“Well, I do not know about that,” he muttered. “I have never taken a virgin to bed. Have you?”
“God in heaven, no, Richard,” I said. “I mean, except her, if she…”
“I think it may not be… I have heard it does not always happen, that there are ways the maidenhead can be broken, riding horses and the like.”
“She’s frightened of horses,” I muttered.
“That’s not the only way. Anyway, I’ve always thought it doesn’t make any sense. If a woman has a… piece of skin there, you know, how does she… you know what I speak of?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, it’s not as if women don’t have to have been having their bleeding before you bed them, so if there’s a piece of skin blocking—”
“No, but it’s not like that, the maidenhead.”
“Yes, exactly, what is it like? No one seems toactuallyknow.”
“Well, we shall eliminate that, anyway. It also means nothing, like the denial.”
He considered this and then nodded. “All right, yes, so again, the evidence. The wedding night itself, I don’t want details, but you said she was… not like a maid?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I muttered, looking down at my hands and studying the creases in my palms. “As I said, I have never bedded another virgin.”
“Yes, but you have been privy to talk amongst other men before. I have never been married either, but we all have an idea about what the act is like with a wife versus a mistress, and wives are supposed to be reticent and frightened and shy.”
“Well, she was…” I shook my head. I did not wish to speak of it with him. What I wished to do chiefly was to cry, because it had been a singular sort of experience, one of the sweetest of my life, the joining of the two of us, and I did not like to think it had been manufactured or that she had been tricking me in some way. “Let us just go back, all the way back, Richard. We need to think this through.”
“My apologies, Will, I should not have asked you to tell me about—”
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head, gesturing with my hands, trying to shake off my inclination to tears. “If it is a trap, if my own sweet, dear wife is nothing but the Elizabeth Trap, then I need to know when it started and how it started and how he did it.”
“All right,” said Richard.
“He arrived in town after we were stuck together in the house, or at least, that is what was reported,” I said. “I suppose he could have been there earlier, telling her how to speak to me.”
“You have both said that you did not really get along at first, though?”
“True,” I said. “But he might have done that on purpose, knowing it would stir me.”
My cousin raised his eyebrows.
“What?” I said. “You like it about her, too, so don’t even pretend that the vivacious sparkling wit you see in her is not that.”
“Oh, no, I just…” Richard chuckled, looking away from me. “I only meant that it was a strange game for Wickham to play, that is all. And, anyway, how would he have contrived to get Elizabeth under your roof? Did not that happen because of the sister’s malady?”
“Maybe he took their carriage so that Jane Bennet would have to go horseback and have to get caught in the rain and then likely get ill and—” I broke off. “That is all very convoluted.”
“Indeed.” Richard’s expression was conciliatory.
I sighed.
“It is more likely,” said my cousin, “that he arrived in town, heard the rumors about your wife and you, and decided to make use of them.”
“Yes, all right,” I said. “So, he wished to convince her to marry me.”
“Because you had asked and she had refused?”
“Well, no,” I said, thinking about that. “No, so perhaps it was after, once she had agreed to marry me. Because this is when she began saying all those things to me, that I liked her because she was scandalous and that we should have a scandalously short engagement, and all manner of that sort of thing.”
