A Wicked Kind of Husband

by Mia Vincy

  “Lady Featherstone,” he said abruptly. He was gazing into the fire, chin resting on his hand. The firelight caressed the contours of his profile. “Lady Peter Elton. Mrs. Westley. Lady Harrington. Almost Lady Yardley, but I put a stop to it when you arrived.”

  Oh no. Heavens, she didn’t want to know. She sipped her brandy, and again. Three, four, five times. Once for each of the women named. She had claimed indifference. And she was indifferent. She was. It was just…her.

  He turned his head to her, his chin still on his hand. In this light, his eyes were nearly black.

  “Four women in three years. Not a bloody Bolderwood among them.”

  “And before that?”

  “Before that I was married and faithful.” He sighed and rested his head back against the chair. “I was nineteen when we married and Rachel was the first woman I ever bedded. We were married nearly six years and I was faithful that whole time and it never even occurred to me not to be. I mean…why would I want anyone else? I had Rachel. And then I didn’t have Rachel, and sometimes I wanted…”

  He stared at the ceiling, lost in a place she could never go. Perhaps staying busy was not always enough for him either.

  “You were faithful to your first wife, but not to me.”

  “You’re not my wife,” he said. “We just happen to be married to each other.”

  “I see. Quite.”

  A marriage in name only. She could not complain: This man did not feel like her husband either. It was better they lived apart. It was one thing to want his kiss, or even his baby, but quite another to imagine him in her life. Her longing was not for him, but for what she had lost and could never have.

  Another sip of brandy, then: for his wife. No. Six. One for each of the years he had been married to Rachel and loved her and was faithful to her. She had spoken of fidelity and he had mocked her, yet he had believed in it too, once.

  “They all know: the husbands, the wives,” he said, talking to the fire again, while she was taking the third of the six sips. He shifted his legs, his energy never staying dull for long. “They marry for family or property or a passing attraction, and courtship is so limited that they hardly know each other, and the men need someone to carry on the family line, and the women need someone to provide for them, and once you’re in a marriage, it’s near impossible to get out of it. So they do their duty and then…If two people are deeply committed to each other, that’s one thing. But if not…People’s lives don’t end when they get married. Marriage doesn’t turn people into little rag dolls who are miraculously released from the chaos of human feeling and desire.”

  She took the final sip. She should stop now. What a funny effect the brandy had. Like her knees were going to float away. She pictured herself rising knees first into the air, so she hung upside down, her nightgown slipping over her head, leaving her body exposed and her face covered.

  Would he find her naked body as interesting as she found his? Probably not. He had already seen five other women. At least. She didn’t want to know that. Ladies did not want to know these things and she was a lady. She would be interested in seeing his body again. How could that be? That she wanted to see his body but did not want him as her husband. How wicked and wanton she was. How he would laugh if he knew.

  “My parents were so much in love,” she said. “Always laughing and kissing. You could see that they enjoyed being together. They were always faithful to each other.” Outside the window, a carriage passed, a man called out. Joshua was audibly silent. “You think me naive.”

  “We were all naive once. You’ll grow out of it.”

  “I suppose that’s what I’m doing now.”

  The glass was at her lips and she remembered she meant to stop. Two more sips: One each for Mama and Papa.

  “I thought I would have that, one day,” she said. Instead, she was married and had no husband. “My whole life stretched in front of me, and I was looking forward to living it. Then one day Papa received a letter telling of Harry’s elopement—and my future was gone. Can you imagine what that’s like?”

  No answer. He gazed at the crackling flames. She pulled her feet up onto the seat under her, tucked her nightclothes around her knees.

  He was quiet so long that when he finally spoke, she jumped.

  “I imagine it is like staring into blankness,” he said. “Each day, you have to get up and face that blankness, and try to carve out another future even while you’re grieving for the one you lost. I imagine that each day you remind yourself to concentrate on what you have and never hope for anything else, and in time, that becomes enough.”

  He knew.

  Because of course: He had loved Rachel. Loved her and lost her. His loss was even worse than hers.

  No sacrifice, he had said the day before. Marrying Cassandra and putting her out of sight made him safe. And made her the perfect wife for him. Because his idea of the perfect wife, was a wife who was no wife at all.

  Chapter 10

  The brandy had failed: Her heart ached for what they had both lost. Cassandra wanted to hate him, but that was not fair. She had agreed to a marriage in name only, back when she was too young to understand how long life could be when you had to live it alone.

  Besides, she didn’t want him either. If she could choose her husband, he would be nothing like Joshua DeWitt.

  “I never had an affair with Bolderwood’s wife,” he said, stretching and reverting to his usual briskness. “I’m not much of a husband to you, but I can promise to be honest, and that is the truth.”

  The empty snifter was heavy in her hands, the reflected flames dancing in the cut glass. She replaced it next to the full one, saw how the flames swam in the rich color of the liquor too. She lifted the glass to admire it.

  He had no reason to lie. What was the worst she could do to him? Go back to Sunne Park and never speak to him again? Take a lover so he could divorce her and cast them all out?

  “Then why does Harry think you did?” she asked.

  “I think this is a scheme to raise money and get revenge. I think they planned it.”

