Chapter 21 #2
He turned to look at her, and she added with a rueful smile, “I speak of my family.”
“Oh. Well, we all have relations who make us blush. I am nephew to Lady Catherine, after all.”
“You are generous,” she said.
“I was not generous in my censure last autumn. I behaved in an unconscionably arrogant manner towards them, and I am sorry for it. I hope you may one day forgive my haughtiness towards them.”
She laughed ruefully. “I think before we speak of forgiveness, you ought to hear what I have to tell you.”
After one deep breath to bolster her courage, she told him everything.
He made no immediate reply but turned back to behold the park for what seemed like a very long time.
When he spoke, he was very gentle. “I am sorry, very sorry, for you. To suffer such betrayal is not… It is devastating, I know, particularly from those whom you consider dear to you.”
How like him it was, she thought, to think first of her. “It was a shock,” she admitted. “I never would have imagined Jane capable of such a deception. From Mama, it is less surprising, I shall admit.”
“Does Bingley know?”
“I do not know. In truth, I…I advised her not to tell him.” She studied his profile for signs of censure. There were none, not even when he turned to look at her fully.
“I would have advised the same,” he said. “It does no one any good now to comprehend that the marriage was begun on a falsehood, particularly not when there was truth behind it, in the act itself.”
“I thought the same. No matter the discrepancy in the outcome, their shared culpability the night of the ball cannot be disputed.”
“But there is one person who has had no culpability in the matter and yet has suffered consequences, ones that will follow her all her life.”
Here it was, then, the very reason she had dreaded telling him. Yes, she had not married him for love but rather for the appreciation of his goodness. He knew it and had wished to marry her regardless.
She moved onto his lap. She had never done that before, and she did not perform it well; it required adjustments on both her part and his to settle them both comfortably within his chair, his arms around her.
Even then, she twisted a little, raising her right hand to push back the curls in the front of his face, curls that immediately fell right back into their unruly place.
“Who might that be?” she murmured.
“I shall offer you two clues as to her identity,” he said. “She is achingly charming and beautiful, and she is sitting on my lap.”
“And I shall tell you that we both have faced our share of consequences,” she told him. “For I believe you have been made to suffer as well. You nearly faced a duel! What if you had died? For that alone, I do not think I shall ever forgive my mother and sister.”
He raised one arm to briefly caress her back. “How can I think myself suffering when everything I have ever wanted is right here in my arms?”
“Where I wish to be is right here in your arms,” she told him. “More than anything.”
“How can you say so? You told me immediately that night in the parsonage that had I proposed you would have refused me. Had it not been for the letter you received from your sister, the letter filled with lies, thus would it have been. Instead here you are, married to me. I got what I wanted; you have everything you did not want.”
“I will not lie to you and say that yes, you are correct. On April 9, or 8, or March 12, or November 1, I would have said I would never marry you. And had someone made me do that at those times, then yes, I would have been very unhappy indeed.”
The pain of that was naked in his eyes, and again she felt the stabbing misery of knowing his feelings.
“And I cannot deny that my feelings changed, very significantly, in a very short period of time. It is natural to mistrust that which has come about so quickly.”
“It is,” he murmured.
“And I should imagine, furthermore, that knowing as we both now do that the calamity which brought us together was nothing more than a falsehood—”
“You must resent it heartily,” he said glumly.
“No, I do not,” she said tenderly. “I resent that they lied to me, but I do not resent the outcome.”
He was not convinced and so she added, “My father once told me a story about a lady trapped in a boat. She knew not how to sail and thus only drifted aimlessly out to sea.”
She began to run her left hand through the back of his hair, tender circles that he appeared to enjoy.
“She was of course exceedingly fearful, not sure where she was going or if she would ever get back to the place she had come from.
Then a fierce gale blew up, so fierce that she could only hide below deck and pray for her life.
“And then the storm ended. She came up on deck and found herself in the most wonderful place she had ever been. A place where she knew at once that she was always meant to be, even if she could not have fathomed it when she stepped onto the boat, or when she was fearful, below deck, during the storm.”
He bent his head and kissed her.
“So yes, I am sad that the bond between myself and my sister has changed, and that my mother has again found a way to humiliate me, but if those things were the storm that brought me here, to a home and a husband I love…” She kissed him again.
“And I love you. Truly I do with all my heart, and I shudder to imagine what might have happened had I permitted myself to drift away from you.”
“I would have gone out on my own boat to find you,” he whispered.
“Likely you would have, and ordered the storm to stop troubling me while you did it,” she said with a fond laugh.
“It is my intention to keep the storms ever from bothering you again,” he vowed.
“The storms will come,” she said. “But as long as we are both in the same boat, I daresay I am content to see where they take us.”