A strange and distressing sensation stirred in my breast: compassion. I had not before considered how it must be for these ladies, the ones who I left behind me among the rubble of their former romances.
Our dance together was surprisingly pleasant. Her hand in mine felt natural and good and I must admit, seeing her cheeks pink with exertion brought to mind some very pleasurable recollections, recollections that had nothing to do with our present time and place. It was over far too soon.
“Will you escort me towards the window for some air?”
Of course I obliged her.
“Thank you for that dance. I do admit I enjoyed it.”
“As did I,” I said with uncommon feeling. Indeed, I wished for another dance with her, though I had never in my whole life danced twice with the same woman at one event.
“Will you tell me something?” On my nod, she asked, “Why did you do it?”
“Why did I seduce you?”
“Yes. I have thought long on the matter and it is obvious you had some purpose in doing it. I have heard you enjoy tempting ladies who are engaged to be married. Why is that?”
“Well.” I shifted, uncomfortable. “It seems rather unfair, you know? A woman stands to gain everything on marrying while a gentleman—”
“You think the woman gains everything? No, no, you are already incorrect. The man gains just as much, or more!”
“Every woman just wants the richest husband she can get.”
“And so does every man want the richest wife he can get, except she also needs to be handsome and accomplished.”
“In marrying, a lady is given security the rest of her life.”
“In marrying, a lady is placed wholly within the power of a man who may give her as much sorrow as he likes and she can do nothing about it.”
“And you think a man is not controlled by his lady?” I shook my head. “There is no woman I have ever met worth loving and any man that tries finds himself heartbroken and alone.”
“Perhaps it is the men who are the problem.”
I shook my head, certain I was correct. “Eve tempted Adam you know, and that is where it began.”
“Perhaps she did but nevertheless…” She leant in and with exquisite impertinence concluded, “It was Adam who took the bite.”
“He would not have taken the bite had she not offered it.”
“And who bears the responsibility for this original sin?” She arched one well-formed brow at me. “Women. It is always the women, while the men go on much as they ever have.”
“Peter Carver—”
“Is married,” she said. “I am but a side-note in his history, limping along while my friends scorn me and their mothers gossip about me. It is not fair.”
“Carver deserved your fidelity.”
She gave a tired wave of one hand. “He was down on Marleybone Street nearly every night. Even his father remarked on his expenses there, right in front of me too!”
I winced; that was bad form indeed. “Well, I am sure he would have stopped once he was married.”
“If the vows were what I awaited to gain his loyalty,” she said, “then I suppose he should have expected likewise from me.”
It was a fair observation and one I had not before considered.
“You permitted me to seduce you—”
“I did.” She admitted it in a tired way, in the way of one who has grown inured to her mistakes. “I will never deny my mistakes for I have learnt from them. But I will say only this, to you and any other man: you may call us your wife, you can take our fortunes as your own, you can fill us with your children, and you can keep us stowed away in the country while you pursue whatever diversions you will. However, if you really want to have a woman, to own her heart, then you must make her feel loved every single day of your life. Otherwise, you only have the shell of her, the bits that she allows you.”
Something in the way she said so pierced my soul. I wanted to say more, but I could not, particularly not when our dance ended and she turned, in a swirl of pink and gold, and left me standing there foolish and silenced behind her.
* * *
I could scarcely sleep that night, eager to call on her, wanting desperately to speak with her and yet wholly unable to know what words to use. As I lay in my bed, hour after sleepless hour, I tried to pretend it was only her figure or her face which interested me and yet, it was not the memories of her physical person which arose, but memories of our conversation, of that one laugh I earned from her, and of the shadows I wanted to vanquish from her eyes which plagued me.
I called at the earliest possible hour which would still be considered polite. She refused me not only the first day but the second, the third, and the fourth as well.
I saw her at a ball a week after that and immediately, I asked her to dance. She refused. I asked again and she pushed me towards this friend or that. At last I told her I would countenance no more.
“So, stop asking me,” she protested coolly.
“I cannot! I want to dance with you.”
“Why?”
And I stood there before her with the most horrifying of any possible reason screaming in my mind: love. Love? The Frederick of old scorned me, reminding me there was no woman worth loving. But what if there was? And what if she who stood before me was that one for me?
But it was too early to say so, even too early to think of it. Instead I could only beg and eventually, she relented.
“Is this some sort of penance you have assigned yourself?” she asked me some weeks later at yet another of these infernal balls where we always found ourselves.
“No.”
“Then why are you always hanging about?”
“Because.” I swallowed against an odd thickness which had arisen in my throat with her question. “Ah… well because…”
She turned those blue eyes towards me and rendered me even more foolish than usual. Such it was that I found myself weakly admitting, “I like you.”
“Oh.” She pursed her lips, looking me up and down rather sceptically. “Well, so long as it is not pity then.”
We began to spend a great deal of time together. The gossips’ tongues naturally began to wag, and at some course, my father felt he needed to interfere. I sat quietly in his study with him one morning, listening as he offered his advisements on life and women and marriage but, as I did, a strange notion occurred to me: he was a bitter, old man, spending most of his days haunting the old abbey and meddling in the affairs of his children. He was to be pitied, not emulated.
