“Did you really?” he asked. “And how did you think it was that men talked women into this if it wasn’t enjoyable for them?”
The thought was amusing to me. Such a blind spot I’d had in the middle of my mind. What a hole there had been in my perception of things!
“I’d never really considered it.”
He seemed equally amused, until a thought struck him like a dart in the neck, and all amusement vanished from his face. He was instantly serious, and my pulse raised with a threat to our newly found joy.
“Do you think, if you did know what it was like, and you knew what I could offer you, you would still have left?”
He wanted an answer, but I didn’t have one for him. What answer could there be? I couldn’t tell him why it was I had to go, and in the absence of that, what would one variable more or less matter?
“Would you have had this to offer me, though? Just the same?”
That brought back his playfulness, and his smile. But the troubled look he’d had on his face for a moment haunted me, and haunted the rest of the conversation.
“Perhaps not,” he admitted.
“Yes, it seems you’ve had some practice.”
The words weren’t harsh as they left my mouth. I wasn’t threatened by them anymore. Whatever other women there were, they were not a threat to me, and with the pleasure that this brought us, I could not imagine condemning him for having done it before. If any of his actions made him the man that could make me feel this way, then I could never complain.
He began to try and reassure me that they meant nothing, and that he’d only been mine, in his heart, the whole time. But I didn’t need those reassurances. I didn’t doubt his heart. I’d never doubted his heart. I lifted my finger to his lips.
“Shhhh,” I said, and then lifted my head so that my lips could go where my finger had just been.
“Did you ever get close?” he asked, and I found my mind casting back.
“Not really,” I said, and I meant it. “I mean to say I was never close to passion. I found myself somewhat on the edge of what may be thought of as business marriages. They would have been advantageous for me and for him. This happened a few times. My family money made for that. And the title. I was a catch.”
“Yes,” he said, dour again. I wished there was some way to avoid these traps in the conversation if I could know what would disappoint him and avoid saying it.
“I waited for you,” he said. “I waited for you for two years. I thought you might come back.”
What was one to say? I was never coming back. I never meant to. His hope had been in vain.
“I didn’t wait. I just decided not to ever go on that way. I never took my heart back from you. I left it with you. And I went on without a thought that I would ever need it for anything. There was never going to be anyone else but you that I was going to love.”
I thought this would make him happier. I thought it would bring him comfort. But it didn’t. Now he seemed sad, but in a different way.
“That’s such a waste. That would have been such a damned waste.”
He kissed me, tenderly, for a few minutes. And then he looked at me, and I looked at him, for a few minutes more. There were years of looking that we had missed out on. Hundreds and hundreds of glances across the breakfast table, and knowing looks exchanged at parties, and post-kiss meaningful moments. We could go the rest of our lives just looking and looking, and we’d never catch up.
“I see your love of wine has grown,” I said, and he laughed.
“It has at that, it has.”
“But not your fortunes.”
He did not take it as an insult, and I meant it as none. It was only an observation. When he didn’t respond, I spoke again.
“So which was true? Was it the whist or the parties?”
“It was a little bit of both, truth be told. I knew it was happening, but I just couldn’t find my way to caring about the money when it was happening. There are renters in the main house now. The state of my house is that it is in trust to me, so I cannot sell it, but the income from the renters keeps me in clothes and in food, and mostly in wine. But I’m always lurching a bit from month to month.”
“Oh, I know that pinch,” I said.
How strange that our lives should have both ended up this way. Not poor but not well off. A bit less than we needed to get by, but more than would send us to any sort of proper work. How ironic that this was how we turned out after all that, and all I’d done.
“But it won’t be that way for long, for you,” he said, more seriously. It could have been a callous way of putting it, but he didn’t mean it that way.
“Yes. Well, one hopes. But I haven’t been able to get an appointment to see the family solicitor since I’ve been back. Well, not until today, that is. Now I have one for tomorrow. Hopefully he will let me in to see my grandmother.”
He had a few questions at that, at why I was not living at home, and why I had to make an appointment to see my own grandmother. But all his phrases began with the supposition that I wanted to see her for reasons of affection.
I supposed he wouldn’t know the complicated way I felt about my grandmother. I should love her, but it was only out of bonds of duty that I could summon anything even resembling love. Not for her as the woman she was. Any way I might phrase it, I couldn’t make him see why that was.
Even so close as we were, lying together after having made love, there was still a barrier between us.
And this was how I knew it would be if I came back, and perhaps why I was as afraid as I had been to return. It wasn’t the seeing him with another woman that had most hurt, nor the knowledge of the life that he’d lived so long without me. It was for him to be himself, and for himself to be in love with me that was the worst. Because nothing had changed, and yet still I could not have him.
Or could I?
I let myself consider it for the first time in years. I had thought I had to make the choice, and then I would be done with it. I would go one way or the other, I would make the sacrifice I had to make, and then the book would be closed. But what if the closed book could be reopened?
