Chapter 15
Matthew could tell something was different the instant he walked back into the house. It wasn’t just that there were now a few extra throw pillows on the sofa or that Rosalind was somewhere upstairs, humming to herself in what was, by all accounts, a pleasant and not alarming way.
It was the air. The air felt a little different.
He’d always had a bit of a talent for feeling a shift in the air.
His mother had hated it when he’d been a boy and had known before she could say a thing if he was in trouble or in favor or if something else had happened, like when their family cat had run off or Aunt Donna had come to visit without warning.
“Boy could be a medium,” his father would chuckle, making his mother gasp and chide about being overheard and blaspheming and so on until his father kissed her to make her stop talking.
“Rosalind?” he called, loosening the bands at his collar and flicking them off over his wrist as he climbed the stairs.
“In here!” she called back, perfectly sweet and singsong. “Just unpacking.”
He turned the corner to find that she had both bedroom doors open, their own and the one his mother had occupied before she’d left last year.
Her boxes and trunks from her brother’s townhouse had been stacked in the empty room, and Rosalind was limping between one and the other as she took items out and found places to put them.
“I hope you do not mind,” she said, glancing up at him with those big hazel eyes, “if I combine my books with yours? There is plenty of room on your bookshelf, though now we will have two copies of some things until we can give them away.”
“Oh?” he said, a smile tugging at his lips as he came to lean against the doorframe. “Where do we overlap, sweet wife?”
She tutted, glancing up at him. “Nowhere surprising, I’m afraid. It’s mostly the Shakespeare. Oh, I found your Milton, though! I’m going to read it.”
“Are you?” he said with a laugh, turning and walking toward the pile of books, where one of the bard’s plays was lying open at the top. “It’s terribly sad.”
He ran a finger over the printed lines, reading a few with a faint smile. “‘If I be waspish, best beware my sting,’” he quoted.
“My remedy then would be to pluck it out,” Rosalind replied, glancing up with a twinkle in her expression.
Matthew assumed a frowning expression and crossed his arms over his chest. “Aye,” he said, imitating her burring brogue, “the fool could find where it lies.”
She giggled, pausing in her task and dropping the books in her hand back into their box. She put her hands on her hips and turned toward him. “In his tail.”
He shook his head, maintaining the brogue. “In his tongue.”
“Whose tongue?” she asked, coming a little closer, that smile making her face shine.
“Yours,” he said, and snatched at her wrist, pulling her to him and silencing them both with a soft, sweet kiss.
“You know, that play vexed me so as a girl,” she said on a sigh as they broke apart.
She took a step back and leaned against the opposite jamb of the open door, watching him with her eyes still sparkling and her lips still curved.
“I could not understand why Katherina would not simply be sweet and make everyone else be nicer to her for the trouble. I see now, and only now, that it wouldn’t have worked. ”
“Not with Petruchio, perhaps,” said Matthew, raising his brows. “But plenty of people honor and value sweetness. I do.”
“You do, don’t you?” she said, her voice gone a little soft. “I believe that you do. Can we sit for a moment? I think all this walking back and forth and bending and standing has been good for my leg, but now it is fatigued.”
“Of course,” he said, reaching for her hand to guide her into the room. “Do you want a chair or the bed?”
She gave a soft titter, glancing at him sidelong. “Is it terrible that I wish to steal that white and pink chair from your vicarage and bring it home with me? It was so perfectly comfortable.”
“It is yours,” he said. “I’ll bring it up tomorrow.”
She flushed, turning and perching on the corner of the bed before finding a way to scoot backward without bothering her bruise. “Thank you,” she said, shaking her head like she was too embarrassed to meet his eye. “You are so kind, Matthew.”
“Are you saying you value kindness?” he asked, sitting beside her. “Or would you prefer I be fiery like Petruchio?”
“Certainly not,” she said with a sniff, and then narrowed her eyes, turning toward him. “Yes, I see what you are doing, Sir Vicar. It is not the same for men.”
“Of course it is,” he replied with a chuckle. “Will you tell me what is wrong? What happened while I was at the church today?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, blinking with obvious surprise, tendrils of her sandy hair quivering around her face where they’d escaped from the ribbon tying it back. “I didn’t say anything was the matter. I was not doing anything amiss, was I?”
“You were not,” he confirmed, reaching out and taking her hand from her lap, twisting his fingers through hers. “Call it a particular talent of mine. I feel it when the air shifts and when the people I care about are unsettled.”
“That is an annoying talent,” she said softly, without any malice.
He laughed and nodded. “Yes, I know. All the same, will you tell me?”
She gave a little sigh, pulling her little tail of hair over her shoulder with her free hand and twisting it around her knuckles. “May I ask you something, before I do?”
“Of course.”
She smiled and then immediately frowned, turning her eyes down to the carpet fibers peeking up between her toes. She took a little sip of breath, blinked twice, and set her delicate little jaw as she looked for the words she wanted to say.
“You said that you had admired me for some time,” she said, not breaking her gaze from her toes. “I assume you meant that in a romantic sense?”
“I did,” he confirmed, watching the profile of her face, the delicate little slope of her nose and the little cluster of pale freckles that amassed there.
“But you would not have pursued action upon these feelings,” she continued, “because … because I am Scottish?”
He released a little chuckle. “Do not say it like that,” he begged. “It makes me sound like a Tory. It was because of the division in our denominational faiths and the fact that my faith is also my vocation. But, Rosalind, I wanted to.”
“You did?” she said, like she did not believe it.
