An Infamous Marriage

by Susanna Fraser

  “I look forward to finding out.”

  She widened her eyes at him. He was flirting again, but she liked it better today. Her face heated. All of her heated, a little.

  He smiled and held up a hand in a gesture of self-deprecation. “That is, I hope you give me the chance to find out.”

  She stared at the white linen in her lap. “I think I don’t want a separation anymore.”

  The words tumbled out of her in a rush, and she heard him sit up and lean toward her.

  Seizing all her courage, she made herself meet his eyes. “That is, as long as you don’t betray me again.”

  “I won’t. I swear it.”

  “But that doesn’t mean—I’m not ready yet...” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say that it was still too soon to share a bed.

  Still, his eyes shone with dark fire. “When you’re ready, I’ll be here.”

  Chapter Ten

  Now that he had a valet and multiple changes of clothing, Jack went to his third nightly call upon his wife dressed more to match her, in a nightshirt covered with a banyan of sumptuous black silk.

  Elizabeth, clad again in her ubiquitous blue woolen wrapper, opened the door at his knock and blinked at him. “That’s very fine.”

  He fingered his own silken sleeve. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought such things were easily had in Canada.”

  “You might be surprised. It isn’t entirely a wilderness. But I didn’t get this there. In my few days in London, I stopped long enough to be measured by a tailor, since I have so little fit to wear that isn’t a uniform. He couldn’t finish anything before I left, so he’ll be sending all my new coats and breeches and such along, but he had this in his shop that another customer couldn’t pay for. Since it didn’t require any altering to fit me, he let me have it for a song. Feel it.”

  He offered his arm, and she ran light fingers over the heavy, soft fabric with its black-on-black embroidery. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she let out a soft murmur of appreciation.

  Last night she wouldn’t have touched him so. It was all he could do not to pull her into an embrace. “You should wear silk,” he said.

  Her eyes flew open, and she stepped back. “I can’t imagine there will be many occasions for it.”

  “Not here, no, but in London or Paris, who knows? In any case, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have your own wrapper like this. Perhaps in green.” His ready imagination clothed her in green silk, with nothing under it, and then laid her on the bed with the luxurious wrapping untied to reveal her creamy, pale skin bared for him to feast upon. How the silk would slide and rustle beneath them as he came into her, and how soft the skin of her inner thighs would be against his hips...

  “That would be fine,” he heard her say.

  “Yes, very,” he agreed fervently.

  She blinked at him, and he wondered what she’d say if she knew what he was thinking. Best not to test it, not yet.

  “But not in February.” She drew him into the room and shut the door behind him. Jack had been so absorbed in his inner visions he’d hardly realized he had been lingering in her doorway. “I don’t see how you can bear it, and with bare feet! My toes would be icicles.”

  He glanced from his bare feet to hers, covered in homemade cloth slippers as modest and practical as her wrapper. “I thought you just didn’t want me to see your feet.”

  She sat in her accustomed spot on the stool before her dressing-table and kicked off one slipper. “No, see. There’s my foot. Only, they get so cold in the winter that I never go about in bare feet, and I keep hot bricks in bed.”

  He took his own chair and drew it closer to hers than he had on the previous two nights. Before she could shove her trim bare foot with its neat, feminine ankle back into her slipper, he caught her foot and drew it onto his lap with both hands.

  She gasped, but with surprise rather than outrage, so he didn’t let go immediately. It jolted him more than he expected, to at last be touching even the smallest part of her naked skin. But he also saw what she meant about needing slippers and hot bricks; her foot felt cold and clammy, not dangerously so, but as his might feel after a long ride or walk on a damp, chilly day.

  He’d intended to tease her by tickling her toes if she didn’t object to his touch, but instead he clasped her foot gently between his palms. “Let me warm it for you.”