“Sir, I do appreciate your advice,” said I on leaving. “Miss Gibbs and I are only friends; however, if it becomes more, I will give no heed to the clucking hens of Bath and London. In any case, her fortune is splendid, so there is something.”
“Splendid?” He was at once interested in the conversation.
I named the sum and with this, my father was satisfied. No more did I hear from him about Miss Gibbs.
* * *
“So, have you seduced any maidens lately?” she asked one day as we strolled the streets of Bath together. “I have not heard your name in the gossip circles of late except attached to mine. If this continues, you might lose your reputation as a rake.”
“Heaven forbid!” I gasped in mock horror. “This must be laid at your door. You have reformed me.”
“I have done nothing of the sort,” she said with a little laugh. “You ruined me, remember? I am part of that illustrious and infamous group of ladies who made you what you are.”
The levity was gone from me when she said so, though she said it very lightly.
“Have you forgiven me?”
She appeared to be surprised by the question. “Do you want me to forgive you? It seemed to me you thought you were on some mission of deliverance for Mr. Carver.”
“Ah well… Perhaps I have begun to see your side of things then. I…” I paused a moment and did not want to look at her. “I begin to see that to be not a rake might be a
greeable too.”
“Not a rake? You, a proper gentleman?” she asked with an impish little smile. “Mad notion. How will you know how to be?”
“Well,” said I. “I suppose I must learn.”
“Hmm.” She appeared to think it over. “I guess I could say I have forgiven you a little.”
“A little?”
She smiled up at me. “I no longer wish to poison you.”
“Progress indeed!” I laughed.
Oddly enough, it was then that I wanted to kiss her, but I thought that might earn me a slap. Regardless of what had gone on before, now we were both different, and I would afford her the respect she deserved.
It was not until much later in our walk that she said, apropos of nothing, “It all happens for a reason, does it not?”
“What does?”
“The mistakes we make, the troubles we endure… They shape us, mould us into something stronger and better.” With that came a crooked little smile and I believed, from thence, I had been forgiven.
The truth hit me in an unguarded moment, when I beheld her in the street one afternoon, walking towards me with her friend. She was so lovely, and my heart skipped a beat just seeing her. I had argued with myself often over the last weeks, telling myself I felt no more than warmth, friendship, compassion but now, I could deny it no more. It was wholly certain: I, Captain Frederick Tilney, owner of a proud heart and an admitted seducer of women, had fallen deeply and irreversibly in love.
“You look very strange,” she said on arriving beside me.
“I feel strange,” I said as I offered my arm. “Very strange indeed.”
Her friend, an obliging soul to whom I am forever indebted, drifted towards an uninteresting shrub while I faced my beloved. “Here it is,” I told her. “I fear I have fallen in love with you.”
She gave me a sceptical look. “Do you, even now, make an attempt at seducing me?”
“No! I assure you, I am perfectly in earnest.”
To this, she would only give a gentle harrumph before we began to stroll along. She would hear no more of it the rest of that day and it was the work of several weeks to persuade her I was wholly sincere, frustrating woman that she was!
The first time I mentioned marriage, a fine autumn day in the park, she turned her back on me and moved away faster than ever I imagined she could. My second foray towards the subject was a month later, and she told me to stop being so silly. It was not until just before Christmas that I proposed and she soundly refused me and said if I mentioned it again, she would cut our acquaintance forever.
She induced in me a sort of madness, a desperation almost. I had to have her, and she had a hundred reasons to refuse me. People would gossip (hang them all), and she believed I was still a rogue at heart (I was not). My father did not like her (that was true, but he did like her fortune) and my sisters Eleanor and Catherine thought her brazen (also correct but I daresay they meant it admiringly).
I began to think of how I could arrange it so that she had to marry me. We had already been found together once before, so that would not work. She had a father who was alive and ample fortune to live on, so there was no hope of rescuing her from poverty, and, she had grown accustomed to the shame of her position. Ignominy no longer troubled her; respectability, she decided, was not worth concerning oneself about.
No, there was nothing for it. I would need to declare myself in such a profoundly romantic manner that she would be categorically unable to refuse me.
I decided I must seek the good counsel of an expert: my sister Catherine, my brother Henry’s wife. Catherine was the sort of woman who lived life as if she were the heroine in some stupid novel. She favoured stories of evil villains, courageous heroes, and swooning maidens, and in the end, the gentleman always got his lady. I knew she would be able to contrive for me some design to make my beloved mine.
* * *
I waited for her in the gathering gloom of dusk. My second was my brother, and assorted other friends and relations were concealed in the shrubs around the small gardens accessed by the Gravel Walk. I thought it a nice symmetry that I should propose here in this same spot where Peter Carver and I had almost exchanged bullets over her.
