Not Quite a Husband

by Sherry Thomas

  She was angry again, angry enough that her shame faded into the background. Indeed, why should she be the one who was ashamed? She’d done nothing wrong. He was the one who had destroyed any chance they had at happiness.

  She clenched her fists. “No. You may not think of me as heartless and capricious.”

  Suddenly he was afraid, as if he were faced with Pandora’s box, the calamities within which, once let loose, could never be put back again.

  But it was too late. Now she wanted him to know. Now her eyes burned with anger. Now her voice took on the weight and the inexorability of that of an avenger.

  “That letter you were so sure showed every flaw in my character—the woman who wrote it, Bettie Young, she worked for a certain Mrs. Hedley. When I delivered Bettie Young’s baby, it was at Mrs. Hedley’s house, on a day the servants were supposed to have the afternoon off.”

  There was a roar in Leo’s head.

  “You do recollect, I hope? But then again, perhaps you did this sort of thing all over town, and Mrs. Hedley’s was but one address among many.”

  He shook his head mutely. No, he had not done this sort of thing all over town. And he had a fine recollection of what happened that day.

  He’d met Mrs. Hedley in Cairo, at the end of a North African journey that took him from Casablanca to the Nile. A young widow, she’d kept house for her brother, who worked at the British Embassy. During Leo’s two weeks in Egypt, they’d had an excellent time together.

  Several years later, on the day he was to depart for Paris, they’d run into each other quite by accident in London. He hadn’t known that she’d returned from Cairo—her brother had at last married and she was happy to get away from the heat of tropics—but she had known about his upcoming marriage.

  Three months after that, they’d met one last time, on the elegant suspension bridge in St. James’s Park, this time at his instigation.

  “I need to know something,” he asked Mrs. Hedley, his voice low even though there was no one nearby. “Are you sure you never told anyone about what happened in April?”

  “Of course not.” Mrs. Hedley scowled at his question, insulted. “I wouldn’t get you in trouble that way. Besides, Mr. Abraham and I had already met by then. He started courting me two weeks after that. I certainly will not have him think that I’d done anything with my widowhood except wait for him to come along.”

  “But your servants—they were there that day.”

  “They didn’t even know who you were. It wasn’t as if you left a calling card on your way out. Besides, they were completely preoccupied: My maid had a baby that afternoon in the servants’ hall.”

  He apologized for questioning her discretion, she accepted his apology, he wished her the best of luck with Mr. Abraham, and they parted amicably, she for an excursion to Bond Street, he to his empty house in Belgravia. Months later, when he read the letter from Bettie Young, thanking Bryony for saving herself and her child, he’d made no connection between the letter writer and Genevieve Hedley’s maid.

  He should have. He should have known all along that this was the dark heart of their story.

  He was still and silent, his eyes lowered beneath his dark, straight brows, his chiseled features in shadow.

  She was shaking again. She felt raw, torn open, and deeply, deeply ashamed—almost as ashamed as she’d been in the hours and days immediately following what she’d witnessed in that house on Upper Berkley Street.

  “What did you see?” he finally asked.

  “Your face in the mirror.”

  “In flagrante delicto?”

  “Not yet.” He’d approached Mrs. Hedley’s bed; he’d been not in it but beside it. And he’d still had his shirt on, his braces strapped firmly over his shoulders.

  “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “Stop you?” In all the intervening years, the thought had never occurred to her that she could have made her presence known. One did not stop a flaming wreck. One ran as fast as one could. “I’m afraid that as my illusions shattered left and right, I did not have that kind of presence of mind.”

  He passed his hand over his face. When he looked at her again, his eyes were blank. “Why didn’t you call off the wedding?”

  She blinked. She’d asked that question of herself many times and it was always the point at which the pureness of her righteous indignation began to be adulterated with the complicity of her own frailty in this matter.

  She had not called off the wedding because he was the one great prize of her life other women of her social station would forever covet. Because she feared the aftermath of a broken engagement so close to the wedding. Because she’d convinced herself that she was magnanimous enough to forgive him; that she forgiven him already.

  Vanity, cowardliness, and delusion—faults in her character that she hadn’t even known, precipitated by the crisis.

  “I thought I could forgive you,” she said. The human mind was capable of infinite self-deception.

  Except she’d never forgiven anyone in her entire life. Her heart was made of glass: It could break, but it could not expand.

  “And when did you realize you could not forgive me?” he asked, his voice soft and bleak.

  She turned her face aside. Within the first hours of their marriage she’d realized it—that she hadn’t forgiven him at all, that her whole body revolted whenever he touched her. But by then they were already married, and it was too late.

  Shame. Self-loathing. Frustration. They churned in him, each enough to drown him outright.

  She sat back down on her camp bed again, her face pale as bleached bones. “Was she your mistress?”

  He shook his head. “No. We were lovers in Cairo for two weeks when I was nineteen. The day I was to go to France, after I left your hospital, I stopped at a stationer’s. That was where I ran into her.”

  “And she proved irresistible. I see.”

