Page 51 of A Tale of Two Dukes
Richard had left her alone all day, exactly as she had wished, and when he’d returned home, they’d dined with the boys, which had made serious conversation impossible; it had been difficult enough to retain her composure and speak normally as they all sat together, as if nothing at all was wrong.
But now the twins were in bed, she was alone with Richard, and she could avoid him no longer.
He looked exhausted, now that he too was no longer maintaining a cheerful facade for his sons’ benefit. They sat at table and confronted each other. It was very quiet; the wind had dropped and the only sounds were the shifting of the coals in the grate, the soft hissing of the flames.
‘What do you have to say to me, Viola?’ he asked her very softly.
‘I’m still not sure I know,’ she answered wearily.
‘What if I said that I could not find it in me to forgive you? What if I said that you had shown yourself no better than Edward in your manipulation of me, and that I must after all leave you, and take the boys? It could be no surprise to you if I did so. Good God, Richard, what were you thinking?’
It was almost as though that was exactly what he’d expected her to say, what he’d been anticipating through the lonely night and this long day.
He let out an inarticulate sound of distress.
‘Oh, Viola, my heart… I could not think to blame you, or try to persuade you, or, God forbid, trick you further if you decide you cannot bear this. I am done with all that. We are married, but if you do not love me and cannot get past this, our union is nothing more than a piece of paper. I was a damn fool ever to think otherwise. The direction of your life, and the boys’, is yours entirely.
It must be. You will go where you wish to go, and spend your time in the manner you wish to spend it, and share your existence with whomever you wish.
I hope it will be me, but I can make no demands on you.
I have not earned that right, if indeed any man ever has it over another free being, but forfeited it by my folly.
I will not try to sway you now by speaking of my feelings.
You would be right to say that they are no concern of yours. ’
‘Despite the fact that I am carrying your child?’
He had not touched her since she had told him, but he did now, very gently, and after a second’s indecision, she did not push him away.
He had moved his chair closer to hers, his hand lay lightly on her belly and there were tears in his eyes, she saw.
‘Despite that, my love. You have no reason to trust me, I am aware, but please know that the last thing I will ever do is to exert the rights the law gives me over you. I did not do this bloody stupid thing in order to get you in my power, though I know it must seem that I did. You are nobody’s possession. Nor are your children.’
‘Our children,’ she corrected him, and now she saw a fragile hope flicker in his bleak face.
It was time she made her feelings clear to him. ‘When I considered whether I should marry you from my own point of view – because after all, your aunt’s will was your problem, not mine – the reasons I could raise against it were two: your reputation, and the loss of my independence.’
‘Only two, when there could be so many more?’ he asked, with some return to his old sardonic manner. It was a fragile cloak he wore, she realised, to protect himself from hurt. ‘Well, that’s encouraging.’
‘Just those two, and you have answered both of them now, it seems. I did not ever think that I could not marry you because I did not love you, Richard. I always loved you. I never stopped. I loved you even as I stood at the altar half-hating you.’
He was hesitant, torn as she could see between hope and disbelief.
His life so far had given him little reason to believe himself loveable, and it might take years to put that right.
She had been luckier in that respect – at least she had her sisters, and the boys, and Emily, even if her relationship with her mother would always be prickly.
‘And my actions have not killed your love for me?’
She shook her head, and put her warm hand over his, where it still rested.
‘Love is not so easily snuffed out, even if reason tells me it should be. I seem to have a gift for constancy. If years spent thinking you were a rake, a libertine, a murderer and even a traitor did not destroy my love, your recent actions could not. And I think – I should not say this, for it will give you a dreadful conceit of yourself – I think that in some respects, you were right.’
His smile was rueful, incredulous, as if he could not begin to understand his luck. ‘How could that be, love? I came perilously close to ruining everything.’
