A Tryst by the Sea, page 7
He had the sense that much of what they discussed should have been covered earlier—years earlier. Penelope was appalled by the sums the dowager viscountess and the Lychmont household drained from Gill’s exchequer. He had not known the extent of her charitable efforts, nor how much she genuinely took them to heart.
Children in the mines. Children in the mills. Children on the streets. The pattern was clear and laudable—and closely mirrored Gill’s agenda in the Lords. How had he not known this about his own wife?
Or—more accurately—how had he not appreciated it about her? All he’d noticed was that she was often from home during the day, attending committee meetings. Parliament did its work mostly in the evening, and thus husband and wife had seen little of each other for much of the year.
“Did you want to marry me?” Penelope asked as Gill did up her hooks. He had changed for supper in his room at the inn, a pleasant little chamber with a view of the elm grove. He’d then come to the cottage to escort Penelope to dinner.
Gill paused, batting aside a now habitual urge to kiss Penelope’s nape. This was their fourth day by the sea, and they were again dining with Lord and Lady Tregoning. Gill had thought separate quarters a terrible idea, but he’d been wrong.
Taking meals together, spending mornings wandering the beaches and paths, and afternoons sipping tea and making lists on the terrace had provided both proximity and privacy. No servants hovering to carry tales belowstairs. No social whirl keeping everybody up until all hours—and no stilted breakfasts either.
By degrees, conversation had wandered, from Gill’s resentment of his mother’s extravagance, to questions like the one Penelope had just posed. Had he wanted to marry Penelope?
“With the general caveat that young men are often idiots,” he said, finishing up her hooks, “I did very much want to marry you.”
Penelope gestured toward the bed. “For the usual reason?”
Gill took up the shawl she’d draped over the back of a wing chair. “That figured heavily in my longings, of course, but you were not exactly a retiring bride. Not once we came here for our wedding journey. I went from being relieved at having the whole matchmaking ordeal behind me and being rather pleased to have a pretty, sweet wife, to being…”
He wrapped the shawl around her and sneaked in a little pat to her shoulder.
“Vergilius?”
“Besotted,” he said. “I became besotted with you. You had read so many books, and you remembered what you’d read. You argued with me over battles and statutes, and you expected no quarter when I returned fire. Then we’d end up in bed, and I realized…”
Penelope faced him and fluffed his cravat. “You realized how lonely you’d been.” She leaned in, only for a moment, and Gill was assailed again by the knowledge that this talking, this discussing and revisiting and recollecting, should have been part of their marriage all along.
But how was he to have known that? “Did you want to marry me? I hardly exerted myself to court you, but then, Mama said I must not pester you when you had a trousseau to pack up and daily fittings to endure.” Mama had had much to say. Papa had observed that arguing with a woman might not be precisely rude, but it was most often pointless, and thus a gentleman spared himself the bother.
“I did want to marry you,” Penelope said, “though let it be said that young women can be idiots too. You were gorgeous and so self-possessed. You always knew what to say, you knew and were liked by everybody, and you had such grand ideas.”
“Ah, youth,” he said, and they shared a smile both sweet and sad. “I will miss you, Penelope.”
These expressions of regret had become a wistful counterpoint to the pragmatic lists and schedules and budgets. And really, who else could share these regrets, but the other party to the marital bereavement?
“I will miss you too, and, Vergilius, may I say something awful?”
“Of course.” But only to me, because a wife should be able to confide in her husband. Why had he not made earning Penelope’s confidences a priority after the baby had died? They’d certainly traded confidences before that.
“I will not miss your mother. I will not miss Bella, and I will miss Tommie only a little. I don’t want to have to deal with them over this annulment. I don’t want them telling me how to comport myself, where I must appear in public, with whom I may not be seen, and how I am to dress.”
Gill retrieved Penelope’s reticule from the vanity. “They’ve presumed to that extent in the past?”
Penelope assessed her appearance in the cheval mirror and met Gill’s gaze in their reflection before turning from the glass.
“After we lost our son, you went to the Hall to contend with your father’s death. Bella came up to Town to comfort me. If anything in the whole world could cut through my sorrow, it was the certain knowledge that I must not toss Bella bodily from the house, or I would create one of those insufferable family rifts that echoes for generations.”
“She did something terrible, if she vexed you to that degree.” Something he and Penelope had never discussed.
“Bella would not leave me alone when I craved solitude. She would not allow me out of the house when I needed fresh air. She forbid even my closest friends to call and nearly stopped me from going to divine services. She countermanded my orders to the servants, decided I should have only bland food when I craved a good spicy curry. Her meddling was without end, and had it not been for MacMillan quoting orders to Bella that I doubt you had left in truth, that woman would have sent me to Bedlam.”
“I’m sorry.” Gill thought back to those miserable, dark weeks, when the grief had still borne a leavening portion of shock. “I don’t recall how Bella ended up in Town. I certainly did not send her to you.” Though Tommie had repeatedly told Gill not to thank him for making the sacrifice of parting from Bella at such a time.