“I did,” he confirmed, squeezing her hand. “I still do.”
“Why?” She turned then, meeting his eye, the swirl of colors in her irises clashing against the flare of her pupils. “Why me?”
He released a heavy sigh, shaking his head.
“You are going to think it is stupid,” he told her.
“But it was at Vix’s wedding. I already thought you were very pretty, of course.
I already watched you when you walked about the rooms I was in, but when we were at the wedding breakfast, do you recall Tod telling the story about Vix stealing that cake from the Covent Garden bakery? ”
Rosalind blinked. “She didn’t steal it,” she said. “She bought it the night before.”
He gave a twisting half smile, his heart melting even further at the correction. “That’s right. And Sir Ambrose asked her what sort of cake it was and she told him it was rose-flavored. Do you remember what you said after that?”
She shook her head, eyes wide. “No.”
His smile grew a little at the memory of it.
“You exclaimed immediately, calling Vix by her new married name, that we ought to have gotten her wedding cake in rose flavor that day. You said it like you were terribly regretful that we hadn’t, and that such an oversight must never be made again.
And I think my heart broke into a thousand little pieces for you right then and there. ”
She stared at him a moment, her lips parting with surprise. “Because of frosting?” she said quietly. “You liked me because of frosting?”
“And filling too,” he replied with a laugh, and picked up their entwined hands to kiss the back of hers.
“No, Rosalind, I liked you because you are so very sincere and caring. I go through my life and my work and see only the masks other people wear. I myself even have to wear them from time to time. You don’t wear one at all.
You don’t even consider them. I love that about you. ”
She wrinkled her brows. “But that isn’t true,” she protested. “People come to you to pray and to confess and to be sick and to be fragile. You see them as they are.”
“Sometimes,” he allowed, tilting his head to the side. “But far more often they come to perform piety for each other, and I am merely the facilitator. Consider Lord Keaton, the man who donated that statue.”
“Oh, I would rather not,” she said, wincing.
He grinned. “Exactly.”
“Hm,” she said, frowning. “I just don’t understand why people are awful when they could …
well, when they could not be. I used to think the worst punishment in all the world was to feel guilty.
For me, it still is. But, Matthew, I think some people never feel guilty at all, no matter how much they hurt others. How is that possible?”
“It shouldn’t be,” he said. “But we are all broken in our own specific ways, I suppose. Is that what is wrong today? Did something make you feel guilty?”
She shook her head, sighing. “No. I was just reminded of someone I wish had felt guilty for making me embarrassed and hurt, and I don’t think they ever did.
Someone who is coming to London instead of staying where he belongs in Aberdeen, far away from me, when I am already hurting and embarrassed all over again besides. ”
“Who?” he asked immediately, something inside him growing cold and sharp. “Who hurt you?”
He realized immediately as he asked it that the question really should have been who else had hurt her. His eyes flicked down to her leg, still awkwardly propped up even in the embrace of the mattress, and he frowned.
“A boy I thought might love me,” she said with a cringe, her teeth showing.
“It was stupid, really. You read so many love stories that you think you see the plot beats in real life as an innocent friendship forms. You think things unfold in a predictable, narrative way because that’s how it is on the page, and then one morning, you wake up and find out he’s engaged to someone else and it was all in your head, and that would be bad enough if you hadn’t spent the last several months telling everyone who would listen how excited you were about your future together, getting them all in a flutter about it too. ”
She held up a hand so he would not respond and shook her head.
“I thought we were friends, at the very least,” she continued.
“I probably could have survived it if we’d remained friends, but I think his new bride must have heard all the things I’d said about him or seen how I looked at him or known in some other way, and suddenly I stopped being included in invitations about the village.
Suddenly I’d hear secondhand about gatherings of the young folk that I thought were my people.
I never mattered to them at all, in the end.
I lost everything because of my delusion.
It was so humiliating, and I could feel them laughing.
I could feel it even if they hid it from me.
“When I came to London that winter to visit my brother, it was such a relief to be free of it. To be surrounded by crowds of people who didn’t know anything about what a fool I was.
So I stayed. I stayed and thought I could start again and be careful this time and not be a fool, and here I am.
Here I am again, and I’m Miss Manners and the whole of the biggest city in the world is laughing at me. Again.”
Her voice cracked, and she turned away from him, shaking her head.
“I thought if anyone from Aberdeen ever showed up in my life again, he would see me recovered and happy and improved and I could feel proud that I overcame that long-ago shame. Instead, I’m just a joke again, and this time there’s nowhere to run.
And it’s not just anyone from that time in my life, Matthew, it’s the worst possible person. ”
He knew better than to try to speak. If his profession had given him anything at all, it had given him that particular sense of tact.
What it hadn’t given him was the context of how one deploys it with a wife.
With someone who is not a parishioner, a polite member of a flock, but rather the very half of one’s own body and soul.
Half of himself, he thought. Half of who he was now.
So there was only one thing to do, and it was to put her back there, in that empty half of him that was aching for the things that had been done to her, for the harm that had been visited upon a creature who deserved nothing at all but love and softness.
He said nothing but he pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her as she dropped her cheek onto his shoulder.
He held her against him as her body began to tremble and felt the relief of his own breath leave him when her arms came up, tentative and uncertain, to loop around his back and grip him, finding her own place in the side of him that needed her there to be whole.
He said nothing but he let her cry. He held her until she was spent.
And he hoped that even without words, it communicated what he felt.
Because there in her arms, with his cheek on her hair and her heart beating against his own, he felt more than he could ever put into words.