(I tell you this in strictest confidence, for Clara herself is unaware of the connection, nor would I have realized it myself had not Lydia revealed it to me, after our marriage. I know I can trust your discretion, dearest one.)
Until that moment, I had no idea that Lydia’s motives were so thoroughly venal. I pleaded with her, I even insinuated that I knew she had lied to me in the matter of Sammy’s paternity, but she held firm, throughout the winter and spring. You will remember my state of mind, during that time. I believe you thought I had doubts, that I lacked conviction. In fact, the opposite. I was frantic that I would lose you. I thought, if you learned of Lydia’s objection to the divorce, you would cut me off altogether. And I was increasingly desperate to be free of a marriage that—as I soon perceived—was not just poisonous but fraudulent. You see, Samuel arrived back in England the following summer, alive (as you know) and having just escaped from a German prison: a fact I learned not from Samuel himself, but from a mutual friend. I was subsequently astonished to discover that the War Office had known of his imprisonment since November of 1914, and that the Red Cross had duly facilitated an exchange of letters. Naturally I confronted Lydia—who had been living at Penderleath since the early weeks of the war, ostensibly to comfort and assist my parents, insinuating herself into their confidence and taking charge of all household matters—and though she denied it, I could only conclude that she must have hidden the fact of his imprisonment from us all this time. That she had intercepted the telegram that should have told us the news, intercepted his subsequent letters and answered them in our name: chosen, in fact, to allow her lover to believe his family had abandoned him rather than reveal how she had maneuvered me into marriage. After he escaped, she naturally got to him first; I can only imagine what lies she told to convince him of her innocence. Samuel, under her spell as ever, accepted her story. He never once visited Penderleath, never once saw my parents. When at last I contrived to meet him and attempt an explanation, he almost murdered me. There was nothing I could do to shake his faith in her.
I don’t know how any of this might have ended. I expect, desperate, I might have come to you and revealed everything, throwing myself on your mercy, begging you to take me anyway, to live with me as husband and wife in some other country, where no one could call it a lie. But then Samuel, out of spite, went to meet you in France, and from that meeting Lydia learned that you possessed a fortune of your own. She immediately conceived a plan: she would allow the divorce in return for ten thousand pounds.
I was desperate. I agreed. I thought I would find the money somehow, even if I had to beg your father to advance me that sum, which I was determined to repay.
And now we come to the third sin.
Lydia, it seems, had no intention of giving up her birthright to her illegitimate sisters. It was, I think, a point of pride with her, almost to obsession, that she alone should inherit her father’s wealth, or what remained of it by the end of the war. She moved back into her father’s house once the divorce petition was submitted, and there she poisoned him, little by little, in order to disguise her actions in what seemed like a natural decline. Suspicious, I went to visit, and upon a physical examination I knew at once what she had done. She wanted him to die before the decree absolute came through, so that Clara and Portia would never come into possession of her father’s business. I threatened to expose her; she threatened to withdraw the divorce petition. We argued for some time. In my fury, at one point, I said I would kill her if I had to. I am sure the servants heard me. They all thought she was a saint, you see; she was a terribly convincing actress. When I left, I tried to take her father with me, but he was too sick to move, and in any case the servants prevented me. By then it was late in the evening. I went the next day to find a lawyer, to obtain some sort of court order for his removal, but before I could begin, I received the news that Mr. Gibbons had died in the night, and I knew what had happened. I knew she had killed him.
I suppose a more noble man would have gone straight to the police. And I should have done, as it turns out. But murder trials are messy things, you know, and everything would be laid bare, Clara would be ruined; my dearest, upright Virginia might recoil in horror at what she learned and leave me. And I thought I was so frightfully clever. I thought I could bargain with her. I went to Lydia and said that, as a doctor, I could initiate an inquiry into the death, insist on an autopsy of the body, and have her prosecuted for murder. In exchange for my silence, she was to hand over to me both the Florida shipping business and the sole guardianship of little Samuel, whom I was frantic to protect, and she was to disappear from our lives forever. She agreed. I thought the whole affair was settled. You and I and Sammy would move to America, build our lives and fortunes there, and have nothing more to do with her. Then, once my parents were gone, so I thought, I would tell Clara the truth of her parentage and give her a rightful share in the business, and perhaps have earned the means to restore our ancient family home to its old splendor.
But Lydia, you see, she doesn’t like to lose, and she lost a great deal in this bargain. I should have been suspicious that she agreed so quickly. And I had neglected one important detail: at the time of her father’s death, while the decree nisi had been issued, the decree absolute had not. We were not divorced. So that when she disappeared—not in the sense that I meant, that she would simply leave us alone, go off with Samuel perhaps, but actually disappeared, in such a way that everyone thought she was dead—we were still married.
Of course, I chose to believe, as did the rest of the world, that Lydia really was dead. I told myself that she had committed suicide, had drowned herself, not out of sorrow but guilt. But I knew there was a possibility she was still alive. And I married you anyway. The precious dream in sight, almost within touch, I could not face the agony, the protracted wait, perhaps years, before I could call you my wife. When, a few weeks later, the half-ruined body of a woman washed ashore some twenty miles up the coast, resembling Lydia in all respects, claimed by no one, I saw my chance. I convinced the local magistrate—an old friend of the family—to produce a death certificate on the face of the evidence: her mental state, the clothes piled by the sea, the body I swore was that of Lydia, though I could not absolutely be sure, given the advanced state of decomposition. And before God, before witnesses, before the registrar of the Borough of Kensington, I stated, in good but not perfect faith, that I was free to marry.