First Comes Marriage

by Mary Balogh

  It was a chilling speech.

  “I still intend to make him happy,” Vanessa said, leaning forward across the table. “It is I who have made him unhappy, you see. Or at least I have wounded his pride or something else that is important to him. Three days after our wedding he gathered daffodils with me—great armfuls he could hardly see around. And when we returned to the dower house he filled the pots and vases with water for me and helped sort the flowers and carry them into each room and position them in just the right place and at just the right angle.”

  “Elliott did this?” The dowager looked surprised.

  “And the very next day,” Vanessa said, “he found me in tears. I was weeping over a portrait of my late husband because I had been happy for three whole days and felt guilty and feared I might forget him.”

  “Oh, dear,” her mother-in-law said, frowning. “Did you explain to Elliott?”

  “I did,” Vanessa said. “At least I think I did. I was not sure how to explain it even to myself. But clearly he did not understand. I will make him happy yet, though. See if I don’t.”

  It would have been very easy just to fall into the busy pattern that life took on as soon as they arrived in town. There were a hundred and one things to do every day— go shopping, go to the library, pay afternoon calls with her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, call upon her siblings after they had arrived at Merton House on Berkeley Square, pore over the masses of invitations that arrived at the house every day and ponder which she wished to attend—after her presentation to the queen, of course. And there was that presentation to think about and worry about—and the ball that would follow it in the evening. It was a ball intended primarily for Cecily’s come-out, but in a sense it would be Vanessa’s too—and Meg’s and Kate’s.

  There were people to meet and faces and names to memorize.

  Most of them were female pursuits. Indeed, it seemed to Vanessa that ladies and gentlemen of the ton lived largely separate existences and came together only for social events like balls and picnics and concerts. The come-out ball would be one such occasion.

  She might have thrown herself into the new life and virtually ignored Elliott, who did she knew not what with his days.

  But she missed him. They had talked a great deal during the three days of their honeymoon. They had done things together. They had made love frequently and at satisfying length. They had slept together.

  It had been a less-than-ideal relationship even then. She had felt his reserve, his unwillingness to unbend and simply enjoy life. She had noticed that he never smiled or laughed. But it had been only a partial reserve. It had seemed to her that those had been happy days for him too, even if he would never have used that exact word.

  At the very least then there had been the hope of more.

  Now he was not happy—not when he was at home anyway.

  And it was all her fault.

  She might have been contented with half a marriage, then, and she might have been contented with the busy nature of her days.

  But she was not.

  On the morning of the day before her presentation, she heard him leave his dressing room. It was still very early. He always got up early in order to spend some time in the office with Mr. Bowen before going about whatever business kept him from home for the rest of the day.

  His mother and sometimes even Cecily took breakfast with him. So did she, but there was no chance of any private conversation there.

  Vanessa hurried into her dressing room, hauling off her nightgown as she went. She did not ring for her maid. She washed quickly in cold water and dressed hastily in a pale blue day dress. She pulled a brush through her hair, checked herself in the full-length mirror to make sure she did not look an absolute fright, and followed her husband downstairs.

  He was in the study next to the library, as she had expected. He had a letter open in one hand though he was not reading it. He was talking with Mr. Bowen. Dressed immaculately in riding clothes and top boots, he looked very handsome indeed.

  He turned as she appeared in the doorway and his eyebrows lifted in evident surprise.

  “Ah, my dear,” he said. “You are up early this morning.”

  He had taken to calling her my dear in public. It seemed ludicrously inappropriate.

  “I could not sleep,” she said, and smiled. She nodded to Mr. Bowen, who had risen to his feet behind the desk.

  “How may I be of service to you?” Elliott asked.

  “You may come into the library or the morning room with me,” she said. “I wish to speak with you.”

  He inclined his head.

  “I will dictate an answer to this one later, George,” he said, waving the letter in his hand before setting it down on the desk. “There is no particular hurry for it.”

  He took her by the elbow and led her into the next room, where a fire was already burning merrily in the hearth.

  “What may I do for you, Vanessa?” he asked, indicating a leather chair beside the hearth and going to stand before the fire himself, his back to it. He was all courtesy with a hint of impatience.

  She sat down.

  “I thought we might talk,” she said. “We hardly ever have the chance to talk to each other anymore.”

  He raised his eyebrows again. “Not at dinner?” he asked her. “Or in the drawing room afterward?”

  “Your mother and sister are always present too,” she said. “I meant alone, just the two of us.”

  He regarded her steadily “Do you need more money?” he asked. “You may ask George for that anytime. You will not find me tightfisted.”

  “No, of course not,” she said, waving a dismissive hand. “I have not spent any of what he gave me two days ago. Oh, except for the subscription cost at the library. I looked around the shops, but there was really nothing else I needed that would not have been a pointless extravagance. I already have more dresses than I have ever owned in my life.”

  He continued to look down at her and she realized at what a disadvantage he had set her—deliberately? She was seated while he stood. He towered over her.

