The Hunger(72)

The fall of 1831 flew by, and Stanton hadn’t seen Lydia for months, other than a curt nod in the market or across the aisle at church. It was approaching the holidays by then and they were having a terribly cold winter, when he finally pulled her away after church one Sunday. Her father had taken ill and she’d come to the service alone. Stanton noticed her hands were icy and pale, and he wondered where her gloves had gone.

She led him back toward the woods, where they fought angrily. She told him to leave her alone, that she’d never wanted his advances. He was crushed, the years of their friendship and the flashes of heated intimacy between them racing through his mind in a confused blur. Where had he misstepped?

He begged her to explain, to help him understand, didn’t want to push her or make demands and yet refused to accept her dismissal outright. There was something she wasn’t telling him, and he simply had to know it. She owed it to him to give him a reason why she would never be his. Give him one reason, and he would take it, and go away forever.

Finally, she relented, and gave him the reason—one he’d know soon enough, anyway.

She was pregnant.

He stuttered in confusion and embarrassment, the cold suddenly creeping through the threads of his good wool coat—the one he saved for Sundays. “But . . . how?” He felt the burn of his cheeks. He might have been inexperienced, but he was not stupid. He knew where babies came from. He understood: There had been someone else.

His jealousy, his fury and hurt, were tempered by worry. “Who is it? Are you to be married?”

It was then that she began to cry—at first faintly, so that he thought perhaps a light snow had begun to fall again. But then harder. She wouldn’t say a word.

He got down on his knees. Her hands were too cold, and he clutched them between his own, rubbing them vigorously even as she wept. Maybe by restoring warmth to her, he would restore the Lydia he knew—or thought he’d known. “Whoever it is, it doesn’t matter to me,” he said through her tears. “I have always loved you and I always will. Please marry me, Lydia, if you love me back.”

She finally stopped crying—the tears left tiny tracks through her wind-chapped skin, and she seemed to him like a painting in danger of blurring until its true form became lost forever.

“Do I know him? Has the cad gone and left you, Lydia?”

She shook her head. “He has not left. He . . . I . . . I cannot ever escape him, Charles.”

His concern had reached a peak now. “I will not let a monster ruin your life, Lydia. We will go to your father. He will make whoever it is pay.”

At this she cried again, in broken, heaving sobs, and pulled away. She ran toward the woods and he followed, calling out to her, finally grabbing her arm and twirling her around. She fell into him, saying something over and over again and even as his ears finally began to comprehend it, his mind refused to.

ItwashimitwashimitwasHIM. It was Father.

The secret fell like a blanket over the woods. Even the birds were silent as the details, slowly and painfully, emerged: Mr. Knox had been forcing his daughter into his bed for nearly two years.

Sickened, shaken, Stanton held on to her, panic and nausea coursing through him in equal measures. All this time he had stood by, not seeing, not helping. Could he ever forgive himself? Ever be worthy of another woman’s trust?

“I will make it better,” he kept saying, though he had no idea how.

She begged him never to let anyone know of the shame she had experienced, saying she couldn’t live with the notion that anyone might find out. In some dreadful, twisted way, she wanted to protect her father. Eventually she pulled herself away, wiped off her face, insisted she had to be home before her absence was noticed.

That was when he made the promise: “Meet me here tomorrow. I will make it right.”

She nodded once, and said, “Please don’t tell anyone.” Then she flew from him.

He stalked the woods for hours after their conversation, shivering as the afternoon dove rapidly toward night. His legs had to keep moving, or the horror would somehow suffocate him.

At last he returned home and went straight to his grandfather’s study. He had a problem, he knew; his grandfather was a good friend of Knox’s. Stern and unforgiving as he was, the chances of him believing Stanton’s story seemed slim to none. But that didn’t matter. The truth didn’t matter, so long as he could fix it.

And so he wove the tale: He told his grandfather that the baby was his. He asked to do the honorable thing and marry her immediately. In his young mind, he thought permission, and means, would follow, no matter the quantity of stern lectures he might receive.

But that wasn’t what happened. Instead of granting them permission to marry, his grandfather threatened to disown Stanton. Lydia’s father had already cast him as the playboy and villain, and Stanton had no choice but to play along—no one would have believed him. Money was power—he was beginning to see that—and Knox was able to buy his own version of the truth.

Stanton only realized the worst of it later: that Knox never wanted him for a son-in-law—not when he knew the man’s terrible secret. Not when he considered him below their station.

Not when he still wanted her for himself.

If permission was not an option, it didn’t matter. They would run. There was no plan in place but there didn’t have to be. Love, and the truth, would carry them, would set them free.