“How can you uproot all of us without even considering another way?”
“You can do whatever you like,” he said without emotion. “I’m only thinking of Gervase now. He’ll have constant care from nurses, nannies, and the best surgeons on hand. He’s never going to be a strong child. You heard the doctor.”
“I have, actually. I’ve heard everything the doctors have been saying.” I caught his eyes pointedly. “Do you know Gervase’s illness could have happened to anyone? That my riding had nothing whatever to do with it?”
A muscle in his jaw convulsed, and he looked away. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“No. I don’t suppose it does.”
For weeks I had been tortured by guilt, thinking my actions had done Gervase harm—but in the end, placing blame on either side was pointless. His future would come down to power and resources. Mansfield’s mother had never liked me. She would push to shut me out of my son’s life, and Mansfield had grown so severe and closed to me. The door between us had become a wall, and Gervase was on the other side. “He’s my child, too. How is it I have no rights, no say?”
He shrugged, pursing his lips. “You’ve brought everything on yourself. Now there are rumours this child is the duke’s.”
“But that’s ludicrous. I was pregnant in June. Harry didn’t even arrive in Kenya until October, when I was months gone.”
“Harry? David? The rumours fly both ways. Honestly, Beryl. One prince wasn’t enough for you? You had to try for two?”
I would have slapped him if I’d had any strength left for outrage. “This gossip disgusts me.”
“So deny the claims.”
“I shouldn’t have to, especially not to you! And what does it matter what people think any more? Damn them all.”
We went on in this way while the servants crouched, no doubt, just outside the door, ready to reveal everything to the Tatler. Mansfield was trying to strong-arm me into making a clearing statement to The Times. His mother was very nearly beside herself over the scandal. “Think of her good name,” Mansfield implored. “Propriety means everything here.”
“I’m so sick of things done in the name of propriety, I could die,” I spat out. “I want to go home.”
“Don’t force my hand, Beryl. I can clear my own name by divorcing you and naming the duke as co-respondent. You’ll lose any penny you ever thought you might get from me. You’ll lose Gervase, too.”
“Can you honestly say you’re not planning to take him from me no matter what happens?”
He looked at me impassively. Tea things rattled just outside the door. I felt close to tears and also hollow, as if I’d lived all of this before, many times over, with different words laid out for the same horrible crimes, for being a woman, and daring to think I could be free. But now it wasn’t only my fate that lay in the balance.
“Come after me with all you have then,” I finally said. “Do your worst.”
—
What transpired next would be whispered and tattled about for decades to come, and mostly bungled in the retelling, like the nursery game of telephone operator where even the most banal message turns tangled and foreign and unrecognizable. Some said Markham stormed the palace with a bundle of love letters from the duke. Some insisted that his mother went, begging an audience at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Queen Mary’s solicitors were woken at daybreak, or perhaps it was Sir Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse. The old lady was outraged, terrified, dismissive, threatening. No one could cite a prince of the blood in a divorce petition, but she would pay to make sure it never happened all the same, ten thousand pounds or thirty thousand or fifty thousand in a capital sum that would generate an annuity for the rest of my life. If I would go the hell away.
Rumour and speculation took on a life of their own, and nothing that was ever said could begin to surprise me. I was too empty anyway. Gervase went to Swiftsden, as I’d always known he would, and he made progress there. His body healed. He babbled and cooed in his lovely cot, liking his own voice. Perhaps he would remember me standing over him, tracing the small crease of flesh beneath his chin. I hoped so. He had Mansfield’s eyes, while I saw nothing of myself in him. Nothing except the way he had fought to be here, alive.
Through the years I would return to Swiftsden to visit him, always watched over by Mansfield’s mother and various nannies, as if they were afraid I’d run off with him to Africa. I had certainly thought about it, if only so that he would know the colours of that place—the lion-gold grass and the snow-glazed summit of Kilimanjaro—and also more truly know me. Instead, I told him stories about Njoro—about Kibii and Buller and Wee MacGregor. Leopard nights, elephant nights, the flat forever sky. When I left I always said the same thing: “One day, we’ll go there. I’ll show you everything.”