  Her eyes were wide and startled, and she didn’t speak. But nor did she pull away, so he kept her foot, stroking up to her ankle with one hand while he cradled her cold toes with the other. She sighed with pleasure and flexed her foot, rubbing her heel against the silk on his thigh. His cock grew hard—it had already been tending in that direction—and he shifted so the loose folds of the banyan might conceal his state. She’d told him she was no longer considering a separation, but he didn’t want to press his luck by pushing her toward bed before she was ready to invite him there.

  But then she jerked her foot free and shoved it back into her slipper. “Jack, I need to know.”

  “Need to know what?”

  She bit her lip and fiddled with the tie of her wrapper. “I need to know about the women in your past. All of them.”

  That struck Jack as a spectacularly bad idea. “All?”

  “Every one. Unless you’ve forgotten, or you can’t count that high.” She met his eyes now, and hers fairly flashed with green sparks amid the brown.

  “I remember, and I daresay it’s not so high a number as you think. Certainly lower than some I know, and I made a later beginning than most. But why do you want to know about the women from before I ever met you? What’s it to do with you?”

  She crossed her arms. “You know my past, such as it is. It doesn’t seem fair to me that I know nothing of yours.”

  He had to fight a wild urge to laugh. “It’s not at all the same thing. Your past is...simple and wholesome.” She’d had a bare fortnight of marriage, and her husband had been ill and dying for half of it. She couldn’t be a virgin, and from a certain unconscious sensuality in her responses to him, Jack guessed her single week of experience had been pleasurable. But still, it couldn’t be compared, so brief and virtuous a history, with his own past of... He wouldn’t call it debauchery, but he’d known his days of wanton freedom. As most gentlemen had. Surely their wives didn’t usually call them to account for it.

  “You make Giles and me sound like a loaf of bread,” she said irritably.

  Now he couldn’t help but laugh. “I beg your pardon. That isn’t what I meant. But, surely most wives don’t expect their husbands to list their every paramour from before they even met.”

  “Oh, very well. You aren’t obliged to list the ones from before we met, though I’m curious to know what ‘a later beginning than most’ amounts to. But I want to know about all the women from after our marriage.”

  “What if you can’t forgive me after you know?” he fired back. He certainly couldn’t imagine her pardoning him for that night with Bella Liddicott.

  “You’ll have to take that chance. For I can assure you I won’t forgive you without knowing. If your past isn’t so dreadful and unusual, what are you afraid of?”

  He was afraid she would never understand. Some of the excuses he’d made for himself at the time—that he was only acting as most men did, that a marriage he hadn’t wanted and hadn’t yet consummated didn’t quite count—sounded weak to his own ears now. But she had the bit between her teeth. Clearly there was nothing for it but to tell her at least some of the truth.

  “Since you insist,” he said, “I’ll begin. But stop me if you grow tired of hearing of it.”

  “I won’t.” She sat straighter, tucking her feet under her stool. “I need to know. What if I were to meet one of these women someday?”

  “It isn’t likely. And keep in mind—” He leaned forward and gazed at her until she met his eyes again. “This is my past. You are my future. I swear it. From this day forward, I keep my vows.”

>   He meant every word, but she cocked a dubious eyebrow. “I’ve been keeping mine since I made them.”

  He could never beat her on that score. He sighed and admitted a truth he never would have shared with another man. “Very well. What I meant by a later beginning than most was that I was one-and-twenty when I first lay with a woman.”

  “I find that difficult to credit.”

  “That’s only because you never saw me as a lad.” He didn’t like to remember himself from those days, but maybe if she could believe he had ever been ugly, runty and awkward, she would have an easier time forgiving him for what he’d become once he’d outgrown all that. “Until I was twenty or twenty-one, people took me for four or five years younger than I actually was. I was short and skinny until I was at least eighteen, and I didn’t stop growing altogether till I was twenty-two or twenty-three.”

  “I had the opposite problem,” Elizabeth murmured. “When I was twelve, people thought I was sixteen, and I’ve been this height since around then.”

  She was a pleasant height for a grown woman, a little under five and a half feet, but she would have made a tall twelve-year-old indeed. “Perhaps our children will strike a happy medium, then.”

