlasting.
Eden composed herself and went to her husband for the last time. She knelt and tried to pray—for Spencer, for herself, and for the son she had never known. Most of all for her son. But the prayers were ashes in her mouth, with nothing behind them but convention and the lost faith of childhood.
“My lady.”
She looked up at the brush of Mr. Reynolds’s hand on her shoulder. “It is over. Your husband is at rest. His pain is ended.”
Convention saved her. “Thank you, Mr. Reynolds. I am grateful for the comfort you have given to us.” She accepted the clergyman’s arm and rose, staring blindly across the landing. Yes, Spencer’s pain was ended. She was glad for that measure of mercy.
But my son. Oh, Spencer, where is my son?
The child she had borne but never knew. Never held in her arms. Never rocked to sleep. The son who had left her womb an aching void.