The Wedding

by Edith Layton

  She honestly didn’t know why. A whining wind drove rain against the windowpanes and whistled down the chimney, causing the fire to complain. She remembered all the misery in that cold world out there, just as he said. And he was near and warm and real and so very alive in a world filled with cold, uncertainty, and death.

  His eyes were tender; his well-shaped mouth held a sweet half smile as he gazed at her lips. She could only stare at that beautiful mouth and wonder what she should say. It felt right and natural when he lowered his head to taste her lips.

  And even more natural when he drew her closer as she sighed against his mouth. His hands sifted through her hair, skimmed over her throat to touch her breast as his mouth sought more than she knew she had to give.

  He opened her lips and slipped little tastes of his tongue inside them so that it was gone before she could protest the strangeness of it, and back as she began to yearn for more. He lowered her on the settee, kissing her cheek, her neck, the white skin that covered her rapidly beating heart. He lowered the tight bodice of her gown to bare the soft pink tip of one breast, and sighed with pleasure at the sight and what it promised as it puckered to a deep rosebud. He fulfilled the promise by bringing his hand to it, to warm the tingling cusp of it, and then his mouth to it, to warm himself even more.

  “Crispin,” she said, in an agony of want and fear, squirming against the terrible pleasure and wrongness of it. He was warm, and smelled of soap and cedar and spicy liquors. His mouth was firm as the body he pressed close to hers, and yet it was gentle. As was his body, although she could feel the driving urgency in it. She realized they’d set something profound in motion, but his kisses, his caresses, and this wonderful newfound intimacy between them almost made her forget it.

  “Oh, Dulcie,” he groaned, covering her breast with his palm, allowing his mouth the pleasure of hers again.

  But the pleasure was so intense they both had to stop and catch their breath before proceeding. In that instant, they both woke to reality.

  She was horrified at herself and shrank away from him. He was no less appalled at himself. He drew back slowly, closing his eyes so he could see reason, because she was half out of her gown and her face showed she was still dazed with desire. He was half out of his mind with frustrated desire himself. He had to force himself to remember his circumstances.

  “Dulcie,” he said slowly, trying to steady his voice, “that wasn’t a very good idea.”

  “You think it was my idea?” she asked, shocked, her hands covering her breasts.

  “Damn and blast,” he said in agitation, rising and pacing away from her, “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It was a mistake, that’s all.”

  “I wasn’t the one who started it,” she said, lowering her head, her face flaming. She wanted to accuse him of trying to seduce her but was too aware of how earnestly she’d cooperated. That was what made her blurt, “I suppose you think the worst of me again?”

  He saw her downcast face. “No, but…oh, Lord, look Dulcie,” he sighed, “I wasn’t thinking. I grant you weren’t, too, right?”

  “You grant?” she squeaked. “You think I was trying to entice you?”

  “You do entice me, that’s the problem,” he said bitterly, “but I didn’t say you tried to. I don’t think the worse of you for it, either. I mistrusted you at first, true, but am I never going to live it down? It was only natural, I’d have been a fool if I didn’t at least wonder about why you married me so fast, not to mention why your father insisted the marriage was valid. After all, there are a dozens of other reasons why a woman might have to marry a stranger quickly, and some are very unpleasant.”

  “I wanted only to help my father,” she said, her chin trembling.

  “I know that,” he said, seeing her distress, and trying to explain himself. “But there might have been other reasons, that’s the point. A rich girl might do such a thing too, if she found herself suddenly needing a husband. She might need one because of her condition, for example. That’s common enough…not that every girl in that condition has misbehaved,” he said quickly when he saw her horrified expression. “Not that I thought you had. Why, you didn’t even know how to kiss until…” He ran his hand through his hair. “But there are times when a girl may have been forced… Oh, Lord,” he said miserably, “I’m not explaining this well, am I?”

