Catherine Spencer – The Man from Tuscany (страница 8)

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and start assuming the worst,” Brian interrupted. “You’ve been under a lot of pressure lately, Anna. What you think are symptoms of a baby on the way might be nothing more than stress. Have you seen a doctor?”

“No,” I wailed.

“Then that’s the logical next step.”

“I can’t go to Dr. Grant. He’s known me all my life.” I gulped, the enormity of my plight hitting home with a vengeance. “I’m still a minor. He’d have to tell my parents.”

Their treasured only child pregnant out of wedlock? It would kill them!

“We’ll find another doctor,” Genevieve said, doing her best to shore up my spirits. “We’ll go to another town where no one will recognize us.”

But the news from Italy, coupled with my certainty that I hadn’t mistaken my symptoms, left me past all hope. “Where?” I whimpered.

“Wakefield,” Brian announced. “It’s just a few miles down the road from Kingston. We have a Visitors’ Day at the college on Tuesday, and I was going to ask if the two of you wanted to come.”

Genevieve frowned. “But won’t your mother and father be there?”

“No. This is mostly for younger people—a chance for us to show off what we’re up to and for future students to have a look around and see what the place has to offer. The instructors make themselves available in the morning, and we’re expected to direct visitors to the lecture halls, but there’s a football game in the afternoon. No one’s going to miss me if I don’t show up for that.”

“And a doctor?”

“There’s bound to be one in Wakefield. Let me set up an appointment and you concentrate on getting there. You shouldn’t have any problem, now that regular bus service runs from Newport. Tell me when you’ll be getting in and I’ll meet you.”

Genevieve eyed me apprehensively. “Three more days. Think you can hold on that long, Anna?”

What she meant was, could I go through the motions and continue fooling my parents into believing all was well with me when, in fact, my heart was breaking and my future loomed blacker than night.

“I have to,” I said. “They don’t deserve this.”

But if the doctor confirmed what I instinctively knew to be the case, I was merely postponing the inevitable. Eventually, either I’d have to tell them the truth or my body would do it for me.

T OO IMMERSED in grief and worry to care about practicalities, I followed blindly as Genevieve and Brian steered me through the ordeal of the medical appointment on Tuesday afternoon. A borrowed wedding ring and a bogus husband was all it took.

“Wexley,” Brian stated firmly when the nurse at the desk asked our name. “Mr. and Mrs. Brian Wexley. My wife has a three-o’clock appointment with Dr. Reese.”

I cringed at yet another lie designed to shield me from the consequences of my rash behavior. Genevieve had “borrowed” her late grandmother’s plain gold ring from her mother’s jewelry case, and it hung around the third finger of my left hand like a lead weight. My cousin’s last words, before Brian and I entered the small clinic, had been, “Stop looking so furtive. They’ll think you’re Rhode Island’s answer to Bonnie and Clyde!”

But that infamous pair had been killed in 1934. A vastly preferable state, I thought morosely, to the one in which I now found myself. A kind of numbness had carried me through the last couple of days, but it was wearing thin as the moment of truth approached.

Within minutes, the nurse beckoned to me. “Dr. Reese will see you first, Mrs. Wexley. Your husband may join you later.”

The indignity of what came next—me stripped naked and covered by a white sheet, my feet nesting in cold metal stirrups, my legs spread wide, and a man I’d never seen before probing at my body—mortified me, but what couldn’t be avoided had to be endured, and all too soon the verdict was in.

“About nine weeks along, I’d say,” the doctor informed me, restoring my modesty by pulling the sheet over me before turning to the door. “Get dressed, my dear, then we’ll pass the good news to your husband and discuss the regimen I’d like you to follow over the next several months.”

An hour later, as I sat in a tearoom, flanked by my friends, it struck me how seriously they’d compromised their own reputations in order to preserve mine. Brian, especially, had taken a huge risk. “You gave them your real name,” I gasped, horrified.

The hint of a smile touched his mouth. “I felt ‘Smith’ didn’t possess quite enough cachet.”

“But they’ll assume you’re the baby’s father!”

“Yes.”

“What about you?” Genevieve asked me. “How do you feel, now that the pregnancy’s confirmed, I mean?”

