Chapter Twenty-two
Her maid came bustling in the next morning, saw me, turned red in the face and then backed out of the room, apologies tumbling from her mouth.
I sat up, rubbing at my face. I had barely slept any time at all, actually. I would have thought when I settled here with her that we should do nothing but sleep, but I knew not quite what possessed me when it came to this woman, to my wife, to my Elizabeth.
It was as she had said once, I felt drunk on her.
At any rate, she was pulling the blankets over her lovely bare shoulder as she turned on her side in her bed and looked up at me.
I stretched. I felt like death, truly. I needed more sleep, but it was unlikely I’d be able to go back to sleep now that the sun was up.
She reached up to rub my arm. “I want you to know, Fitzwilliam,” she said, yawning a little, “that I do not forgive you.”
“Mmm,” I said, also yawning. “I suppose you would not.”
“I would not,” she agreed. “You definitely cannot simply come into my bedchamber and do that with me and think it would solve anything.”
“Indeed, I was not exactly thinking when we did that.”
She stopped touching me. “You do not still think that I—”
“No,” I said. I looked down at her. “But I do not know why you are this way about it.”
“It?”
“The marital bed,” I said. “I have heard that wives can be… reticent, and you are always sort of the opposite.”
She shrugged under the blankets. “I don’t know that it’s ‘it’ so much as it you.
And I do not know what it is about you, either.
I am enamored of you, certainly, but I think what I chiefly enjoy so much is the way you want me.
” She gave me a little smile. “But what we do together feels nice, of course.”
“I suppose it was something that made me think that you could have been with him,” I said.
“I can stop enjoying it,” she said, with a wry smile. “I can put you off of it and tell you to leave me be and that I am far too tired.”
“No,” I said, scooting down in the bed and lying down on the pillow to look at her. “Obviously, not. I should be counting myself lucky to have you, not casting aspersions on you.”
She did not say anything.
“I suppose you have not been wanted often in your life,” I said.
“No one has ever wanted me the way you want me,” she said in a small voice.
“Agreed,” I said, cupping her cheek with one of my hands. “I like it, too.”
She met my gaze.
I kissed her, a slow, sweet, and thorough kiss.
She squirmed in close to me, pressing her bare skin all along the length of me, from my chest to my shins. I wrapped my arms around her, holding her tightly against me.
Another kiss, this one just as thorough.
She sighed into my mouth.
I toyed with the waves of her hair.
The kiss ended.
I did not let go of her.
“Is it enough?” she murmured.
“What do you mean?”
“The wanting,” she said. “As you said last night—this morning, I suppose—before we came to bed—we have neither of us trusted the other.”
I toyed with her hair and looked into her eyes. “I do not know, my Elizabeth, I do not.”
“What is want without trust?” she said. “It seems changeable, like the storm winds. Must we not learn to trust each other somehow if we mean to continue?”
“We must,” I said. “Yes, we must indeed.”
“How do we do that?”
I thought about it.
She kissed my chin. She giggled and said I needed to be shaved, and she ran her fingers over the hair was that coming in.
“Oh, do I need to be shaved?” I said, rubbing my face against her shoulder.
She shoved at me, giggling wildly, and I rolled us both over and pinned her down and kissed her again and…
At any rate, there was little more serious talk after that.
Later, after I had been shaved and dressed and washed my face, I came down to the breakfast parlor, where Elizabeth was sorting through a stack of letters.
“What are those?” I said.
“Invitations,” she said. “To balls, to dinners.” She lifted one. “To Vauxhall with the Petersons.”
I snatched that from her. “That is odd,” I said. “In the winter? Just us and them?”
“Apparently, the colonel was right about how to conduct myself at the ball. Now, we are sought after company, you and I.”
I handed the invitation back to her. “Well, that’s good, I suppose. One less problem to worry about.”
“Of course, it might only be that I’m an oddity,” she said. “Perhaps they simply want me around so that they can gawk or laugh about me behind my back.”
“I am certain it is not that,” I said.
“You did not go about telling everyone that I was some hussy with Wickham before I married you, did you?” She was sharp.
Hussy? I shook my head. “Obviously, that wasn’t something I wanted people to know. I spoke of it with Colonel Fitzwilliam and no one else.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” she said.
“You would not think that I would do further damage to my reputation, would you?”
“You did marry me because I was a scandal,” she said.
“That is not why I married you,” I said.
She eyed me, eyebrows raised.
I bowed my head.
It was quiet.
“Well,” she said, “we must accept some of them, I think, or it will look very odd. We do not need to accept them all. In fact, we could not. Some of them overlap, and even if we only chose the ones that didn’t, we should be far too busy.
However, I am not sure about how I must behave, so I should like to enlist the colonel’s advice again. I shall invite him for tea—”
“No,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows again, even higher this time.
“He has admitted to me that he…” How had he put it? “Coveted you, and I told him, or he offered, or I don’t know, but he is to stay away for a time.”
“Coveted,” she repeated. “As if I am a prize sow.”
“And you encouraged him and do not deny that you did. And what is more, you felt guilty about it, because I could see the way you were when I spoke to you of it—”
“I did none of these things!” she snapped. “You told me that you were jealous of him, and then I did not know how to behave whenever he was around, or when you spoke of him, or anything else.”
“This all began before that.”
“Well, before that, I only thought that I was being friendly and he was being friendly, and Lord, Fitzwilliam, he was the only person I could talk easily with. It had been ever so long since I’d had a conversation with someone.”
“I suppose you were not having conversations with me?”
“We do not talk so much as…” Her face reddened.
“All right,” I muttered. “We get distracted easily, but we talk. We had that rousing conversation about Defoe, I seem to remember.”
She laughed. “What? The time when you took the opposite position of me just to rile me up, and then you said that I was the most ravishing woman you’d ever seen when I was in a passion, then you put your hand inside my—”
“Right,” I said, wincing. “So, that conversation was a bad example, but there have been… conversations.”
“Yes, I suppose, but not many.”
“Well, anyway, I should feel better if we had a bit of a break from Richard Fitzwilliam, that is all,” I said.
“Of course,” she said. “Because you do not trust me, and I suppose you don’t trust him, and it doesn’t matter what I think anyway, because your word is law.
” She got up from the table. “I seem to have developed a bit of a headache,” she told the table, not me.
“Please excuse me.” And before I could say anything at all, she was gone from the room.
I slumped in my chair.
I wanted a nap.