He was skiing in the Andes and/or living with a wealthy Nazi widow or squatting on a beach in a forgotten communist regime somewhere. Positive sightings of John were continuous and for me, surprising only in the volume of those credulous enough to believe in them, or maybe it lies in all of us to wish to disappear from our former lives and the responsibilities and burdens created by them. Maybe that is why so many believed he had gotten away, and not just away, but was living out a life of pleasure somewhere.
It was wish fulfillment for them as well. Yet, and you may find this amusing, once, and for a great many years ,I was the same; one of them. For nearly a decade I wondered as well, most often and most times with rage and fear, when the papers printed "positive sightings" of John with "A beautiful mystery companion" and then would flesh out the story, by speculating how and why a woman of substance might wish to support and abet him in his disappearance.an innocent girl instead. John will see and his family will see that I am worthy.
I went mad, verily incandescent with rage, liberally seasoned with my old companion's jealousy and insecurity, it could be true. Oh I knew, I knew so well how one glance from those narrow blue eyes in that unforgettable, dark aquiline face, a woman might be driven to do anything, concede all, act in any way he might request, just to keep him near. Moreover John's beautiful face, which almost always possessed a look of barely veiled boredom or scorn, could at rare moments take on the look of a lost abandoned child, and oh that rare glimpse of , to return him to his former grand distant self, for you see it was inconceivable that a man like my John should ever be lost. That was for lesser men, never John. My Lord John you see possessed all gifts that nature and nurture could provide; a masculine beauty, so perfect that every would be painter that passed through his life, would not be satisfied until he could attempt to copy that masterpiece onto oil. He had a deep and beautiful speaking voice, and his manners were so perfect and unstudied in their execution, that he could have never been mistaken for anything but the peer of the realm that he was . Once ,right before we wed, he was approached by the film maker, Ian Fleming to play his new James Bond. Amused and much more flattered than he would admit to, John gracefully declined. For John, son of a Labour Peer though he might be, was firmly anchored to the past Athertons, and remained conscious at every moment of his lineage, and it imbued his every action, for though all gifts were his, he retained all his life an unnatural fear of being laughed at, or even spoken of with anything less than awe.
2.
Certainly this contributed in no small way to the series of life shattering disasters we would share.
My John, 8th Earl of Atherton (a Godlike figure, to use my own words to a reporter, upon our engagement), was also a man of no humor, completely lacking in irony, a terrible racist, and a snob who wore that title proudly. A failed gambler, a liar, a drunk, a cheat, and a wife abuser, and finally, ultimately a murderer and a coward.
Despite these rather glaring character defects, none of this was the reason I killed him.
I could have killed him, because he had murdered my spirit a thousand times over, without mercy, and then having done so, he decided to literally finish the job by murdering my body. Of course, he botched the job, as he had botched everything else in his life, killing
This, of course, was long after he had left me with the wreckage of our lives, and left me with the shame
and horror, and somehow, and this will puzzle me forever, he left me to be blamed for it all as well. After he left, I lived on in an increasing hell, of shame, and ghastly publicity, and poverty, and the loss of my home and children, but, and here I flinch in shame. Even this is not why I killed him.
I killed John, my husband, because after all this, I loved him still, and could have forgiven him everything. So you see, when he returned that night, nearly a decade after his botched murder of the girl he mistook for me, and after his subsequent disappearance, I threw myself at him, screaming in joy, and, and one more time (the last time as it happened) he met my desperate love with his distance. He looked startled, and dare I say, revolted, and so with no thought really, I picked up my shears and I put them through first one beautiful eye and then the other, and then his throat, and last in his chest, where his heart should have been.