“Torn. Overwhelmed.” I dreaded what lay ahead. I could no longer put off the inevitable. My parents would have to be told. If they didn’t disown me, they’d send me away to give birth in secret, then insist I have the baby adopted. But this was all I had left of Marco. How could I ever part with this child?

“You don’t have to go through with the pregnancy, you know,” Genevieve said in a low voice. “There are certain…clinics in New York or Boston where people in your situation can be helped. It’s a matter of finding the right name—”

“No,” Brian interrupted flatly. “They’re illegal and unsafe. Women die in those places.”

She rounded on him, concern for me making her shrill. “You have a better idea, do you?”

“Yes. Anna and I will get married.”

Dumbfounded, I stared at him. “You can’t be serious!”

“Why not? We’re both single and unattached. My prospects are good. I’m twenty-four and ready to settle down, and you need a husband. No doubt people will talk and add up dates when your condition becomes obvious, but they’ll assume the baby’s mine and that’s what matters. Based on our lifelong friendship and the fondness we have for each other, I’d say that all adds up to a pretty compelling reason to plan a wedding as soon as possible.”

I pause in my story, turning to Carly. “He was offering me an easy solution, and the temptation to take him up on it was huge. Although he was nothing like Marco, your grandfather, Carly, was the sort of man any woman would be proud to call her husband, and believe me when I say I was well aware of that fact. He was tall, strong and good-looking. An avid sailor, crack golfer and former high school basketball star. More than that, he was kind and generous and intelligent.”

She nods mutely and I go on.

We shared a similar background, Brian and I, and if I’d never spent a summer in Italy, I might very well have married him anyway. But “I can’t let you do this,” I protested. “You don’t deserve to be smeared with my scandal.”

“Does your baby deserve to be labeled a bastard, Anna? Consider that before you turn me down.”

His observation brought home the wider implications of my situation. Those other options—an illegal abortion, or adoption—were out of the question. How could I deny my baby, when his father had taught me that nothing is shameful or forbidden in the expression of true love? Yet to subject a child to the shame of illegitimacy was equally unacceptable.

Still, I made one last stab at resistance. “What about our parents? Won’t they be suspicious?”

“Don’t worry about them,” Brian said with a laugh. “They’ve already got us halfway down the aisle. They’ll be happy to push us the rest of the way.”

“It would be the ideal solution,” Genevieve murmured.

Brian squeezed my hand. “And definitely best for the baby.”

Suddenly, from the ashes of my dreams, a tiny miracle presented itself. Part of Marco was growing inside me. I owed it to him to give his child the best possible life, and because of Brian’s generosity and decency, I was in a position to do so.

“You don’t have to decide right away,” he said, taking my silence for uncertainty. “Think it over, and let me know when I come home on the weekend.”

But making up my mind on the spot, I said, “I don’t need to wait that long. I’ll marry you, Brian, and I promise you now that you’ll never regret it. I’ll do everything in my power to make you happy.”

His smile suggested I’d done him the world’s biggest favor. No one watching would have guessed that ours would be a marriage of convenience. “Then start making plans. I’ll speak to your father on Saturday.”

I never learned exactly what transpired between my father and Brian that next weekend. They remained in the library quite a while, their voices an indistinct rumble beyond the thick oak door. But by Sunday, I was wearing an engagement ring and that night, our two families celebrated our upcoming wedding with dinner at the yacht club.

Thankfully my nausea wasn’t too severe, and I wasn’t showing yet. My clothes, though, didn’t fit as easily as they once had and if I didn’t want to be escorted down the aisle with my burgeoning midriff half-hidden behind a massive bouquet, we had little time to lose.

“We thought two weeks from now, on the seventh of November,” Brian said, when asked about a wedding date.

“But that’s far too soon!” my mother objected. “Why, I’m not sure we can even get a decent wedding dress by then, let alone a place to hold a reception. What’s the rush?”

“The holiday season’s coming up, and that’s always busy,” he explained. Then, with charming diffidence added, “And I’m an impatient groom. I don’t want to wait until the new year. Anna might change her mind about taking me on as a husband.”