I discovered a clean handkerchief in the drawer of my writing desk and brought it to her.
She took it, still crying, but it seemed as though she was beginning to get control of her emotions.
I lowered myself into the chair beside her and waited for her to speak.
“I’ve made such a fool of myself by coming here,” she said at last.
“Why don’t you start from the beginning?”
She sniffed, wiping her eyes on the corners of the handkerchief, and then looked up at me.
“I met him in Brighton. I was taking a little holiday there. I’m a typist for a small company in London, but I had a few days off and a bit of savings, so I thought that I could benefit from the sun and sea air. It was very quiet since it was the off-season, but I enjoyed that. I’m not much of one for crowds of people.”
I nodded encouragingly.
“And then, one day, I was walking along and there he was. The most handsome gentleman I had ever seen in my life.”
Though I did not believe this young woman had married my husband, the description was accurate enough. Milo was remarkably good-looking, a fact that never failed to attract the attention of women wherever we went.
Of course, he was not the only handsome gentleman in England, and it was a stretch of the imagination to believe it was he who had bumped into this young woman on a beach in Brighton. Milo didn’t even particularly care for beaches; they wreaked havoc on his Italian leather shoes.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“It was the last week of January,” she answered promptly.
Despite knowing that it could not possibly be my Milo to whom she was referring, my traitorous mind cast itself back to see if I could remember his whereabouts at that time.
He had been gone, I realized. He had been tending to some business affairs regarding a nightclub in which he had invested. Though I was quite certain he had been in London at the time, I supposed he might very well have gone south to Brighton instead. Not that I believed he would do such a thing.
“Would you like some tea?” I asked suddenly. I ought to have offered before now, but the truth of it was that I wasn’t as concerned with my duties as hostess as I was with delaying her story. For some reason, my unease was building, and I needed a few moments to collect my thoughts.
But she shook her head. “I don’t care for any, thank you.”
And so there was nothing I could do but say, “Then please continue.”
“I’m afraid I was gaping at him,” she said. “He looked just like a cinema star. I knew he was going to walk right past me, so I thought that I would look at him for as long as possible. But he stopped in front of me. I stared at him for a moment, and then he leaned down and picked something up out of the sand. ‘You’ve dropped your glove,’ he said. I hadn’t even realized that I had let it go. He held it out to me, and when I reached to take it, our fingers touched.”
I found myself caught up in her romantic story, but the sudden recollection that she was allegedly telling it about my husband took some of the fun out of it.
“And so you formed an attachment?” I said, hoping to spare myself some of the details. I still didn’t believe it was Milo, but it was all so strange. What I wished more than anything was that he would suddenly appear in the doorway and straighten all of this out.
“He remarked how cold my fingers were, and would I fancy a warm cup of tea? So we went to the teahouse. We talked for hours. And after that, we spent a great deal of time together over the next week. When it was nearly time for me to return to my job, I didn’t know how I was going to bear it.”
I thought back to being young and in love, to the undulating waves of bliss and confusion and anguish. Everything had always seemed so very urgent, as though the end of the world would come if romance were thwarted. The future had been alive with possibilities. And then suddenly one was married for six years and heavily pregnant. How quickly life goes by.
“… and he said he didn’t want to say goodbye either. And so we decided that we would be married.”
“Just like that?” I asked, rather surprised at the swiftness of it all. Even at my most romantic, I could not envisage marrying a man I had known for only a few days.
She nodded. “We … we spent one more day together.” One more night, their wedding night, was what she meant. I could tell that from the way she blushed and avoided meeting my eyes.
So this man, whoever he was, had taken her to bed under her assumption that he was her husband, though he had clearly been using a false name. What a wicked trick to play on a young, innocent girl.
“And then?”
“Then I had to return to my job, and he told me that he would follow me to London shortly. But … but he didn’t. I’ve been waiting for so long, and I began to wonder if something terrible had happened to him, so I thought I’d better see if I could locate him myself.”
“Did he give you this address?” I asked, wondering how far the charlatan had taken his ruse.
She shook her head. “I found his name in the London Directory. There was a listing for a flat and … and a big house in Berkeley Square. I … I thought it must be some mistake, for he had told me he didn’t have a place to live in London. But he had mentioned that his people came from Kent. And then I found out that he had this property, so I decided to come here. I … I didn’t know about you, of course.”
“Of course,” I said gently.
We sat for a moment, both of us, I am sure, contemplating how we might proceed from here. It seemed clear that either there was another handsome Milo Ames who hailed from Kent and had failed, for reasons unknown, to reunite with his new bride in London or that someone was using Milo’s name, for what purpose I couldn’t imagine.
The simplest way to deal with things, I knew, would be to have Milo come home directly. I ought to see if he could be reached at Mr. Ludlow’s office.
It seemed the young lady was thinking the same thing, for she looked up at me. “When do you expect him back?”
“In a few days, but I should like to clear things up before then.”
She nodded.
“He said his name was Milo Ames?” I asked.
She nodded again. “Yes.”
“And he was from Kent.”
“Yes.”
“I assume someone must be using my husband’s name. What did the man look like?”
I thought I detected a bit of sympathy in her expression as I asked the question. I’m sure she thought I was some sort of deluded cuckquean, left pregnant and alone while my husband ran about seducing other women.
A year or two ago, I might have believed it myself. But, though Milo had done his share of outrageous things in the past, he had left most of his wild ways behind him. Even in the wildest of times, I didn’t think that he would have seduced a young woman under such outrageously false pretenses. He had never had any difficulties winning women without wedding them. Myself excluded, of course.
“As I said, he looks rather like a cinema star: tall and very dashing, with black hair and the bluest eyes you ever saw.”
Tall and dark. Black hair, blue eyes. Though Milo was certainly not the only gentleman who might fit this bill, it did fit him.
A thought occurred to me. “Do you have a photograph, perhaps from your wedding?”