‘Your ridiculous scheme gave me an excuse to marry you. And I needed an excuse. However much I have pined for you for all this time, I am not sure how I would have come to that point by myself, if you had made me a more conventional offer. I have my pride, and Edward, as you know well, crushed it utterly. I had enough with him, more than enough, of sitting at home waiting for a husband to notice me, to treat me decently and give me permission to have any sort of life of my own. The hurt runs deep – it would always have been hard for me to trust you unless you had found a way of showing me I could, beyond mere words of wooing. Before yesterday, you have not been the most open and communicative of men, have you? And more than that, no man had touched me, from the moment you left me till you came back. How could I set all that wasted devotion, as I saw it, aside, thinking as I did that you had lain with half the women in London in the years between, when I had been so lonely? And yet I wanted to, with all my heart.’
‘But in my clumsy desperation, I made flippant reference to your fertility, and I should have known that that would wound you,’ he said soberly, clearly determined to have everything out in the open at last. ‘I thought you’d realise that of course I meant both of us – the way Edward tried to use us both as little more than breeding livestock, the hope that we could somehow set it right.
But I could not expect you to know how I had never stopped thinking of you, day after day after day, months, and weary years, wondering what you were doing, if you were happy, aware that I was missing so much, aware of the years with you and Ned and Robin that Edward and circumstance had cheated me of.
I knew that I had no place in your lives – that one or all of you could be gravely ill or die, and nobody would think to tell me, for weeks, forever.
It drove me a little mad at times. I could not dare to hope that you were feeling anything similar.
Indeed, I should be generous enough to hope you weren’t. I hate to think of you in such pain.’
‘But I was, my dearest love,’ she told him unsteadily.
‘I have been happy with the boys, and shared moments with them that can never be restored to you, both while Edward was alive and after he died. Their first steps, their first words – I will not torture you with the recitation of it all. They have been the joy of my life. But always the shadow has been there – that it was wrong, what he did to us, and no less wrong because we lay down together with our eyes open, as we thought. I was eighteen and you were one and twenty – what did we know of what we were losing, of what he was taking from us permanently because of his own selfish obsession? He could easily have lived another twenty years, at your expense, and mine. I could have died, as you said, without ever seeing you again, or you could have, and yes, nobody would even have told me of it, because he had made sure we could be nothing to each other when we should have been everything.’
‘Can it ever be mended?’ he asked her unsteadily. ‘When you describe it like that – and justly – it makes me doubt that it ever can. And I have done nothing but make matters worse, in my desperation and folly.’
‘We can try to mend it,’ she said firmly. ‘We can spend the rest of our lives together trying to mend it, every precious day that we are granted, whether our time is long or short.’ And then she rose, and came to him, and kissed him.
It was the first kiss they had shared in almost twelve years, and after a second of surprise, his lips opened under hers, and their eager mouths explored each other, memories flooding back of how they had loved to do this once, of how natural and perfect it had once been, and could be again.
It was a closer union that the joining of their bodies had yet been, and said far more than all their words. It was everything.
In a moment, it was too much, too piercingly sweet, and they broke apart, overwhelmed, and held each other tightly, bodies pressed together, faces close but lips not quite touching. It was impossible to live at this pitch for long.
‘Just one stipulation you had, madam, in our marriage settlement, and you have broken it after a mere month or two,’ he teased her with mock-sternness, his voice unsteady but his hands warm and sure on her body.
‘It is written in legal ink for all to see that I should never kiss you. I did not break it; I will always remind you – you did.’
‘I did,’ she agreed readily, ‘and I mean to do it again. And again and again.’ She suited her actions to her words, pressing little kisses to his lips, his cheeks and eyes. She could not easily have said if she or he was laughing or crying as she did so.
‘You told me – in church, my wicked lady! – that I could fuck you but not kiss you. It must have been obvious, I suppose, that I was perfectly ready to do either or both on the spot.’
‘I lied,’ she said, smiling. ‘You can do both. Indeed, I hope you will. I insist.’
‘I’m always eager to fulfil your expectations,’ he said as she moved to straddle him, and they came together in naked honesty at last.