Not Quite a Husband

by Sherry Thomas

  It was almost as humbling an experience as his marriage to realize that he could not take his youthful brilliance for granted. That he might never duplicate the grace and ease with which he’d dashed out his first papers, between mountain climbing jaunts, safaris, and the assorted other adventures of a young man who liked fun as much as he liked glory.

  After an hour he put away the notebook and brought out a travel chess set, something else he’d acquired from the garrison at Chitral. He played a game against himself, a game that, predictably enough, came to a draw. He reset the pieces.

  White king pawn, black king pawn, white king bishop pawn—the classic king’s gambit opening. The last game he’d declined the gambit. This time he took out the white king bishop pawn with the black king pawn. King’s gambit accepted.

  He set down an elbow on the table, rested his chin in the valley between his thumb and index finger, and considered his next move.

  “Disobeying the doctor’s order already?” The sun had dropped behind the mountains, but he could still see that Bryony was rosy-cheeked from her exercise. “No, don’t stand up.”

  “It’s not much more strenuous to sit in a chair than sit up in bed,” he cajoled. And motioned a nearby coolie to bring her a chair.

  “Well, you’d better defeat yourself soon. I’ve asked Saif Khan for an early dinner. You still need your rest.”

  “It’s hard to defeat myself.”

  “Well, then, I’ll defeat you,” she said casually, sitting down.

  He laughed, even though he didn’t mean to.

  “You think you are invulnerable at chess?”

  He turned up his hands. It wasn’t whether he thought so, but that he hadn’t been bested since he was eleven.

  “If you think you are so strong, I’ll take white.”

  White moved first; it was the smallest concession she could have asked of him. Usually he had to give up significant pieces before anyone would play with him. She continued the game he’d started, her choice of maneuver the white king knight. King’s knight gambit.

  He responded with his king knight pawn. “I didn’t know you played.”

  She advanced her king rook pawn. “There are probably a great many things you don’t know about me.”

  He set his king knight pawn one step forward. “Then you should tell me. I can’t know otherwise.”

  Her king knight leaped over the four pawns that had neatly lined up in e4, f4, g4, and h4. His king knight joined the battle. Her king knight dashed back and took out his king knight pawn. He removed her king pawn.

  “You are not going to tell me anything, are you?”

  “I don’t know what you don’t know.”

  They jockeyed for control of the center of the board—she was a far superior player than he’d supposed. He deployed his king knight deep into her territory and took out her king rook.

  “I do know, for example, that my godfather called on you after our petition for annulment had been lodged with the ecclesiastical courts,” he began. “And I assume he offered you a bribe if you remained married to me. But I don’t know what precisely he dangled before you.”

  She marched both her king knight and her queen bishop to his door. “A new wing for the hospital. Land and facility for the medical school too.”

  He disposed of her queen bishop with his king and said nothing. Even with such enticements, even with the guilt she must have felt at turning down the gifts for the hospital and the school, she’d left him all the same.

  She repositioned her king knight. “Your move.”

  He narrowed his eyes. Her king knight was in place to demolish either his king or his queen. How had he been so careless? There was no choice but to protect his king. He retrenched.

  She took his queen. “He is your natural father, isn’t he, your godfather?”

  He glanced up from the board. Her eyes were the deep green of the underlayer of a glacier, her skin as clear as a snow-fed lake.

  “Yes,” he said. Very few people knew. But then, very few people cared about the paternity of a fifth son. “Do you mind?”

  “Not particularly. Do you?”

  “When I first learned, I did. Not anymore.”

  “When did you learn?”

  She had eyes only for the board, but he felt her curiosity. It was such an odd thing, coming from her, because it was normal. It was what a man and a woman sitting down to chess did under unclouded circumstances: talk about themselves, about the people and things that mattered to them.

  “My mother told me when I was fourteen.”

  “That’s a bit young.”

  “I’m not sure there is a right age for this sort of thing.”

  “And how did you take it?”

  “Not too well. I was thoroughly embarrassed at the thought of my own mother having had an affair with a man, any man. I nearly died from mortification when she further informed me that the affair was still ongoing. My father’s passion was mathematics. I felt that hers should have been something similarly sexless, botany or Shakespearean tragedies, not something that would, my God, shag her regularly.”

  Her lips twitched. “Did your father know?”

  “He did. I felt wronged on his behalf, even though my mother reassured me that they were all very good friends, that they all knew, and that nothing would change just because I now knew too. Which only made me feel like a dupe since I was the only one who didn’t know.”

  She looked up at him now, with an expression that was almost a smile. “And then what happened?”

  “And then something wonderful happened. I went home that summer and found out that indeed, nothing had changed. My father was thrilled to see me. We cloistered ourselves in the library for hours every day, read the latest papers, debated the insufficiencies of Euclidean geometry, and developed our own list of axioms as a foundation for a new approach to geometry.”

  When Leo finally plucked up the courage to ask the earl whether it bothered the latter in any way that he had under his roof someone who was not of his own flesh and blood, Lord Wyden had only smiled and said, “All you need to know is that you are the son I’ve always wanted.”

