“It is dishonest, yes,” he said. “But I cannot go about telling everyone about that.”
“Well, she will conceal your secret,” I said. “It would ruin her brother else.”
“That is true,” he said softly.
“I cannot agree to surrender my wife to you to travel without me,” I said. “I cannot simply say I shall do that.”
“I wish she had not married you,” he said. “If she had married Bingley—”
“You cannot mean that,” I said.
“She is in love with you, that much is clear,” he said. “And I think you love her, too, in whatever way you are able to come by love.”
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“But the two of you are not meant to be together. You are opposites and you want different things. If you keep her too close, you will stifle her. And if you do not, the two of you will always be at odds.”
“We are not at odds!” I exclaimed.
“I have just spoken to her all afternoon on this walk, and all she speaks of are every little thing that the two of you disagree about.”
I looked at the back of her head as she was speaking to Mr. Bingley and his sister. I did not feel as if we were at odds. Did she truly feel that way?
“Your brother thinks we are at odds,” I whispered to her, later, in the darkness of her bedchamber.
“Let us not talk about my brother right now,” she whispered back, running her forehead against my bare chest.
“It is not about your brother,” I said. “I do not feel as if we are at odds. In this moment, right now, in fact, I feel as if we are rather one flesh. I feel ever so close to you, and even when we are at odds, there is some quality to it, something that seems to draw us together in its own way.”
She hummed into my skin. “Yes, yes, I quite agree.”
“Good,” I said, shutting my eyes, running my hand over her bare spine, feeling at peace with it all.
“Perhaps that is what it is between us, the thing that gives our union such spark and movement,” she said. “It is because we are not always in agreement, because there is such a passion to our differences. You like me because I am not like you, and I like you because you are not like me.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “After all, it would be quite boring to be in the company of someone exactly like yourself.”
“Yes,” she said, “and have you noticed how easy it is to hate things in others that remind you of things within yourself?”
“Indeed I have,” I said. “I think that is one of those odd truths that we all wonder about. Why is it so? In my case, I suppose it is obvious that I do not like myself—”
“That is not at all obvious,” she said. “Of all the men on earth, you seem to be the one with the highest opinion of himself.”
I gasped. “That is not at all the case. How could you say that?”
She giggled into me. “Oh, Lord, Will, you are entirely self-important and you have such ideas about what is right and wrong, and you will not change any of them—”
“This is about your brother again.” I sighed heavily. “We cannot but have a discussion of him, it seems.”
“It has absolutely nothing to do with my brother,” she said. “Why, if someone were to say to you that they knew a numberof accomplished ladies, you should say that you know only three dozen, and—”
“Three dozen?” I scoffed. “Perhaps half a dozen. There is such a to-do made over women’s accomplishments, truly, but I rarely find it so impressive as all of that.”
She laughed helplessly into my chest. “Ah, yes, half a dozen, how could I think otherwise?”
“You, of course, are remarkably accomplished.”
“I am not.” She lifted her head to smirk down on me. “My mother is likely more accomplished than I am. You know I have only a passably pleasing voice, that my piano-playing is a bit awful, and that I do not even speak French.”
