Chapter Eleven #4
He brushes his knuckles down the scarred side of his face.
“There were reasons I didn’t pursue sexual relationships.
You know I was not well. Not just physically, but I had many concerns about the physical.
When I knew I had to take a wife, I also knew I had to get over it.
” He laughed. “I did. I thought… I rather thought we were something like happy. For a while. We didn’t need to talk about the past. I just tried to play the role of husband and she was my wife.
She was very good. She…she liked people, more than I ever did. ”
“But she wasn’t happy?”
He shakes his head. “No. Colette had quite a long struggle with depression. For most of her life, actually. Not just when she was married to me. But I… I didn’t know.
” His gaze gets extremely distant. “When I found her body on the rocks below the tower window I was so sure someone had done it to her. That the palace had been breached again. That it was like when my parents and I were taken. I… Until I found her note. After that I began to learn more about her, the real her. All the things she wrote in her diaries but never told me. How sad she was, and had been for years, even back to her childhood. It overwhelmed her.”
“Lucian,” I say, my breath filled with my own grief. At the image of him finding his young wife. At this certainty that he’d felt that everything was all right, and then it wasn’t.
“That night in the garden, when I couldn’t find you, I was very worried that you might’ve harmed yourself. I have learned that I’m not good at identifying the signs of what someone else is actually feeling. I don’t want you to be sad, sparrow. I’m trying to make you happy.”
I blink, my eyes filling with tears. “Depression isn’t as easy as happy or sad.
It actually has to do with how your brain functions.
That’s not my area of study, but I’ve done quite a lot of reading about it.
In many ways she might’ve been happy with you.
As happy as she could’ve been. It’s only that her brain might also have been making things feel so heavy.
Unbearable. You know, you can see it on a brain scan.
The way that some people can’t produce serotonin and dopamine. ”
“I know,” he says. “Still, I regret it all the same. All these years on.”
What a horrible thing that I feel jealousy still. Over the deep emotion this man must carry for her twenty years later. I see it on his face. The pain. The regret.
It’s ridiculous to be jealous. She’s gone, and his emotions are still there, and that seems fair. A tribute to her in some ways, since she’s not here anymore.
But I’m his wife, and I find that I feel tender over it.
“Why did you let people think…?”
“What am I going to say? In her culture what happened is seen as a disgrace. A weakness. We said that it was an accident, people didn’t believe it.
In order to clarify it, we would have to tell the truth, and that would change her story, and her legacy.
It didn’t seem fair. In many ways I felt like perhaps I did kill her.
That life with me was the thing that made it too unbearable.
I didn’t think so, I thought we had enough happiness, enough love that the difficulty wasn’t so terrible.
I was wrong. If you think I’m difficult now, you should’ve seen me then. ”
Perversely, I’m jealous of that too. I want to know him. The version of him then, the version of him now. Every version of him always.
“What about Andrea?”
He laughs. “Not dead.”
“What?”
Of all the revelations he might have given me, that wasn’t what I expected.
“Andrea is not dead. We married, and we never consummated the union. It became clear to me quite quickly that it wasn’t going to work.”
“Why?”
“She’s a lesbian.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Yes. Which she told me after we married, and also told me that she would try to lie back and think of England, so to speak. I told her I wasn’t interested in such a sacrifice.
But there was no going back to her family—they would only have married her off to someone else.
They never would have accepted her. They were…
from another time. So we hatched a plan.
We annulled the marriage in secret—the priest knows, it couldn’t be helped, but as we never consummated that was easy enough.
I helped her fake her death, she ran off to be with her lover, who she is now married to.
She’s living under a different name in America.
Far away from her family. And far away from any prying eyes. ”
“So you…you took the blame for that as well?”
“It became part of my legend, did it not? And as I said to you before, it felt somewhat fitting. And beneficial. At the time, it seemed like a decent idea. All these years on it is ill-fitting. But then…”
“You’re punishing yourself,” I say. “Letting people think all these things about you.”
“I don’t know that I’m punishing myself,” he says. “But I had no investment in my own reputation. Not when there are aspects of it I deserve.”
“All you did was care for a woman who suffered from depression. All you did was help another woman going to live her life.”
“Yes. I suppose so.”
It’s awful of me to be relieved that he didn’t love Andrea. That they didn’t even have an intimate relationship, though then I have follow-up questions about all the other women he might’ve been with. “Who do you sleep with?”
“You, sparrow.”
“Before me.”
He lets out a slow breath. “There are always women who want danger. I’m happy to oblige.
I told you, my reputation suits me. And in many ways it’s well-earned.
Do not think that I am some kind of tragic figure, or a savior.
The fact of the matter is, I have leaned into this for all these years.
You would like to hear that I’m actually good and celibate, wouldn’t you?
I am so sorry. I cannot count how many women I’ve taken to bed.
And I don’t know their names. Nor do I care to learn them. ”
He’s saying that to distance me. It’s also true, though. I see it in the tortured lines of his face. What I also see is he’s not proud of this. It isn’t nothing to him. He doesn’t like the man that he’s become, and that is a stark, shocking revelation.
He’s made the world hate him, but even more than that, he hates himself.
He is pushing me away here, and I’m not quite sure why. If his marriages really are a source of pain or if it’s something else.
“Well, as long as everyone consented,” I say, looking down at my dinner.
He laughs. “A funny thing coming from you.”
