Chapter 54 #2
“Being with child lasts longer than a few weeks.”
“Very well,” I say. “If you feel this way throughout the pregnancy, then I can certainly last that long. I do not only love you, Annabelle, for what you have given me in the bedchamber.”
As usual at the word love, her body goes rigid.
She fixes me with her soft blue gaze. I know, somehow, that she is listening carefully.
“Do you not love me just for that?”
I close the book. Perhaps I can make her understand.
“No. I do not. I know that the bedchamber is where our relationship began. And I love it. I will always love being so close to you. But that is not the only way in which we are close—nor is it the only way that I wish to be close to you.”
Her gaze is on the pillow in front of her, her fingers tracing the pattern of the brocade.
“What other ways?”
“Our conversations,” I supply. “I have told you all about myself. From that very first breakfast. I feel you understand me—and I feel I am beginning to understand you.”
She reaches over and takes the book from my hands.
“A Lady’s Valet,” she says. “I do not know this volume.”
“It is quite diverting. Although not yet as exciting as some.”
“What else did you buy?”
I show her the other volumes—one very filthy volume with actual pictures; a book that professes to be the confessions of a depraved Spanish priest; and a volume focusing on the sexual career of Casanova with choice engravings.
“Have you ever thought of writing one?” she asks.
“A novel?”
“Yes.”
“An erotic novel?”
She looks at me wryly.
“Yes.”
“No,” I say honestly. “I haven’t.”
“I believe you would be good at it.”
In the past, I daydreamed about writing novels.
I imagined penning novels anonymously so my father would never know.
Whenever I attempted a start, it seemed too dangerous—my imagination started to run in untoward directions.
Ravishing heroines and daring knaves and kisses that fired the blood…
and, well, things that I wasn’t brave enough to pen. I never made it past a page or two.
“I thought of it long ago. Once or twice. But…”
“But what?”
I feel myself color. She laughs.
“Writing made you feel too wanton.”
I nod.
“Well, perhaps for me you could try.”
“If it would please you.”
“It would. That way you might not have given up your profession for nothing.”
“Annabelle,” I scold, taking her hands. “I haven’t given up my profession. I am merely taking a break from it. And I did so for the best thing that has ever happened to me—marrying you. But I will make you a bargain.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“I will try and write something erotic, for your eyes only—if you tell me a bit more of yourself.”
“What of myself?”
“Anything—as I said, I want to feel closer to you. I do have a topic specifically, but it does not have to be that.”
Her eyes narrow in suspicion.
“It is the only thing of your history which I do not yet understand. Unless it is truly idle gossip.”
She withdraws her hands.
“You mean George Garrison, I presume?”
The boy who drowned. Who the good wives of Trescott mourned.
“Yes.”
“Must you really know of my every humiliation?”
It is a strange way to describe a drowning. But I have learned that with Annabelle, so much is not what it seems.
“I will not insist that you tell me. I do not want to know what you would rather not share. I do not want intimacy by force.”
“And would you write to please me? Even if I refused?”
I smile. She is exhausting, truly—unrelenting. But I have learned her by now. I know if you fight her, you will only push her further from you. If you are gentle, however, she often comes just a bit closer.
“I think you know, Annabelle, that I would do anything that you wanted. If my writing something will delight you, I will do it. I would obey any request from you if that is what you needed.”
She bites her lip as if considering. And then she huffs out a breath.
“If I am to tell you about George Garrison, then I must tell you about Terrence French.”
That name was also mentioned by the Trescott good wives. But that tale paled in comparison to that of George Garrison.
“I will listen to anything you will tell me.”
“Very well,” she sighs, looking away from me. “Since you want to think the worst of me.”
“I do not,” I say, taking her hand. “I only want to know you.”
“Well, know me you shall. At your own peril. I told you about Frank—and how things ended.”
I nod. “And he lives only by your grace.”
She gives a little, half-hearted laugh.
“After Frank, I was desperate. I wanted to show myself that I had not cared for him. And I wanted to defy my father. At first, there was no one else I could stomach bedding—and my standard was not high. Months passed. And something strange happened. I began to transform. Physically. When I was with Frank, I was awkward. My skin spotted and my figure too round.”
That Annabelle could have been awkward I very much doubt. I refuse to believe that she was ever anything less than beautiful. But I don’t interrupt her, not wanting to stem the flow of her story.
“But in the months afterwards, in some perverse twist, I became much more comely. Beautiful, even. If my father despaired of getting anything from me on the marriage mart before, he was grieved doubly now. For it became evident he could have gotten something for me, just as I had revealed that my virtue was forfeit.”
“Did he tell you such a thing?”
“Not precisely. But it was evident. He began to ask me to appear at dinner in fine dress. He would say it was practice for my debut. It was a form of punishment. We both knew that I would never make a debut. That I was doomed to live in his house at his mercy. Well, I refused such a fate. I was not sure how I would escape yet. But I knew I would.”
My heart constricts at this description. Her father wanted to humiliate her.
“What a bastard.”
“He was. And he pushed me to abandon reason altogether. I know I cannot blame him for my actions—”
“You can,” I interrupt. “You were a child.”
“Only just.” She sighs. “Terrence was the son of the local solicitor. He had been away at school, but then he came back. When we met in town I knew I had found what I was looking for. He began to ply me with attention—gifts, compliments—but I knew what he wanted. And I didn’t care.
I started meeting him in the woods. With Frank, I was so sweet on him…
and he was gentler. It wasn’t like that with Terrence. ”
“He forced you?”
I imagine finding Terrence French the next time we are in Trescott and slitting his throat.
