“No, but I am sure it has nothing to do with you, only with her. And you will have other Seasons. I hope you will be patient.”
“Yes. I know that not everyone is lucky enough to meet their husband at their first ball in their first Season,” Arabella teased. Mary’s lips curved into the smallest of smiles, her dimples barely showing. Mary had done exactly that, of course, five years ago.
The two women walked a bit farther and then turned around to walk back.
“Do you touch yourself, Arabella?”
Arabella was glad they were walking side by side so that Mary would not see her blush. Mary was wholly unembarrassed about all of it. Perhaps that was what being married does.
“Yes,” Arabella finally answered.
“Good. You should. When you are married, you will know what you like, what you want. No one’s feelings get hurt by acts of self-love, as it is the most private of actions. It is your concern and yours alone. And you cannot get with child from it.”
“What is the exact thing that gets one with child?”
“You don’t know?” Mary turned to look at Arabella.
Arabella shook her head.
“You’re old enough. I’m surprised Mama Katie hasn’t discussed it with you yet. Perhaps she still has some difficulty seeing you as a woman since you are the youngest of us. She wants to keep you a girl. But I don’t see you that way. You are a woman, and women your age are getting married every day and having children. After all, our now-deceased Queen Charlotte married at seventeen. You should know about coupling.”
Arabella suddenly felt very aware of the breeze on her chest and arms, the tops of her legs rubbing together as she walked.
Mary went on, her voice clear and calm.“You have seen the phallus on the statues of Greek gods in the museum, haven’t you? A husband puts his phallus inside the place where the wife’s monthly courses come from. He will rub himself there and put his seed in the woman.”
“That’s the thing that hurts?”
“Just the first time or the first few times, Arabella. When you are married to the right man, you will want it. More than that, you will hunger for it. And the man is always hungering for it.”
“And only married people couple?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“But you should be married. It’s better. Not just because it avoids scandal and bastards, but because everything is better if you are having this kind of pleasure and intimacy with someone you love. I wouldn’t want to do it with someone I didn’t love.”
“Then why do men go to brothels?”
Mary stopped walking so Arabella stopped, too.
“It is troubling and I can’t speak for men,” Mary said slowly. “They have very peculiar notions about it all. They have difficulty with delayed gratification. And they can be rather stupid.”
“I see,” Arabella said, not seeing at all.
And they walked on, with Mary explaining why she had been kneeling and David had been standing and other permutations on the pleasures a man and woman can provide to each other.
That night, in her own bed, Arabella made a vow to herself.I amnotgoing to marry a stupid man.
One
Two months after her return to London from her trip to Cornwall and Bath and her mother’s subsequent marriage, Arabella Lovelock had finally solved the problem of what to call her stepfather when among members of the family.
“Middlewich.” She lifted her chin and dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her neck with her mother’s handkerchief, her own having been lost on the lawn of the castle. She had just come in from playing shuttlecock with her new step-aunt Marianne Cavendish, one year her senior.
“I’m not calling him Papa or Father or Uncle,” Arabella said. “He’s none of these things. And he’s only twelve years older than I am. I’m not calling him James or Jamie. That would be disrespectful. No, not because he is a duke. Now that I am almost eighteen, I intend to call Harry’s husband, the Earl Drake, Thomas. I already call Mary’s husband, the Viscount Tregaron, David. But I am not going to call the man married to my mother, the father of my future brother or sister, by his first name. I asked the duke what the men at his club call him. They call him Middlewich. So that’s what I am going to call him.”
“It’s a mouthful,” said her mother Catherine, the very pregnant and very new Duchess of Middlewich.