  “They planned it?”

  “It’s all I can think of.” His gaze flickered to the glass in her hand and up again. “Assume that I’m innocent. Now, consider that they are in severe financial straits, they blame me, and I make an easy target.”

  “But to say that about his own wife! He must know that transcripts of crim. con. trials are published in full and sell in the tens of thousands. Her reputation…”

  He shrugged, sighed. For a man who said he never got tired, he seemed weary tonight. “That’s why I think she must be involved also. Other ladies have weathered worse, even emerged from such scandals with a certain cachet; she could brazen it out too, so long as he doesn’t divorce her. The aristocracy is renowned for such behavior; people almost expect it now.”

  “They hardly seem on the brink of divorce. If you had seen them at the rout last night, all smiles and touches and looks and…Oh. Oh.”

  “What? What?”

  “They said something about taking justice into their own hands. But this is…Heavens, Joshua, this is disgusting.”

  “Disgusting. Disgraceful. Distasteful. Despicable.”

  It was all of those things and more. She tried to comprehend it. How smug they had been last night, knowing they had planted a powder keg under Cassandra’s family: not only Joshua, but Cassandra and her sisters by association.

  “No,” she said. “Harry would never do that.”

  “Perhaps your precious Harry is not the man you thought,” Joshua said, irritably.

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say that Phyllis must have been a bad influence, and she was ashamed of her willingness to blame the woman rather than the man. She recalled Harry’s cozy triumph when he met his wife’s eyes. He could not have been influenced if it was not already inside him.

  “They told me they were swept away by passion,” she said. “I don’t know if we had much passion, Harry
and I. I thought we were in love but I’m too sensible for passion.”

  “Not much passion?” He snorted. “You just hurled a chair across the room, woman.”

  It was so ridiculous she had to laugh. “You say the sweetest things.”

  He laughed too, and she thought that this was nice, chatting with him by the fire, curled up comfortably, warm inside and out. Maybe they could be friends some day.

  “Harry and I were only engaged for a week before Charlie died, and I suppose I wasn’t good company after that,” she said. “He did visit me a few times, but I didn’t have much to say.”

  Because her heart was so broken. Three years on, and still it hurt, the memory of the night when Charlie’s friends brought him in, sweating and bleeding from the knife wound between his ribs, yet making jokes all the while. She was not long home from a ball, where she and Harry had danced twice, and Harry had kissed her and said he’d always hold her in his heart. Papa was up in Scotland, and Mama had to be sedated, and so Cassandra helped the doctor, her white ballgown smeared with her brother’s blood, and she nursed Charlie for three days until he died.

  “I liked Charlie. Everyone did,” Joshua said. “And you were better off not marrying Bolderwood if he couldn’t stand by you during a bad time.”

  “Did your marriage have bad times?”

  A bleak look passed over his face. How he must miss his wife.

  “Nothing in particular,” he said, and added nothing more.

  So this is brandy, Cassandra mused, as the silence stretched between them. It put several thick panes of glass between her mind and the world. Her emotions were curled up in a little ball, like Mr. Twit sleeping at the end of her bed.

  She missed Mr. Twit.

  “You’ve drunk all my brandy,” Joshua said.

  She looked at the glass in her hand. It was empty. Oh.

  “Lucy has taken to drinking brandy,” she said.

  “What? She’s…how old?”

  “Nineteen. I hide the bottles but she finds them. The first time, it was afternoon. Mama has this pet goat called Guinevere, and the goat gets into the roses. Lucy got the goat out and, under the influence of brandy, she brought the goat inside so it wouldn’t attack the roses, and she tied a bonnet on its head.”

  “What for?”

  “So no one would know it was a goat. It was a cunning disguise.” She laughed. It had not been funny at the time, although Lucy had been laughing. But Lucy had been drinking brandy, and now Cassandra was drinking brandy, and really, the brandy did a marvelous job of making things funny. “So there was this poor goat, in this giant bonnet covered with fake cherries and grapes, running around the house, dodging the servants, and bleating and breaking things and eating the flowers. Finally, we chased her outside. Poor Guinevere. She wouldn’t be caught again and wore the bonnet for an extra day until I could get it off her.”

  He laughed. She did like his laugh. It warmed her like brandy.

  “Another time, Lucy dressed up in one of Mama’s old gowns and a wig and sang bawdy songs.”

  “What bawdy songs?”

  “I am not singing a bawdy song.”

  A slow, wicked smile spread over his face. “You know the words, don’t you? Perfect, polite, prim Cassandra, singing bawdy songs.”

  “It was Miranda. She’s my older sister. Half-sister, I mean. From Mama’s first marriage.”

  “I don’t care about Miranda. I want the song.”

  “I mean, Miranda found this old songbook and dared me to perform one, but then…”

  She’d been twelve to Miranda’s sixteen, and didn’t understand the words. She had sat at the pianoforte, heart thumping, her breath so short she wasn’t sure if she could sing, but she was determined to prove herself to Miranda, so she played the first two notes, and paused, and everyone was listening—the Bells and the Larkes were there too, as were the vicar and his wife and mother—and then—

  “Miranda sang it instead,” she said.