  Mrs. Hedley had congratulated him warmly. And then, once they were outside the stationer’s, she’d winked at him in her bubbly way, and asked if he’d like one last tumble before he became a respectably married man.

  He’d turned her down. As he’d turned down other women who’d wanted to be his last lay.

  “She was far from irresistible.”

  “You went with her.”

  The incontrovertible truth. He had gone with Mrs. Hedley in the end.

  “I had a case of cold feet.”

  “About me?”

  “About you.”

  “And that is your excuse?”

  “That’s not my excuse. That was just what happened.”

  “Very convenient, don’t you think, to have a case of cold feet just when you run into an old lover.”

  “It was not like that.”

  “Then what was it like?”

  What had it been like?

  “I suppose—suppose—I—” He took a deep breath. He’d never stammered in his life. “I suppose there were always doubts in the back of my head. That I’d made too hasty a decision. That you and I hardly knew each other. That we might not be as well suited as we both wanted it to be.”

  She stared at the hem of her nightgown. “And then what?”

  “Then I went to say good-bye to you at the hospital. I thought it would be interesting, to see the hospital. But I’d never been in a hospital before and it unsettled me. You in that hospital unsettled me.”

  He’d arrived at a bad time, possibly. There had been some kind of food poisoning going around, patients were vomiting in the lobby of the hospital, faster than the unfortunate cleaners could mop the messes away.

  He should have been reassured by her coolness—she’d walked through the lobby as if it were a flower garden in spring—but it had only further heightened his sense that he truly knew nothing of her. The triumphal, proprietary air she took on as she introduced him to her colleagues also bothered him. He would have expected some such from a society miss, but not from her, whom he’d believed to be above such boa
stfulness.

  “What about me that unsettled you?”

  “Your aloofness, which I’d always liked before. Your vanity, which I’d never known existed.”

  She laced her fingers together. “I see.”

  He wanted to evaporate, to simply cease to exist. His reasons were in every instance pale and stupid—even more mortifying spoken out loud. But he had no choice now. He owed her this much.

  “On my walk to the stationer’s, I was—I was suddenly swamped with doubt. I questioned whether my decision to marry you wasn’t as lunatic as everyone said it was, whether I was really resigned to a life without children of my own, whether we wouldn’t end up in a few years with nothing to say to each other.”

  He stared at his hands. “And the wedding was in a week.”

  Outside Imran called to a coolie to take more care with the bathtub. The river babbled cheerfully. The ayah softly hummed a tune that seemed to be a temple song.

  “I could have drunk myself into a stupor. I could have unburdened myself to Will. But Mrs. Hedley was there, and she wanted a tumble, so she was the distraction I chose.”

  Ironic, that in what he’d done out of fear that they might be unhappy together lay the cause of the greater part of their unhappiness.

  “If it’s any consolation to you, I regretted my choice even before I entered her house. Afterward I thought myself a hundred kinds of stupid. I came back from Paris determined to make something beautiful of our life together, because you were the only one I wanted.” Suddenly he had to speak past a lump in his throat. “I suppose it was too late.”

  She said nothing.

  “And if it’s any further consolation, I haven’t been with anyone else since I married you.”

  She spread her hands open over her knees. “I would like to dress now, if you don’t mind.”

  He rose from the corner. “Certainly. I beg your pardon.”

  At the tent flap he turned back. “You are right: I was a callow youth. But I never meant to hurt you. I’m sorry that I did—in such a despicable way, no less. Forgive me.”

  But he already knew that she would not forgive him.

  It took dozens of one-hundred-eighty-degree turns for the road to zigzag up the steep slope leading toward Lowari Pass, ten thousand feet above sea level, a narrow gap in snow-peaked mountains that towered thousands of feet higher to either side. From the top, looking down at the way she’d come, Bryony thought the dirt path resembled so many hairpins that a careless goddess had dropped. The mountains, like a choppy sea, stretched blue and jagged toward the horizon.

  She tugged her coat more tightly about her—Leo had warned her it would be cold at the top, but it was even colder than she’d supposed.

  “Here, drink this.”

  She accepted the hot tea he offered with a murmured “Thank you.” She didn’t know how he had managed to get the cook up to the top first—so that there was hot tea for everyone—but he seemed very efficient at this sort of thing.

  A gust of wind blew. She shivered despite the hot tea in her gloved hands. He took off his coat and draped it over her shoulders. She waited another minute, until she heard his voice much further away, before she turned her head for a glimpse of him without his coat, standing by the mule train, listening to a gesticulating coolie.

  She wanted to cry.

  In the isolation of her own imagination, what he’d done had seemed so much worse, one example of a large, pernicious pattern: liaisons all over London during their engagement; and after their wedding, adulterous affairs left and right.

  When it was nothing of the sort.

  What he did was still atrocious and wrong. And she would have been well justified in jilting him. But she hadn’t jilted him; she’d married him. Were wedding vows but so much confetti, an ephemeral sparkle in the air, to be swept away as rubbish the next day? Had she not owed him something more than cold shoulders and locked doors?

  Would they have been able to patch things together if they’d had this awful but necessary conversation while they were still married?