  Later, on the fjords of Norway with his godfather, with whom he was no longer angry, Leo had related the conversation with the earl. Sir Robert had sighed wistfully—the closest to sentimentality the ever-practical man ever came—and said, “I will always envy Lord Wyden for that. That you are his son—and not mine—in the eyes of the world.”

  In the end, there had been more than enough affection and esteem to go around. He grew closer to both Sir Robert and his father. He became so close to his father, in fact, that when the earl disowned Matthew for a youthful infraction, then disowned Will for standing up for Matthew, for the longest time Leo had refused to believe that the severity of Lord Wyden’s action might not have been entirely justified.

  Bryony sighed. “He knew and he loved you all the same.”

  His bishop took out her knight that had knocked off his queen. “Is that why you don’t speak to your father, because he doesn’t love you enough?”

  She moved not a single muscle, yet he sensed her tremor. Her response was to summon her queen to lay waste to his king knight.

  He took out her queen knight pawn. After she’d ransacked his queen, he’d moved aggressively to endanger her king. But she’d been equally fearless in coming after him.

  She used her queen to check his king. “Watch out.”

  He whisked his king out of harm’s way. “Watch out for what?”

  She menaced his king bishop. “Imminent defeat.”

  He sacked her queen knight. “Yours?”

  “No, yours.” She sailed her queen across the width of the board. “Checkmate.”

  He didn’t understand immediately. He surveyed the board with the laborious incomprehension of a middling student forced to master calculus. Then, shock. It was a true checkmate, with no escape for his embattled king that he hadn’t even realized was embattled.
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br />   Her lips twitched again. She rose. “I will go tell Saif Khan he may serve dinner whenever it is ready.”

  He watched her go. “Now why did we never play chess?” he murmured.

  The question was addressed more to the river and the sky than to her. But she stopped, her head turned, her profile perfectly limned, for a moment, against the purple shadow of the mountain. A strand of hair fluttered against her lips. Then she went on, without offering any answers.

  “Who taught you to play?” he asked later that evening over apricot pudding, an English preparation except for the addition of rosewater and cardamom. Until then he’d been too busy eating, his recovering appetite ravenous for innumerable helpings of food.

  “Callista’s mother,” she said.

  Day had faded. The lantern light cast copper gleams upon her cheeks and her hair. He no longer reeled back in renewed shock each time he saw the white in her hair, but he would never get used to it, the destruction of perfection.

  “Toddy?” Callista’s mother, the second Mrs. Geoffrey Asquith, had been born Lady Emma Todd, according to her tombstone—she’d died giving birth to Callista. But among the Marsden brothers, she’d always been referred to as Toddy.

  She looked up from the pudding, surprised. “You remember her? You were only three when she died.”

  “I remember her funeral. It was one of my earliest memories—everyone in black, all my brothers crying.”

  It was also his earliest memory of Bryony, a starkly etched remembrance against the fog of time. She’d been the only child who did not cry—even he’d wept out of confusion.

  “Is that all you remember of her?”

  He could not tell whether she sounded relieved or disappointed.

  “That’s all I remember, but my brothers remember more. They used to tell me about this fancy dress party she threw for the children. They all went as the Knights of the Round Table. Except me: I was the Holy Grail in a bassinet.”

  As the youngest of five boys, he’d been the butt of all sorts of jokes during his infancy.

  “I remember that party,” she said.

  Her voice was different: not so self-isolating. Her expression had turned softer, more wistful. He’d never seen her wistful.

  “What do you remember?”

  She thought for a moment. “A white velvet dress, a pointy hat, and a belt with bells on it—I was a princess, I think.”

  “Did the Knights of the Round Table pay court to you?”

  “Yes, but only because I had a basket of sweetmeats and prizes to hand out.” The corners of her lips curved slightly. “The Knights of the Round Table had me well surrounded.”

  It was strange to hear her talk of a time before his earliest memories of her. It was strange, in and of itself, to hear her speak of her nursery days. When he’d been a boy, she’d seemed so much older than he, as if she’d sprung into life nearly full grown, or at least well above and beyond the clumsiness and vulnerability of childhood.

  She poked at her pudding. “What else do they remember about Toddy?” she asked, almost hungrily.

  “That she organized terrific picnics. Though the one they remember best was a disaster, apparently. Will fell into the stream and then ripped off his wet clothes and ran around naked. I believe he was later soundly caned for it.”

  “That was my sixth birthday,” she said. “It wasn’t a disaster at all. Your mother did choke on a piece of chicken when Will sprinted about without a stitch on, but the rest of us thought it was hysterical. And then, after Will was spirited away, we played games for the rest of the afternoon.”

  He felt as if he were up in a dusty, cobwebbed attic, opening creaky, ancient trunks, only to find inside perfectly bright, undiminished jewels.

  “Did they tell you about anything else from those days?” She was hungry for it. Her tone reminded him of the way he used to ask obliquely about her—And Callista’s sister, is she still cutting people open?

  There had been another story. And he had taken an unbelievable amount of ribbing for it when he’d announced their engagement to his brothers. Matthew had cabled from Paris and Charlie all the way from Gilgit to say the same thing: Lord Almighty, she was Mary and you were Baby Jesus.