  She rose with awful calm, her face ashen. Her warm refuge from the cold world had turned into the heat of unseemly desire and then to disgrace, in very short order. She didn’t know what to do with desire or disgrace; she only knew she had to strike back.

  “Well, then, am I an adventuress?” she asked shakily. “Or merely with child?”

  “I didn’t mean that, I never meant that. I was just trying to explain how I felt before I knew you,” he said, starting toward her. He stopped, realizing he couldn’t trust himself to take her into his arms as he yearned to do. Not when she looked so vulnerable and he knew he was no less so.

  “And now you believe me to be a saint? Of course, that’s why you kissed me just now. Well, I’m going to bed. And you may go to the devil, sir!” she cried, and fled the room before she could ruin the effect by bursting into tears.

  “Why bother? I’m already there,” he told the empty room when she’d gone, and then hung his aching head in his hands.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Do you want anything else, my lady?” a footman asked.

  He couldn’t hear Dulcie’s soft answer, but Crispin allowed himself a dour smile at what it could have been.

  Yes, would you lie down on the floor so I might walk on you? If she’d said that, he thought resentfully, the servants would probably have done so happily—any of the servants in or outside the hall. They doted on her. She hadn’t spoken to her lord husband for three days—three entire days, morning till dusk—and yet they fawned over her. He hadn’t even seen her, except for stolen glimpses, in all that time. She breakfasted in her room, went to bed early, and managed to avoid him during the hours in-between.

  He didn’t know where she lunched or when she dined, for he had studiously avoided doing either at the hall since their kiss three nights ago. He was sure she wouldn’t have come down to eat if he had been there, yet none of his servants seemed to notice his absence. Whenever he heard her voice, he also heard how the servants leaped to attention for her and attended her with gentle voices and little sighs. They saved their reproachful glances and thin-lipped looks for him, as though he were a monster.

  She was a penniless girl from Fleet prison, with no name except the one he’d given her, and no fashion except for the clothes he’d paid to put on her back. And yet they all clearly adored her. But then, they weren’t Londoners, nor were they enlightened.

  Only a few generations back, Crispin recalled sourly, the lord of the manor would have kept company with his household staff, even to eating and sleeping in the great hall with them, like a tumble of pups before the hearth. He could actually have picked a wife from their ranks in those days, if the king didn’t order up one for him as part of some grand political scheme. The lord reigned, and his rule was absolute. But there’d been few real tyrants in the countryside since the day some lower lordlings got King John to swallow his pride and sign a charter limiting his power over them.

  What held for the king of all England served for every lord as well. Unlike his French counterparts, an English lord did not own his serfs’ souls as well as their bodies. Since there was no droit du seigneur, he had no feudal rights to bed a virgin serf on her wedding night. In fact, he had no absolute authority at all, Crispin thought moodily. The lord built his keep with the help of his men-at-arms, and with them he protected his serfs, and that was the way of his world—in theory. Let him neglect them or his duty to them, however, and he’d find no food in his larder, no serfs in his fields, and no life in his body before long. A charge of murder needed witnesses to support it, and there were always more agreeable, ambitious lords to be found. An agreeable lord was on
e who knew his people and who, in his way, catered to them.

  They were very egalitarian in those days. Just because one man held a higher station in life didn’t mean another couldn’t speak his mind. And this was the countryside, where nothing changed more slowly than people’s minds.

  So woe betide a viscount they thought was treating his young bride badly.

  Crispin’s bath was cold in the morning, but not so cold as his breakfast or his butler’s smile, and none of that was as cool as the looks he got from his grooms whenever he escaped to the stables. All because of a girl who’d come into his house under false pretenses and might never leave.

  He knew he should fly to London, but he couldn’t—not with the way his household staff catered to her. Who knew what she might do while he was gone? And yet he couldn’t bear to look at her, because when he did, he felt not only incredible desire for her but a tenderness as well, and he didn’t know how to cope with these feelings.

  But he wasn’t going to hide from her anymore, either. Three days was long enough.

