I snatched that from her. “That is odd,” I said. “In the winter? Just us and them?”
“Apparently, the colonel was right about how to conduct myself at the ball. Now, we are sought after company, you and I.”
I handed the invitation back to her. “Well, that’s good, I suppose. One less problem to worry about.”
“Of course, it might only be that I’m an oddity,” she said. “Perhaps they simply want me around so that they can gawk or laugh about me behind my back.”
“I am certain it is not that,” I said.
“You did not go about telling everyone that I was some hussy with Wickham before I married you, did you?” She was sharp.
Hussy? I shook my head. “Obviously, that wasn’t something I wanted people to know. I spoke of it with Colonel Fitzwilliam and no one else.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” she said.
“You would not think that I would do further damage to my reputation, would you?”
“You did marry me because I was a scandal,” she said.
“That is not why I married you,” I said.
She eyed me, eyebrows raised.
I bowed my head.
It was quiet.
“Well,” she said, “we must accept some of them, I think, or it will look very odd. We do not need to accept them all. In fact, we could not. Some of them overlap, and even if we only chose the ones that didn’t, we should be far too busy. However, I am not sure about how I must behave, so I should like to enlist the colonel’s advice again. I shall invite him for tea—”
“No,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows again, even higher this time.
“He has admitted to me that he…” How had he put it? “Coveted you, and I told him, or he offered, or I don’t know, but he is to stay away for a time.”
“Coveted,” she repeated. “As if I am a prize sow.”
“And you encouraged him and do not deny that you did. And what is more, you felt guilty about it, because I could see the way you were when I spoke to you of it—”
“I did none of these things!” she snapped. “You told me that you were jealous of him, and then I did not know how to behave whenever he was around, or when you spoke of him, or anything else.”
“This all began before that.”
“Well, before that, I only thought that I was being friendly and he was being friendly, and Lord, Fitzwilliam, he was the only person I could talk easily with. It had been ever so long since I’d had a conversation with someone.”
“I suppose you were not having conversations with me?”
“We do not talk so much as…” Her face reddened.
“All right,” I muttered. “We get distracted easily, but we talk. We had that rousing conversation about Defoe, I seem to remember.”
She laughed. “What? The time when you took the opposite position of me just to rile me up, and then you said that I was the most ravishing woman you’d ever seen when I was in a passion, then you put your hand inside my—”
“Right,” I said, wincing. “So, that conversation was a bad example, but there have been… conversations.”
“Yes, I suppose, but not many.”
“Well, anyway, I should feel better if we had a bit of a break from Richard Fitzwilliam, that is all,” I said.