  Miranda got into trouble, of course, and enjoyed every minute. Mama and Papa never learned the plan; they’d patted Cassandra on the shoulder and said they were glad they could rely on her to be good.

  That time, Cassandra had complained, because Miranda and Lucy were naughty and got all the attention, whereas she was good and got none. So Mama took her to Leamington Spa, on a special trip just for her.

  She missed Mama too.

  “Sing it now,” he said. “Shock me, Mrs. DeWitt. Besides, you have been drinking, and this nation has a proud tradition of using drink as an excuse to sing bawdy songs. It is your patriotic duty.”

  “Oh my. Well. If it’s my patriotic duty.” It did seem like an excellent idea, and she enjoyed the way he was looking at her. “It was called ‘Oyster Nan’. Um…”

  She gathered her hazy thoughts and sang:

  As Oyster Nan stood by her Tub

  To show her vicious Inclination;

  She gave her noblest Parts a Scrub,

  And sigh’d for want of Copulation.

  He burst out laughing, his eyes dancing with delight, and she laughed too, enjoying herself more than she ought.

  “What next?” he said. “Did Oyster Nan get her—”

  “Don’t say it.” She pushed her hair from her forehead and tried to remember. “There was a vintner,” she said. “And they…they sported.”

  “They sported, did they?”

  “But they were interrupted, and then…I don’t know. The words made no sense. Um…”

  She sang again:

  But being call’d by Company,

  As he was taking pains to please her,

  I’m coming, coming, Sir, says he,

  My Dear, so am I, says she, Sir.

  “Why are you laughing?” she asked. “It’s not even funny.”

  But his hands covered his face and his shoulders were shaking. She imagined sliding her hand over those shoulders, his laughter rumbling beneath her palm, feeling the shape of his muscles and the warmth of his skin.

  When his laughter subsided, he said, “You are a treasure.”

  His expression was soft, then. His smile mingled with the brandy and made her body feel odd and delicious, like it had the night before, on her bed, when she thought he would kiss her, and maybe he would kiss her now.

  But he wouldn’t kiss her. He had loved his wife. He didn’t want her. And she didn’t want him either. She kept forgetting that part.

  She put the glass back on the table, and only realized she’d almost missed the edge when he lunged and caught it and moved it to the center. She could knock that glass off the table and it would break.

  “She’s broken,” she said.

  She glanced at Joshua. He was studying her with a slight frown.

  “Lucy,” she clarified. “She’s broken inside and I don’t know why. We’ve had our fair share of tragedies, but…I don’t know how to fix it and it hurts to watch her breaking into pieces. You’re a bit broken too.”

  His head jerked up. “Nobody’s broken. That’s just life.”

  “I think you are trying to stop life from happening, but life keeps on happening anyway.”

  She didn’t know where that thought came from, but it seemed a very good and important thought. Brandy didn’t interfere with her thinking. Her thinking was good. She understood now. She understood that…something.

  But he didn’t like it. Irritation flashed in his face. “Calling me broken because I don’t paste a smug smile over everything and pretend I’m better than everyone else.”

  “Are you talking about me?”

  “You have no idea what it’s like to make mistakes,” he said. “You can never understand human failings.”

  “How would you know what I do or don’t understand?”

  “When have you ever made a mistake? When have you made a bad decision? When have you even broken a single bloody rule? Huh? Name one thing you have done that you should be ashamed of.”

  The room tilted. This was what it meant to
be drunk. Foxed, tipsy, bosky. Was Papa bosky when he got himself killed? The image of Papa swam before her eyes. Papa, hugging her after her wedding. Papa, explaining how the estate ran, telling her everything would be all right. Papa, lying motionless on the bloody straw in the stable. Even after his funeral, she didn’t cry. She wrote to her husband, and when he couldn’t be bothered to come, she took over running the estate, even though she didn’t need to—they had a good land steward, and she was already busy with the household with Mama unwell—but she’d had to fill every moment from morning till bedtime.

  “I bribed a public official,” she said. “That’s what I did. I lied to the law and I lied to the church.”

  Joshua had loved her father too. If she told him, she would hurt him. Good.

  “Papa didn’t fall off his horse and break his neck,” she said. “He shot himself. And I bribed the coroner and the doctor and everyone else to cover it up so no one would know.”

  Joshua had only had one glass of brandy, but his head was spinning as if he had drunk a whole bottle, and he had to grip the arms of the chair so he wouldn’t fall off.

  Then the world steadied itself. Cassandra sat staring at nothing, and everything was the same and would never be the same again.

  Lord Charles had shot himself. No. Lord Charles was the most cheerful, warmest man he had ever known. He always had a kind word and a smile. He went out of his way to help others, and never let a penny rest in his pocket if someone else needed it more.

  “Why?” The word hardly made it out of his choked throat.

  “I don’t know. He left no note. After he died, I learned he’d had financial problems, but you gave him enough money to fix that.”

  “Yes.”

  Money. What in blazes had the money been good for? For too long, Joshua had believed money could solve all problems, but every time he thought he was protected, life went and threw something else at him to prove, yet again, that he was wrong.