The Heiress(35)

He blew on my coffee before he handed it to me. “It’s too hot, my dove,” he’d say, an endearment I loathed. “Let me get it ju-ust right.”

Now see what you’ve done? I’d blocked that out until just now—can you blame me?—but here it is in my brain again, Hugh Woodward cooing, “ju-ust right.”

You can see how it didn’t take long for my mind to begin to drift to thoughts of ridding myself of him.

Divorce, you say. And yes, that was an option. But a costly one, because, like I said, Daddy adored Hugh—not to mention relied on him and trusted him implicitly. Which meant there had been no legal wrangling to protect my—and Daddy’s—fortune from him. What was mine was his, so say we all.

Hugh wouldn’t have wanted the money, exactly. It was me he was after, but if I were to leave him? I wasn’t sure what that devotion might turn into, were it thwarted.

Plus, I had married him to secure Daddy’s favor. If I divorced him, I’d be right back where I started—only worse, because now, I would’ve disappointed Daddy.

I did bring it up, vaguely, to Daddy once. We were driving into town, rain pelting down on the car, so heavy we could barely see the road. Earlier that year, one of the handymen Daddy hired to keep up the house had driven down the mountain in just such a storm, and ended up running off the road, his car plunging down the side of the mountain. It took them three days to get to him, due to all the rain, and when Daddy took a curve just a little too fast, I had bitten my lip so hard I’d tasted blood.

It was still on my tongue when I started to talk about Hugh, about maybe marrying too soon, about how you don’t really know someone before you start sharing a life together.

Daddy hadn’t replied at first, the only sound the steady drumming on the roof, and then he had tapped his fingers against the steering wheel and said, “Hugh’s a good man, Ruby. I’d reckon any woman who couldn’t make a go of it with him couldn’t make a go of it with anyone. Or anything. She wouldn’t be the kind of woman I’d have much use for.”

I didn’t reply because he didn’t expect me to, but that put a very neat end to any idea of divorce.

And yet I couldn’t see myself pointing a rifle at Hugh’s chest and pulling the trigger. He hadn’t done anything to deserve that, although the coffee situation does come close.

But there were times when he was on top of me in our bed, my nightgown rucked up, his pajama top still on, when I watched his shadow on the ceiling, moving over me, inside of me, and thought, Maybe his heart will give out one of these days. It’s how he’d prefer to go, probably.

(A side note: Duke was an amazing lover, and a shit human being. Hugh was a terrible lover, and a … well, not amazing, but decent enough person. It seems to me that it should not be that hard to be both good in bed and a good man, and yet the vast majority of men never cease to amaze me in their refusal to master this particular skill set. Something to make note of for yourself, perhaps.)

So this is where my head was in the autumn of 1967. Hoping for some accident to befall Hugh, or for some trick of biology to snuff him out, anything that meant I would no longer have to put up with him driving my car and singing all the wrong lyrics to songs he didn’t actually know on the radio.

It was that car that set the whole thing in motion.

I’d gotten a flat tire on the road up to Ashby House, and managed to limp into the drive, planning on calling a mechanic in the morning.

Hugh, however, had decided to be my knight in shining armor as usual, and went to change it himself.

An absolute comedy of errors.

The jack was in the wrong place and dented the body, lug nuts were spilled not once but three times, the hubcap nearly went spinning off the mountain at one point, and then, even though he’d finally gotten the jack in the right position, it slipped just as he’d come out from under the car, one of those missing lug nuts in his hand.

“Oof!” he said cheerfully, looking at the car and the place where, only moments before, his head had been. “Almost found yourself a widow two times over, Roo!”

(I do not need to tell you how I felt about this nickname, or how I felt when I discovered he signed all our correspondence to friends and family, “Love from Hugh-Roo!”)

Yes, almost a widow again. Seconds away from finally being free, but despite being the klutziest man alive, Hugh had gotten lucky.

Would that luck hold?

It took awhile, figuring it out. I ginned up and tossed out a million different schemes from a fall during a hike to a swimming mishap, all of them discarded because they required my presence. I could be present for one husband’s terrible death, that was one thing. But there when the second one corks it?

Harder to explain.

And then I remembered the barn.

It wasn’t really a barn, in that at no point had it ever held animals. It was more an outbuilding that my father had had grand plans for at one time, a place to entertain his hunting buddies and drink while trading war stories. He’d had it wired for electricity, no easy feat, back in 1949, but it was dodgy, and once, when I’d gone out there exploring, I’d found a dead raccoon on the barn’s wood floor, its body stiff, tiny droplets of blood on its mouth and nose.

When I’d told Daddy later, he’d nodded and said, “Probably touched the wrong wire.”

I hadn’t thought about that barn in ages, and had rarely been into the woods surrounding Ashby House since I was a child. Daddy took me on walks and shooting expeditions when I was younger, but I’d never much enjoyed it. I’d always told myself it was the memory of being taken from those same woods that made the trees feel so close, the light seem so far away, but the truth was, being in the wilderness was not my idea of a good time. Honestly, it wasn’t until I married Andrew that I started …