Chapter 11
Colin lifted her without a warning.
One arm went around her, and the world tilted. Then she was sitting on the edge of the writing desk by the window, with the inkstand rattling behind her and her feet hanging above the floor. He stepped between her knees as though the whole arrangement had been agreed upon months ago.
Her hands were still in his shirt. She had not let go. She was not certain she could.
He kissed her again, slower this time. His palm slid up her thigh over the black gauze, and every sensible thought she had ever had flew out of her head like water out of a cracked jug.
It was the strangest discovery of her life.
She had read about this in books that would have gotten her sent to her grandmother’s, but the books had been wrong about all of it, because none of them had mentioned that a person could want a thing and be frightened of it in the same breath.
His mouth moved to her jaw, then under it.
I could let this happen. I could simply say nothing and let it happen. It would be perfectly proper because he is my husband, and nobody in England would say a word.
“Wait.”
He stopped instantly.
That was the part she would think about afterward, lying awake in a strange bed in a strange house.
Not the desk, not his hand, not the sound he had made against her mouth.
It was the fact that he stopped as though somebody had cut a rope, withdrew his hands, and stepped back.
He stood there, his chest heaving, and waited.
“Explain,” he demanded.
“I can’t do this.”
“You’ll have to do better than that.”
“I know.” Leonora slid off the desk, pulled the wrapper closed, and made herself look at him. “I know we are married. I know exactly what I agreed to in the chapel this morning, and I know what every woman in the gallery believes is happening in this room right now.”
“But…?”
“But I will not lie with you as long as I’m not in love with you.”
Nobody spoke for a moment.
“Say that again?”
“I will not lie with you as long as I am not in love with you,” Leonora repeated. “And I am not, not yet, because I have known you for eight days and I have spent four of them frightened of you. So, no, not tonight.”
Colin turned away from her and put both hands on the back of a chair.
“I don’t need love in my life,” he said.
“I’ve done without it for fifteen years and found it no great hardship.
I don’t want it. I have a title to keep out of the courts and a child upstairs who needs a name.
That’s what this is, and I’d be doing you a kindness if I said it plainly.
I shouldn’t care for you, Duchess. I’d rather not. ”
It should have hurt more than it did.
Leonora stayed where she was and found, to her surprise, that she did not believe him.
He has said that four times tonight in four different ways. A man who feels nothing does not have to keep announcing it.
“You don’t have to love me back.”
He turned around.
“I mean it. I’m not asking you for anything.
I’m not going to weep at breakfast or leave you notes or ask you what you’re thinking.
” Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect.
“But I will not give my body to a man I don’t care for.
I will not be talked into it, and I will not be bought into it with nightgowns, however beautiful they are. ”
“That isn’t why I sent them.”
“I know. That’s the problem.” Leonora pulled the wrapper tighter, which did nothing at all.
“A man who wanted only an heir and a name for his daughter would have sent me a sensible trousseau. You sent four nightgowns and seven words, and one of the four gowns was never in that shop, which means you described it to another modiste on Bruton Street out of your own head.”
Colin did not answer that.
“So no, Your Grace, I don’t believe you feel nothing. I believe you have decided to feel nothing, which is a different thing and a great deal more work.”
“You’ve known me for eight days.”
“Four of which I have spent in a room with you, and I have watched you very closely in every one of them, because I was frightened of you, and being frightened of a person is remarkably good for the attention.” She lifted her chin. “I notice things. It’s the only accomplishment I have.”
“And what have you noticed?”
“That you have not once looked at the baby without checking first whether anybody is watching you do it.”
His eyes flashed.
For a moment, Leonora thought she had gone too far, and then she saw that she had not gone too far at all, that she had simply gone somewhere nobody had been in a long while and that he had no map for it.
“Ask me for something else,” he said. “Anything else. Ask me for the London townhouse. Ask me for a carriage of your own and horses to go with it, and I’ll have them at the door tomorrow.”
“I don’t want a carriage.”
“Everybody wants a carriage.”
“I want a week of you at the table in the morning,” Leonora said. “That’s all. That is the entire price, and it’s a great deal cheaper than horses.”
“That’s not a smaller thing than a carriage.”
“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”
She crossed the room and opened the connecting door for him, and stood holding it, and hoped very much that he could not see her hand shaking on the edge of it.
“I’m sorry, husband,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Colin did not move. “One week.”
Leonora kept her hand on the door. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’ll give you one week to prepare, wife.” His voice had gone flat and cold and absolutely certain. It was the voice from the corridor, the voice that had told her to sit down at his table. “And then I’ll claim what’s mine.”
She had a great many answers to that, and she said none of them because she had just seen his hand. It was still on the back of the chair, wrapped so tightly around the wood that it had gone white across the knuckles.
“Then you have a week to give me a reason,” Leonora threw back. “I would start at once, if I were you. You’ve used up rather a lot of tonight.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he went past her through the door, and she shut it behind him, and turned the key.
Colin did not sleep.
That was ordinary enough. He had not slept properly since a wicker basket had appeared on his doorstep, and before that he had not slept properly for a decade. He had long ago stopped considering it as a difficulty and started considering it as a fact about himself, like his eye.
What was not ordinary was that he could hear her.
The walls of this house were three feet of Elizabethan stone and had kept out weather and creditors and two centuries of unwelcome relations, but none of that helped, because the green door was no longer painted shut.
He had ordered it eased. He had stood in his own hall four days ago and said Have it eased to a woman with a slate.
Now, there was a quarter inch of air between his room and hers, and through it came the sound of her pacing up and down.
She’ll wear a track in the floorboards.
Colin got up and stood at the window in the dark.
He had handled it badly; he was aware of that. But being aware of it was no use to him whatsoever, because he had no notion of what handling it well would have looked like.
He had wanted her. He had wanted her from the moment she stepped around the screen in the modiste’s shop and probably a good while before.
He had gone into her room tonight fully intending to have what he had been imagining for six days, but then she had said one word, and he had let go of her as though she had burned him.
That was what troubled him. He had stopped without deciding to.
Fifteen years he had spent making certain that nothing in this house moved unless he moved it.
Every debt, every servant, every acre, every arrangement, all of it held in one hand and held tight, because the alternative was what his father had been—a man who loved a woman until it curdled and came out the other side as something with a knife in it.
Today, a lady of one-and-twenty in a black gown had said wait, and his hands had come off her before she finished speaking.
That is not control. That is the opposite of control. That is a rope in somebody else’s hand.
The pacing next door stopped. Colin stood very still and found himself listening for it to start again. When it did not, he somehow felt worse.
Then he heard the bed take her weight, the small ordinary sound of a woman turning over, and after a while nothing more.
The last carriage went down the drive at a quarter past one. He heard it from his own window, and gave it another half hour, and then went down through his house in his shirt with a candle in his hand, past a gallery that had been swept and shuttered and was quite dark again.
He got as far as the hall and stopped, because there was a sliver of light where there ought not to have been one.
The drawing room. Somebody had left four candles burning in it, and the whole yellow square of it lay out across the flags like a spill.
He stood for a moment and looked at it.
Mrs. Pike would have said it was the maids.
It was not the maids. Nobody had been in that room all day; the whole business had been held in the gallery, and this room had been shut up since the morning.
Somebody had come in here on the way to the stairs, on purpose, and lit four candles in an empty room and left them burning.
She lights up rooms. That is what she does. She has been in this house for half a day, and she has already started lighting it up.
He put them out, one by one, because a house could burn.
Then he went back up for his boots, and stepped out of the house, and crossed the lawn in the dark, and climbed thirty feet of rope ladder to a room built for a boy of fifteen, and sat in it until dawn broke.