A Lady Awakened

by Cecilia Grant

  “I’m not drunk.” He sucked in more air. “Just pleasantly fortified. And as to habit, one can enjoy a drink of brandy without making a regular practice of it.”

  Bitter laughter boiled up in her and she had to fight it down. “Men always think they control their habits, and never see that the reverse is true.”

  “I tell you it’s not a habit.” Now she heard some irritation. “I had Granville up to the house for a glass or two. I thought to be sociable. That’s the first time I’ve indulged since the day I met you. And if you need further reassurance, I’ll abstain before I come to you tomorrow. Now can you cease to address me as though I stood before you in the dock on charges of public dissipation?”

  She turned his words over in the darkness. He might be telling the truth. Admittedly she lacked objectivity on this topic. And she’d never known him to be drunk before, though of course some men were skilled at hiding it. Maybe she should suspend judgment until tomorrow, when he would keep or break his word. She drew a clean breath. “I’m sorry. I have very little tolerance for any form of inebriation.”

  “So I apprehend.” His voice went mild as he turned his body toward her. “Who had that intolerable habit? Your father? Your husband? The brother with whom you don’t care to live?”

  Her insides recoiled from the forward question, but her tongue had already got started. “Andrew?—that’s absurd. He’s so strict as to make me seem lenient.”

  “Then I hope I never meet him.” He spoke in a calm, pleasant, conversational tone. “Is his nature, and yours, a reaction to growing up with an intemperate parent, perhaps?”

  None of this was his concern. None of it. She sealed her lips into a tight line. But if she chose this juncture to keep quiet, she would encourage him to a conclusion that wronged her father. “How can you ask?” She couldn’t bear that injustice. “John Blackshear was a serious, Bible-reading, abstemious man.” She ought now to make a defense of Mr. Russell. That would logically follow. She stayed silent.

  “Ah.” The syllable was lush with comprehension. He thought he knew all, now. She could feel the way his mind worked in the silence. Reviewing every scene they’d played together, with this as the secret subtext. As though this one facet of her marriage could account for everything he’d previously found unaccountable in her. “Do you care to speak of it?” he said after a moment.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever, to anyone?”

  “No.”

  She heard his mouth doing something mobile, perhaps making a false start or two before he spoke again. “Did he beat you?”

  “No.” For Heaven’s sake. “I told you I don’t care to speak of it.”

  “Did he have an evil temper?”

  “Nothing of the sort. Nothing like you’d read of in a novel.” He would conjure a melodrama of Gothic proportions if she didn’t give him some better idea of the truth. “It was a kind of absence, more than anything. And an impediment to my feeling that degree of respect that a wife would like to feel for her husband. Because I believe a man ought to be dependable, and have some command of himself.”

  “Not much chance of that, with a man in thrall to the bottle.” His words drew a soft underscore to her own, encouraging her to go on.

  “Precisely. The drink made him changeable. It put great gaps in his memory. He would forget whole hours and everything that had passed in them.”

  “But he remembered the way to your bed.”

  Her breath caught. He’d gone right to the core of it, surely as though he’d sliced her open and laid a finger on her beating heart. For all that she framed Mr. Russell’s habit as a bothersome inconvenience, something that could not truly touch her, the fact had remained: he, her husband, could touch her. Whenever he wished, he could. A man who made himself a stranger to his wife still had that right. A wife had no right to refuse.

  It could have been worse. He didn’t beat you. He wasn’t cruel. That stern self-reproach never did have the bracing effect one would wish. Her eyes were blinking with loathsome rapidity, their will to expose her frailty luckily thwarted by the dark. She breathed in, sharply, and dug her nails into the meat of her palms.

  “Martha.” Across the distance of a pillow his attention flowed, a warm, buoyant bath inviting her to linger.

  “Mr. Mirkwood.” She made the words like a hand held upright, commanding him to halt. “Your kindness and concern do you credit, I’m sure. But I’ve said all I care to on this subject. I suggest we go to sleep now.”