  She didn’t know.

  And now she would never know.

  The face of the ravine was black rock; the downpours of rainy seasons past had stripped all soil and almost all vegetation from the steep slope. The bottom of it, far below, was barren and rock-strewn, without a trace of the water that had so forcefully shaped the landscape.

  Their path was a narrow passage scarped into the very cliff itself: on one side, an implacable wall slanting outward, on the other side, an approximately one-hundred-fifty-foot drop straight down, and in between, a roughly gouged trail that promised sprained ankles, if not a plunge right over the edge.

  They’d lost a mule not an hour ago. The poor creature had tumbled over and landed, after a fall that seemed to last a whole day, in a splat of exploded flour bags and what sounded like an almost human whimper.

  And then, the horror, it was still alive, broken but alive, its limbs convulsing in agony. Bryony stood with her hand over her mouth, helpless.

  A gunshot rang out. With almost frightful precision, a spot of blood appeared between the mule’s eyes. It jerked once and went slack.

  Bryony turned to see Leo extract a spent round from a breech-loading rifle. She’d known, somewhat vaguely, of the sporting exploits of his youth—his godfather, an enthusiastic sportsman with no other sons, had taken Leo everywhere with him. But she had never seen him operate a firearm—and until this moment had paid no attention at all to the two rifles he had with him.

  The deadly accuracy of that single shot astonished her. This man had been her husband. Yet she’d only known him as the drawing room favorite who occasionally produced incomprehensible monographs on some arcane finer points of mathematics.

  Perhaps the mule’s unfortunate demise colored her perception; perhaps the road truly turned more difficult: Once they resumed their progress she’d found the going hair-raising. She tried to remind herself that 16,000 men had marched northward on precisely this same path to relieve the Siege of Chitral two years ago and that messengers regularly traveled this route with mail and dispatch. But with every wobbly step, she thought only of the whimper of the mule as it hit the scabrous ground far below. And the bullet between its eyes.

  The path, following the contour of the cliff, turned abruptly. The already meager width of the trail narrowed to no more than eighteen inches at the turn. Worse, the trail, always uneven, now tipped toward the drop at what seemed to her an almost forty-five-degree angle.

  She stopped. She needed to scrape the bottom of the barrel for what remained of her courage. Logically she knew that the path continued beyond the jutting rock blocking her way and that Leo and the guides had already safely rounded it. But she could not see that continuation. And she was not such an experienced mountaineer as to not quake at the tilt of the trail—it would be all too easy to slip off the incline into the sharp-teethed maw of the ravine.

  Leo reappeared, coming back toward her. “Are you all right?”

  Like her, he had opted to cover this stretch of the road on foot. But whereas she felt herself to be tiptoeing on a tightrope, he walked as easily as if he were on a parade ground.

  She nodded by habit before slowly shaking her head.

  Without another word he extended his hand. She hesitated only a second before gripping it. Instantly her fear halved.

  He took her safely past the tilted ledge skirting the outcrop that cut through the cliff face. She did not let go of his hand on the other side, because it was still the same spine-tingling path. Hands held, he guided her until the path became an ordinary goat trail again, one that did not punish a single misstep with an irreversible plummet.

  She could have kissed the ground for simply being there. Releasing his hand, she stripped off her gloves and flexed fingers that were almost numb from tension. She looked up to see his gaze on her hands.

  Their eyes met.

  “I hear the road is much improved in recent years,” he
said.

  “I can tell,” she answered.

  He laughed softly.

  “Thank you,” she added.

  He smiled briefly, a sweet smile that drove a bead of pain deep into her heart. “It’s no hardship to hold your hand.”

  Upper Dir was an austere place. Small settlements clung to the skirts of mountains. Broken boulders littered the land, torn loose by earthquakes that occasionally convulsed the Hindu Kush, then deposited willy-nilly by the swift torrents of rainy seasons. And yet occasionally, between forbidding crags, they spied small hidden plateaus, almost alpine in their lushness, and once even a whole slope covered in asters, brilliantly purple.

  “Things are running much more smoothly now that you are back on your feet,” she said, taking a sip of her afternoon tea, her eyes on the carpet of asters, her mind still on the other side of the Hindu Raj, on the events of the night and the revelations of the morning.

  “Did anyone give you trouble when I was sick?”

  She shook her head. Imran and Hamid had kept a leash on the coolies. But the coolies had pushed back at the guides, and complained, and dawdled. Only then had she appreciated Leo’s talent for putting a ragtag collection of coolies happily to work and orchestrating their tasks so that everything was done the right way at the right time.

  She glanced at him. He was looking better, but still tired. Despite their late start, they’d done two marches already, and he planned to get one more in before dark. She wanted to cradle his head in her lap and watch him fall asleep.

  “How do you manage the coolies?”

  It was strange to be talking like this, of ordinary things, when the sky had fallen. But then she was strangely hungry for his company, as if she missed him, even though he was never more than fifty feet away.

  He shrugged. “Experience, I suppose. Do you remember my great-uncle Silverton?”