He had gone all this time. He had not married, as I thought he would. He had not had the children that I thought he would have. His heart had not been spoken for the way I’d imagined.
No. The word echoed in my head. No, I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t change my mind. It wasn’t fair to him; it had never been fair to him to make him choose. Perhaps before now he had not found anyone, but maybe after this he would. If I broke his heart again, for his own good, he would see me for what I was, and he would see I had nothing to offer him. And he would find a woman who could be more than a love he could only hold for one night. He would find a woman who would share those breakfast glances with him, instead of denying them to him for all those years.
He would get what he deserved.
It was what I’d told myself: that I’d done it for him. It was what I had clung to when I doubted myself. But if I were honest with myself – and here, in the embrace of the man I’d always loved, I may as well be honest with myself – there was no small measure of fear. Because what if, after it all, he made the choice on his own that I had made for him all those years ago.
I buried my face in his chest, running from the thoughts that I’d kept at bay for so long and just now let wander in. I could feel his hand cradling my head, stroking my hair gently.
He was so caring. This was the man I knew. This caring that had gotten buried somehow by the scoundrel with the brash way about him and the long line of young ladies he’d talked his way into. This was the heart of him. How had he let it be hidden?
I calmed down, feeling his heartbeat, and resolved to think no more on any of these things that could disturb the night I had with him. It was the one night I would have of the entire life I once dreamed I would get. Nothing should spoil it.
He was kissing the top of my head now. At first like a friend, but then m
ore insistently. I adjusted to face him, so that he could kiss my lips. And it began again. And I felt him again. And I loved him again.
Chapter 11
Henry
My morning routine was all askew. I didn’t need to find my way home from wherever I’d ended up. I didn’t need to nurse my head, or hunt like some urban forager for my breakfast. I only had to lie here, with the sleeping body of my wife.
But she was not my wife. I knew this. I told myself I knew this, but it was hard not to think of her that way. I’d thought so long about what my life would look like if she were my wife. What our mornings would be. What sweetness we would bring to each other. And the biggest part of it was always the morning, when she would be here, beside me, and I would feel the weight of her against me.
And now that I felt the most important part of the life I imagined had she not broken our engagement so suddenly, and left with so little explanation, then how hard it was not to imagine that interruption had simply not taken place.
Last night had been much different than I’d imagined. Before she had left I’d imagined both of us, innocent, fumbling our way through with love to cover the gaps that our inexperience left. And since that time long past, making love had been a very different thing than last night. It had always been for my own pleasure, chiefly, and when the pleasure of the woman entered into it, it was mainly for my ego to be satisfied, if I were truly to be honest with myself. I only cared that she enjoyed herself so much as it reflected well upon me as a lover, and so that she would spread my reputation as a competent Casanova to any other future potential conquests.
But with Emma, it was as though it were my first time as well. I knew the mechanics of it all, and I knew her body and the reactions that it would have to different touches much better than she did, it would seem. But as for the feelings I was having, I was in new territory. For the first time I cared more for her pleasure than my own, and rather than a sense of victory or achievement, when I had reached my climax, I felt a closeness I hadn’t anticipated.
And there she was. My mystery.
There were so many things I wanted to ask her. Why had she left? I would have shaken her, and begged her, and screamed at her until she told me, only I knew that this was only more likely to drive her away again. My fear that I might lose her, whatever part of herself she deigned to give me now, was greater than any curiosity or any desire to understand the pain she’d left me with.
I was torn. I wanted to wake her so that I could speak to her, and kiss her, and make love to her. But I also wanted to let her sleep, here, protected by my arms. While she slept nothing would hurt her. And she could not hurt me.
I settled for stroking her back, gently. Not enough to wake her if she needed to sleep, but enough so that if she were close to wakefulness she might be brought out of her slumber back to me. How lightly did she sleep? Would this be enough to disturb her? There were so many things about her that I should have learned years ago, and yet had not.
And at last, she awoke.
At first she seemed confused about where she was and what she was doing here. But then the confusion of sleep lifted, and we lay together, tracing out the edges of each other’s faces with our hands, and planting the occasional kiss.
“How long have you been awake?” she asked me, at last.
“For a while now. You’re a late sleeper. I never knew that about you. It’s going to be noon before we get breakfast.”
The moment I said it, I wished I hadn’t. She scrambled to get out of bed, hardly seeming to mind that she dug her elbow into me and carelessly hit me with her hair. Seeing her body, up and moving around, still naked as she had been the night before, aroused me. But her sense of hurry worried me too much to think I could do anything about it.
“What are you doing?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to know the answer, and already feeling the build of righteous indignation.
This was our morning, years in the making. This was the one morning, out of all of the mornings I’d wasted in her absence, that I got to learn what our life would have been like. And there was something she deemed more important than lying with me?
