A woman he had known all her life and he suddenly didn’t know at all.
“Do you feel any better?” he ventured.
“Yes.”
“I’m glad.”
As the carriage got away from London, she vomited once, opening the carriage door and leaning out just as he rapped on the ceiling to tell the coachman to stop the carriage. He clutched at her skirts, sure she would tumble out as she heaved and gagged. Finally, the carriage slowed and she sat back and took his proffered handkerchief and wiped her mouth.
“You didn’t have to stop the carriage, George. We can keep going. We are behind time as it is.”
“If the carriage won’t stop quickly enough, I would rather you get sick in the carriage than open the door.”
“All right, I will. But I’m done for now. We can go.”
He knocked on the carriage ceiling with his knuckle and it started moving again.
Long minutes ticked by. She looked anywhere but at him.
“Shall we talk?” he asked at last.
“If you like.”
“I’d like to know what you’re thinking.”
She shook her head and compressed her lips into a thin line. “This isn’t chess. There’s no advantage in going first. You tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking of how to make this right. For you.”
She was silent.
He went on. “I’m thinking of what I said to you, at that tea. When I was trying to keep you from marrying Thornwick. It was terrible and I have felt—”
“Yes. It was terrible.”
“What I said, it wasn’t what I meant—”
“It doesn’t matter what you meant, George. What matters—” She took a deep breath. “What matters to meis that I believed it. I believed my oldest and best friend despised me.”
“I don’t despise you—”
“Didn’t I just say your real feelings don’t matter to me?”
George felt a sharp pain in his chest. But he also felt he deserved the cruelty of her words. He tried to push his own hurt away and concentrate on what she was saying.
Phoebe frowned. “What does it mean about me that I believed it?”
“It means you hadn’t been shown enough care and attention so you would know—”
“That’s rot, George. Utter rot.” Her whole demeanor was suddenly one of a fierce certainty. She must have looked this way in the black priest’s hole when she had sat astride him and taken him. “My whole family has shown me care and attention. There could have been no more caring father in the world than mine. My mother, despite her manner, always found a way to make me feel loved. I know Andrew would do anything for me. And I know you love me. And yes, I know Alice loves me. I even know what she did with Thornwick was some deranged act of love on her part. No, I have received plenty of care and attention.”
She looked away, her fierceness gone, replaced by a defeated sadness. He longed to move across the carriage and take her in his arms, but he sensed he should wait.
Her voice trembled. “And it still wasn’t enough. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t trying to make other people happy with me. When I wasn’t starved for praise. Mostly from you, of course. But also from Alice. But it was never enough. Because . . . because, I don’t know why. I don’t know why I needed so much.”
He didn’t know either. Because he had no sense of what she was talking about. She had never seemed a praise-seeker to him. Never a toady. She had never wanted to display herself, to show herself off.
But she had always done whatever he had demanded of her, hadn’t she? He had thought it was because they were in total agreement and because what he wanted had to be right, but what if that weren’t true?
