“Oh, sit yourself down.” He reached for a plate and knife and began ladling marmalade onto a thick cut slice of bread. “All this frenzy over nothing. Calm yourself, Lady Linfield, afore you bring on another fainting fit. Let us just speak plainly to one another, I’m tired of all this obfuscation.” He gestured with the dripping knife, thus splattering the tablecloth with a multitude of orange blobs. “As gobblepricks go, I cannot say I was captivated by Mrs Cluett’s talents. ’Tis said she was once famed for the bliss she afforded a fellow by sucking his sugar-stick, but I fear her talents are lost with her youth. I was not risen to a stand, and therefore I will not be availing myself of her company again.”
Jane’s cheeks bloomed red over his coarseness. “You won’t?” she asked, dubiously.
“No.”
She regarded him thoughtfully, as he chewed and swallowed, and washed the repast down with a long swallow of tea. “I’m not rightly sure I understand you.”
“You understand me.” He threw her a foxy grin. “My use of flash language does not make me so incomprehensible.
Jane sat. “But you refuse to send her away.”
Linfield started on another slice of bread. “Best damn marmalade ever. Love it, I do. Mama’s best…” He chewed and swallowed. “Janie, George is an old friend, and the weather is awful inclement. It wouldn’t be very Christian of me to turn them out into the cold now, would it? Particularly as they have no place to go, and we’re only weeks away from the Christmas season. I’m sure you don’t wish to see them dead in a dell because we couldn’t find it in our hearts to be forgiving. I think you’re not such an unkind a woman as that.”
Lord, but he was a manipulative devil.
“Shall we speak of other things? I thought I might attend you tonight.”
“Tonight!”
“Yes. You are, of course, rightly aggrieved by my neglect of you. So, I will attend you in your chamber.”
“My chamber. Linfield my room is blackened, the bed burned down to cinders.”
“Well… whatever chamber you please. There are rooms aplenty in this place, either move yourself or Miss Wakefield to another of them.”
“But I should wish to be close by her,” Jane protested.
Linfield prevaricated by producing a kerchief and daubing his lips clean. “Janie, it need only be for one night, then you may bunk together if it pleases you. I can understand these things. How one might seek companionship during the night. It is something I’m partial to myself. Which I suppose brings me to another delicate topic. Suppose we speak about the arrangements in more detail.”
“Detail?”
“Yes, dearest.” He washed the words down with another swallow of tea. “I realise that you might not be terribly informed…. Might be best if I readied your mind for the occasion.”
“My mind?”
Jane was clearly either so befuddled or angered by him that her voice had been almost stolen from her.
“In case you have a preformed notion of how things should proceed, based on what you have heard, or been told, by…”
“By?”
“Your mother? She might have hinted at what to expect… in the marriage bed.”
“No,” Jane said. “No, she did not…. Well, perhaps a little.” It was obvious to Eliza that Jane added the latter realising that her knowledge of the marital act must be seen to have come from somewhere. If Linfield was at all acquainted with Jane’s mother, he would not have proposed or ever believed her a source of such wisdom, Mrs Morley being as hard and brittle as an old broom handle, a sour spendthrift, and not the sort to spare an anxious bride some kindly, or even informative words.
“Well, dismiss whatever nonsense you’ve been told. It won’t be like that.”
“It won’t?”
Poor Jane, she was clearly addled to her core.
“No. Well, perhaps a little. But, not really. That is to say, our,” —here Linfield made a strange arrangement with his fingers— “our bodily parts will still come together.” His complexion became increasingly peaky as he spoke. “However—”
“Are you trying to ask me to do what that woman was doing to you?” Jane blurted.
Linfield rose to his feet. “Hen’s teeth, woman! Good God, no.” He smashed his cup down onto its saucer, so that it made an appalling clatter. “I would never. Gracious…” He seemed most overcome, one hand flying to his hair and combing through the unruly strands of it, and the other forming a death grip around the handle of the cup he’d likely just cracked. “It’s not the sort of thing one asks from one’s wife…. Not at all. I’m not a monster, you know.”
He backed away from her, as if she were some kind of hereto unidentified beast.