  The air stirred with movement. Unerringly through the dark, his hand came and set itself against her head, palm at her ear, fingers spread and sunk into her hair. Just for a moment his hand remained there, just long enough to hold her steady as he brought his lips to her forehead. “Good night, then,” he said, and she felt his warm breath at her hairline. He lay back, with nothing more to say, and she listened to his breaths as they lengthened and turned to light snores.

  SOME TIME in the night, turning over, she collided with part of him. His arm snaked promptly across her and pulled her close, as though she had belonged on that part of the bed all along, and had somehow wandered. She held her breath, waiting for what would come next, but nothing did. His arm had acted of its own accord, perhaps as a reflex honed from countless nights spent with a woman in easy reach. Or perhaps her presence beside him coincided with a dream of some other lover.

  That was not her business. He could dream whatever he liked. Only she’d prefer not to be drawn in as some kind of surrogate, her body ensnared in so many places by his. His legs tangled with her own. His arm across her, high on her chest. His chin and throat making a space just right to fit the top of her head. She could feel his pulse through her own scalp, and again through her shoulder where it rested against the middle of his chest. His breathing too: the soft rise and fall of his ribs; the slow, faint rush of air from somewhere over her head. Soon, surely, he would turn the other way and release her, but for the moment she lay there, trapped in bonds all made up of him, and there was nothing to do but consider the predicament.

  If one loved a man, one must wish for this. Such a strange notion. One would wish for this clasp of the arm. This space his body made for hers. This little song, hushed and rhythmic, played by his pulse and his breath as though for the purpose of lulling her to sleep.

  But what lady could ever sleep this way, surrounded by so much male? She could feel the appendage, slumbering against her hip. Her breathing, and his, might create movement enough to wake it. And from there, to wake him.

  Slowly she drew her leg out from under his, and worked her way in a lateral slither toward her own edge of the bed. Scarcely had she gone six inches before his arm tightened and pulled her more firmly against him. He grumbled something incoherent; twined his leg again with hers. His lips pressed once to the top of her head. The appendage didn’t stir.

  “Mirkwood,” she whispered. He couldn’t possibly do all that while asleep, could he?

  He made no answer, and in the quiet she shaped her mouth, her lips and tongue and teeth and palate, to something new. “Theophilus.” The name floated out like milkweed fluff blown from her palm, wayward and ephemeral.

  He grumbled again—she felt the thrumming of it in his chest—then fell silent save for the breaths, in and out.

  She closed her eyes to wait for sleep or sunrise. Probably the latter. Her breathing arranged itself in soft accord with his own. Well, if she didn’t sleep, they would at least be assured of catching that early-morning hour at which he must rise and make his quiet departure. She’d speak to him then about schooling his limbs in restraint.

  WOMAN Some base animal part of his brain gave him the news. Woman, not two feet distant.

  His nose confirmed the report. Sweet scent of naked woman, with an overlay of something floral. Lilac. A powder made to smell of lilacs. Ah, yes. That woman.

  His eyes eased open. Faint gray, in the strip of window between the curtains. No sunrise colors yet, but they’d come. Th
en he must be off.

  He had time. He needn’t even wake her.

  Her back was to him, her hair spilling all ways over the pillow and one shoulder exposed where the covers had slipped down. He tugged at the sheet and draped it over her shoulder, restoring her modesty. In trade, he took away every inch between them. His chest met her back—gently—and he draped an arm over her rib cage to keep her there. His knee pushed—slowly—between her knees. His hand grasped her thigh, lifting it up and back to rest atop his leg. His cock brushed against her, lingering on the threshold of where she opened to him, and—quiet as snowfall—slipped in.

  “What are you doing?” Awake and alert in an instant. “You did this already, last night.”

  He cursed softly. “Can’t you just sleep through it?”

  “Sleep through it? Are you mad? You could wake a churchyard with that thing.”