“I believe last night I mentioned that today I finally have an appointment with my family solicitor.”
She didn’t even stop searching for her clothing long enough to look at me to say it. She already had her petticoat on, and was searching for her corset. I could feel the intimacy we’d shared getting further and further out of reach with every step she took.
I was dumbstruck. Of all the things she could have mentioned that would draw her from our bed, this was perhaps the most confounding.
“Your grandmother isn’t dead, yet,” I said. The words were blunt, considering they were regarding her only living relative, but I didn’t care.
“No, but by the time she is it will likely be too late,” she replied.
I stood. She was tying up the strings of her corset now, so that she could fasten it in the front. Her fingers worked the strings expertly, which I resented for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I grabbed it from her roughly. It was only to stop her. I wanted to get her attention. But I had perhaps been a little overeager, and she looked at me with just a hint of fear in her eyes.
“No!” I said. “I will not let you go again. This is to be treasured. You have found nothing else, and I will find nothing else. If you are again to sacrifice both our lives, then I will at least know why you have done it. You will not hold me in the dark. You will not open up the doors I had closed long ago and parade out my affection for you only to shut them without warning.”
She was not afraid any longer; she was angry.
“What would you know about it?” she asked, and her anger fed my own.
“Nothing!” I said. “Because you have told me nothing. When I asked you to be my wife, I asked for a woman who would share all with me, as I would share with her. I asked for a partner who would be as intimate to me as my own skin, and with whom I could trust ever secret I may happen across, and every passing thought, however frightening. And you … you agreed without a moment’s hesitation. And then what has changed? What made this such a hateful idea to you that you will not share with me even those things that directly affect that which I hold most dear?”
The heat of her anger had begun to dissipate with the truth of the statement. I saw her there, at war within herself. She spoke without seeming resolved.
“If you knew about it you might hate me,” she said finally, in a quiet voice.
I considered lying to her, and telling her that I could never hate her. But I had just promised her the truth of me, and I could not now deliver lies.
“Is that not worth the risk?”
I would not give her back her corset. I would not let her leave. I did not want her to test this, but I was determined that she would not leave my house without an explanation for her actions. My heart was pounding. This could be the end of me, in a very real way. What she said, I might not be able to go on from.
“It was my grandmother’s wish that I not marry you.”
Thus far it was not such a surprise. Our engagement, nor even our courtship, had been public specifically because her grandmother had a longstanding record of disapproval of my family. Not a feud, nor anything so dramatic as that, but reason to hesitate before causing upset.
“So she should disinherit you. What then?”
The words sounded hollow out in the air. They didn’t belong to this conversation. They weren’t made in the moment. I’d said them a thousand times to Emma in a thousand conversations I’d had with the ghost of her.
In my imaginings, she never had a good answer. She only stammered and admitted that I was right, and we should be together. But real Emma, alive and standing before me, was not so amenable.
“Yes, I would never come into my fortune. And however you may say that money is nothing next to love, you cannot grasp what it is to not have any. Not for us, who have never had such a fate upon us. Even
here, in what we think is our poverty, we only want for not worrying about money, not for having enough for food. And what’s more, you would also lose your inheritance.”
This was a new revelation.
“How?” I asked, doubtful. I had told myself I wouldn’t doubt whatever she told me, if she ever summoned the courage to tell me.
“It’s not important.”
“Of course it is.”
I sat, considering. My grip on the corset loosened. She could take it now, and dress, and run. But instead she sat down next to me.
“It’s not a matter that we would only have one fortune to live off. We would have had none. Your family would be discredited. My grandmother knew things, and I fear she still knows them. I could not ask you to ruin your family and sacrifice your own future for me.”
I had thought I’d thought of everything, but this had never been a consideration.
“You were my future. You still are.”
Her hand was on my shoulder now.
“You may say this in the heat of the moment. You may say this because you think that the consequences won’t be so dire. But they would be. They surely would be. We would be nothing. We would have no skills, nor any trades. We would not even have our titles. And however you think we’d be able to survive it, you cannot imagine. If you were to make the right decision, you would tell me not to marry you. I took that burden for you.”
I wanted to stop her. I should, I thought. I should stand up and tell her it didn’t matter. We would find a way. But instead, I only let the corset slip through my fingers. She finished dressing while I sat, trying to order my mind.
When she reached the doorway, she stopped.
“She only made me promise I wouldn’t marry you. I was the one who decided that if I could not marry you, I would have to go away. I didn’t … It was never my intention to ruin you. I did what I thought was best for us both.”
And she was gone. Again.
Chapter 12
Emma
I shook it off. I tried to. I had to. Walking out of the estate I felt afraid, but too hurried to indulge it. I barely had a moment to think of how absurd it was that I should be here now. So long ago this had been all I wanted: to wake up in the morning on his estate. But in those fantasies I had always been the lady of the house, and the house had been, well, the main house.
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