“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?”