  She was sitting in a window seat in the yellow salon when he strolled in. He didn’t look at her after that first brief encompassing glance, but he knew she’d stopped reading to look up at him. He felt her attention to the tip of each hair on his head, and he could feel the loss of warmth when she quickly averted her gaze. It was ridiculous, but it was true. She affected him in a way no other woman had, and that wasn’t the least of the reasons why he was so frustrated now.

  “Madam wife,” he said coolly as he looked out a window, “how have you been? More to the point, where have you been?”

  “Here,” she said in a small voice. “Where else should I be?”

  “Where indeed? Maybe I should have asked where you were hiding? I’ve been here too, and I haven’t seen you.”

  “Yes, you have,” she said with quiet dignity. “I know you have, because I’ve seen you—the other afternoon when I passed your study, yesterday when you passed the dining room while I was having luncheon, last night, when you came in and walked right by me, and, oh, a dozen other times, I think. I’ve just been ignoring you the way you ignore me. But it’s getting foolish now. If I can’t go to London and you can’t bear to look at me here, what am I to do? I’d be out of this marriage in a moment if I could. I…,” she said, her voice breaking so that he turned to look at her. “I should think you’d know that by now.”

  She was pale, he noted with sudden alarm. She wore a vivid pink gown, but it served only to make the flush in her cheeks seem hectic against the pallor of her skin. Her eyes were dim. It seemed to him that she was in pain, if only because of the rigid way she held herself, one arm around her waist, the other fisted on her book.

  “I’m not a mind reader,” he said gruffly. “Look, Dulcie, there’s no reason to cry,” he said, and would have come to sit by her if she hadn’t waved him off so fiercely. Her lovely eyes filled with tears. But they were tears of anger as well as sorrow, and though she was crying, she was obviously trying to stop. Her chin trembled, her mouth looked fragile, her eyes were streaming. He felt terrible—both guilty and outraged that she made him feel that way, and helpless, because he didn’t know what to do except to hand her his handkerchief.

  “Please go away,” she said in a muffled voice after she accepted his handkerchief and hid her face in it.

  “Not until you tell me what’s the matter.”

  Her reply was to lift her head and stare at him in disbelief.

  “I mean,” he said uncomfortably, “aside from the usual.”

  “The usual?” she asked, her eyes getting wild and her voice heating up to a fine fury. That pleased him. The little he knew of her was enough to assure him that once she got mad at him the treacherous tears would stop. He could face anything but her weeping.

  “The usual?” she cried. “Do you mean the fact that I’m married to a stranger who seems unable to stand the sight of me, who has carried me off to nowhere, and who keeps kissing me and apologizing for it, and making me so confused that all I can do is cry? Is that what you mean?”

  “Well…yes,” he said, with a smile.

  And then she didn’t know what to do. She could face his scorn more easily than his smile. Or at least, she thought, seeing how that tender smile transformed his hard face and warmed his eyes, she could avoid his anger and stoke her own while she did so. But there was nothing she could do but respond to his smile and damn herself for a fool.

  “What have I done now to make you cry?” he asked gently. “Or, let me rephrase that, what have I done lately? Aside from avoiding you as cleverly as you’ve avoided me, that is.”

  “Well, nothing,” she admitted grudgingly. “Nothing new. I just feel low, and not at all well. It’s—it’s only…all of it, you see. That, and…you know.” She turned her head away.

  “No,” he said, sitting beside her and taking her hand, “I don’t.”

  “It’s nothing,” she said in a fierce whisper, caught between anger and embarrassment.

  He was fascinated by the way her emotions showed in the slow flush that crept up her neck and flooded her smooth white skin with ruddy color. Then he became bemused by the silkiness of the tiny ringlets that weren’t long enough to be caught up with the rest of her hair at the nape of her neck. He wondered how they’d feel against his lips.

  “Please tell me,” he said absently.

