Hugh shrugged, perching on the edge of his desk. “Horses this time. Some furs, I believe, as well as a new painting for her bedroom, and…” Trailing off, he’d studied the ceiling. “A necklace, I think.”
I closed the ledger with a snap that made him flinch, but his eyes kept moving over my face, drinking me in, and he said, “I’d be happy to go over the accounts with you sometime. A lot of this stuff is in my own little code.”
(His “own little code” was literally just the first letter of whoever was being paid. L for Loretta, N for Nelle, AH when something was purchased for Ashby House. In retrospect, this says more about Hugh than this missive ever could.)
I can’t remember how I replied to that. I demurred, I’m sure, because it was weeks before I actually took him up on that offer, and then, it was only because of Nelle.
My sister had married, as I mentioned, and she and her husband, the limp dishrag known as Alan Franklin, had taken up residence at Ashby. Within a few months of their marriage, Nelle was pregnant, and that January in 1964, Howell was born.
He was an ugly baby, if you asked me, which no one did. But he was a boy.
Not just any boy, of course. The first McTavish male heir since Daddy, and oh, how Daddy doted on him, right down to making sure Howell’s legal name was Howell Franklin McTavish. He’d take Howell into Tavistock, Howell in one of those ridiculous outfits Nelle always dressed him in that made him look like the tubercular heir to some tiny European country, all smocking and lace and his monogram emblazoned across his chest.
“My grandson!” Daddy would boom, Howell in his arms, little face red, and soon Nelle had a new car, a beautiful and sleek Chrysler that would “be safe enough for the baby.” And then her husband, Alan, had a new office in the McTavish building, an office nearly as large as Daddy’s. And soon Nelle and Alan had moved bedrooms to one of the larger suites, and one night at dinner, I realized that Alan was sitting at Daddy’s left, Nelle at his right, and I was all the way at the other end of the table.
Alone.
That night, I lay in my childhood bed, staring at the ceiling, and those old fears, fears I thought I’d banished years before, began to creep along the walls, sliding in the shadows, slithering up the mattress and into my brain.
He has an heir now. An undoubted McTavish, and a boy at that. What does he want with the cuckoo in the nest?
Before I’d married Duke, I’d dreamed of being more than just Mason McTavish’s daughter, but I’d spent the last few years wrapping the McTavish name and fortune around me, and I suddenly found that I was terrified of losing it.
And since we’re being honest, I can also admit that a part of me wondered just how much my name and Daddy’s money had counted in the aftermath of Duke’s death. Had there been phone calls I hadn’t known about? Money wired to police stations in Paris, whispered conversations and assurances that had kept me free?
I didn’t know, but I was determined to hang on to my position in the McTavish family by any means necessary.
So.
Hugh. A man Daddy depended on above all others. A man who adored me with a kind of simple worshipfulness that was, after Duke, a balm of sorts. A man who, once we were engaged, slid into Alan’s office, moving him back to the smaller space on the third floor where he belonged.
We married on an autumn afternoon in the front room at Ashby. No silk gown this time, no five-piece band and glass lanterns in the garden. A smart powder-blue suit, a dry kiss on the lips in front of a judge, and I was a wife yet again.
Mrs. Ruby Woodward.
I was miserable almost instantly.
Hugh wasn’t a bad man. Certainly not a dangerous one like Duke.
But he asked me where I was going every time I left a room.
He never wanted me to drive myself anywhere, insisting on taking me himself.
He picked up the extension when I was on the phone to ask who I was talking to.
He blew on my coffee before he handed it to me. “It’s too hot, my dove,” he’d say, an endearment I loathed. “Let me get it ju-ust right.”
Now see what you’ve done? I’d blocked that out until just now—can you blame me?—but here it is in my brain again, Hugh Woodward cooing, “ju-ust right.”
You can see how it didn’t take long for my mind to begin to drift to thoughts of ridding myself of him.
Divorce, you say. And yes, that was an option. But a costly one, because, like I said, Daddy adored Hugh—not to mention relied on him and trusted him implicitly. Which meant there had been no legal wrangling to protect my—and Daddy’s—fortune from him. What was mine was his, so say we all.
Hugh wouldn’t have wanted the money, exactly. It was me he was after, but if I were to leave him? I wasn’t sure what that devotion might turn into, were it thwarted.
Plus, I had married him to secure Daddy’s favor. If I divorced him, I’d be right back where I started—only worse, because now, I would’ve disappointed Daddy.
I did bring it up, vaguely, to Daddy once. We were driving into town, rain pelting down on the car, so heavy we could barely see the road. Earlier that year, one of the handymen Daddy hired to keep up the house had driven down the mountain in just such a storm, and ended up running off the road, his car plunging down the side of the mountain. It took them three days to get to him, due to all the rain, and when Daddy took a curve just a little too fast, I had bitten my lip so hard I’d tasted blood.
It was still on my tongue when I started to talk about Hugh, about maybe marrying too soon, about how you don’t really know someone before you start sharing a life together.
Daddy hadn’t replied at first, the only sound the steady drumming on the roof, and then he had tapped his fingers against the steering wheel and said, “Hugh’s a good man, Ruby. I’d reckon any woman who couldn’t make a go of it with him couldn’t make a go of it with anyone. Or anything. She wouldn’t be the kind of woman I’d have much use for.”
I didn’t reply because he didn’t expect me to, but that put a very neat end to any idea of divorce.
And yet I couldn’t see myself pointing a rifle at Hugh’s chest and pulling the trigger. He hadn’t done anything to deserve that, although the coffee situation does come close.
But there were times when he was on top of me in our bed, my nightgown rucked up, his pajama top still on, when I watched his shadow on the ceiling, moving over me, inside of me, and thought, Maybe his heart will give out one of these days. It’s how he’d prefer to go, probably.
(A side note: Duke was an amazing lover, and a shit human being. Hugh was a terrible lover, and a … well, not amazing, but decent enough person. It seems to me that it should not be that hard to be both good in bed and a good man, and yet the vast majority of men never cease to amaze me in their refusal to master this particular skill set. Something to make note of for yourself, perhaps.)
So this is where my head was in the autumn of 1967. Hoping for some accident to befall Hugh, or for some trick of biology to snuff him out, anything that meant I would no longer have to put up with him driving my car and singing all the wrong lyrics to songs he didn’t actually know on the radio.
It was that car that set the whole thing in motion.
I’d gotten a flat tire on the road up to Ashby House, and managed to limp into the drive, planning on calling a mechanic in the morning.
Hugh, however, had decided to be my knight in shining armor as usual, and went to change it himself.
An absolute comedy of errors.
The jack was in the wrong place and dented the body, lug nuts were spilled not once but three times, the hubcap nearly went spinning off the mountain at one point, and then, even though he’d finally gotten the jack in the right position, it slipped just as he’d come out from under the car, one of those missing lug nuts in his hand.
“Oof!” he said cheerfully, looking at the car and the place where, only moments before, his head had been. “Almost found yourself a widow two times over, Roo!”