“I don’t know what that means,” Vix said, her lip curling.
“Yes, you do,” Mae said, laughing now. “How horrible for you, little Victoria, to have a husband who wants to be wanted back.”
“How dare you call me little?” Vix retorted. “I am a full head taller than you. I could throw you across this lawn like a javelin.”
“You do want him back, don’t you?” Mae said, ignoring the threat, still infuriatingly amused. “And you’re just thrashing there for no reason at all, denying yourself the pleasure. What a waste of time!”
“Oh, lecturing me about denial of pleasure?” Vix shot. “Have you even spoken to Roland since that day you cut off a man’s foot at him?”
Mae shook her head but did not stop smiling. “No. But he has not spoken to me either. And we are not married.”
“You could be,” Vix threatened. “Shall I arrange it?”
Mae arched her brows. “Don’t try to distract me, Lady Aster. You will fail.”
Vix glowered, snapping her attention back to her dog, who was just now leaping into the air in several failed efforts to snatch theball before it could land back in the grass, each time to Dinah’s squealing encouragement.
“Have you?” she said, without looking at the other woman. “With a man?”
“No,” said Mae. “But I am well demystified of the process by merit of my vocation.”
Vix nodded. “And have you observed,” she asked, “that men tend to retain all the power in the aftermath of the encounter?”
Mae considered it. “Not when the couple is married,” she said, after a moment. “In fact, I would say quite the opposite.”
That surprised Vix enough that she turned to look at Mae again. “That cannot be true. Unless you simply mean childbearing.”
Mae shook her head. “No. I mean … look at Hannah and your brother. Do you feel that she lost some hold over him after they wed?”
Vix paused, frowning. “No.”
“No,” Mae agreed. “If anything, he seems even more enchanted, doesn’t he?”
“My brother is not like other men,” Vix said softly. “He is special. He has feeling.”
Mae’s face faltered, a little flicker of concern creating a line between her brows. “Vix, plenty of men have feeling,” she said. “What about the vicar and Mr. Reed? You are close with them as well, are you not?”
Vix felt herself shrinking, pulling her arms around herself as though there were a sudden chill in the air. “They are differenttoo,” she said, knowing it was meek, even to her own ears. “I have met the world, Mae. I am not being naive.”
“No, I know you aren’t,” said Mae. “Do you have any calluses?”
“What?” said Vix, immediately distracted from the chill by a flash of annoyance. “What the devil does that have to do with anything?”
“I do,” said Mae, holding her palm out and running the tip of her thumb along the insides of her middle two fingers. “From sewing needles growing up. From my tools. A lot of my patients get them in the funniest places because of the work they do.”
“So what?” said Vix, peering at the little rough lines on Mae’s fingers.
“Sometimes they get too thick and start to impede someone’s mobility for the other bits of their life, beyond just their work,” Mae continued, as though this were polite conversation, “and they come to me so I can shave the callus back down. Sometimes, too much armor stops us from being able to move through the world the way we are meant to, even if we grow it for good reason.”
“Calluses,” Vix said, after considering it for a moment. “Yes, perhaps I do have a few.”
Mae nodded, folding her hands in her lap and leaning back. “It is only something to consider.”
And Vix did, all the while watching her dog, who did, in the end, catch the ball from the air.
CHAPTER 18
Ambrose had awoken this morning not to his beautiful wife, tousled and warm on the pillow next to his, but rather to a to-do list written in precise, narrow inky letters, each with a helpful checkbox next to the thing he was expected to perform.
