‘It isn’t, really. And I think it would be bearable, perhaps, if I had a child to love. But I don’t think there’s going to be a child, Richard.’
‘You’ve not been married a year. Just a few months. It’s still so soon – too soon.’ He did not like to hear himself saying these words, as if he was urging her back to Edward’s bed, which was the last thing he wanted to do, God knows. But if he didn’t want that, what did he want? Nothing he could ever have.
‘But Edward has been married twice before, and he has always wanted an heir. Needed one, to keep the title in the family and away from your brother, whom he so dislikes. He can hardly have failed to… he does not fail to now. I don’t think he’s had the uncommon bad luck to marry three infertile women in succession. I think it’s him. Surely, he must suspect as much himself.’
‘It’s unendurable!’ he said passionately and confusedly, for just as she was eighteen, he was only one and twenty, and then he kissed her again, and they clung together.
11
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’tbad. 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 thenshewas 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.
12
His Lordship was Edward’s oldest friend, in every possible sense of the word. He was, in fact, only a year or two senior to the Duke, and therefore barely fifty, but, as Richard said, he was the sort of man who must have been born pompous, and bored his nursemaids witless in the cradle.
The noble pair had undertaken the Grand Tour together, round about the time of the American Revolution, and remained as thick as inkle-weavers ever since. The Earl had even written a book on the unique experience, a weighty tome, and had it privately published in lavish, gold-tooled binding. There were several presentation copies in the Winterflood library, many of them with the pages still uncut. In anticipation of the gentleman’s arrival, Viola had attempted out of curiosity to read one of them, but had lost her will to live among the stately, relentlessly self-regarding paragraphs within a few moments of picking it up. It didn’t signify much; she’d met the Earl briefly before, and knew that he had never in his life cared to know a woman’s opinion about anything, or even admitted that she might have one. He’d be as likely to ask a table or a chair what it thought about the current political upheavals and the chances of peace. He was married, and had a great number of children and grandchildren, and they all had her heartiest sympathy, especially his long-suffering wife.
One evening, the two old friends had been left together over their port, while Viola withdrew to sit alone by the drawing-room fire, bored, but less so than she would have been in their company. Richard had also tactfully left the older men to enjoy each other’s conversation and reminisce about their shared past and unimaginable youthful adventures. He had some urgent work to do, he said – papers to look over. He’d kissed the Duchess passionately but all too briefly in a dark corner and then really had gone off to his dull task. He’d said, and she reluctantly agreed, that they dared not risk being caught together in a compromising situation, all the more because unlike Edward, who noticed nothing, Lord Marchett seemed sharp, and had already worried them both by the pronounced coldness of his manner towards them, and his penetrating gaze that seemed to follow them about and judge them harshly.
She’d been reading a novel by Miss Burney earlier in the day, and most provokingly put it down somewhere; now, she wanted it to help while away the long evening, and could not find it anywhere. She’d already looked in the library – not on the crowded shelves, that would have taken days, but on all the tables. It wasn’t in the hall or any of the rooms she used most often, and she was sure she hadn’t taken it upstairs. Irritated with her own absent-mindedness, she thought she might as well search the one place in this part of the house where she hadn’t looked – the little antechamber to the dining room – before she admitted defeat. Positive it was a waste of time but reluctant to give up, she slipped quietly in there from the salon that adjoined it.
This antechamber was a curious little space, hardly more than a closet – it had two doors, and no furniture apart from a cushioned window seat that spanned the meagre width of the room. It would have been wonderfully cosy to sit with Richard there one cold afternoon, except that the chances of being observed when one emerged, dishevelled and guilty from kissing, into one of the adjoining rooms, or from outside through the tall sash window, were too great.
And her book was there on the seat. Someone – perhaps one of the servants – must have picked it up elsewhere and left it there by accident; she certainly hadn’t done it herself, however distracted she was by her current state of euphoria. She took it with a low sound of mingled exasperation and triumph, just about to leave and go back to the warmer drawing room, when she froze at the sound of voices. The door to the dining room wasn’t fully closed, she saw now, and it was possible to overhear Edward and Lord Marchett in conversation as they sat together at the table. She was no eavesdropper, and besides, nothing could be more tedious, since she’d have more than enough of their platitudes later – except that the subject of their discussion had her rooted to the spot with horror, then creeping closer to the crack to make sure she missed nothing.
‘I wonder that you have that tricksy young cub Armstrong to stay with you, Winterflood,’ the Earl grumbled in his habitually ponderous tones. ‘He’s just the kind of creature silly chits find handsome and lose their empty heads over, and I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, myself. Especially not if I had a flighty young wife, which, I am happy to say, I do not.’
‘He is my cousin,’ Edward said mildly, ‘and I have always been fond of him, unlike his complete scoundrel of a brother. And he of me, I like to think.’
‘That may be so, but he’s a damn sight fonder of your new duchess, and looking to make a damn fool of you by cuckolding you under your own roof, if you ask me.’
Viola felt a wave of horror wash over her, a rush of dizziness, but she could not move. She would have liked to flee, but realised that she must remain and hear all that was said – it was vital to know how far the man’s suspicions went, and whether her husband meant to pay any attention to them.
Edward said nothing, and Marchett ploughed on, clearly determined to shake him out of his strange apathy. ‘I’m not sure you understand me, old fellow,’ he rumbled with a touch of friendly contempt. ‘I’m telling you that your young cousin means to put a pair of horns on you, if he hasn’t already. And although the boy should be horsewhipped, and the ungrateful doxy turned out into the street in her shift, I’m bound to say that you deserve some share of the blame for not putting a stop to it long before this. You leave them alone for hours every day – of course they’ll be up to mischief. It’d take a far slower lad than that Armstrong not to take advantage of the situation. He’s probably got her skirts up around her waist in one of your best bedchambers as we sit here like a pair of blinking idiots.’
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s come to that yet,’ Edward said without any particular appearance of concern. ‘But you’re quite right; it will, and soon enough.’
