The Sixth Morning
Chapter thirty-six
Henry
He did not send for his wife until the light had gone gold and the house had quieted. She came in still in her gardening apron, a smear of soil along one wrist, and stopped short when she saw what lay on the bed.
“You are meant to be resting,” she said.
“I am resting. I am in bed. I have never in my life been more thoroughly horizontal.” He moved his hand toward the document. “Come here.”
She came, sat on the edge of the bed where she had rested her head for four days. “It is our marriage contract,” she said.
“It is.”
“Why is it here?”
“I have spent the better part of a week lying in your bed owing you my life,” he said, “and unable to stop thinking that somewhere in London was a piece of paper that called you a condition.” He picked it up.
It felt heavier than paper had any right to be.
“I had Brigg read it to me again this morning. Do you know, in the whole of it, there is not one line that protects you. Your mother is provided for. Your sisters are dowered. The trust is irrevocable. The heir is accounted for to the third contingency.” He looked at her.
“Your own mother asked, the night it was signed, whether there was a clause for her daughter. There was none. And I signed it, and I thought myself generous.”
Violet said nothing. Her hand had come to rest near his.
“I knew what I was purchasing,” he went on, his voice dipping.
“An heir, and a quiet, grateful woman to provide it. I did not know I was marrying the person who would capture a murderer and save my life. I am ashamed to admit, I had decided in advance that you were a means to an end, and a man does not look closely at a means.” His jaw worked.
“Its existence offends me, Violet. I will not have it exist anymore.”
With unsteady hands he tore the document from top to bottom with great effort. He did not stop there. He tore it across, and then folded the halves and tore them again, into quarters, and laid the pieces on the bed between them.
“The settlement on your family stands,” he said. “That, I would never touch. But this is gone. And there is another being drawn in its place. One that guards you, not the heir and regardless of heir. You will never again be as vulnerable as you were when we signed this contract.”
She was crying without sound. But only for a moment. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and looked at the torn pieces.
“You did not have to do this,” she said.
“I am aware. I wanted to.” He swallowed. “There is something I have not told you,” he said. She edged closer to him. “When I was under. I could not answer, but I heard you.”
She tilted her head. “What did you hear?”
“Come back to me.” He let it sit between them. “I have spent six days in this bed thinking about what a man owes a woman who said that to him while he was dying. And I concluded that he owes her the truth about what she is to him. Which is why I sent for Brigg.”
“Henry.” She picked up one of the torn quarters.
Her thumb moved over the ink of her own signature, the careful hand she had used that night at Thornwick, sitting across from a man she did not know.
“I signed this believing I was purchasing my family’s survival and my sisters’ future with my body.
I had calculated the cost, and I was willing to pay it, and I did not expect to be happy.
I expected to be useful. I expected to endure. ”
She set the piece down.
“I did not expect you to pour my tea with your own hands to make certain no one had poisoned it. I did not expect you to smash a chemist’s shop because he had been rude to me.
I did not expect to hear you defend my mother’s name to men who could ruin you.
” Her voice caught but held. “I did not expect to fall in love with a man who was so determined not to be loved that he made it nearly impossible.”
He turned his hand over, palm up.
“I should have told you the morning after our wedding what I will tell you now,” he said. “When I heard that you refused Trowbridge’s money and rejected his plea for retraction, I pretended I did not already know I had married the most remarkable woman in England.”
She put her hand in his and held it. Then she gathered the torn pieces of the contract, crossed to the hearth, and fed them to the fire one quarter at a time. She watched each piece catch and curl and blacken, and when the last of it was ash, she turned back to him.
“Now,” she said. “We begin.”