6. Doomed Love
It was never going to work out well, she should have known that from the start. Perhaps she did on some level, and she she still went ahead with it. It was foolish, silly, and the easiest thing in the world; to take another woman's son and begin gradually- almost so she did not notice it happening- to look on him as her own.
She'd always had a funny thing about relationships: when her mother encouraged her to accept Joe, she had shied away from doing so, and when propriety and reason couldn't have been more set against her affair with Charles, she threw herself into it whole-heartedly. The more she told herself that William was not hers to mother, the more she found herself doing just that.
It had seemed so simple at the time. She had always regretted that their circumstances hadn't allowed her and Charles to have a child. He was there, pining none too silently- well, not that he was trying to draw attention to himself, but he certainly didn't hide it well enough for her to be able to overlook it- for a sense of family, and there she was only too willing to provide one.
No one quite knows where they stand in relationships that are by and large unspoken, surely she should have remembered that. She was more than willing to stick up for him, to Charles, to that vile boy Thomas, even to his Lordship if necessary; she was willing to listen to him talk about missing his life at home if he wanted to. Only he didn't know that, and she was wary of telling him in case he felt as if she thought he wasn't coping very well. Not only that, she was frightened of him knocking her back by telling her he doesn't need her.
So she's left there, really quite hopeless, listening from behind the door in the evenings as he presses the keys of the piano in a sad kind of way, unable to offer to tell him that she's there for him. That she loves him.
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