  “Good Lord. If I’d known you awoke with a sense of humor, I should have been spending the night long before this.” He thrust once and then twice. Christ, but he ought not to do this. The things she’d told him last night were coming back now, as was a vague, ardent resolve to respect her bodily reticence, and prove himself a better man than her husband.

  And now here he was imposing himself on her—in her—and demanding she go back to sleep. Still, she hadn’t stopped him. She would, wouldn’t she, if she really objected?

  He thrust once more and drew almost all the way out with a shuddering breath. “Truly, do you want me to stop?” He sounded like he’d just run from Vauxhall to St. James’s.

  Her ribs expanded into his chest, slowly, while she thought it over. “I don’t suppose there’s any harm. And this might be the right bit of seed.”

  “Good thinking. This might be the bit.” I’ll do my best to make it the bit. A place, after all, for worthy intentions. He paused to set his lips to her shoulder, careful to keep his rough cheek clear of her smooth one, before he resumed.

  Chapter Eleven

  A SECOND DAY of threshing only solidified his opinions. How was he to properly enjoy a slice of toast again, knowing the terrible drudgery that lay behind it? And what primordial coxcomb had first grown discontented with the earth’s bounty of fruit and game, and cast a calculating eye on stalks of grain? He should like to meet that man, and fetch him a sound knock to his shaggy head. If he hadn’t lost all his quickness, that was. Nearly four weeks without a bout at the parlor might have done irreparable harm. Each in turn he took his hands from the traces to flex out the fingers and clench them in fists.

  “Should you like me to take the reins, sir?” Mr. Quigley, a slight whippet of a man, had clearly been nonplussed by the master’s inclination to drive the wagon instead of riding alongside on a horse, as Granville had the decency to do, and was every minute watching for signs that he might be required to take over.

  “Not at all. You did your part with the threshing this past week. You’re to sit back now, and enjoy what scenery we encounter on the way to this mill.”

  Quigley set his wide-splayed fingertips on his knees, and frowned at the road before him. Something in the attitude brought Mrs. Russell to mind. Not much for the incidental pleasures, these denizens of Sussex.

  But the scenery rolled past, for those capable of enjoying it, until finally a town loomed into view, and at its near end, a smallish river with a gray-brick mill on its bank. A fall in the river sent water over the top of the wheel, driving it round and round with presumably enough energy to turn a grindstone. Gears came into it somehow, or so Granville had said. Large gears and small gears interacting in some mysterious way to make the stone turn faster than the wheel itself. Sideways as well. The waterwheel sat upright while the grindstones, both the fixed one and the one that moved, lay horizontal. Granville had sketched a diagram and Theo had nodded sagely at it while daydreaming of the widow’s bed.

  At the mill they unloaded their sacks of grain—let Quigley eye him as dubiously as he would; he could match muscles with any laborer—and watched a wheel-driven chain hoist them one by one to the sack floor, where some mill fellow stood ready to pour the grain down a chute to the grindstones. There would be nothing to do now but wait for the wheat to come back as sacks of flour.

  He looked about him, reaching for the hat he’d put off while unloading the wagon. “I might go take a walk through that town, if you can spare me,” he said to the agent. “I’ve been used to going for long rambles this time of day, but never yet to any of the neighboring towns.” A superfluous lie, perhaps. For all he knew, Granville hadn’t even noticed his pattern of absences in the afternoons. At all events, the agent could indeed spare him, and Quigley raised no objections to his going, and so he set off up the road to where the hamlet properly began.

  The town was a pretty thing of its kind, a hodgepodge of brick, whitewashed, and half-timbered buildings all shouldered together in cheerful ignorance of the modern age. Carts cluttered the curving high street: he’d come on market day. A flaxen-haired child was leaning out an upstairs window, wide eyes taking in all the bustle below. Theo raised his hat when the child’s gaze came to him, and was rewarded with as joyous a wave as if he’d been some beloved uncle just returned from a sea voyage with presents in his pockets.

  Presents. He felt through the coins in his coat. He might buy a thing or two here. Decent cheese for Mr. Barrow, perhaps. Maybe something for Mrs. Russell. He started for the far end of the street, to make his way slowly back and see what was on offer.