“She just presented herself, uninvited, because ‘family doesn’t need an invitation.’ She turned away my sister’s offer to visit, and I would not have learned of that perfidy except that my sister mentioned it several years later. I longed for you, Vergilius, not because I could be any sort of comfort to you, but because if you were on hand, you could make Bella go away.”
Gill wrapped his arms around his wife. “Mama and Tommie would not let me leave the Hall. They had one excuse after another for why I had to meet with the solicitors again, the steward, the vicar. Then it was planting, the condolence calls… and Mama was insistent that I leave you privacy in which to recover from both the ordeal of birth and the loss of our son.”
Penelope gave him her weight. “I’m sorry, Vergilius. I should have told MacMillan to have the horses put to and taken myself down to the Hall, without a word to Bella.”
“I should have had my horse saddled and come home to you, without a word to anybody.”
This, too, had become part of their conversations—regrets, increasingly sharp. Shoulds and oughts and why didn’t I’s along with many, many apologies, freely given and freely reciprocated.
“Promise me something,” Gill said, keeping his embrace loose. “Promise me that if you should ever be in need, if you don’t trust your solicitors, if you aren’t getting along with whatever trustees we choose, you will let me help. Send for me, drop me a note. Don’t be all noble and distant and stubborn.”
She eased away, her expression hard to read. “That is an odd request to make of the woman who is precipitating the most monumental scandal ever to sully the Summers escutcheon.”
“Promise me, Pen. Please. I cannot keep you trapped in a marriage that has failed you, but I cannot ignore that, for ten years, we were man and wife, and marriage to me has cost you much.”
“I cost you as well, Vergilius.”
That was the sort of comment that begged for a change of subject, but if Gill did not pursue the topic now, he might never learn what had prompted such an outlandish observation.
He led Penelope by the hand to the cottage’s front door. “What did you cost me?”
“Another woman, a stronger woman, would not have been laid so low by the baby’s death. Bella has had disappointments. Your mother lost a child. They both assured me that my grief was unnaturally intense, selfish even, and I must…”
“Soldier on?” Gill said, finding a new least-favorite phrase. “Bella and Mama both had other children, other sons. They had been married much longer than a year when their losses befell them, and they weren’t twenty years old and wed to a man stumbling into a title when his wife needed him by her side.” He opened the front door, wishing good manners allowed last-minute cancellation of their dinner plans. “A stronger, wiser husband would not have left you to contend on your own for so long, Penelope.”
That had needed to be said aloud. Gill had chided himself in the odd moment for those months apart, but had followed his moments of self-doubt with reassurances that Penelope could have come down to the Hall if she’d wished. He’d invited her to often enough, while she had returned his invitations with silence.
“It’s chillier than I expected,” Penelope said, joining Gill on the front terrace. “I should wear my cloak.”
“I’ll fetch it.” Gill left her by the door and went to the wardrobe in the bedroom. Penelope’s purple merino cloak hung next to her old dressing gown, some sort of metaphor for the woman versus the viscountess.
Gill took out the cloak and draped it around Penelope’s shoulders and let the stroll up the path put distance between sad, intimate discussions and an hour intended to be social. At the dinner table, he exerted himself to be pleasant to Lord Tregoning and his lady. Gill smiled, he listened politely, and in the back of his mind, he turned over a puzzle.
That old dressing gown, the one that was four sizes too big for Penelope, had belonged to Gill long ago. The elbows were worn, and one lapel was frayed, suggesting regular use. Penelope’s jewelry box had been open, and atop her trinkets and earbobs had been Gill’s embroidered handkerchief. A shiny green ormer shell had glinted among her necklaces and bracelets, the thin chain of a golden locket wrapped about the shell.
Unless Gill was mistaken, that locket held a curl of his hair and his likeness.
Penelope’s determination to end the marriage was at least tinged with regret, which broke Gill’s heart all over again, yet some more.
“I had not appreciated how much of a service the present marquess has done us by living into great old age,” Amanda, Lady Tregoning, said. “We had a chance to find our balance as husband and wife and to weather a few storms before William had to start taking on the duties that go with the title.”
She gazed fondly at her husband’s retreating form. The waiter who’d brought out the fruit-and-cheese course had informed Vergilius of a note arriving for him at the front desk. Lord Tregoning had excused himself to have a word with old friends seated nearer the veranda, and thus the ladies had a moment to themselves.
“How long have you been married?” Penelope asked.
“Ten years,” Lady Tregoning replied. “Arranged, though we were cordially acquainted prior to the betrothal. We finished growing up together, to the extent anyone ever finishes growing up. You and Summerton seem quite settled.”
That erroneous observation was kindly meant. “We are contemplating a separation.” Penelope should probably have kept that admission to herself, except the knowledge of what lay in store at week’s end loomed larger and larger in her awareness.
Summerton was granting her wish, her dearest, most heartfelt wish, and now… she wasn’t sure her wish made such great good sense after all.
“I’m sorry,” Lady Tregoning said. “William and I reached the same point after the second miscarriage. We raised the topic of a separation gingerly at first, but then realized that it wouldn’t solve anything. We’d still be childless, we’d still be relying on the younger brothers to see to the succession, but we’d…”
Penelope wrapped four small raspberry tarts in a linen napkin and slipped them into her reticule. Vergilius liked them with his breakfast.
