“It’s all right if it’s not possible twice in a row ever again,” she said. “I have no expectations.”
“You don’t?”
“Yes.” Then, “It’s like the beans you get from a mysteriouspeddler. Sometimes they’re magic, sometimes they’re not. But you won’t find out until you put them in the ground and sprinkle water over them.”
“Well,” he said. “Well.”
Did he understand her?
“Well,” he said. “You certainly know how to make my beanstalk grow.”
He understood her.
Nineteen
The concubine set a riddle for her king.
“The man who makes it doesn’t want it, the man who buys it doesn’t use it, the man who uses it doesn’t even know about it. What is it?”
The answer was a casket, but her king said instead:
“If I am the man who makes it and doesn’t want it, it is war . . .”
—The Concubine and Her King.Unpublished MS.
Henry thought Susannah could not be more beautiful today, with little flecks of sun on her hair under the oak tree.
“Grandfather didn’t know what to do. He looked sick,” Mina told Susannah. “I let him read your letter to me, too.”
“Is that right?” Susannah said, leaning towards Mina but looking at Henry.
She sounded a trifle dreamy. She and Henry had gotten back to Bledsoe Park yesterday, and they’d lain in bed last nightand talked and touched until dawn like they were young lovers.
But they weren’t, and an afternoon nap would not go amiss for either of them. That would be its own kind of pleasure, to lie with her in the middle of the day, their bodies touching, their minds floating away.
Neither of them had really had a good night’s sleep since their cozy and loving night in Susannah’s narrow bed in the cottage. They’d eaten bread and cheese in the kitchen—him in the brother’s enormous shirt—and then gone to bed early and slept until they were awoken in the morning by Susannah’s brother’s cursing.
As it turned out, a neckcloth was the culprit. Henry was no Carruthers, but he managed a fair Osbaldeston tie for the groom’s cravat. The blushing giant had thanked him and then said that his wife-to-be wanted “the lord at the wedding because no one else has ever had one.”
So Henry and Susannah had attended despite Susannah’s worries that he, Henry, might take attention from the bride. They’d gone to the ceremony and gone to the breakfast, and Henry had made sure to pay several compliments to the bride, even fuss over her a little.
If Henry had displaced anyone, it had been the bride’s father. Henry didn’t think much of Ned Greenway, only that the man was still far too pretty given his age had to be near the earl’s.
Henry had merely kept one hand on Susannah as much as possible and looked daggers at Greenway when circumstances did not allow the other.
The entire wedding breakfast party—absent Mr. Greenway, who enjoyed his own wares far too much—saw Susannah and Henry off in Henry’s carriage.
Susannah embraced Dando and then held him at arm’s length. “You won’t leave the cottage without tellingme first.”
Dando’s face went red, and he looked at Henry, who quickly turned earlish and got himself and Susannah into the carriage immediately.
“Your brother and his wife will be staying on,” he told her as the carriage rolled out of Much Wemby.
“But—”
“Please, Susannah. Please let me do this. Neither of them want to go.”
“But—”
