Chapter 44
And so it was that Lottie Tolliver became—under protest, and with several remarks upon the vulgarity of possession implied by the name—Mrs Jasper Deverell, in a ceremony of such noise, colour, tears, disorder, and expensive flowers that even the most hardened cynic might have mistaken it for happiness.
This author shall not bore you with the particulars of the day, since wedding descriptions are, I am told, tedious to the modern reader—a claim I find profoundly suspicious, given how very attentive those same readers become whenever two people brush hands in a corridor.
I shall not describe the wedding night either, for such scenes are most exciting when the bride is a trembling innocent and the groom a patient instructor of mysteries.
As you well know, Lottie and Jasper were no such thing.
(For those readers of particularly sturdy nerves and scholarly curiosity, an additional account may be found after the conclusion of this tale, though I warn you now that it is not for the faint of heart.)
Let us skip forward instead some years hence, so that I may assure you our two heroes were indeed very happy, and that marriage had not proven a cage at all.
Let us go, in fact, to the year 1820, to the deck of a ship off the coast of America, where Lottie Deverell stood in a salt-stiffened cloak, her bonnet ribbons whipping furiously about her face, and declared that the Atlantic Ocean was, in her considered opinion, “vastly overrated.”
“It is an ocean,” said Jasper, who stood beside her with one hand braced at her waist. “I am not certain it was seeking your approval.”
“Then it ought not to have made such a name for itself.”
“I shall inform it at once.”
She narrowed her eyes at the grey-green expanse before them.
“I still maintain that if Morleigh did not wish us to come to America, he should not have written such a long letter advising against it. Nothing has ever made me more certain of a course of action than a duke explaining why I ought not take it.”
“Particularly,” their companion said, “when the duke used the phrase female imprudence.”
At the rail beside them stood Miss Penelope Deverell—sixteen years of age, alarmingly beautiful, and already in possession of political opinions that had made an elderly gentleman regret addressing her at dinner.
She had accompanied her brother and sister-in-law to the New World, officially, for sea air and the improvement of her constitution; unofficially, because there are only so many drawing rooms a clever girl may be shut inside before she begins considering revolution as a reasonable alternative.
“That was his mistake,” Jasper murmured.
Lottie could feel her husband smiling against her temple, though he said nothing more.
He had spent the better part of six years discovering that the surest way to love Charlotte Tolliver was not to contain her, instruct her, manage her, or plead for sense, but simply to keep pace with her, a task at which he considered himself tolerably proficient.
She looked back towards the approaching shore.
Somewhere beyond that misted line lay roads they had not taken, cities full of strangers, rooms in which no one knew her as a Tolliver daughter or the wife of an aristocratic gentleman unless she chose to tell them.
A whole unruly continent waited before them, vast and difficult and unknown.
Behind her lay England and the life she loved enough to leave, because leaving no longer meant losing it.
Jasper’s arm tightened around her waist as the ship pitched. “Well?” he said. “Shall we conquer America?”
Lottie scoffed. “My dear, when have I ever settled for doing merely what a man could?”
Penelope brightened. “May we explore it?”
“Better,” said Lottie.
“Scandalise it?”
“Best.”
They all laughed, and Lottie leant into Jasper, purely because she wished to.
Below deck, their trunks were packed for every possible destination, and several impossible ones, should they become bored enough to invent them.
Penelope had brought eleven gowns, twelve books, a much-underlined copy of Wollstonecraft, and a collection of dangerous little pamphlets she insisted were educational.
Perhaps, if you are very fortunate, this author may one day be prevailed upon to relate Miss Penelope Deverell’s own tale in the New World; but for now, let us leave her there, sharpening her opinions upon the unsuspecting Atlantic.
We shall end, as we must, with Lottie Deverell.
She stood at the edge of the world with her husband behind her, the wind in her hair, and the salt upon her lips.
Six years earlier, she had thought marriage the most dangerous wager a woman could make, and she had not been wrong.
Marriage, in the wrong hands, certainly could be a cage, a terrible bargain, a silencing for women and a slow, pretty surrender in white satin and pearls. A respectable little death, applauded by relatives and sanctioned by law.
Indeed, Lottie had wagered her name, her future, her liberty, and her heart upon Jasper Deverell, and somehow—against every reasonable expectation, and certainly against the gloomy predictions of several relations—she had won.
It was not that she had been tamed, nor that her husband had been conquered. Rather, in their hands, marriage had become the finest wager either of them had ever made. They had gone on as they had begun: quarrelling, laughing, daring, fleeing, returning, and meeting one another always as equals.
So yes, dear reader, Lottie Tolliver had become Mrs Jasper Deverell, but if anyone supposed that made her smaller, quieter, softer, or more easily managed, then they had understood neither marriage, nor wagers, nor Lottie Tolliver at all.
She had won—which was fortunate, for she had always been a very poor loser—but better still, Jasper had won with her.