Page 21 of A Tryst By the Sea
“A green ormer,” he replied, setting off down the strand.
“Watch out for pirates,” Penelope called after him. “I would not want to lose you to the foul clutches of the Barbary corsairs.”
His lordship stalked back across the beach, kissed Penelope on the mouth, and then marched on at the tide line.
Her teasing had been meant as just that, but Summerton’s kiss had been in earnest. Penelope watched him walk away, an ache starting up in her chest. A new ache, one sharp with regret, for she did esteem her husband too.
She always had. She took off her own footwear and was assailed by the thought that she hadn’t realized how much she’d lose when she set Vergilius free, but by the end of this week, she would be intimately acquainted with the magnitude of that loss—that loss too.
Gill had wanted to reserve mornings for wooing, but he’d been unable to abide by his own rules. On a blanket on the beach, over a tray of sandwiches on the terrace, at breakfast in bright seaside sunshine, he and Penelope considered finances, who should be told what, and other details of untangling a long and public marriage.
He had the sense that much of what they discussed should have been covered earlier—years earlier. Penelope was appalled by the sums the dowager viscountess and the Lychmont household drained from Gill’s exchequer. He had not known the extent of her charitable efforts, nor how much she genuinely took them to heart.
Children in the mines. Children in the mills. Children on the streets. The pattern was clear and laudable—and closely mirrored Gill’s agenda in the Lords. How had he not known this about his own wife?
Or—more accurately—how had he notappreciatedit about her? All he’d noticed was that she was often from home during the day, attending committee meetings. Parliament did its work mostly in the evening, and thus husband and wife had seen little of each other for much of the year.
“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.Hadhe 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 todealwith 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 tocomfortme. 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.”
