He wanted Georgiana very badly. Not just her body, though he ached for that. He wanted her companionship, her respect, her love. And that need had only intensified since the night before. Ralph closed his eyes and relived his encounter with Sally Shaw. He no longer wished to think of her by name. He did not wish to picture her as she had appeared at the opera. He wanted only to remember how she had felt in his arms.
She was small and very shapely, her skin soft and incredibly smooth. He had not expected her to be naked. But he gloried now in the memory of his hands moving over her, learning some of the mysteries of a beautiful woman's body. And she was beautiful. It was a tragedy that she sullied that beauty with paint. He supposed that there was something extremely sordid about what had happened. He had coupled with a woman he did not know, a woman whom he had not even seen close. But it had not seemed sordid. She had offered herself sweetly and undemandingly. He had felt no fear of clumsiness or failure as he discovered inside her body the delights that he had dreamed of for several years.
She must be very skilled in her art. She had shown no signs of distaste or boredom, and no impatience to be rid of his weight or his person when it was all over. He found himself all impatience for the two days to pass until he could be with her again.
Did he feel guilty? He rather feared that he did not. He had been unfaithful to the wife he claimed to love, and he planned to repeat the infidelity, probably many times. He should despise himself. He had only to think of Georgiana to know that it was she he wanted. And could one want two women at the same time? He very much suspected that one could. Georgiana was beyond his reach at present. He was not quite sure why this was so. There was no nameable barrier between them, but there was a very real one, nevertheless.
He had begun their marriage all wrong, giving in to timidity just at the time when he had most needed to be decisive. He was sure that if he had consummated their marriage on their wedding night, they could have made the adjustment to married life and begun to build an affectionate relationship, even if the process had taken time. He might have been clumsy. He might have hurt her. It might have been a very unsatisfactory wedding night. But it could have been lived down. The fact that he had left her had paralyzed all future action. Not only for him. There had been that one occasion when he had been close again to making love to her. But she had lost her courage.
It was a ridiculous situation they found themselves in. Ralph was sure that most people of his acquaintance would hold him in the utmost contempt if they knew. Here he was, with the courage to hire himself a whore and take his pleasure with her, yet terrified into inaction by the mere thought of going to his wife, who slept nightly in a room adjoining his own. He really did not wish to dwell on the thought. It shook to the roots his new found sense of manhood.
Georgiana. His love. His biggest failure in life.
Chapter 13
The evening at Lord Standen's townhouse was indeed quite different from anything Georgiana had expected. Most of the guests were male, and most were considerably older than either she or Ralph. Normally she felt quite unselfconscious in a crowd and could converse with the greatest of ease with whoever happened to be near her. On this occasion, she felt out of her depth. This was no frivolous social occasion.
Yet Ralph, she noticed with some interest, seemed immediately to be in his element. After some introductions had been made on their entry into the drawing room, he drew her into a group that was talking animatedly about something to do with taxes and land reform. She did try at first to follow what was being said, but her attention quickly wandered.
It was caught by a young lady on the other side of the room, almost the only person in the room, in fact, noticeably below the age of thirty, with the exception of her and Ralph, and the man on whose arm the girl's hand rested. He was a slightly built young man with a thin, ascetic face and a shock of unruly black curls, a marked contrast to the blond beauty of his companion. Georgiana had been introduced to both a mere few minutes before, but she could not remember their names.
She caught the eye of the young lady, who smiled and beckoned her. Georgiana removed her hand from Ralph's arm and crossed the room.
"Do join us, Lady Chartleigh," the girl said. Her beauty was quite flawless, Georgiana saw. "I daresay you are rather dismayed to find yourself in company with so many dry old sticks. I must not say that very loudly, of course, but Standen's parties are not strong on excitement."
"Oh," Georgiana said. "I had not realized I was looking so bored."
The girl dimpled. "I used to be terrified of him," she said, "Until Nigel told me that my own opinions are quite as valuable as anyone else's. I must say I still stand in some awe of all this superior intellect. These people all make me feel the merest pea goose. But sometimes the most intelligent people are not the most practical people. Is that not true, Nigel?"
