“Papa always said you’re the reason he got Mama to marry him,” she said, brushing at her eyes. “You helped him woo her.”
“He did all the wooing. I just showed him the back entrance to the British Museum Reading Room. But we became friends after that.”
She smiled through her tears. “I’m glad you had a friend. I’m glad it was my father.”
“He was the one who helped me decide what to do with my life. He asked me questions about what I liked. What I wanted.”
What he had wanted, initially, had been what Crispin had found for himself. A wife. But Oliver was still too young, too unsure of himself, too untested. First, he must settle to a living. And Crispin helped him see how natural beauty and a life connected to the out-of-doors and the seasons would improve his health and lift his spirits.
After long hours mulling it over, Oliver decided if he must be consigned to a landlocked life in England, he should be in the prettiest part of it. He studied landscape paintings, pored over maps, and decided on the Lake District.
He sold half of his deceased father’s business interests—the ones that could not be managed from afar—and bought Crossthwaite and became a yeoman farmer. He succeeded at his agricultural pursuits and bought more land and put sheep on the pasture, rented some to tenants. He had time to climb fells and swim in meres and read. But a wife still eluded him.
Finally, Crispin and Georgiana took him in hand, insisted he attend their dinner parties when he visited them in London. That was where Oliver had met Violet Winter.
But he could not speak of Violet. Especially not to Henrietta, even though he was sure she must already knew the sordid story from the villagers or the Crossthwaite servants or her own parents. He must move the conversation away from himself and his poisonous past.
He could feel the curl dangling, brushing his forehead, but he did not push it back.
“What do you like, Henrietta?” he asked her. “What do you want?”
“You know what I like, and you give me everything I want. Even before I ask for it, sometimes.”
He meant large things. Intangible things. Hopes and dreams. Not silk threads or a packet of saffron.
But she must have known that. She called herself slow, but she wasn’t. She understood what he had asked her.
Henrietta rolled onto her stomach and rested her cheek on her folded hands in front of her, her elbows akimbo, her face turned away from him, hidden.
Whatever his wife dreamed of, she could not bring herself to tell him.
The rain pitter-pattered on and off for another hour, and Oliver spent that time trying not to look at the curves of Henrietta’s bottom, perfectly outlined by the clinging drapery of her summer dress.
She did not move until Nathaniel awoke and asked for another biscuit. Then she turned her head and blinked her eyes and smiled and seemed herself even when the rain stopped and they headed back to Crossthwaite.
Oliver Hartwell thought he knew his wife. But, maybe, he didn’t, at all.
Part Three
Bed Me, Husband
Fourteen
August, 1819.
Henrietta buried her nose in the tall stack of Oliver’s folded shirts. Although she adored the scent of his shirts before laundering, the smell of clean linen was its own, if lesser, pleasure. She managed to get a hand on the door knob without letting the stack slip and used her hip to bump the bedchamber door open the rest of the way.
But Oliver was not in his study as she had thought he was.
Oliver was in his bedchamber, dressed as she had seen him last, sitting on the edge of his bed, holding himself.
Touching himself.
She noticed out of the corner of her eye that his head moved—perhaps to look at her coming into the room—but she found it impossible to take her attention off the organ in his hand.
How did his phallus fit into his trousers? It was so large and thick, poking out quite a far distance from a nest of black hair. And it was a dark and angry red, an entirely different color from the rest of his golden skin. And his hand was moving so quickly, so forcefully. Wouldn’t he hurt himself?
It seemed like forever, but it was likely only a second or two before she heard a choking sound and white material fountained out of him. Seed. So much seed. His other hand was right therein his lap, holding a handkerchief. He must have intended to catch his seed and forgotten.