  It was an outspoken age, and she was not a retiring girl, but she had little experience with men, and less with gentlemen. And while it was daring, even exciting, to talk about some things, other things were simply embarrassing. Her confused mortification was so acute she felt pressure building in her head and her ears actually seemed to be ringing.

  “You know,” she finally said in a grieved whisper, her head turned aside. “I don’t feel right physically, but I do in my mind because at least there’s one less accusation you can make now.”

  He was completely lost. “What do I know?” he asked carefully, enunciating each word in case she was the one who hadn’t understood.

  “About…about my monthly cycle,” she said in a sudden rush, to get the thing said and done. “That’s what,” she added defiantly, looking straight at him. “So now there’s no reason for you to suggest I married you for that reason.”

  “Oh. That!” he said, remembering his muddled words and almost blushing himself. However young and innocent she seemed, he realized he’d trusted a relative stranger far more than a prudent man should have done. It wasn’t like him, but then, he hardly recognized himself when he was with her.

  “I never suggested that you were with child,” he reminded her. “I merely mentioned it. I’m sorry if you thought I was accusing you. Poor girl, are you in much pain?” he asked, remembering how some women suffered at their monthly time. “Can I get you anything?”

  All of it was there, clear to see on his face: his sympathy, his amusement, and his relief.

  “Yes. You can go away!” she snarled. “Go find a nice dark dungeon for me. I’m sure you have one here. Just leave me,” she said miserably. Life was unfair; man and nature made it so. She was poor and female, and she hated to hate him, and besides, her heart as well as her stomach hurt now.

  He took her hand and placed a light kiss in the center of her palm. “I’m sorry,” he said, holding her hand, which lay tense and rigid in his own. “I really am, about everything that has happened. But it’s been difficult for me too, you know. When I lost all my money, I lost all chance to live the kind of life I wanted. I met you in a prison, through the best efforts of a little thief and a big one. I went through what I thought was a mock marriage, to save you. Not for the money… No. Really, see?” he asked, slipping two long fingers into an inner waistcoat pocket and extracting a gold coin.

  “I never spent it; it became a good-luck piece.” He gave a cough of a laugh before he slipped the coin back into his pocket. “Yes, even so, a good-luck piece. Because my ships did come in—I regained my fortune and my pos
ition. And then, on the eve of my greatest triumph, I found myself truly wedded to a girl I didn’t know. But one I’ve come to care for. I’m as confused as you are, Dulcie. Think hard now, put yourself in my place. What should I have done? What should I do?”

  “Murder me?” she asked in a little voice.

  “Well, no, I don’t think that’s necessary,” he said with a smile. “Maybe I wanted to at first, but what was I to think when you first showed up? Look, Dulcie, let’s begin anew. I know I proposed a truce with you before and it came to nothing. But we’ve come a way since. Who knows how much further we’ll have to go? This isn’t about the clothes you should wear or what society might think. This must be for us.

  “We’re in this for however long. Let’s come to some kind of terms with it or we’ll tear each other and ourselves apart. I’ll concede that you are blameless and not scheming for anything but your own freedom. You must forgive me my anger and suspicion. All right?”

  She considered this. He hadn’t mentioned what they would do about the kissing part, and she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that. But she didn’t want to bring it up or he’d know she was thinking about it. She’d been deeply lonesome. It had been terrible being so lonely when she knew he was in the house, seeing glimpses of his wide back always turned to her as she crept past whatever room he was in. She was used to her own company. Her father had often left her alone, and they’d moved too often for her to make any fast friends. But there was always someone she could talk to: a landlady, sympathetic neighbors, even the vendors she bought their meals from. Now she was utterly alone in a household full of servants she didn’t know how to approach. She didn’t know if she even had the right to approach them.

  Hard as all that had been, it was far worse to be living in the same house with a man she was beginning to admire, and not even being able to chat about the weather with him. His abandonment of her was more hurtful than she could have imagined. There was danger in knowing him, but the promise of friendship was a strong lure.