Page 24 of A Tryst By the Sea
“Pen? Are you well?”
He knows just by looking at me that my dancing slippers are pinching.“I am being ridiculous.”
Vergilius held out the chocolate she’d chosen for him. “Tell me.”
She took it and set it on her plate. “I don’t want your mother and Bella in my house. It’s not my house, it was never my house. I left that place with an intention to never return there, but I don’t want those women making free withyourwine, inviting their friends intoyourparlor, and drivingyourhorses in the park.”
Vergilius rose and held Penelope’s chair for her. He was quiet as they made their way past the reception desk and out the front door, pausing only long enough to drape Penelope’s cloak over her shoulders.
“A question for you, my lady.” He strolled arm in arm with her to the elm grove, the laughter and noise of the inn fading with each step. “What would have made itourhouse,ourwine, andourhorses?”
It was on the tip of Penelope’s tongue to answer with one word: children. Children would have changed everything. Even daughters would have changed everything, but again, she heard her mother-in-law and sister-in-law echoing in that reply. According to those two,even a daughterwould have proved Vergilius’s virility, though not as effectively as a nursery full of sons would.
Vergilius’svirilitywas not now, nor had it ever been, in doubt.
“I have seen myself as a failed broodmare,” Penelope said, “and thus a failed wife, but there’s more to it than that. I failed to listen to my own instincts, and in a way, Vergilius, I have failed my vows.”
He shifted his hold so they walked hand in hand. “That is utter rot, Penelope. Tell me you know that reasoning to be the rankest tripe.”
“It’s not reasoning,” she said as they emerged from the trees to behold the vast sea undulating beneath a rising moon. “It’s how I feel, Vergilius. I suspect you have felt likewise, but we have not shared how we feel. We’ve shared formal dinners and lonely breakfasts.”
He was quiet all the way to the cottage, then he again opened the door and lit the various candles. When he’d also poked up the fire, he bowed his good-night over Penelope’s hand, as he had for the past several nights.
They had two more days before he would return to Town, two more nights before he would stride out of Penelope’s life.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Vergilius said, “but before I go, I will tell you, my lady, that if I had to marry again, that if I was once more that strutting young fellow determined to catch up to his younger brother’s marital accomplishments, I would still account myself the luckiest of bridegrooms to end up married to you.”
He kissed her lingeringly on the mouth, then walked off into the darkness. Penelope caught sight of him half an hour later when she’d made herself a last cup of tea to take out to the terrace. She was swaddled in his old dressing gown, a habit she’d acquired after the baby had died, and she’d waited in vain, for months, to be summoned to the Hall.
Down on the beach, Vergilius sat upon a rock, his knees drawn up, his boots beside him on the sand.
“Good-bye.” Penelope tried the word out at a whisper, and even that was enough to bring tears to her eyes. She grew cold keeping the vigil on the terrace, and when she eventually went inside, her husband was still alone on the distant beach.
Her last thought before drifting off in a bed where she still couldn’t get warm was that she’d left a perfectly luscious chocolate sitting on the edge of her plate.
What manner of fool wasted perfectly luscious chocolate?
Chapter Six
Gill’s mind was accepting what his heart refused to admit: Penelope had made her decision, and she would not be charmed away from it. She’d suffered in silence for years from a marriage that had, as Gill had said, failed her.
Hehad failed her. She’d never refused him anything—save for not joining him at the Hall after Papa’s death, and she’d had her reasons, of course—and Gill wasn’t about to refuse her anything now. She had asked him to take her riding along a wide, sandy expanse of beach, and he had rented her a handsome mare so they could gallop along the waves. She had asked him to read to her, and he’d done his best with bucolic Wordsworth.
Then he’d trotted out, from memory, some of the naughty old John Wilmot verse he’d picked up at university—the man had been a stranger to euphemism—and Penelope had descended into outright laughter. One goal attained.
She’d retaliated with a limerick about old Friar Tuck that had astonished Gill with its vulgarity and left him wondering what other treasures his wife had kept hidden from him.
“Have we resolved where I’m to live?” Penelope said as they returned from a final afternoon spent on the beach.
“I thought you were taking Antrim Cottage? It’s unentailed, available now, and well maintained.”
Antrim Cottage was also just outside a pretty little village in Berkshire, not halfway to the benighted Highlands, which had been Penelope’s original choice of abode.
“Antrim Cottage is lovely,” she said, “but it’s the former gatehouse for Antrim House. You enjoy spending time at Antrim House in the autumn.”
He’d thoughtsheenjoyed those weeks away from both Town and Hall in autumn. “Then I will promise to avoid Antrim House,” Gill said, “or I can break the entail on Antrim House—Tommie will have a price for that, but he’ll agree as my heir—and you can have Antrim House.”
Penelope preceded him into the cottage, something about her posture suggesting that, like many negotiations, this one was coming spectacularly unraveled just as the opposing parties ought to be shaking hands on an understanding that met all needs.
