Chapter 23
“Do you ever find your husband to be just infuriating?” Bridget asked.
Dorothy laughed.
The two of them were in Hyde Park, resting beneath the sweeping limbs of a marvelously large and ancient oak tree.
At first, the outing had been entirely pleasant.
Bridget had laid back on the grass, and with the cool wind sweeping across her body, she had felt as though she was at peace with the world.
It was a good place for one to lay and waste away the day, or it had been. Inevitably, her thoughts turned to Lewis and the pleasure he had denied her only the day before.
“I think men are generally frustrating sometimes,” Dorothy said.
Bridget frowned. Her sister’s reply was far too fond, indicating that Dorothy did not really believe her husband as frustrating. At least, he was not frustrating like Bridget’s husband was.
Bridget sighed. Of course, Dorothy would not understand with her doting husband, who had genuinely wanted to marry her.
Dorothy shielded her eyes from the sun and turned her head to face Bridget. “What is it that your husband has done?” Dorothy asked.
Bridget bit the inside of her cheek, trying to decide how best to convey her feelings.
In truth, it was not really about the pleasure he had refused to give her.
No, it was something much deeper than that, but Bridget was struggling to give exact shape to what she felt inside her soul, all the way down to her core.
“I find that my marriage is lacking,” she began tentatively.
“In what way?”
Bridget sighed. “There is nothing affectionate between us. I feel… I don’t know how I feel.”
Dorothy furrowed her brow, as though there was something she wished to say, but instead, she remained silent while Bridget gathered her thoughts.
“It is though there is a silent war waging between Lewis and me,” Bridget said.
“What is the prize?”
Bridget blinked. “What?”
“You describe your marriage as a war,” Dorothy explained. “That seems to imply that there is something of value to be won. What is it that you are both trying to win?”
“I…” Bridget trailed off.
Her first, instinctive thought was that they were fighting for control, but that made no rational sense. Lewis was her husband. He was the one who controlled the course of their marriage, and there was nothing she could do about that.
“I suppose we are trying to determine who each of us is going to be,” Bridget said instead. “And who we are to one another.”
Dorothy slowly nodded. “Well, marriage does have a way of making you reconsider how you see yourself.”
“I am uncertain that I want to reconsider myself,” Bridget said dryly. “I like who I am, and if Lewis does not…”
Dorothy raised an eyebrow. “Do you believe that your husband dislikes you?”
Bridget said. She tossed her head back onto the linen spread beneath them and stared at the tree branches above her head. “I do not know if it is dislike per se.”
“But?” Dorothy prompted.
“But…no matter what I do, Lewis always seems so cold to me,” Bridget said flatly. “He is insistent on me being the perfect duchess, and I worry that his image of a perfect duchess is one that I shall never measure up to. He wants me to be something that I am not.”
Bridget glanced at her sister, anticipating a remark about how there was only so much that could be expected from a marriage of convenience. Dorothy said nothing, however, only looking toward the sky with a thoughtful look.
“I fear he will never see the real me. Worse, he will never desire the real me,” Bridget said. “He is never going to really want me, much less love me. I know it is a marriage of convenience, and I thought I had made my peace with that. But I have not. I do not know that I ever will.”
“I am not entirely certain that your husband holds all the blame,” Dorothy said.
Bridget frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You say that he does not see the real you,” Dorothy said. “Have you made any earnest efforts to show him the real you?”
“Of course, I have!”
Dorothy raised an eyebrow, doubt clearly painted across her face.
Bridget looked away from her sister, turning her attention to the tree roots beside her.
Despite her clearly voiced defiance, doubt bloomed inside her chest. Hadn’t she tried to prove just how unsuitable she was, from the very start of her courtship with Lewis, in the hopes that he would find her unworthy as a wife?
And hadn’t she tried several schemes to persuade him to annul the marriage?
Maybe he did not really have a full picture of who she was, only the frustrating person that she pretended to be. Bridget clenched her jaw, her pride a little wounded.
“Maybe you are right,” Bridget mumbled.
“That does happen on occasion,” Dorothy said, her tone kind.
“But it does not matter,” Bridget insisted. “Even if I showed him who I really am, that does not change his desire to have this only be a convenient arrangement. He may never give me what I want, and I am uncertain that I am even in the right to ask for more.”
“You have never hesitated to make your desires clear before,” Dorothy noted. “Why do you hesitate with your husband?”
Bridget could not quite explain it. She just knew instinctively that if she admitted that she wanted more, something deeper and fonder between herself and her husband, it would be confessing some small defeat.
It would be making a concession, and Bridget had never enjoyed accepting defeat, no matter how small.
“You should be honest with him,” Dorothy continued. “I know you will not like hearing that, but it is true.”
“I never like your advice,” Bridget said.
