Foxden Hotel (The Dudley Sisters Saga Book 5) by Madalyn Morgan (ebook reader ink txt) 📕

‘Yes please. I feel mean enjoying my tea when you haven’t got a cup.’

‘I don’t want tea, but if you’d like me to stay a while, I’d be happy to.’

‘Thank you, Maeve, I would,’ Bess said, tears welling up in her eyes. ‘Argh!’ she clenched her fists, trying her hardest not to give in to tears that she was powerless to stop. ‘I’m silly letting that awful man upset me like this,’ she cried. ‘It’s just that he kept on and on about the man who drowned in the lake.

‘He knew the man who caused the trouble on New Year’s Eve, David Sutherland, had threatened me, and that Frank had hit him. McGann quoted the exact words that Frank had said to warn Sutherland off. He said a witness had told him that Frank had threatened to kill Sutherland.’ Bess let out a long breath. ‘The problem is, Frank did say he’d kill him. But he only said it because Sutherland provoked him. Frank would never have done it. McGann’s so-called witness had taken what Frank said completely out of context. Of course you know all this because you were there.’

Maeve nodded.

Bess took her handkerchief from beneath her pillow and dried her eyes. ‘McGann kept asking me how long I’d known Sutherland, and if I’d had a relationship with him when I lived in London. He asked me over and over again. He didn’t stop until I broke down and admitted that I had known David Sutherland in London.’ Maeve gasped. ‘No, no,’ Bess said, ‘not in that way.’

Bess couldn’t let this kind, decent woman think that she had wanted to be with David Sutherland. ‘I didn’t have a relationship with that vile man.’ Bess looked squarely into Maeve’s face. Dare she tell her what Sutherland had done to her? She ached to share the secret that had been the source of her nightmares for so many years. She was desperate to talk to someone about the pain she lived with. A pain that was as raw today as it had been ten years ago. But more than that, Bess wanted someone other than Sergeant McGann to know what David Sutherland had done to her. She took a calming breath. ‘He raped me,’ she said.

Maeve held Bess’s hands in hers. ‘I am sorry. So very sorry.’

‘I hope you don’t think badly of me, Maeve?’

‘Why would I think badly of you? Men like Sutherland, wicked men, bullies, take what they want from women--’

‘Sutherland did that all right. And I wasn’t the only woman he took from and ruined.’ Maeve gave Bess an enquiring look, but Bess shook her head. ‘It’s a heart-breaking story, but it isn’t mine to tell.’ Maeve nodded, accepting Bess’s decision to keep a confidence.

‘It’s because of Sutherland that I can’t have children. Poor Frank, he wanted children so much, we both did.’ Tears fell silently from Bess’s eyes. ‘As soon as we were married we began trying for a family. When it didn’t happen, I knew something must be wrong. We’d been married more than two years when I went to see our family doctor. He asked me a lot of questions and afterwards said that he could see no reason why I hadn’t conceived. Trying too hard and worrying about it can stop a woman from conceiving, he said, and told me to go home, relax, and enjoy my husband.’

Bess took a long deep breath. ‘It was then that I told him that I’d been raped. He was the first person I’d told since Frank.’ A loving smile spread across Bess’s face. ‘I told Frank when he asked me to marry him. I thought it was right that he should know. Most men have an idealistic view of the woman they marry. A single woman walking down the aisle in white illustrates to her husband, and to the world, that she’s a virgin - and I wasn’t.

‘I also thought that telling Frank before we announced our engagement would give him a moral excuse to back out of the marriage proposal.’

‘But he didn’t take it,’ Maeve said.

‘No, he didn’t.’ Bess felt the fine wings of butterflies stirring in her stomach. ‘And I love him for that. But sometimes, when I see him with Aimee, or with children staying at the hotel - and that bloody pony,’ Bess said, laughing in spite of herself - ‘I wonder if he now regrets his decision.’ Bess dried her eyes. ‘Anyway, the doctor first thought my problem was psychological, but I knew it wasn’t. The following day I had an internal examination, after which I was told that due to the amount of damage that had been done, I would probably never conceive.’

‘Do your sisters know?’ Maeve asked.

‘I told Margot when she told me about a friend of hers. I don’t want to break a confidence, but a talented young dancer at the theatre where she worked was beaten up by David Sutherland.’ Maeve dropped her gaze and slowly shook her head. ‘I know it’s a huge coincidence, but it’s true. Sutherland almost killed her.

‘I didn’t tell Ena or Claire, I thought they were too young at the time.’ Bess flicked her hair back. ‘I was training to be a teacher and living in London when it happened.’

‘Was Mrs Burrell in London then?’

‘No, I was there three years before the war, at a teacher training college. I came back in September thirty-nine, when the children in the school where I taught were evacuated. Margot moved to London the year after to be with Bill. He was a motorcycle courier with the MoD by day and a volunteer ambulance driver in the evenings. By then I was turning the Foxden Estate into farmland with half-a-dozen Land Girls.’ Bess sighed thoughtfully and looked into the middle distance. ‘It feels like a very long