Page 21 of A Tale of Two Dukes
Viola had read once – having had a great deal of time for reading in the last few months since her marriage to Edward – of a French king who had believed he was made of glass.
She understood that this was a pitiful delusion, a symptom of some illness of the mind, but the idea had lodged in her brain all the same.
It was not that she was afraid that she would shatter into a thousand pieces, which had been the king’s great terror, for in her bleakest moods, that would almost have been a relief: oblivion.
No, she feared that she was becoming invisible.
It was increasingly easy to believe this, when days passed with only the briefest of conversation with another human being.
Sometimes, even on the rare occasions when she was in company, she was afraid to speak, and did not, in case it became horribly plain that, while she could hear her own voice, echoing in her head, others could not.
What would she do then? If she screamed, and she felt like screaming, nobody would hear her.
Edward’s visits to her bed did not mend matters.
Sometimes, at night, she found herself formulating the thought that she must be real because he put his hands on her, because he had marital relations with her, was doing so now as she lay there under him, and this was no help at all.
It hardly made her a human being, just some sort of passive vessel.
She wasn’t even sure she wanted him to stop.
It wasn’t bad . It wasn’t anything. It passed the time, and she had so much time.
She knew that her state of mind could not be healthy.
He didn’t speak to her, barely said a word, but he did try to please her.
She thought – something else she’d read, or heard whispered – that he probably believed that women could not conceive unless they experienced orgasm.
To her, just using female common sense and looking at the world around her and the casual couplings, not to mention violent assaults, that so often seemed to bear unwelcome fruit, this seemed unlikely.
But then she was not the desperate one. If her husband had read that in order to fall pregnant, a woman must paint herself orange and run naked around the grounds at midnight, she had no doubt that she’d be freezing her toes off on a nightly basis.
But he hadn’t heard that – nothing so outlandish, though she suspected that some of the peculiar dishes she, and she alone, was served at dinner were not just there to keep her fed, but had another purpose.
She was beginning to hate the sight of eggs, however ingeniously they were cooked.
So, he tried to please her when he was in her bedchamber.
Diligently. Doggedly. Sometimes, he achieved his goal through sheer persistence; sometimes, she pretended, to speed matters along.
Sometimes, recently, she’d helped him gain his objective by imagining that the man touching her was Mr Richard Armstrong instead.
That worked. So she’d already been unfaithful to Edward, in her own mind.
But that was all. Did kissing constitute infidelity?
Were there rules on such matters? She could hardly ask anyone.
Because now, since Mr Armstrong had arrived, since he had been so kind to her and they had kissed, Viola was walking on air.
She was giddy with happiness. She knew that it was wrong, she was refusing to think about what might happen next, but she could not deny all she was feeling inside.
All she could do was struggle to conceal it, most of all from Edward.
Not that her husband appeared to notice her moods – he hadn’t seemed to be aware of her profound unhappiness, so it seemed unlikely that he’d notice the recent joyful change in her, which was all due to Richard’s presence.
Once they’d kissed, there didn’t seem to be any reason not to do it again.
She would never have imagined that so much time could be spent, nor so much pleasure taken, from kissing.
Nothing in her previous experience with Edward had prepared her for this; he rarely kissed her, and when he did, it could not be described as magical.
Sometimes, she and Richard rode out to some distant part of the estate and found a secluded spot where they could embrace in private, but more often, they walked sedately through the gardens, side by side, not touching, to one of the distant summerhouses or follies, of which there were many dotted here and there.
Winterflood had an abundance of gardeners to maintain its splendour, but none of them were doing any work outdoors with the weather so cold.
There was little chance of being interrupted, and they flattered themselves that they were being careful and discreet.
It was chilly in the places they found, of course, but they kept warm in each other’s arms. Though they talked, they didn’t speak about the future – they didn’t take their intimacy any further – they just kissed for hours.
Richard kissed her hands, worshipping them in minute detail, and pressed his lips against the blue veins at her wrists with an intensity that almost made her swoon.
She did the same to him, dropping soft kisses into his palms, sometimes just holding his hand against her cheek with her eyes closed and his arm about her.
They explored each other’s faces with lips and fingers, and sometimes, as when he kissed her eyelids or her hair, his gentleness brought hot tears to her eyes, though in general, his presence made her purely happy, happier than she had ever been in her life.
The contrast between Edward, who barely seemed to see her, and Richard, who saw her as no one else ever had before, was so overpowering that she dared not dwell too much upon it, or on what was to become of them both.
Nothing, she assumed, on the odd occasions she allowed herself to think about it seriously.
This could not last, and nothing could come of it, and eventually, he would go away, back to his mysterious life out in the world.
She would be left here with Edward. At least she’d have some memories, some reason to believe that she existed. Or had existed, once.
She told Richard everything – all about her family, their characters, from her parents and Sabrina down to tiny Bianca.
It was trivial stuff, she thought, and must appear all the more so to him, who’d journeyed so widely and seen so much, but he seemed fascinated by all of it, because it was so different from his own life.
His only sibling was his older half-brother, and their relationship, he told her, had never been close.
Far from it, since Tarquin was a bully and a person not to be trusted; she knew because he had told her so that his brother was not at all happy Edward had married again, and must be counted her enemy.
Both his parents were long dead, and he had few other relatives apart from a terrifying old aunt, his mother’s sister, and some older Yorkshire cousins he barely knew.
He didn’t talk much about his day-to-day life now, but she knew he had some training as a lawyer and was employed by a City firm to oversee their foreign interests.
His situation involved a great deal of travelling, and he was happy enough to talk about that, making her laugh with his descriptions of his comical misadventures in various far-flung locations.
But as for his job itself, he said that it was very dull, consisting mostly of peering at goods in warehouses – which were always either freezing cold or hideously hot – and pretending he knew what the great piles of things were supposed to look like.
And smell like, for that matter. Often, they did smell most unpleasant.
He could read a ledger, he said – he had learned, and he had developed an instinct for when people were trying to cheat him, which they usually were.
But all that was boring and he’d much rather talk about her.
She knew he desired her – her experience over the last eight months had taught her that much, at least, the mechanics of the human body – and she found that she desired him.
She blushed when their eyes met, she felt dizzy when she knew she would see him soon, and every inch of her body tingled when he touched her, or even when he looked at her across a room.
She felt heat pooling between her legs when she was with him, and even when she was not, and touched herself when she was alone late at night, imagining he was touching her, was with her in her bed, holding her.
Wishing he could be. That was a new experience for her.
Her intimate life with Edward was not by any means unpleasant – he was experienced enough to be able to make her body react to his touch, even if her mind and her heart were left entirely unaffected – but she’d never been aroused by the mere sight of him, nor did his attentions make her want to caress him in return, or cling to him, or kiss every inch of him.
He didn’t seem to want that either. Probably excessive passion was not required of a duchess.
Not this duchess, at any rate. Perhaps the previous one…
Viola thought later that it was possible that this stalemate would have continued until Richard was obliged to leave to go back to work, and all of their lives – many people’s lives – would have been very different, if Lord Marchett had not come to visit his old friend at Winterflood that cold February.