“Does it not upset you?”
He sighs.
“My potential marriage was years away. My father was very clear that I was not to marry before I had enough money. We quarreled about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told him that I wanted to marry. I was taught that the marital relation was the only honorable way to slake my lust. And well, it is embarrassing—I shouldn’t go on. You would laugh at me.”
“Tell me. I won’t laugh.”
“I told him that I found the conditions of my existence unbearable. That I could not live in this state of constant, unspent desire. That it was fraying my health. My sanity. He told me to wait.”
“He commanded you not to marry?”
“Yes. I tried to persuade him that I needed to marry. To be so untouched—it was killing me.”
“He told you no.”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever think of defying him?”
“Had I loved a woman I might have. But I had no one in particular in mind. Just loneliness and desires that I found difficult to conquer.”
“He did not care that you were in pain.”
“No, I don’t believe he did. When it comes to me, he is often only capable of seeing worldly advantage and how I may obtain it.”
“Did you hate him for it?”
“At the time, yes, I did a little.
“And now you may never marry because of me. So it only follows that you will feel the same of me.”
“No,” he says, his mouth at my ear. “Because it was not marriage I actually cared for, I see that now. I wanted to be free of my prison. And you freed me, Annabelle.”
“I forced you.”
“That might have been the only way to free me. I suspect I would have been too terrified otherwise.But I want to askyoua question. Although I suspect you will not want to answer it.”
“Most probably.” I contemplate refusing him the liberty. But I feel so relaxed, lying against his chest. “But you may ask it.”
“Why had it been so long since you had seen your family?”
“Surely, Alfred, you can work out the answer to that question without my participation.”
“I am afraid I cannot.”
“I was depraved,” I say simply. “And a disgrace to my father. So he turned me out. At sixteen.”
“His own daughter?”
“To be fair to him, he gave me warning. And he did not disown me after my first transgression, even though he was not a liberal man. But for my dead mother’s sake, he told me, he hushed up the business of my lost virtue even though I never asked him to do so.”
“Then why did he throw you out in the end?”
“Another scandal. One that could not be contained. He was done with me by then. Our relationship had never been close, always cold, but even I can see that many fathers in his position, of his stature, would have done the same.”