She shakes her head. “No. I was willing. But only because I wanted to hurt myself. And he was the perfect mechanism. He wasn’t kind.
When he bedded me and when he spoke of me.
He knew I was ruining myself by being with him and he told anyone who would listen anyway.
I had put myself on a path of destruction and he only hastened me down it.
And he was an unpleasant, selfish lover.
If I hated myself any less, I would have stopped. ”
I squeeze her hand.
“Annabelle.”
“I know,” she says softly. “But let me explain. George was Terrence’s friend.
George was a different type than Terrence.
He had grown up poor in Trescott, but he was clever and had gotten his fees paid to Harrow.
He was going to Oxford. But Terrence said that he was clumsy with women.
And he wanted me to bed George, to initiate him in the ways of women. He suggested it and I agreed.”
My stomach turns. It kills me that she was so treated. That this horrible young man saw her as nothing more than a toy—something he could loan out to another.
“We all met at the lake. It was summer and unusually warm. Terrence had me—and then George did too.”
Her countenance is gray. But unlike when she told me about Frank, she doesn’t seem near tears.
“He was actually better than Terrence. He was shaking, I remember. And gentle. In other circumstances we would have liked each other, I think.”
She pauses gravely.
“Anyway, George was nervous. And he had had an extraordinary quantity of gin. Terrence always drank and he was drunk too. After George and I—copulated, he went in the water. I think he felt ashamed. Terrence and I got into a fight once he left. He was jealous.” She laughs bitterly, that bitter laugh I hate.
“Even though he begged me to swive George, he was cross once it happened. He called me all sorts of names. And, of course, I protested this treatment.”
“I will kill him.”
“Oh,” she says, rolling her eyes. “He isn’t worth that, Alfred. Anyway, after some time we realized that George was missing. That he wasn’t in the water. And then Terrence realized that he was—but he was drowned.”
“And the town and your father blamed you even though it wasn’t your fault.”
She shrugs. “Was it not my fault? I was there. I let him go into the water. A poor, shaking boy whose virginity I had just taken. He was handsome, George. He had a bright future. He was better than either me or Terrence, to be honest.”
“Than Terrence, yes. But not you,” I protest.
“A girl so depraved as to bed two boys in one night?” She shakes her head.
“Anyway, it was a scandal that my father could not overlook. Terrence and George weren’t common boys like Frank.
My father cast me out. But it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
I’ve always felt guilty about George—because his death was my salvation.
George saved me in a way. I went to London in disgrace. And I built something for myself.”
“Thank you for telling me,” I choke out.
“Do you love me now?” she says, her voice stripped of all emotion. “When you have learned that what they say of me is true?”
“Annabelle,” I say, at a loss for how to explain the complexity of my feelings. “It isn’t true. What they say.”
“How can you say that, Alfred? After what I just told you?”
I can’t believe that she, of all people, could say such a thing.
“It is you, Annabelle, who taught me that there is no shame in desire.”
Her eyes flare.
“But it wasn’t desire, Alfred. I didn’t desire Terrence. I let him use me. I still don’t know why. Not completely. Or why I agreed to bed his friend upon his request—and then let the boy drown.”
“You didn’t let him drown. You didn’t know. Come here,” I say, unable to bear another moment with her out of my arms. “Please.”
To my relief, she doesn’t resist.
“Do you know how many nights I spent aching and ashamed?” I say in her ear. “That I spent terrified of my own desires? Terrified to even touch myself because of what those who were supposed to know better told me? Countless. Too many for one lifetime.”
“But you were honorable. You resisted your worst impulses.”
“No, Annabelle,” I say. “This is what you taught me. My worst impulses weren’t the ones that made me desire. That wanted to give and receive pleasure. My worst impulses were the ones that made me afraid and kept me in agony. I stifled my best impulses for years—until you let me follow them.”
She is silent, which means that my words are having some effect.
“You were only finding your way out, Annabelle. You didn’t know how to get out of your father’s house. And this was the only way you knew how to do it. I wish I had been as brave as you. I still wish I was.”
“That is a very generous interpretation of the tale.”
“No more generous than the one you gave to me for my own conduct. You saw the potential I had for love, for passion, when you could have seen cowardice and repression and shame.”
“But doesn’t it disgust you? That I would let myself be treated in such a way?”
I pull back from her, because I want to look in her eyes when I say these words.
“No. Your body is your own. You shared it with one boy who didn’t deserve it and another boy who seemed as heartsick and confused as yourself.
There is no shame in that. I wish Terrence had been better to you.
Because you are precious. But if you think that I will condemn you, that I will call you a whore for being young and curious and lost, I won’t. ”
Her soft blue eyes fill with tears.
I pull her towards me.
“Thank you for telling me,” I repeat.
Unlike when she told me the story of Frank, Annabelle doesn’t sob. But she clings to me even tighter than before, her wet face pressed into my shoulder.
“I do want to kill Terrence French though,” I say.
She laughs, the sound muffled by my chest.
“He isn’t worth the effort.”
She looks up at me, her expression softer, somehow, than I have ever seen it. As if our conversation relieved her of something.
“Honestly, Frank hurt me more because I felt something for him. I never cared for Terrence, and he could tell. I think it made him angry.”
“It’s no excuse.”
“You know,” she says haltingly. “You know that I care for you, Alfred, don’t you? That I couldn’t ever be married to anyone else?”
“I do,” I say, pulling her back into my arms.
And tears spring into my eyes now.
Because I am pretty sure that these words—well, they might be the closest Annabelle de Lacey gets to I love you.