  “I hope so, for their sake.”

  “So do I. I could hardly bear to look in the mirror, for many a year. Undergrown, scrawny, all nose and eyebrows and spots. If girls looked at me at all, it was only to flinch or to giggle behind their hands.”

  “Surely after you went into the army...”

  “Believe me, it would have taken far more than a red coat to make a handsome hero out of me.”

  “I only meant there are no prostitutes in Selyhaugh, and you don’t strike me as the sort who interferes with the servants, but in London or abroad...”

  “Ah. As to that, I didn’t like the idea of inflicting myself upon some girl who hated the sight of me but had to pretend otherwise because I was paying her.”

  She blinked at him in surprise. “That’s...kind of you, I suppose?”

  He shook his head. “Hardly. I was only embarrassed, and hated to imagine them complaining about me after I left or, worse, laughing at me.”

  “But you eventually overcame your scruples.”

  “Not really. A lady seduced me after I turned twenty-one. When she first began to show me attention, I thought it was only to mock me...but she convinced me otherwise.” He supposed Bella had thought of him as something of a trophy to be collected, but she’d been kind and passionate and a patient tutor in the arts of love.

  Elizabeth’s eyebrows rose. “A lady? Is this someone I might meet?”

  “No danger of that at all, I’m afraid. She died, several years ago.” Because of that particular tragedy, Jack reasoned that he was safe keeping his later liaison with Bella a secret. Elizabeth wanted to know about his women so she wouldn’t be embarrassed by meeting one of them in ignorance. Such a meeting with Bella was now impossible.

  “Oh.” Elizabeth bit her lip, and Jack thought he understood her unspoken response. She couldn’t grieve a woman she’d never met, much less one who’d been her husband’s lover, but she had too good manners to express relief at anyone’s demise.

  “After her,” he said, “I suppose I went a little mad for a time. At first I had to test, to make sure she wasn’t the only woman who wanted me, and then...well, I didn’t see the harm in enjoying life’s pleasures.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t contract some loathsome disease,” she said severely. Her eyes narrowed. “You didn’t, did you?”

  “No. You’re right, I was lucky.”

  “Well, then,” she continued, “now you may as well tell me about the women from after we married.”

  He nodded but hesitated for a long moment, marshaling his thoughts. It was safe to keep his reunion with Bella a secret, but was it right? He remembered that night in London, how angry he’d been to find himself married to what he’d thought was a completely inappropriate and undesirable woman. It had felt so satisfying to complain to Bella of how ill-used he was, and bedding with her had been an act of defiance against Elizabeth and even poor Giles. Now he writhed inwardly over how immature he had been, and how utterly wrong about his wife. No, he couldn’t speak of it. Some deeds were too shameful to be brought to light.

  “I’d had a mistress in Montreal before we married,” he said at last. “A Canadian woman, of an old French family fallen upon hard times. Her name was Marie-Rose. I went back to her for a little while, but then we were called to Upper Canada, and she found a new protector. A few months later I took up with Hannah Mackenzie. She was Métis, with an Ojibwa mother and a Scottish fur trader for a father.” He spoke quickly, wanting to have done with the tale as soon as he could. “She stayed with me after I was injured until it looked certain I would live, and then she married a fur trader who’d caught her fancy. I wished them well. After that, I, er, fell in with Sarah Boyd.”

  “Fell in with?” Elizabeth raised a dubious eyebrow.

  “I’m not proud of it, but she was a...a welcome distraction when my convalescence dragged on and on.”

  “Hmph.”

  Elizabeth sounded startlingly like his Uncle Richard when she made that sound, but this was hardly the moment to mention the resemblance. “But I broke it off with her at the beginning of 1814. Since then, there’s been no one.” A year of celibacy. By far the longest stretch he’d known since his somewhat belated loss of virginity. How much longer would he wait? How long would it take his wife to forgive him?

  “And that’s all?” she asked.