  More than one pretty girl glanced up at his passing. Speak of what was on offer. Even in the plainer clothes he’d put on for today’s chores, he must cut a notable figure in this town. He gave a little straightening tug to his coat and smiled at the girl nearest him.

  Things could begin this way. Things so often had. Glances exchanged, a gaze held half a second longer than was proper, a smile in which she could read everything, or nothing at all.

  Confound his shallow soul. Was he no better than this? He’d thought he’d detected, of late … well, he rather thought he’d detected a certain tenderness in his thoughts of Mrs. Russell. A certain something that ought to preclude such speculative attention to other women. Such full-body notice of the russet curls escaping this one’s bonnet. Of that one’s lips, quirked up at the corners and lush in between.

  Well, his body looked out for his welfare, didn’t it? No profit in tender thoughts of Mrs. Russell. If he were foolish enough to fall in love—and Lord knows he was foolish enough for most uses—his would be a solitary plunge. He would blink up at her, as from the bottom of a well into which only he had been careless enough to tumble, while she peered down at him with a disapproving face, because she liked a man to be dependable and he could not be relied upon even to watch where he set his feet.

  Regardless, he would be faithful. He’d pledged the widow a month of exclusive attentions, and a man’s word must be worth something. He turned deliberately to a cart at which the only female present was an un-tempting sort, a solid-looking matron in the lavender of half-mourning. Another widow, like as not. So much the better. She was picking, with a stately aspect, through the cart’s assortment of leafy things. Lettuces. Watercress. God only knew what. She threw one quick sharp look at him, and he bent his attention to the leafy things too.

  “I beg your pardon.” Why not make a friend of her, if only for the minute or two they must bear each other’s company? He spoke softly, to omit the vegetable-seller from the discussion. “I’m not at all sure of how to choose a good lettuce. Are the darker leaves better?”

  She looked at him again, assessing this time. Then she jabbed at a lettuce. “This is as good as you’re likely to find,” she muttered at the same confidential volume. “But don’t pay more than tuppence for it, no matter what he asks.”

  Now what could he do but buy the lettuce? With one hand he hefted it; with the other he fished out a few coins.

  “A lettuce for you there, sir?” said the vendor, all affability. “That’s five pence.”
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  Presumably he was to insult the vegetable, and its seller into the bargain, in hopes of threepence saved. He glanced at his neighbor, but she was picking with concentration through some parsley and didn’t glance back. He paid the five pence.

  “Badly done,” she said through pursed lips as soon as the man had turned his attention elsewhere. “He saw your fine clothes and raised up the price. They’ll always take such advantage, if you allow it.”

  “It’s only threepence lost. I’ve thrown that much away just cleaning out my pockets.”

  “And didn’t he know that, too, to look at you. You look like you don’t know the cost of anything, pardon my saying so.”

  “That’s only too true.” To be lectured by a lady in mourning had almost a cozy familiarity to it, these days. “I thought to buy a bit of cheese, and I haven’t the least idea what’s reasonable to pay.”

  This subject drew her in further. “You’d do better to buy your own cow. There’s only the one dairy in these parts, and their cheese is inferior. You’d be sure to overpay for it, too, just as you did for that lettuce.”

  “I can’t regret the threepence. I can’t begrudge the man a little profit. If he can get an extra few pennies here and there from those who won’t miss it, won’t that help to keep the price low for everybody else?” That was really a rather solid argument, all the way around.

  Her eyes ran critically up and down his face. “I frankly fear for you at the dairy stall. They’ll have your pockets inside out before you’ve half begun.”

  “Then might I prevail on you to go there with me and keep me out of danger? I’ll give you this fine lettuce for your trouble.” Notions were beginning to form; hazy notions of more than one good deed in which this woman might play some part.

  “Keep your lettuce. I couldn’t enjoy it at the price, even paid by someone else. I can spare you five minutes, I think.”