  “It was not about money I wished to speak,” she said. “It was about us —about our marriage. I think I hurt you.”

  His eyes grew cold.

  “I believe, ma’am,” he said, “you do not possess the power to do that.”

  It was proof positive that she was right. People who were hurt often felt the need to strike back—only even more viciously.

  “If that was all you wished to say,” he said, “I will bid you—”

  “Of course it is not all,” she said. “Good heavens, Elliott, is the rest of our married life to proceed this way, as if we are nothing to each other but coldly polite strangers? Just a few days ago you were skipping stones across the water at Finchley Park and I was rowing us in circles and we were gathering daffodils. Did all that mean nothing to you?”

  “You surely did not expect that those days would be more than a mildly pleasant interlude before the real business of the rest of our married days began, did you?” he asked her.

  “Of course I did,” she said. “Elliott—”

  “I really must bid you good morning,” he said. “May I escort you to the breakfast parlor? Perhaps my mother will be down by now”

  He offered his arm.

  “Those three days and nights—four nights—were the most wonderful of my whole life,” she said, leaning forward a little in her chair and fixing her eyes on him.

  She watched him inhale, but she swept onward before he could say anything else.

  “I loved Hedley” she said. “I adored him, in fact. I would have died in his place if I could. But I was never in love with him. I was never—” She swallowed awkwardly and closed her eyes. She had never said any of this aloud before. She had tried very hard not even to think it. “I was never aroused by him. I never wanted him in that way He was my dearest friend in the world.”

  There was a horrible silence.

  “But he was
dreadfully in love with me,” she said, laboring onward. “Not because of my looks, of course. I think it must have been my cheerfulness and laughter and my willingness to be with him. He was so very ill and weak. If he had been robust and healthy, I daresay he would not have loved me at all even though he had always been my friend. He would have fallen in love with someone who was prettier.”

  Still he said nothing, and she had stopped looking up at him. She gazed at her hands, which were now tingling with pins and needles.

  “You are big and strong and healthy,” she said. “What happened between us was … well. I have never enjoyed anything so much in all my life. And then afterward, when we had returned to the main house and I had learned about Crispin and realized how dreadfully unhappy Meg must be and then you were gone for the afternoon and I was alone and it was raining—well, then I remembered Hedley And I remembered that I had pushed his portrait down the side of my trunk when I left Warren Hall and I went and got it. I thought of him and I mourned his early death and the fact that I had never loved him in the way he thought I did. I felt guilty for having enjoyed myself so much with you when I had never really enjoyed myself with him. And then I felt guilty for feeling guilty—for I ought not to feel guilty at enjoying myself with my new husband, ought I? Indeed, I ought to try to enjoy myself. And here I am getting tied up in words again just when I so much want to explain myself clearly to you.”

  She stopped—and listened to him inhale deeply and then exhale.

  “I am no good at dealing with Cheltenham tragedies, I am afraid, Vanessa,” he said. “I am to feel gratified, am I, that you were not in love with Dew though you loved him? There is a difference, I take it? I am to be doubly gratified that you felt such eager lust for me during the three days following our marriage—such eager satisfied lust—that you completely forgot the man you loved, but with whom you were never in love?”

  He had succeeded in making her confession seem trivial. She had bared her soul to him, and it had left him cold.

  She raised her eyes to his. He was looking steadily back.

  “You are not, it is to be hoped, in love with me, are you?” he asked her.

  She hated him at that moment.

  “No, of course not,” she said. “I married you in order to help my sisters gain an entrée into society, just as you married me to solve the problem the three of us posed for you and to beget your heirs. But even a marriage of convenience need not be an unhappy marriage, Elliott, or a marriage in which the partners rarely speak or spend time alone together. I want us to have a workable marriage. I know you might have chosen someone far lovelier and more suitable than me if you had waited, but it was you who chose not to wait. What else was I to do when you came to offer for Meg but offer myself instead?”

  He regarded her with narrowed eyes.

  “It is probably as well that we are not in love with each other,” she said. “Then we might not even try to be happy. We might rely upon the feeling of euphoria that being in love doubtless brings and not bother to work at building any sort of lasting and amicable relationship. But we can be happy again if we try.”

  “Again?” He raised his eyebrows. “And what does this trying involve, Vanessa? If you expect me to bare my feelings at every turn, you are doomed to disappointment. That is something strictly for females.”

  “Well, for a start,” she said, “surely you do not need to be from home all day every day. Neither do I. Sometimes we could do something together that will bring us both pleasure.”

  “Like going to bed?” he asked.

  She would not look away from his eyes though she felt her cheeks grow hot again.

  “For longer than five minutes at a time?” she said. “That would be something. Though a workable relationship must rely upon more than just that. There is to be tomorrow night’s ball, of course, but that is only one thing, and it is sure to be dreadfully formal. But every day there is a pile of invitations that I look through with your mother. May we perhaps decide together upon a few that would suit us both?”