The dark young man looked gravely at her. "Quite so, my love," he said. "But they are also the most powerful people and ultimately will be able to do far more than you or I to set right the inequalities of our social system."
"Lady Chartleigh," the girl said, "I can see that you look quite bewildered. And how foolish of me to forget that when one is introduced to twenty new faces in fewer minutes, one is unlikely to remember a single one of them afterward. This is my husband, Nigel Broome. He is Standen's brother, you know, though you would never guess from looking at them, would you? I am Sylvia Broome. Like you, we have been married only a few months."
Georgiana relaxed. Here was someone as ordinary as herself, a girl of her own age, surely. In fact, now that she looked more closely, she seemed to remember having seen Sylvia Broome before, probably at some of the social events of the spring. She smiled and began to talk.
It was a strange evening. No cards. No dancing. No music. No charades, just conversation, and lots of it. But Georgiana had made friends with Sylvia and Nigel Broome by the end of it. They were a fascinating couple, she found. They were deeply devoted to each other although physically they seemed such a mismatch. Sylvia had a habit of prefacing much of what she said with "Nigel says..." And he never failed to listen with the whole of his attention to everything she said, no matter how seemingly frivolous.
What made them most fascinating to her, though, was the fact that they did not spend their days in fashionable idleness. Not for them the constant fight against boredom that she knew from her own life, and which had often led her into all sorts of troublesome scrapes. Nigel ran a school for destitute boys in their own home. They had twenty enrolled, though actual numbers fluctuated quite alarmingly, they confided. It was their sole ambition to give the boys enough of an education to enable them to get positions as servants or perhaps even clerks.
"When you see the reality of the situation, you quickly lose your larger ambitions," Nigel Broome explained. "We have no dream of reforming the world. If we can be of small help to a mere handful of boys so that they have some future instead of none at all, we will feel that our venture has been a success. As Sylvia once said, the ocean is made up of little drops of water. Each little drop is as important as any other."
"But in your own home!" Georgiana said, turning to Sylvia. "How can you bear it?"
"The adjustment has certainly not been easy," the girl said, laughing. "I lived a retired and very pampered life in the country until my guardian brought me to London this year, you know. But Nigel says that being able to adapt to change is part of maturing, and Nigel is always there to calm me down when I am ready to say I can take no more. It is a challenging life, Lady Chartleigh. Looking back, I can hardly recognize the girl I was a mere few months ago—a timid, frivolous ninnyhammer of a girl."
"You were never that, my love," her husband said gravely.
Ralph joined them partway through their conversation. He sat beside Georgiana and smiled at her. She felt a rush of warmth. How good it was to sit thus with one's husband, conversing with another equally young but very interesting couple. There was something very domesticated about the scene. And how horrified by the very notion she would have been only a couple of months before. Sylvia Broome was right. One did change very quickly after marriage—even after a very incomplete and unsatisfactory marriage.
"How does your brother react to your project?" Ralph asked Nigel Broome. "He seems very set on bringing about sweeping social changes in the country."
Nigel smiled. "I am afraid we do not always see eye to eye," he said. "It might seem surprising since we have very similar ideas. But my charge is always that my brother's head is in the clouds. Airy notions do not bring about the changes that are so desperately needed, or if they do, those changes come about so slowly that whole generations suffer in the meanwhile. He charges that my solution helps so few people that it is quite worthless. We keep the peace by agreeing to disagree."
Later, in the carriage on the way home, Ralph took Georgiana's hand, something he had not done for a while. "Are you very tired, my dear?" he asked.
Georgiana yawned. "Mmm," she said. She was resisting the urge to rest her head on his shoulder. As it was, she had allowed the motion of the carriage to tilt her sideways so that her shoulder was propped against his arm.
"I am glad the Broomes’ were there," he said. "I had not met them before, though Standen has spoken of his brother. He was betrothed to Sylvia Broome, you know."
