Chapter 23 #2
“You are my husband,” she whispered back, the words as shy as they were sure. “You do not have to earn being near me.”
He kissed her again, knowing that it was not something that he ought to be doing. But he could not resist it.
Somehow, whenever she was in close proximity, he could not help himself, and all reason went flying out the window.
When he drew back, it was only far enough to look at her properly. “I cannot promise to stop thinking of you,” he said, voice still rough. “I doubt I could if I wished.”
“I do not wish it,” she returned, “I have been thinking of you as well. I have wanted you near and did not know how to ask without sounding foolish. Do not hold back from me, Stephen. We can be happy together. We can be…” She faltered, then steadied. “We can be a sweet family of our own now.”
Stephen began to pull away immediately. It was an obvious recoil, as though he could not bear the thought of what she had suggested.
As though she had crossed some line.
As if it were not his wife who was speaking to him, but rather a stranger whom he had encountered on the street.
“This,” Stephen said, “is the problem. We cannot.”
“We cannot… what?” she asked, though she feared she knew.
“We cannot have…” he stopped, “A family.”
For a heartbeat, she thought she had misheard. “I beg your pardon?”
“I cannot have children,” he said. “There will be an extension of this connection that we have between ourselves. This is what my final decision is.”
The room altered, and Maria’s fingers loosened from where they had gathered in the silk of her skirt.
“You cannot,” she repeated, carefully, “Or you will not?”
“Both. I made a vow before my father died. My line ends with me.”
Silence met the words and then filled up with her heartbeat. Somewhere inside her ribs, something small and hopeful put its hands over its ears as if the sound might stop the meaning.
“A vow,” she said. “You vowed….”
“Never to have an heir,” he said. “I am never to continue what he built.”
Her throat tightened. She had only just dared to set her hopes upon a table and a nursery and sunlight that belonged to them, and now that little handful of wishes felt as if it had been brushed carelessly off a table and left to shatter on the floor.
“Why,” she managed, “would you promise a thing like that?”
He dragged a hand over his mouth, and for the first time since she had known him, he looked not composed but wearied by memory.
“Because he ruined everything he touched,” Stephen said, quiet and flat. “He married my sister to a man who made her life a prison and then a grave.”
Maria stared. “Your…” She could not complete the sentence.
“She was two years younger than I,” he said.
“He called it an advantageous match. I called it a sale, but of course, I was not given too much say on the matter. When she… when she died of it, I made certain the man paid. But there are debts one cannot settle. My father would have smiled at a grandson born to the title he worshipped. I told him I would never give him one.” He looked at Maria then, and something like a tired challenge sat in his gaze.
“I meant it,” he continued on.
The room pulled away from her, a foot or so at a time. Maria held very still because if she moved, she was not certain which part of herself would fail first.
“And when did you intend to tell me this?” she asked.
He closed his eyes, just briefly, and she heard what he did not say: Not at all, if I could have helped it.
“I ought to have told you sooner,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed, and heard the calm in her own voice with a sort of detached awe. “You ought.”
He took a step toward her. She took one back.
“Maria…”
“You have had days to avoid me,” she said. “I am your wife, and it is things like this that would bring us closer. Why must you barricade yourself and punish me?”
He flinched. “Do not think I took any pleasure…”
“I do not think you took pleasure,” she cut in, “I think you made a decision. You decided for both of us. You put your past on the table and pushed our future off it.”
“I cannot undo what I promised.”
“And I cannot unknow what I want.”
Her eyes burned. She refused to let the first tear fall.
“Do you know,” she said, and the words came quicker now because if she did not say them they would choke her, “for years I did not permit myself to want anything at all. Wanting was punished. Now I learn that wanting in a marriage is also punished, only gently, only with an apology and a sad story.”
“I am not asking for your forgiveness,” he said. “I am asking for your company. For your trust. For your…” He broke off.
“For my what?”
“For your love.”
“You cannot ask me to love you and then tell me I must be less than I am to do it.”
“Less?” His mouth tightened. “To live a full life with me is to be less?”
“To live a life that excludes the very thing I have only just dared to hope for,” she said, “is to be set aside by my own husband’s vow to a dead man.”
“I would not set you aside.”
“You already have,” she answered. “You hauled a past horror into our present and crowned it king.”
He drew breath as if to argue. But then when he spoke again, his voice was soft.
“I fell in love with you,” he said, “I did not plan it; I did not want it; I tried to be careful with it and failed. We can have everything but children. We can have peace. Laughter. A home that is ours. You and me. Do not throw it from you because of one part we cannot add.”
She stared at him, astonishment transmuting to anger.
“Stephen,” she said, “you made me want the very thing you now tell me I cannot have. You taught me what it felt like to hope, to imagine, and you kissed me as if a future were possible, and now you offer me an incomplete version because your father’s portrait still snarls in your head.”
He closed his eyes again. “You are not wrong.”
“Then be brave,” she said fiercely. “Be braver than he was.”
“I do not know how.”
“I cannot teach you,” she said, and knew as she said it that a thread inside her was snapping. “Not while I must stand here and trade my dreams for your vow.”
“Maria…”
“I cannot do this,” she said, and the words surprised her with how calm they sounded, “I cannot live in a house where my husband loves me well enough to hold me, but not well enough to face what love asks of him.”
He went very still. She saw him reach for some argument that would not be selfish, not be false, and not be cruel. She watched him fail to find one.
“Do not go,” he said, and in that moment, he sounded like something lost.
She did not move for three heartbeats that felt like years. Then she curtsied and turned toward the door.
“Elinor,” she said, “my cloak, if you please. And tell the coachman I will require the carriage.”
Elinor had been hovering just out of sight. The woman appeared with the cloak already over her arm. “Your Grace…”
“Now,” Maria said gently. “Please.”
Elinor fastened the cloak with hands that trembled only a little. “Shall I wake a footman?”
“Two,” Maria said, because she would not be a fool with her safety, “And Thomas to drive.”
Stephen had not moved.
“You mean to go out at this hour?”
“To my brother’s house,” she said. “It is my house too. They told me so. I am going to find out whether they meant it.”
“Maria…”