  He inclined his head, though he did not say anything.

  “Marriage is not easy to accustom oneself to,” she said. “And I think it is often worse for the man. Women are used to being dependent, to thinking of others as well as themselves. Men are not.”

  “We are selfish bastards, then?” he asked her.

  She was horribly shocked. She was not sure she had ever heard that word spoken aloud before now.

  She smiled slowly.

  “If the cap fits …” she said.

  For a moment there was a gleam in his eyes that might possibly have been amusement.

  “Have you seen the Towneley collection at the British Museum?” he asked her.

  “No,” she said.

  “They are classical sculptures brought from the ancient world,” he said. “Some ladies will not go to see them, and some men will not take them even if they wish to go. They have not been provided with clothes, you see, and are shockingly naked. They provide a marvelous glimpse into one of the world’s greatest civilizations, though. Do you wish to go?”

  She stared at him.

  “Now?”

  “I suppose,” he said, his eyes moving over her, “you will wish to have breakfast first and change into something more suitable.”

  She jumped to her feet.

  “How soon do you want me to be ready?” she asked him.

  “In one hour’s time?” he suggested.

  “I will be ready in fifty-five minutes,” she promised, and she flashed him a bright smile before turning to hurry from the room and dash up the stairs.

  She was going to go out with Elliott!

  He was taking her to see the Towneley collection, whatever that was. She did not care. She would look at a field of mud if that was where he chose to take her— and delight in it too.

  She paused when she was inside her dressing room and had rung for her maid.

  He had asked her if she was in love with him— adding that he hoped she was not.

  Was she?

  It would add an unfortunate complication to a life that was already proving difficult.

  Was she in love? With Elliott?

  She could not answer the question. Or would not.

  But suddenly she felt the ache of tears at the back of her throat and behind her eyes.

  “I have sorted through the post,” George Bowen said when Elliott returned to the study. “The invitations for the ladies to look at are in this pile. The letters I can deal with myself are here. The ones that need your attention are there. The one on top—”

  “—will have to wait,” Elliott said without glancing at the pile—or at his secretary. “I will be spending the morning with her ladyship.”

  There was a short pause.

  “Ah, quite so,” George said, making a great to-do of straightening the third, small pile.

  “I will be taking her to see the Towneley collection at the British Museum,” Elliott said. Later, he wished he had not added the next words. “It is her wish that we do some things together.”

  “Some wives are funny that way,” George said as he mended a pen though there was no sign that he intended to put it to any immediate use. “Or so I have heard.”

  “I need to go upstairs and change,” Elliott said.

  “You do.” His friend looked him critically up and down. “A suggestion, Elliott, if I may?”

  Elliott had already turned toward the door. He sighed and looked back over his shoulder.

  “I suppose the museum and the collection was your idea,” George said. “And a fine one it was too. But take her to Gunter’s afterward. I daresay she has never tasted an ice. It will please her. She will see it as a romantic gesture on your part.”

  Elliott turned fully to face his secretary again.

  “And you are suddenly an expert in romantic gestures, George?” he asked.

  His secretary cleared his throat.

  “One does not need to be,”
he said. “One has only to observe ladies to understand what pleases them. And your lady is easy to please, I would wager. She is a cheerful little thing—even when there is not much to be cheerful about.”

  “You are wishful of making a point, George?” his employer asked with ominous calm.

  “The trouble with you,” George said, “is that you do not have a romantic bone in your body, Elliott. The only thing you have ever known to do with a woman you fancied is to bed her. Not that I blame you. I have often envied you, if the truth were known. But the fact is that ladies need more than that or at least— Well, never mind. But they are romantically inclined and it behooves us to give them what they want at least occasionally—if they belong to us, that is, and are not merely mistresses.”

  Elliott stared at him.

  “Good God!” he said. “What the devil have I been harboring beneath my own roof in the guise of a secretary?”

  George had the grace to look apologetic, though he did not remain mute.

  “The sculptures first, if you really must, Elliott,” he said. “I believe your lady has the fortitude not to need smelling salts there. I believe she will even enjoy them. But take her to Gunter’s afterward, old chap.”

  “This early in the year?” Elliott asked.

  “Even if it were January,” George assured him. “And especially after she has been all alone for four days — except for the other ladies, of course. And married for only a little over a week.”

  “You are impertinent,” Elliott said, his eyes narrowing.

  “Only observant,” his friend said. “You had better go up and change before breakfast.”

  Elliott went.

  He was not in the best of moods as he climbed the stairs to his room—though he had not been in the best of moods for six days. Not when he was at home, anyway. He had been happy enough at his clubs, at Tattersall’s, at Jackson’s boxing saloon, mingling with his friends and acquaintances, talking on congenial topics like the government and the wars and the upcoming races and boxing mills.

  He was convinced that he had made the biggest mistake of his life when he had allowed Vanessa Dew to talk him into marrying her.