Page 23 of A Tryst By the Sea
Penelope wrapped four small raspberry tarts in a linen napkin and slipped them into her reticule. Vergilius liked them with his breakfast.
“You’d be giving up?” Penelope suggested. “Creating a scandal, fueling gossip?” She’d be doing all of that in spectacular fashion once word got out that the lawyers were involved.
“We’d be compounding our losses,” Amanda said. “I’d reached the point that when I looked at William, all I could see was the man to whom Iowed sons, not my friend, not my partner in mischief, not a fellow who’d need allies when his father died. Not the only person who knows just by looking at me that my dancing slippers are pinching. I had to widen my focus to encompass all of him again. That was work, but work worth doing, and he had to see in me more than an unhappy wife.”
“But two miscarriages… How can you face the prospect of the same thing happening yet again?”
“We are careful, and whether to try again is an ongoing discussion. When I’m ready, William isn’t. When he’s feeling courageous, I’m not. We have three nephews. Children for us would be a blessing, but they are not a necessity. Being honest and kind with each other is what matters.”
Elsewhere in the dining room, people were laughing and talking, while in Penelope’s mind, ten years of marital history were taking on a very different aspect. Lady Tregoning and her husband had been talkingfor yearsabout whether to try for more children, while Penelope had been hiding behind the Society pages and stuffing her calendar with committee meetings.
“How did you cope?” she asked, keeping her voice down. “When you felt you no longer knew your husband, when you wanted to stay home yet again, when the sight of family coming to roost in your home for the Season made you bilious?”
Lady Tregoning’s smile was wistful. “We didn’t cope very well at the start. We muddled along for the first couple years, and everybody told us to try again. To put the past behind us. Carry on, and don’t dwell on what cannot be changed. I hate those words—‘don’t dwell.’ It felt as if they were telling me to ignore my own broken heart. Then I lost the second baby—a boy—andcarrying onwas beyond me.”
Penelope sipped her wine, a pleasant white. “Precisely. I sometimes hate my sister-in-law.”
Amanda bit into an orange tart. “How many?”
“Seven. Four boys, three girls, and I suspect she’s not done. She pops them out like some broodmare. At her oats for breakfast, a baby in the straw by noon, at grass an hour later.”
“We hate them, the broodmares, and then we feel guilty because we aren’t among them, and we know nobodypops outa baby without considerable pain, danger, and struggle. But if I’m a broodmare, is my dear William merely a stud colt? I will never forget the day he asked me that, and I had no answer for him.”
“It’s different for men.” Penelope was horrified to hear herself quoting her mother-in-law.
“It could well be worse,” Amanda replied, selecting a chocolate from the arrangement on the platter. “The fellows are supposed to be strong, stoic,manly. Impervious to suffering. How lonely that must be.”
“We don’t think of them as lonely.” Vergilius had been the most generous and tender of lovers, and good God, Penelope missed him intimately. They had made passionate love, but they had also talked in bed. Long, thoughtful conversations punctuated by rest and affection. Did his lordship have anybody else to simply talk to?
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 didtalkmatter when she was about to causescandal?
