And now, it was done, and I was shaking, and my body was like the ocean itself after a wild storm, calm in the wake of the agitation of the intensity that had worked its way through me.
I reached up to touch his face, and our gazes met, and it was as if we were looking into each other, inside each other.
He kissed me.
I sighed into him.
“You’re all right?” he breathed. “I am ever so sorry. I should have taken more care. I got… distracted. Your body is perfection itself. I should have ascertained if I was hurting you.”
“No,” I said, caressing his face, feeling luminous and happy and good. “No, it didn’t hurt.”
He rubbed our noses together, shutting his eyes. “Lizzy, I… I thought I loved you before, but I—”
“Let’s go home, Fitzwilliam,” I said, my hands spanning his broad, bare shoulders.
He pulled away to look into my eyes. “That’s what you wish?”
“You wish to please me, don’t you? You wish to please your wife? Take me home. Let’s be married.”
He gave me a wry smile.
I lifted one of my own bare shoulders. “I think we’ve been married for some time now, in fact.”
He chuckled. “Yes, perhaps we have.”
fitzwilliam
The next day, we were in the process of stealing a carriage to take back with us as we journeyed north when everything went rather badly.
It was morning. The sun was high in the air. In this part of France, we had noted that every Thursday there was a mid-morning rain shower. Once we got further into the north, we would avoid the rain. But now, the air was humid, and there were clouds in the sky, clouds that would grow darker and heavier as the morning dragged on.
We usually stole carriages under the cover of night.
But this morning, we were giddy on each other.
I wondered at myself, wondered why I’d waited. I had told myself it was about honor, about the idea of having a covenant between myself and God and the state and society. And of course, with her, a covenant with my wife.
But it had been clear, last night, when she’d seized my hand across the table and said she wanted it, that I’d been waiting for her.
She hadn’t been ready to be mine, not all this time.
I wasn’t entirely sure what had shifted, not exactly, but I thought I recognized it. It was a shift that I had observed in others, a shift that I had made myself, but a long time ago, when I was quite young and my father died and I inherited everything, all those responsibilities.
The shift was just a difference between wanting to conquer the whole world, see everything, have everything, explore everything, have nothing but possibility ahead of yourself and with this moment when a person realized that having nothing but possibilities meant that one never got anything at all.
A possibility was a promise of something, but if one kept all possibilities, one never got what each possibility promised.
One had to commit, to accept a path.
It meant closing things off, but it also meant reward.
She was not like me. She’d never had a boyhood full of curiosity and exploration, never had years at university on her own. She’d been under the strictures of family obligation andsocietal expectation her whole life. She’d needed a little time to explore her possibilities.
But everyone got tired of that, eventually.
Everyone wanted something real, not just a promise.
So, that was why it had been right, I thought.
