Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Your grace!” Kitty dipped into an exaggerated curtsy as soon as she spied her outside Gunther’s on the corner of Berkeley Square.
She had asked her friend to meet her here rather than Leo’s town house just yards away, because she had wanted to be able to talk to her openly without Letitia, Abigail, Emilia, and, most especially, Leo, within earshot.
“Now there are two words I never expected to say with regards to you!”
“That makes both of us.” Portia hugged her friend tight, needing the comfort of familiarity in her suddenly topsy-turvy world. “Promise me that you will never use them again in my presence either because I hate them.”
“Oh dear. Things are that bad, are they?”
“I’ve lost my purpose, my name, my independence, my legal right to make my own decisions, and my writing.
I’m married to a nobleman—which bothers me immensely—but also a noble man, which bothers me more.
Leo hides it well, but can no longer bear to be in the same room as me and has made it plain that he doesn’t trust me.
I have been forbidden to write anything that could be construed in any way as seditious and, to add insult to injury, I’m going to have to curtsy before our awful king tomorrow while I try and doubtless fail to act in a manner befitting a duchess.
Never mind that Mary Wollstonecraft would be turning in her grave to see how much I have betrayed my reforming principles, so what do you think? ”
“I think that you are very lucky not to be on a prison hulk bound for the Pacific.” Kitty had never been one to mince her words. “So perhaps you need to start counting your blessings, Portia, rather than your sorrows, as you do sound rather ungrateful when that man saved your life.”
“I am supremely grateful, that is the problem. I feel as beholden to him as he feels beholden to me for getting me my first criminal record. We are achingly polite to one another if we are forced to collide, but do our utmost to avoid one another otherwise. If we spend more than five minutes in one another’s company all we do is argue.
I’ve just spent five interminably long days in a carriage while he preferred to ride on his horse beside it, and it honestly felt like five months. ”
Thanks to the longer early summer evenings and even earlier mornings, they had made the journey from Bath to Mayfair in record time. Helped by the brevity of their rest stops and their cringingly awkward but blessedly short meals together watched by the rest of his family.
“Don’t you even collide at nighttime?” asked Kitty in her customary open way as she slapped her hands together and wiggled her brows. “What with you being married and all?”
“That is not something we do.”
“Recently or ever?” asked Kitty undeterred.
“Ever.” While Portia had initially thought that she was relieved by that, seeing as any sort of physical relationship wouldn’t have been wise if they were getting an annulment, she couldn’t help seeing his lack of interest in her doing her wifely duty as a sign of how much he now loathed her.
“Gracious.” Thankfully, Kitty didn’t say anything else until after the waiter had seated them and left them alone with menus.
“What happened to all that passion he had for you in the garden that night?” Because of course her friend, who could never remember where she was supposed to be or what she was supposed to be doing most of the time, remembered every minute detail of every anguished letter that Portia had sent her.
“That died once he discovered that I wrote for the enemy.”
“But still…” Her friend wasn’t convinced. “It is quite possible to be furious at someone and still love them madly. Feelings do not change that quickly.”
“His have. He is pleasant when we collide but not really himself most of the time. He’s more guarded and less …
Leo.” Portia couldn’t really define what that meant, even to herself, beyond that it wounded.
“At least he’s not the man I got to know before everything went to hell in a handcart.
I see glimmers of the real him once in a while, but they quickly disappear as soon as he remembers what I did to him, and I can always see precisely when he remembers because his brows furrow a split second before the shutters slam back down again. ”
In truth, she hadn’t seen any sign of the real Leo since their last altercation in his study after he had accused her of using her poison pen again. “I honestly think that if he could have stayed in a different inn to me every night this week too, he would have.”
“He never once came to your room?”
“Never once even walked me to the door despite his room being on the same floor.”
“And, let me guess, you never once ventured to his either?”
She had wanted to. Each time she heard his footsteps next door she had yearned to go to him and try to bridge the impasse between them but had stopped herself.