She looked at her sister, who grinned. “I know. To be fair, I think most people dislike receiving advice. That is because the best advice one can offer most often involves doing something difficult or undesirable.”
“Yes.”
Bridget gave Dorothy a soft smile. “I do not know how you have the patience sometimes,” Bridget said.
Dorothy shook her head. “I don’t know. If your husband rejects you, it will hurt, but you will eventually recover.
You are too strong to be defeated by such a blow, Bridget.
And if he does receive the real you positively, you have the chance of making yourself into something even better.
Ideally, that is what marriage is about; it is discovering the best in yourself and others. ”
Bridget nodded, even as doubt crept inside her. Dorothy painted the ideal marriage as such a lofty goal, and Bridget did not know how she could ever manage to achieve such.
“I will think about what you have said,” Bridget insisted. “I will.”
But thinking about advice that someone had given and acting upon such advice were two entirely different things.
Lewis sat across from his grandmother, his attention fixed entirely on his grandmother’s leg, which she had not ceased bouncing up and down ever since he had entered.
He clenched his jaw, trying to decide how to approach the woman’s clear restlessness.
It was not the movement that he found vexing, of course.
Rather, that movement meant his grandmother was unusually distressed, which left Lewis with two potentially undesirable options.
First, he could ignore the movement and hope that whatever had made his grandmother more anxious than usual ceased to bother her.
It was entirely possible that she did not even notice the movement and would, indeed, be more distraught if he drew attention to it.
The second option was that he could ask what was distressing her and potentially remove that troublesome thing, whatever it might be, and bring his grandmother some peace of mind.
He sighed deeply. “Do you want to talk to me about something?”
She visibly started, her teacup rattling a little in her hand.
A flicker of guilt crossed her face, and Lewis inwardly winced, wondering if his question had been more accusatory than he had intended for it to be.
It was difficult to know if his grandmother’s nerves were particularly bad sometimes or if he was just too blunt, as he sometimes was.
“You seem as though something is distressing you,” Lewis continued, softening his tone. “If you want to tell me what it is, I might be able to help.”
Sometimes, his poor grandmother could not even identify the source of her distress.
“You have not let me meet your new wife,” his grandmother said.
All the air left Lewis’s lungs in a great whoosh. “Oh,” he said.
A vague numbness swept over him, for he had not anticipated discussing his wife at all.
“I want to meet her.”
“You shall,” Lewis said. “When the time is right.”
“But when will that be? It is far past time for any respectable man to introduce his wife to his relatives,” she continued, her teacup clattering loudly against its saucer. “I did not even attend the wedding—”
“By your own choice,” Lewis interrupted. “And I understand why you did not attend the wedding. But I fear that my wife would be terribly taxing on your nerves, and it is for the best that you not meet her just yet.”
His grandmother set aside her teacup and saucer and instead clasped her hands tightly in her lap, as though she was trying to hide the way that her body moved restlessly, refusing to submit to her control.
“I have given it a great deal of thought,” she said. “I want to meet her.”
“I know.”
“Are you ashamed of me?”
Lewis winced, the words striking him as sharply as any physical blow might have.
“You wound me,” he said. “I am not ashamed of you. My dear grandmother, you cannot help how you are. It is only your welfare that I am thinking about. Bridget is a brazen and unpredictable lady, and I just do not think she is an appropriate guest for you. Not yet.”
His grandmother gave him an exasperated look. “You say that she is to blame, but I suspect you mean I am difficult.”
“I do not,” he insisted. “I promise that it is Bridget whom I am concerned about.”
Lewis shuddered just imagining what chaos his young wife might see fit to enact upon the household. If his poor grandmother was anxious now, Bridget would doubtlessly do something to force the woman into a severe attack of the nerves.
Worse, Lewis doubted Bridget would even do such a thing maliciously. She was not a bad person. It was merely that Bridget was careless. She left a wake of destruction in her path and did not seem to care who might be damaged in her efforts to do whatever she wanted.
“Well,” his grandmother said. “You married the girl. I imagine that you must also see some redeeming qualities in her.”
Lewis suspected that she disbelieved that Bridget might prove to be a problem, and he was forced to concede that his grandmother made an excellent argument. Why would Lewis marry a woman who was so troublesome?
“She does have redeeming qualities,” Lewis said. “It is just that she can be…a lot, sometimes. But she is also charming and beautiful. And very romantic.”
Lewis was not exactly certain that romantic was a redeeming quality, for he feared that Bridget had probably gotten into a fair amount of mischief due to that particular characteristic.
Still, it did give her a certain lightness that was endearing.
Bridget seemed to believe that the entire world was beautiful and had the potential for greatness, and even if Lewis disagreed with that, he nevertheless found himself drawn to her in a way that he did not wholly understand.
“She might be good for you,” Lewis said thoughtfully. “Someday.”