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.”
“He is a treasure.”
“He will miss you,” Vergilius said. “You might consider taking him with you.”
Penelope was assailed by the temptation to cry, right there in the dining room, but that would cause talk. Though what did talk matter when she was about to cause scandal?
“Pen? Are you well?”
He knows just by looking at me that my dancing slippers are pinching. “I am being ridiculous.”
Vergilius held out the chocolate she’d chosen for him. “Tell me.”
She took it and set it on her plate. “I don’t want your mother and Bella in my house. It’s not my house, it was never my house. I left that place with an intention to never return there, but I don’t want those women making free with your wine, inviting their friends into your parlor, and driving your horses in the park.”
Vergilius rose and held Penelope’s chair for her. He was quiet as they made their way past the reception desk and out the front door, pausing only long enough to drape Penelope’s cloak over her shoulders.
“A question for you, my lady.” He strolled arm in arm with her to the elm grove, the laughter and noise of the inn fading with each step. “What would have made it our house, our wine, and our horses?”
It was on the tip of Penelope’s tongue to answer with one word: children. Children would have changed everything. Even daughters would have changed everything, but again, she heard her mother-in-law and sister-in-law echoing in that reply. According to those two, even a daughter would have proved Vergilius’s virility, though not as effectively as a nursery full of sons would.
Vergilius’s virility was not now, nor had it ever been, in doubt.
“I have seen myself as a failed broodmare,” Penelope said, “and thus a failed wife, but there’s more to it than that. I failed to listen to my own instincts, and in a way, Vergilius, I have failed my vows.”
He shifted his hold so they walked hand in hand. “That is utter rot, Penelope. Tell me you know that reasoning to be the rankest tripe.”
“It’s not reasoning,” she said as they emerged from the trees to behold the vast sea undulating beneath a rising moon. “It’s how I feel, Vergilius. I suspect you have felt likewise, but we have not shared how we feel. We’ve shared formal dinners and lonely breakfasts.”
He was quiet all the way to the cottage, then he again opened the door and lit the various candles. When he’d also poked up the fire, he bowed his good-night over Penelope’s hand, as he had for the past several nights.
They had two more days before he would return to Town, two more nights before he would stride out of Penelope’s life.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Vergilius said, “but before I go, I will tell you, my lady, that if I had to marry again, that if I was once more that strutting young fellow determined to catch up to his younger brother’s marital accomplishments, I would still account myself the luckiest of bridegrooms to end up married to you.”
He kissed her lingeringly on the mouth, then walked off into the darkness. Penelope caught sight of him half an hour later when she’d made herself a last cup of tea to take out to the terrace. She was swaddled in his old dressing gown, a habit she’d acquired after the baby had died, and she’d waited in vain, for months, to be summoned to the Hall.
Down on the beach, Vergilius sat upon a rock, his knees drawn up, his boots beside him on the sand.
“Good-bye.” Penelope tried the word out at a whisper, and even that was enough to bring tears to her eyes. She grew cold keeping the vigil on the terrace, and when she eventually went inside, her husband was still alone on the distant beach.
Her last thought before drifting off in a bed where she still couldn’t get warm was that she’d left a perfectly luscious chocolate sitting on the edge of her plate.
What manner of fool wasted perfectly luscious chocolate?
Chapter Six
Gill’s mind was accepting what his heart refused to admit: Penelope had made her decision, and she would not be charmed away from it. She’d suffered in silence for years from a marriage that had, as Gill had said, failed her.
He had failed her. She’d never refused him anything—save for not joining him at the Hall after Papa’s death, and she’d had her reasons, of course—and Gill wasn’t about to refuse her anything now. She had asked him to take her riding along a wide, sandy expanse of beach, and he had rented her a handsome mare so they could gallop along the waves. She had asked him to read to her, and he’d done his best with bucolic Wordsworth.
Then he’d trotted out, from memory, some of the naughty old John Wilmot verse he’d picked up at university—the man had been a stranger to euphemism—and Penelope had descended into outright laughter. One goal attained.