  “The first Nativity play Toddy put on,” he said.

  “Hmm. I remember more the last Nativity play she put on. She got a camel on loan from somewhere. But the camel didn’t care for what our groom fed it. It—it fertilized the entire chapel and the smell made the ladies swoon. Do you not remember that?”

  “No.” He had no personal recollection of Toddy.

  “Now that was a proper disaster. My father was quite angry at her for that bit of foolishness. But then, later, after the two of us finished crying about it, we laughed so hard that we cried again.”

  He stared at her, amazed. When they’d lived together as man and wife, there had not been a single memento of Toddy among her possessions. It had seemed reasonable enough to assume that she had stayed as distant from Toddy as she had from her current stepmother—an assumption in keeping with her dry-eyed stoniness at Toddy’s funeral.

  A drop of tear tumbled down her cheek. Shock paralyzed him—he hadn’t even known she was capable of tears.

  She was as flabbergasted as he. “I’m sorry.” She fumbled for her napkin. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  He handed her his handkerchief. Clumsily she dabbed at her eyes. But her tears did not stop. For a long minute, he did not move. Then he stood up, thinking to give her some privacy. Instead, he rounded the table and pulled her to her feet.

  He’d embraced her before, toward the beginning of their marriage. Her rigid unresponsiveness had put an end to that. He took a deep breath and drew her into his arms.

  She stiffened. He almost stepped away by instinct. Instead he hugged her tighter.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered in her ear. “It’s all right. You can cry. Sometimes God makes perfect people. Why shouldn’t you be devastated?”

  “I don’t cry,” she said, her words muffled. “I never cry.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “It’s fine. You can cry as much or as little as you want.”

  As if he’d given her the permission she needed, her quiet tears turned into trembling sobs. She was slight in his arms—she’d become thinner, a wisp of a woman. He stroked her back and kissed her hair, as if she were a niece who’d skinned her knee. After a while, she relaxed into him—her body surprisingly supple, surprisingly soft—and her sobs subsided into hiccupy exhalations.

  “There is something I never told you,” he said. “When we were still married, I paid a call to one of my mother’s old friends. Her sister happened to visit her on that day and it turned out that the sister and Toddy had gone to finishing school together. When she learned who I was married to, she said to let you know that Toddy had thought you the most wonderful child who ever lived.”

  They’d been still married, but her bedroom door had already been barred. And he’d been in no mood to pass on such compliments. In fact, he’d thought Toddy sadly deceived, given how little Bryony remembered her.

  She raised her head. “She did?”

  “Those were Lady Griswold’s precise words. When we get out of the mountains, I’ll cable her and see if she can find some of Toddy’s old letters to give to you.”

  She lowered her face again. “You don’t have to go to so much trouble for me.”

  He let her go. “It’s no trouble.”

  She stood in that spot for a long moment. Then she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, a quick brush that barely touched his skin. “Thank you. Good night.”

  “Good night,” he said to the darkness beyond the reach of the lamplight, as her footsteps faded behind him.

  Before Toddy, Bryony’s memories had consisted of dim, gray impressions of Thornwood Manor’s cavernous rooms. Her mother, disappointed to bear only a girl after years of infertility, had died of acute pneumonia before Bryony turned t
wo. Her father, preferring to be a widower in town, but believing children were better off in the country, had been overwhelmingly absent.

  But with Toddy’s arrival, her world burst into color. According to all accounts, they’d been instant friends, the lively twenty-year-old new Mrs. Asquith and her shy, reserved four-year-old stepdaughter. And from that moment on, for the entire three short years that remained to Toddy, they were never apart.

  They traipsed over the estate and the nearby hills, collecting leaves, petals, and seeds to help Toddy document the local flora. They organized picnics and children’s parties and scavenger hunts. And when the weather did not allow for walking or riding, they drank hot cider, played chess, and stuffed their minds with obscure bits of knowledge by opening the encyclopedia to random pages.

  They’d had so many plans, she and Toddy. The arrival of the baby was to be such a celebration. But then Toddy had died in childbirth—smiling, vibrant Toddy who’d been full of life and energy and curiosity and kindness.

  It had been the end of the world.

  Three months after Toddy’s funeral, Bryony’s nanny died. Six months to the day after Toddy’s death, Bryony’s father married again. But between the engagement and the wedding, misfortune befell the third Mrs. Geoffrey Asquith: one of her sons was struck by poliomyelitis, the other tuberculosis.

  Immediately after the wedding, she came up to the estate and deposited a governess to take command of her stepchildren, the wet nurse, and the new nanny that the housekeeper had hired. Then Bryony did not see her again for five years, as she shuttled between the sanatorium in Germany and a hospital in London.

  The governess she hired, Miss Branson, was better suited to manage a half-dozen criminally inclined boys than two orphan girls. Miss Branson instituted a reign of fanatical order and discipline, until she married the vicar and left to tyrannize the vicarage instead.

  The governess who followed, a Miss Roundtree, was a great improvement, an absentminded old dear. Bryony’s father, her stepmother, and her two still-sickly stepbrothers came to live part of the year in the country. The family was together at last.