“I know where I am not welcome and I am sick and tired of the arguments,” Portia huffed as she threw up her palms. “So we are trapped in this horrible vicious cycle where neither of us are the least bit happy about any of it and we cover it up with politeness.”
“Could it be that his pride is simply dented? You did rebuff him, after all, when he practically offered you his heart on a plate. Although how you could resist him when you claimed that his kisses are so intoxicating that they made you weak at the knees is beyond me.”
“Do you know how to whisper?” Portia hissed as she hid her ferocious blush behind her menu. “The whole of Mayfair really doesn’t need to know of the nonsense I wrote to you in a moment of sheer madness.”
“Are you now claiming that his clever lips didn’t make you swoon?” It galled now how much her friend was quoting Portia’s own damning words back to her.
“I am simply trying to explain that he no longer wants me in that way. Or at all, in fact. If you must know, he’s already in the process of gathering all the evidence he needs to get our marriage annulled without feeling responsible that I’ll be transported to the Antipodes.”
“So it really is a loveless marriage of convenience?” A reality that clearly distressed the romantic dreamer that was Kitty. “Are you sure that there is no hope for you both to live happily ever after together? No spark? No glimmer?”
Portia still felt sparks but Leo clearly didn’t. “Not everyone gets to live happily ever after, Kitty. But he’ll be happier once he is rid of me and I’ll be happier when I get my old life back.”
Her friend scoffed. “And again, I will remind you that feelings do not work like that. You might think you will be happier with your old life back, but it is as plain as the nose on your face to me that you will be devastated to lose him.”
“I will not.” Yes she would! “I will be a little sad, of course, because he has always been decent to me and Leo is an affable, likeable sort most of the time, despite his obnoxious title and despotic need to bend everyone to his stubborn will. But he is a duke, for pity’s sake, and I am a reformer to my core and never the twain shall meet.
” Except when they had, it had been magical.
“There is such a thing as compromise, Portia. Perhaps if you find some middle ground, you will find a way to muddle through. Especially as you have clearly fallen in love with him.”
“I have not!”
“You have too!” Kitty yanked Portia’s menu down so that she could jab the air between them. “I have known you since we were both sixteen years old and I have never seen you so bothered by a man in all that time.”
“Of course I am bothered by him. I am accidentally married to him and need not be! Both for my sake and Leo’s.”
“Are you aware that something peculiar happens to your face each time you say his name? Or of how gushing you were about him in your letters despite all your lofty claims of twains never meeting? Or how fondly you speak of him despite his despotic need to bend everyone to his will or how utterly wretched your expression becomes every single time you mention the word annulment?”
“I am not made of stone, Kitty. This is an awful situation and I do feel wretched about it.”
“I think you are falling on your sword, Portia, because you think he wants to find a way out of the marriage, and you think you should want out of it because you have always been convinced that marriage wasn’t for you.”
“I value my independence and am, and always have been, wedded to the cause. I cannot pursue my political ambitions as some man’s chattel—.”
Kitty yawned loudly. “Oh for goodness’ sake!
People change, Portia, and what they want changes too.
It is perfectly acceptable for a grown woman of four-and-twenty to reevaluate what she thought she wanted as a child of sixteen!
You have grown up a lot since then and I sincerely doubt that you still believe that everything is as black-and-white as you did back then, do you?
” Her friend did not even give her time to nod at that irrefutable logic.
“Just as it is perfectly acceptable to be scared to dare to want different.”
“I don’t want different!” But perhaps she did and that really was a scary prospect. Especially with him.
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” said Kitty, waggling her finger.
“And, for the record, not every husband treats his wife like a chattel. Georgie’s doesn’t and neither does Lottie’s, so if our friends can find happiness with a partner and still lead fulfilling lives why can’t you?
They are living proof that it is possible to have it all. ”
A part of her wanted to believe that, no matter how unlikely or practical it would be in her case. “Neither of them are married to dukes nor constricted by the strict societal confines of being a duchess.”