  He nodded firmly. “That’s all.” It almost felt like the real truth. Sarah had been the last, after all.

  “I suppose three isn’t that many, but it was all so public.” Her voice wasn’t angry, only matter-of-fact.

  “I wish I’d known. It never occurred to me that Canadian gossip crossed the waters. And...I cannot undo the past, but I am sorry. And more than sorry I gave you pain. Such was never my intent, never at all.”

  She nodded. “I’m glad I know. I couldn’t—I don’t think I could forgive, while I lived in ignorance.”

  He got to his feet and inclined toward her in a slight bow. “I think I understand. And now, perhaps I should leave you to your rest.”

  “Yes, I think that would be a good idea.”

  * * *

  As had happened every night since he came back, Elizabeth found that sleep eluded her long after Jack had left her to her solitude.

  She had little to compare it to, but she supposed his account wasn’t so dreadful. Aside from the fact that the affairs with Hannah Mackenzie and Sarah Boyd had been conducted after his marriage, none of it was even especially scandalous. She wished she could have known the real truth about his connection with Helen Mannering three years ago when Lady Dryden had passed the gossip along to her. It would have spared her so much anger and agony—and Lady Dryden would have lost her triumph. If only she’d had the courage to write him an honest letter telling what she’d heard and asking for his honesty in return.

  She was almost ready to forgive him. She’d made her stand and shown him she wasn’t to be trifled with or treated as a mere convenience. But it hadn’t even been a full week since his return home. If she gave in too easily, why should he take her seriously in the future? Besides, she needed several nights more to erase from her mind the image of the parade of women he’d known. Could he really be satisfied with just her, plain and undistinguished as she was?

  But she understood him much better now, which was something. He seemed less a handsome, arrogant man who took what he wanted because he could have it and more a man who still to some degree thought of himself as the awkward youth he’d once been. She got the impression he’d spent most of his twenties in a state of giddy disbelief that women actually found him handsome and enjoyed his company. He’d grown steadier with age, spending months and years instead of nights and weeks with the women in his tale. He seemed to enjoy women for more than just their bodies.
He certainly listened to her when she spoke, and he understood her well—better, sometimes, than she’d wanted to be understood. Perhaps he truly did want to make something of their marriage beyond the bare minimums of law and necessity.

  She hoped so, since, whether she wished it or not, much of her own happiness depended on him. She had no way out of this marriage, nor, she had to admit, did she even want one. She liked Jack so much. For as severe as she tried to be, she loved to make him smile, craved the full-throated masculine abandon of his laugh. She could spend all day admiring the way his dark curls lay on his head, or his square, strong body. She’d even had a hard time taking her eyes from his bare feet tonight. They were such male feet—big and hairy, with blunt toes and short, squared-off nails.

  And, good God, when he touched her! Though she tried to tell herself it meant nothing, that it was only the practiced art of a man with much more experience than she had, it still made her breath come faster to remember him catching her cold foot between his warm hands and the feel of his thigh with its horseman’s muscles under the whispering silk of his banyan.

  Soon, she promised herself. Soon.

  * * *

  Two days later, another letter came from Jack’s friend, Colonel Lang. “They hope to see us for dinner the day after next,” he announced.

  Elizabeth set down her pen—she’d been working on the household accounts—and blinked at him. “Oh. Then we must go.” She wasn’t looking forward to it, but she was coming to accept that Jack was right and she’d allowed herself to become too much of a recluse.

  He cleared his throat. “I, ah, took the liberty of telling Lang whose daughter you were, to avoid any possibility of putting either of you in an uncomfortable situation. Would you like to hear what he says?”

  “I would.” It couldn’t be so dreadful if he was still willing to invite her to dine.

  “He says, ‘Please assure Lady Armstrong that I would never hold against her the actions of a parent, which are now well over a decade in the past. I have more than made up anything I lost then, and I would be a sad sort of fellow if I were still dwelling on such a grudge after all this time.’”