“You’d be giving up?” Penelope suggested. “Creating a scandal, fueling gossip?” She’d be doing all of that in spectacular fashion once word got out that the lawyers were involved.
“We’d be compounding our losses,” Amanda said. “I’d reached the point that when I looked at William, all I could see was the man to whom I owed sons, not my friend, not my partner in mischief, not a fellow who’d need allies when his father died. Not the only person who knows just by looking at me that my dancing slippers are pinching. I had to widen my focus to encompass all of him again. That was work, but work worth doing, and he had to see in me more than an unhappy wife.”
“But two miscarriages… How can you face the prospect of the same thing happening yet again?”
“We are careful, and whether to try again is an ongoing discussion. When I’m ready, William isn’t. When he’s feeling courageous, I’m not. We have three nephews. Children for us would be a blessing, but they are not a necessity. Being honest and kind with each other is what matters.”
Elsewhere in the dining room, people were laughing and talking, while in Penelope’s mind, ten years of marital history were taking on a very different aspect. Lady Tregoning and her husband had been talking for years about whether to try for more children, while Penelope had been hiding behind the Society pages and stuffing her calendar with committee meetings.
“How did you cope?” she asked, keeping her voice down. “When you felt you no longer knew your husband, when you wanted to stay home yet again, when the sight of family coming to roost in your home for the Season made you bilious?”
Lady Tregoning’s smile was wistful. “We didn’t cope very well at the start. We muddled along for the first couple years, and everybody told us to try again. To put the past behind us. Carry on, and don’t dwell on what cannot be changed. I hate those words—‘don’t dwell.’ It felt as if they were telling me to ignore my own broken heart. Then I lost the second baby—a boy—and carrying on was beyond me.”
Penelope sipped her wine, a pleasant white. “Precisely. I sometimes hate my sister-in-law.”
Amanda bit into an orange tart. “How many?”
“Seven. Four boys, three girls, and I suspect she’s not done. She pops them out like some broodmare. At her oats for breakfast, a baby in the straw by noon, at grass an hour later.”
“We hate them, the broodmares, and then we feel guilty because we aren’t among them, and we know nobody pops out a baby without considerable pain, danger, and struggle. But if I’m a broodmare, is my dear William merely a stud colt? I will never forget the day he asked me that, and I had no answer for him.”
“It’s different for men.” Penelope was horrified to hear herself quoting her mother-in-law.
“It could well be worse,” Amanda replied, selecting a chocolate from the arrangement on the platter. “The fellows are supposed to be strong, stoic, manly. Impervious to suffering. How lonely that must be.”
“We don’t think of them as lonely.” Vergilius had been the most generous and tender of lovers, and good God, Penelope missed him intimately. They had made passionate love, but they had also talked in bed. Long, thoughtful conversations punctuated by rest and affection. Did his lordship have anybody else to simply talk to?
Penelope certainly didn’t. Vergilius had never asked to resume relations, and she hadn’t either. Give him time, Mama-in-Law had said. Don’t nag. Don’t impose.
Penelope was abruptly tempted to gulp her wine. She instead put the glass down and pretended to consider a plum tart.
“William took me away from Town when things were at their darkest,” Amanda said. “Took me to Cornwall for a summer, of all places. We walked all over the countryside, read to each other, went fishing and never caught anything, rode horseback to nowhere in particular. We’d sometimes go for hours without speaking a word to each other, but we needed the closeness to be had even in silence.”
“What gave you the idea to do that, to turn your backs on all of Society and your families and…?” Penelope waved her hand in the general direction of the other diners.
“I don’t know,” Amanda replied, holding the platter out to Penelope. “When William suggested it, my first reaction was that I did not want to spend a summer weeping in some dreary cottage by the sea. I nonetheless suspected William needed the respite, and I do love him. We wept, some, but we also napped, and wandered, and talked. We needed time, and we made some wrong turns, but we knit ourselves back together more securely than we’d been knitted together before.”
Penelope took a pretty little chocolate pressed into the shape of a rose. “You had a foundation to build on.” And the leisure time and means to do the rebuilding. Perhaps most couples soldiered on because Society and limited means gave them no choice, and thus that tactic became the standard.
“You have a foundation too, my lady,” Amanda replied, setting a chocolate on her absent husband’s plate. “I see how Summerton looks at you. The viscount is not simply your stud colt, and you are not simply his broodmare.”
Penelope let the smooth, rich sweetness of the chocolate dissolve on her tongue and selected a sweet to put on the edge of Vergilius’s plate. He wound his way back from the foyer, a scrap of paper in hand, while Penelope allowed herself to simply appreciate him.
She could not knit herself back together with Summerton, but she could admit that she’d grieve the loss of him. They did have a foundation, but a couple could not dwell in peace and safety without walls and a roof too.
“Bad news?” she asked as Summerton resumed his seat.
Amanda excused herself and joined her husband at the table closer to the window.
“I don’t know. My mother and Bella have arrived in Town, and they are asking after our whereabouts. MacMillan recalled where my trunk had been sent and thought I should know of the invasion.”
