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“You might as well tell me the worst.”
“She never said a bad thing about you.”
“Now I am surprised.”
“She painted you as the very image of a perfect English gentlewoman: sweet, docile, perfect in every way.”
Isidore gasped.
“You are particularly skilled with needlework, and sometimes stay up half the night stitching seams for the poor. But when you aren’t engaged in charitable activities, you knot silk laces that are as light as cobwebs.”
“What?” she said faintly, dropping back into her chair.
“Light as cobwebs,” Cosway repeated, reseating himself as well. “I remember actually considering whether I should request further details. I was establishing a weaving factory in India.”
“You were—what?”
“Weaving. You know, silks.”
“I thought you were wandering around the Nile.”
“Well, that too. But I’m afflicted by curiosity. I can’t go to a new place without wanting to figure out how things are made, and how they might be made better. That leads to shipping them here and there, generally back to England for sale.”
“You’re a merchant,” Isidore said flatly. “Does your mother know of this development?”
He thought about it. “I have no idea. I expect not.”
“I truly feel sorry for her. You do realize that I wasn’t even living with her during the time when she wrote all those letters describing my domestic virtues?”
“A revelation I find, sadly, unsurprising. I’m afraid my arrival has been a terrible shock to my mother. All the time she was sending me letters about my submissive, chaste wife—”
“I am chaste!” Isidore flashed.
He met her eyes. “I know that.”
A flare of heat went straight down her back to her legs. “So you thought I was a meek little Puritan—”
“Tame,” he said, nodding. There was an annoying hint of a smile in his eyes. “Meek and obedient.”
“Your mother has much to answer for.”
“I formed a picture of our marriage based on that wife.”
“Who doesn’t exist.”
He nodded, but his face sobered. “You’re obviously far more intelligent than the pliable woman my mother described, Isidore. So I have to tell you that from what I’ve seen in the world, the best marriages are those in which a man’s wife is—well, biddable.”
Isidore felt her temper rising again but pushed it down. What could she expect? He may not have the outward trappings of an English gentleman, but he was voicing what many a man believed.
“I agree,” she said. “Although I would broaden the category. Were I to choose my own spouse, for example, I would like him to be, shall we say, civilized?”
His teeth were very white against his golden skin when he smiled. “Meek and obedient, in other words?”
“Those are not popular words among men. But I could see myself with a husband who was more quiet than myself. I have—” she coughed “—a terrible temper.”
“No!”
“All this sarcasm can’t be good for you,” she said. “You told me in the carriage that you like your every utterance to be straightforward.”
