Chapter Ten
CHAPTER TEN
Taio handles the upset of his mother’s appearance—and our nightly experiments in vulnerability and true nakedness—by doing what men always do. He hides behind business.
Though in fairness, I would do it too, if I could.
But my business is back in New York, and I haven’t yet worked out how to tell Tess about my change in circumstance, so no hiding in convenient jobs for me.
“There are matters I must attend to,” he tells me each morning with what seems like stiff and strange courtesy to me.
Because every night, he loses himself in my arms. Every night, we find new ways to tear each other apart.
Every night I am more in love. Every night it’s as if there is less and less that separates us. As if these different bodies we wear are entirely beside the point.
I am beginning to loathe the dawn, like some kind of emotional vampire.
Because no matter how early I wake, by the time I make it to the breakfast table, Taio has retreated once more behind his aristocratic veneer.
Perfect suit. Perfectly shaved and showered.
A hint of that spicy scent of his to haunt me as he sits and reads the newspaper with his bit of toast and olive oil, and his coffee black.
I eat churros and chocolate and try not to gaze at him too much. I want to confront him. I want to parse what his mother said and interrogate the difference in his nighttime and daytime behavior. I want to crawl in his lap and give him something to think about besides the dry financial news.
But I have never been a wife before. Much less a marchioness.
Maybe these staid and proper daytimes are par for the course. Maybe that’s why this house has separate bedrooms for the Marquess and his wife.
Maybe these rich people aren’t allowed to act as if they like getting naked with each other and this is one more obvious rule I can’t figure out, coming from my lowly beginnings the way I do.
I decide to try something completely new to me as a person.
I become accommodating.
“Where are you again?” Tess asks me over the phone after one such breakfast. I’ve had hours to brood about it after Taio took himself off to his offices with a stern look and the ever-so-slightly chiding I will see you, cosita .
Later . In case I am tempted to get any ideas.
“I’ve never known you to stay away from New York for so long. ”
“I know,” I say. I look around these new, separate rooms they moved me to, adjacent to Taio’s. I might end up every night in his bed, but we must maintain the pretense that sleeping in my own bed could occur at any time. “Attending that ball really upped our profile.”
“Oh, it did. We’re getting more calls than we can handle.”
But she laughs, because she loves a challenge, which is only one of the reasons I love her.
And I discover that I am something like ashamed to tell her the truth.
Not the whole truth—since that would involve both Taio and my wedding and the fact that the man she thinks is our boss not only is not, but we have no boss either because I made him up—but the fact that I’m on something of a holiday.
Because I never take a break. I haven’t had a vacation in ten years.
It’s always been a point of pride. If I tell Tess I’m relaxing, she’ll assume that’s a cry for help and alert the local authorities.
I can’t tell her that. I can’t. “If you need to hire support staff, the budget can support that,” I say instead.
“Finally,” Tess breathes. “I’ve always wanted my very own minions.”
The truth is, I hardly know what to do with myself. I spend the first few days as Taio’s wife wafting about like a lady of leisure. A real marchioness, I tell myself.
I take walks through olive groves and vineyards. I try to read books in languages I only wish I spoke. I flip through European magazines. I swim in the heated pools, curl up in the cozy armchairs in a variety of salons, and gaze out the window.
By the third day, I am deeply bored.
By the seventh, I am considering building a tree fort in the olive groves with the various bits of wood I’ve found littered about the place, but I suspect that this is the sort of lowbrow, non-aristocratic urge that his mother is concerned about.
I wander around the absurdly gigantic house until I find my husband. He is tucked away in what I assume is his office suite—this, too, looks like it could double as a throne room with no file cabinets or copiers in sight—looking through stacks of documents.
He glances up when I enter and once again I watch his face run the gamut of expressions. First, and I don’t think I flatter myself, I see pure delight. Then something more like consternation.
And now this, the stern gaze he reserves for me.
“I need something to do,” I announce without preamble. “I’m not used to not working. I’m becoming nonfunctional.”
A frown appears between his dark brows. “The role of marchioness is in and of itself a job.”