“What’s that?”
“Many would argue that you didn’t consent.”
“I did,” I say. “And have a hundred times since.”
“Our age gap is very problematic,” he says. “And I am a king. You were forced into the marriage.”
“I want you,” I say.
“You didn’t choose me.”
“I don’t know exactly what you want me to say. I didn’t. I didn’t choose you. I don’t hate you. And you aren’t…forcing me to do anything. Ever. When we have sex I actually feel like I understand you. Or something close to it.”
“You should go to university.”
Suddenly, his prickliness, his relentless pushing me away, makes some sense, but that’s the only thing that makes sense.
“What?”
I’m shocked by what he’s saying.
“You had a tentative acceptance anyway, didn’t you?” he asks.
“Yes. I did. But—”
“I am absolutely certain that if I make a phone call you will be admitted to the university.”
“I don’t want you to get me admitted. I worked hard for this on my own.”
“You cannot have everything,” he says, his tone stern. Angry. “Please don’t be unreasonable.”
“I don’t understand you,” I say. “You told me that there was no way that I could do this. You told me that I couldn’t go anywhere, and now we’re in England, and then you told me that you were simply carrying me in a cage. So what is this, and what am I supposed to make of it?”
“I am trying to give you what you want, and you are being fucking ungrateful.”
“I’m confused,” I say. “Because you’ve made it clear that while you want me to have the things I want, you mainly want it your way. You don’t care about what I want exactly.”
“I care,” he growls. “I don’t want you to jump out a tower window, sparrow, because I’ve clipped your wings and you cannot fly.”
The heavy regret in his voice stabs at me. Of course, he’s afraid that I’m going to hurt myself. Especially after the conversation about Colette. And as much as I want to take him up on his offer, I’m also not going to manipulate him into it. Not with his feelings.
Or maybe, I simply don’t want a gift that’s actually something that belongs to another woman. A dead woman.
“I don’t want to be a token that you’re using to try and salve your guilt.”
“I’m not,” he says. “You are brilliant. I was listening to you talk to Dr. Swift. I don’t understand half of what it is either of you said, but you are brilliant.
And the world should have your brilliance.
If I keep you in a cage, then all of your gifts stay in that cage with you.
It is a disservice to you, and to everyone.
You deserve better. Better than that. And I have changed my mind.
I’m not going to keep you caged. I’m going to allow you to go to school. If that is still what you want.”
The grief that I’ve been processing since we left Oxford crashes on me now in a wave. To think that this is right in front of me. That all I have to do is reach out and grab it…
“I will arrange it. You don’t even have to return to the palace. I will have everything you need sent here.”
“You would…you would really do that for me?”
“Yes,” he says. “As I’ve said before, you are young. You are young, and why shouldn’t you try to have as many of your dreams as you can?”
I stand up, and I move to him, thoughtless, wrapping my arms around his neck and sitting on his lap, burying my head in his neck. “You’re really doing this for me.”
“Don’t,” he says. “I am doing nothing for you except…getting out of your way.”
He melts me with that, and I can’t be angry, not anymore.
“Thank you,” I say, lifting my head and looking at him. Then I lean in and kiss him. He picks me up, standing out of the chair, and carries me up to a bedroom. I’m not even sure that it’s the one we are going to be staying in tonight. Though, I suppose now it is.
He’s hungry, fiercely so, and he strips me of my clothes quickly, kissing my neck, all the way down my body.
Normally he takes his time. Normally he makes sure I have at least one orgasm before he’s inside of me.
He doesn’t do that tonight. He sheaths himself in a condom—he’s been protecting me ever since we decided that I would start taking the pill, waiting for a long enough period to pass to ensure that it’s working—and thrusts inside of me.
I cling to him, trying to ride the wave of his ferocity.
But I can’t control it. All I can do is surrender to him.
His movements are so feral, so fierce, he pushes me up the mattress, my head hitting the headboard. The bed crashes against the wall, and I fear that we may have to pay for the damage caused by this union. But that I remember that I’m married to a king, and cracked plaster is not a concern.
“You want this,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “I want you.”
He grits his teeth, pressing his forehead against mine, and I lose my control. I cry out his name, and he breathes out mine, and then we hold each other after. Like it’s the end of something.
“You will go to school,” he says. “Because it’s what you wanted. It’s what you wanted before you were forced into this. Because you have to.”
“What happened to me taking classes online?”
“It’s never going to be the same. It’s never going to be your dream. You won’t be in a room with all of these people who share your passion. You won’t be able to live independently, in a dorm.”
God. I’ll be living without him. Something I’ve done for twenty-two years, granted, but not something that I imagined doing again.
I’ve never lived alone.
He is right about that. I’ve never had this experience, and it’s one that I wanted.
“How will we…how will we see each other?”
“There are breaks. And I am a king. I have a private plane, and I’m allowed to fly in and out and—”
“You need to change that law,” I say.
He puts his head against my shoulder. “Yes. I do.”
“I’ll go to school,” I say, a deep lashing of grief hitting me.
But this isn’t the same grief as before.
This is something different. This is something entirely unexpected.
I’m getting what I want. He’s not stopping me from it.
Not anymore. So why do I feel so…sad? It’s like when I found out I wasn’t pregnant.
Like when I found out he wanted me to go on the pill, which was a good thing, except…
it means I’m not trapped with him. Maybe it even means that I’m not as important to him as I was.