Chapter 23 #3
“You have a criminal lack of biscuits in this establishment,” she announced, setting the tray at the foot of the bed with great ceremony.
“For a moment I quite despaired, convinced you lived in some dreadful state of bachelor monasticism. Indeed, I had begun to suspect you kept no servants at all –though, upon reflection, I suppose they merely heard us and wisely withdrew to their quarters.”
Theo stirred, lifting himself against the pillows with the slow caution of a man nursing an injury. The sheet remained draped debaucherously about his waist in a manner that made her grin.
“I did not expect to be feeding such a ravenous woman under my roof.”
“Our roof,” she corrected, settling herself cross-legged beside him and reaching for the cheese. “And you ought to have known it by now. I am ever hungry for biscuits. It is practically the chief distinction of my character.”
They ate in companionable silence – the rarest sort, born not of want for words, but of an ease between two friends long acquainted.
Hetty bit into an apple and chewed thoughtfully. “It is very quiet here.”
Theo glanced up at her. “Do you dislike it?”
She tilted her head, considering. “No. It is only that I have never encountered this sort of quiet. At home, there is ever some commotion: a sibling thundering upstairs, the pianoforte being viciously assaulted, Nell attempting homicide with a soup ladle. Voices everywhere. Constant, overlapping, unrepentant voices.”
He smiled. “And now there is only me.”
“Precisely. And you scarcely ever shout or fling slippers. You shall need to amend that. I can hardly be expected to endure peace indefinitely. ”
“I can be persuaded to storm about the place with great fanfare, if it pleases you. I could slam doors and glower into the fire while clutching a brandy.”
“Oh, I adore brooding,” she declared. “You would make a most excellent figure of tragic gloom.”
He gave a long-suffering sigh. “It appears marriage to you will be far more demanding than I anticipated.”
“Indeed,” she said sweetly, reaching for the wine. “I fear you have acquired a wife of uncommon appetites. I suggest you fortify yourself accordingly.”
He gave her that familiar lopsided grin –the one that always made her feel as though they shared some secret mischief – and brushed a crumb from the corner of her mouth.
“You should know, Hetty that we may reside wherever you please. If London is your kingdom, then I shall gladly rule it at your side. But if the crowds grow tiresome or the noise too great, there are other prospects. Langley Park in Surrey, naturally. A house near Bath. A hunting lodge in Northumberland which no one has visited these twenty years, and which I strongly suspect is haunted. And if none of those will do… why then, I shall build you a blasted manor from the ground up. With a biscuit wing, if that is the desire of your heart.”
Hetty laughed. “I have no wish for ghosts or biscuit wings. Though perhaps in the future.”
“Then name it, wife… You must know I can supply you with anything your mercenary little heart desires. A pair of matched Arabians, a row of Paris gowns so indecently fashionable the ton will expire of envy, a diamond parure that will make Miss Pomeroy choke upon her syllabub. I might even procure you an Italian villa, should you wish to cultivate olives. Where shall we live, Hetty? A palace in Mayfair? A manor in the shires? Say but the word, and I shall set about acquiring it before breakfast.”
She tipped her head, as though giving grave thought. “I should like a grotto,” she said at last, very solemnly. “Filled with swans. And perhaps a grotto-maid, whose sole occupation is to sing madrigals while I eat tarts upon a rock.”
Theo gave a bark of laughter. “Then I shall see it built at once. But come, Hetty, jesting aside. Where is it you would truly have us live?”
She released a long and heavy sigh. “That is the difficulty. I do not entirely know… I think I should like the country from time to time…I do so love the clean air, the horses, the way the leaves change in the autumn. A place where one may breathe without interruption.” She glanced towards the window, as if the rooftops of Mayfair might part to reveal a stretch of heather or the shimmer of distant fields.
“But not always,” she went on, warming to her thoughts.
“I desire London too. And my family near at hand. I desire the theatre and scandal sheets and quarrels in crowded bookshops over the last copy of a truly dreadful novel. I desire lemon tarts and overheard gossip and dancing until my slippers fall apart. I desire laughter and light and the delicious racket of it all – on my own terms.”
“You desire both,” he said simply, biting into his apple and watching her with an expression so suffused with quiet adoration that it turned her bones to water. “The peace and the pandemonium.”
“Precisely. And most of all, the freedom to choose between them as I please. Is that terribly unreasonable? ”
“No,” he said softly. “It is you. And I find I am quite devoted to it.”
She gave a satisfied sigh and nestled against his shoulder, her curls spilling across his chest. “Do married earls go on honeymoons?”
“They do, if their wives employ that particular tone.”
“Well then,” she said, peering up at him through her lashes, “I insist. Before we determine any residence, I mean to be scandalous abroad… outrageously improper in foreign cities, where no one knows our names. I wish to shock innkeepers, disgrace gardens and make an absolute mockery of opera boxes. And I do not wish for children just yet,” she added.
“Only the practice. A very great deal of practice.”
Theo’s laugh rumbled low in his chest. “I shall take you to any corner of the globe you desire, but for mercy’s sake, cease speaking so if you expect me to sleep. I am already a ruined man.”
She laughed then – one of those wild, ringing Tolliver laughs that no etiquette book could contain – and tucked herself more securely against him. “Yes, somewhere scandalous,” she murmured, curling her fingers into his side. “Just you and me.”
There was no immediate reply, nor was there need of one.
The manner in which he drew her nearer, his hand splayed across her back, his chin coming to rest upon her crown, spoke more eloquently than any vow or flourish could.
They lapsed into silence again, and it was a golden sort of stillness, not awkward nor expectant, but luminous, as though the very world had been momentarily suspended to grant them space to consider what they had done, what they had become, and what marvels might yet await them .
Hetty lay tucked beside Theo, her limbs tangled with his beneath the rumpled counterpane, resting her cheek against the warm slope of his shoulder and felt – for perhaps the first time – that her future was not some narrow, dreary corridor to be trudged down, but rather a series of doors flung gloriously open to a hundred glittering possibilities, all hers for the choosing.
It astonished her, this feeling, for she had spent so many years thoroughly convinced that matrimony would be the end of herself, that to wed would be a slow erosion of the self. She had meant every vow she ever made to remain unwed, for she would not diminish herself, nor her own freedom.
Yet here, in Theo’s bed, lying amongst apple cores and crumbled cheese, her hair in glorious disarray from her husband’s rather determined hands, she did not feel diminished. She felt expanded and emboldened, as though she had not been given a cage but rather, a pair of wings.
For Theo could give her anything a lady might wish: country estates, London soirées, a lifetime’s supply of lemon tarts and thoroughly unnecessary horses, if she so desired.
She would want for nothing under his roof, and yet it was not the promise of land or wealth or perfectly tailored gowns that she cared for.
He always had – she realised – encouraged her not merely to exist, but to live in all of life’s fullness, to be loud, laughing, frivolous, and foolish, and wholly, unapologetically herself. He had never once asked her to be less.
And that, she thought – as she stole the last bite of his apple, grinning as he pretended to scowl – was a far greater romance than all the manors, diamonds, and dancing slippers in all of England.