“Then you will have to tell me what that job entails. Because I have done all the wafting about that I can bear, and will soon start attempting scientific experiments in the garden sheds that might or might not involve an explosion or two.” I don’t know how to make things blow up, but surely that’s what the internet is for.
I smile sweetly at him. “What will the neighbors say?”
“We have no neighbors in any real sense.” Of course his tone is repressive. “There are a great many kilometers between this house and the next.”
I have taken to wearing the absurd lounging pajamas that are set out for me, because I take immersion in a role seriously, and lean one silken hip against his doorjamb. “That sounds like a challenge.”
“I assure you, it is not.”
But if I hope that he will be the one to take me by the hand and teach me how to bear his title, I’m disappointed. He passes me off to his stone-faced mayordomo, who looks me up and down as if she doubts very much that I have what it takes.
“Let me guess,” I say as she walks me into yet another part of the house I haven’t seen before—the kitchens and, beyond them, a hall of what seems to be offices. Hers being the first and largest. “You too believe that I am a stain upon the family name.”
Salma pauses as she goes to sit behind her desk and I realize she’s waiting for me to sit first. When I do, she follows, and delicately clears her throat.
“You are the Marchioness of Patrias, Madam,” she says in her matter-of-fact way. Her gaze meets mine, steady and knowing at once. “Save the Marquess himself, whose opinion about this family could possibly matter more than yours?”
And that introduces me to life as a grand lady of a grand house.
And I like solving mysteries. It’s all about collecting and sorting through details. Deciding how to weight them, how to interpret them, and how to use them to build a picture.
Running a house like this is much the same.
Especially because the house spends part of each month being open to the public, which requires a whole different set of details to follow and keep on top of.
By the end of the second week, I can admit to myself that it would be possible to live like this after all.
Because an estate like this is made up not simply of the people who own the house, but all of the great many people who work here.
The land. The rentals. The tours. There are relationships with locals to maintain, regulations to follow, and an endless variety of ways to handle these things depending on the goals of different months and seasons.
Is it a harvest period? Is it a heavy tourist period?
Are there repairs that cannot be delayed?
Is there outreach that can be undertaken with the locals to try to lower any animosity about the resources a huge house like this consumes?
No two days are ever the same and I discover I like being good at something else.
As if there’s more to me than the thing I decided I’d be good at when I was eighteen and scared.
I tell my husband this later that same night when I meet him out on one of the balconies before dinner, a nightly custom I have also come to love.
“Don’t tell your mother,” I say as he hands me a drink, something fizzy and nonalcoholic, “but I think I will be an excellent marchioness.”
“I would prefer that we not discuss my mother,” he replies, and his face looks almost tortured as he pulls me closer, setting his mouth to mine.
I make a note to wear this particular red dress—another magical addition to my grand lady wardrobe—more often.
And when we finally get to our dinner, we eat it cold, wrapped up in blankets and each other before the fireplace in his room.
But the next day, after I wake naked in my husband’s bed, still giddy from the things he did to me the night before, and then another stern and silent breakfast, I realize that I’m into my third week of handling grand estate affairs. And my fifth month of pregnancy.
I stop halfway through getting dressed—because lounging pajamas are for ladies of leisure, not competent marchionesses, as Salma did not dare say directly but I feel she implied —and let those facts press into me.
Particularly the latter.
My baby will be here soon. Very soon.
And there is one matter that needs to be addressed directly before that happens.
So after I dress as impeccably as possible—something that is not hard when my wardrobe expands on its own, every piece a work of art—I do not go to the little sitting room attached to these quarters that Salma indicated was the marchioness’s office. I seek out his mother instead.
Francette lives in one of the newer parts of the house. Salma, who finally took me on a real tour of the entire house and all the ground, told me that the wing that once stood here burned down in the nineteen-twenties and they only rebuilt it twenty years or so ago, to modern standards.
It is kept out of the tours, the mayordomo told me.
Because it does not give that historical punch that the punters want? I asked. No coats of armor and random masterpieces?