“Do you truly regard me in that light?”
“In what light?”
“As your wife.”
He moves towards me.
“Yes,” he says. “Of course. I married you before God, Annabelle. Am I not your husband?”
“I suppose you are.”
“No,” he says. “You do not suppose. You know.” He takes my hand and pulls me up from the chair. “But perhaps I need to show you.”
“You are going to show me?”
Alfred has been growing in confidence in the bedchamber of course. But he seems unusually bold now.
He kisses me deeply, drawing me towards him.
I melt into the man. After all, this intimacy is what I have paid for so dearly. At the price of my name and—to a degree—my freedom.
“Do you know,” he says, “that one of my favorite parts of my green book is a marriagenight?”
“No, I did not.”
“Yes,” he says solemnly.
“And what happens?”
“The man, the man who the book is about, has just been wed. He has waited to marry his bride for some years and now he finally gets to have her.”
A little shiver goes through me.
“It seems very sentimental.”
“Yes, it is,” he murmurs. “And he very much wants to get a child by her.”
My pulse spikes. A child. An heir. It was my original motivation, besides pleasure, in seducing Alfred Saintsbury. He does not know it, of course. He will never know. There is no point to telling him. It would only upset him.
“He does?”
“Yes,” he says. “He has a particular fantasy of her fat with his babe. And he dreams of filling her with seed and knowing that she has allowed him to try and get her with child.”
My body warms. I press my knees together once more.
“And so how does he bed her?”
“I’ll show you,” he says gently. “Get on the bed. On your hands and knees.”
“On my hands and knees?”
“Yes.”
I obey, glad to not think. I have directed, arranged, and bent the world enough to my will for one day. I must admit—I like that he is the architect of this encounter.
“He tells her that he wants children,” he says. “That he wants to see her carry his child. “
He places his hands on my hips.