Catherine had gone to her, full of breathless anxiety made all the more alarming by her present delicate state. Henry and Catherine, married less than two years, had already thrown out one tiresome, little scamp and were presently cooking another. “You know, it can be done for amusement sometimes,” I told him.
“What?” Henry asked. “What can?”
I shook my head. “Not now. Remind me to show you something I have in my bedchamber later.”
Henry was bewildered, but there was no time for questions or explanations, for here came my lovely almost-bride with Catherine hard on her heels. She knew only that I intended to fight someone on behalf of Miss Gibbs’ honour. I anticipated—rightly it seemed—that she would immediately run to me.
My Rosalind—for I dared already call her so in my mind—was as lovely as she had ever been. I hoped I did not fool myself that I saw tears of genuine fear glistening in her eyes. Her hair had begun to fall from its pins, no doubt from the exertion of a quick trip here and her breaths came deep and quick.
“Captain Tilney! What do you do?”
I stood at the precise angle that Catherine and I had rehearsed, looking manly and resolved in the face of sure danger.
“I am here to fight for you, my darling. You will not marry me because of what has gone on in the past, so I will vanquish that which has tarnished your good name.”
“But,” she looked around her wildly, “who will you fight? Catherine did not tell me who had served the insult.”
“You already know who did.”
She stared at me, uncomprehending.
“It is the Frederick Tilney of old who has ruined it all,” I told her. “That dreadful rogue! A seducer of women! Who did not believe in love, or faithfulness, or anything of the like! A curse on his wretched, black soul!”
My brother handed me the blade, and I positioned it over my own heart, pressing it in lightly. “I once held my heart too proudly to love any woman but many months now, you have held it for me. If I cannot have yours in return, I cannot live!”
The panic had receded from her and in its place, amusement. “Lord above Tilney, what is this now?”
“A duel!” I cried out. “To the death!”
“You intend to duel yourself?”
“Yes!” I pushed the blade against my chest a bit hard, wanting only to make my point.
“I am no expert on fencing,” she said, with a wry look, “but I doubt you could do yourself much harm holding the blade at such an angle. I think the worst you could do would be to cut your shirt, although that would anger Morley and he might do you some harm.”
With a chuckle, I lowered the blade. Was not this why I loved her? She was unafraid to be witty and disinclined towards the sheep-like deference most ladies showed to gentlemen of my station.
“That is true.” I dropped the blade. “Very well then, I shall put my theatricals aside and come to that very last of resorts: honesty.”
I made an expansive gesture towards the surrounding shrubs where anyone of my acquaintance who was important to me was concealed and urged them to emerge. They did, slow and uncertain but my attention was returned to her.
“Rosalind, I love you, with everything that I am. I can never deny that once, a worse version of me used you ill, but knowing you and being with you has made me a better man. Even if I can never persuade you to marry me, I will be ever grateful to you for turning this rogue into a true gentleman.
“That said”—I gave her my best, most charming smile—“I do intend to plague you for your hand in marriage until I no longer have sufficient breath to do it. Pray permit me the chance to make you the happiest woman in the world?”
She did not make an immediate reply which was a good thing. In my previous attempts, the refusals had come quic
k.
“After all,” I said, stepping closer, “we have both had our share of youthful missteps and yet, have not we learnt from them? I know I have.”
I reached out and dared to take her hand in my own. In her haste, she had forgotten gloves, and I was grateful for that. Her soft, small hand fit so well in mine as if we were formed for one another.
“There will never be anyone for me but you, so long as I live,” I told her. “You have my promise of that, in front of everyone I know. Once I held my heart proud, but now, I do not hold it at all; it has been given over to your care. I am yours, mind, heart, and body, for all eternity, and all I ask of you in return is to answer ‘yes’. Please say you will be my wife.”
My entreaty hung in the night air, and there was not a sound around it. We waited: me, my friends, my relations, the birds, and insects, all of us waiting to hear what she would say.
She did not look at them, but only stared at me, looking into my eyes as if she saw me for the very first time. “I will make you feel loved every day of your life,” I whispered.
She made a sound, a half-laugh commingled with a little sob, and dropped my hand to cover her face with her hands, but as she did, she moved to my chest where she lingered. It was in this I believed I saw my answer and, risking a painful slap if I was wrong, I decided to kiss her.
With one hand beneath her chin, I tilted her face to mine, my other hand gently tracing her spine before landing at her waist, pulling her even closer into my embrace. We both sighed when our lips touched, our breaths mingling together in the small space between us. Resolved to be more a gentleman, I had put my back to our audience whilst I kissed her. Nevertheless, they had some idea of what we were about and began to cheer and shout congratulations.
“It is a ‘yes’ then dearest?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Frederick Tilney, I will indeed marry you.”
Thus, began our story, though it is several years gone by now. I once was a rake, who no woman could claim as her own (and indeed few of them wanted to). Now, I am the possession of many women—five to be exact. There is, first and foremost, my Rosalind, ever my true love, but between us, we have managed a few more: Miss Caroline Tilney, Miss Margaret Tilney, Miss Louisa Tilney, and, our youngest, Miss Anne Tilney.
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