Page 8 of It Takes Two to Tumble
“You can put me down on the bench,” Alice said, so close her breath ruffled his hair.
“Must I?” he asked, squeezing her a bit tighter, then loosening his grip because he could feel the contours of her bones. He was seized by the idea that if he put her down she’d blow away.
“I’m afraid so.” Her voice seemed graver than this conversation required. “How did you find Captain Dacre?” she asked after he had arranged her on the bench.
“He’s cold and angry and seems dead set against kindness,” Ben said, not mincing words, and then immediately feeling guilty for being so uncharitable. “He returns from two years at sea and instead of—I don’t know—embracing his children or even greeting them or whatever it is fond papas do, he makes himself as disagreeable as possible.”
“When my father came home from a trip he’d always bring me back something special. A new set of paints, or something else he could slip into his bag.”
“Well, he was fond of you. Who can blame him?” Ben asked. He didn’t want to talk about the captain. Not here.
“A doctor from London came last week while you were up at Barton Hall.”
“Did he have anything helpful to say?”
“He thinks I’m malingering.”
Ben sucked in a breath and held it until he could trust himself to speak calmly. “Did your parents believe him?”
“No, thank goodness. Or, even if they did, they’d never say as much, which is more or less the same thing.” Ben disagreed there, but didn’t want to point it out. “But I feel like I’m starting to believe him. What if I’m mad? He told Father that this is a form of hysteria he usually sees in older women who have already had children and now wish to get attention in other ways.”
Ben would have liked to give this medical man some attention, preferably with his fists and quite possibly with his boots. “You haven’t walked on your own in months. If you were shamming it, you’d have to be as mad as a March hare, and I think we’d all have noticed by now.”
She was silent, the only sounds the hooting of an owl and the rustling of leaves. “He was so sure of himself.”
“It’s his job to be sure of himself. He can’t charge five guineas to shrug his shoulders and walk away.”
“I don’t want to get married until I know for sure whether I’m going to recover.”
“I don’t care whether you can walk, Alice.”
“But I do,” she said vehemently. “I want to know what’s in store for me before I make any promises. I want to know what my life will be like. I think I deserve that. My opinion on this matters, Benedict.” She sounded almost angry on those last words.
Ben couldn’t argue. He wasn’t going to try to persuade her to marry him against her will. He took her hands. “Anything you want. However long you want. I’m not going anywhere. But in case you were in any doubt, I want to marry you, no matter what. There’s nobody else I can imagine spending my life with.”
He thought this was a good thing to say. It was the truth, and it was what he told himself whenever he thought about his marriage: there was nobody other than Alice he could imagine being with. But Alice tilted her head to the side and regarded him quizzically. “You know there are people who marry for other reasons.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You mean dynastic marriages? I never seem to have any money at all and you have three hundred pounds. I don’t think we qualify.”
She laughed, but her smile didn’t last long. “No, I mean when the butcher’s boy steps out with the baker’s daughter. They have their own reasons.”
His own smile faltered but he shored it up. “I daresay they do, and that it has something to do with sandwiches.” His own parents had gotten married while drunk on lust; he was rather pleased with himself that he wasn’t repeating their mistake. He preferred not to dwell on the fact that his own sobriety of thought owed more to his lack of interest in women than it did with any moral uprightness. That wasn’t the point.
“Very droll,” she said.
He kissed her hand, just a light brush of his lips over her cool skin, and tried not to notice Alice’s slight frown.
Since it was already a terrible day and not much could make it worse, Phillip climbed the stairs to the schoolroom. He knew it would be empty but he wanted to see it, maybe to confirm that it was still precisely as bad as he remembered, no better and no worse. The schoolroom was tucked away in a dismal, north-facing corner of an upper story, grim even at noon but beyond dreary at night. When he pushed the door open, the hinges creaked angrily as if the door hadn’t been opened recently. Indeed, it had the damp and dusty odor of a room long unused. The moonlight shifted, illuminating an unintelligible scrawl on the chalkboard and dredging up every stray particle of shame and confusion he had experienced as a child in this room.
For a brief moment he was glad the children were off making mischief in cherry trees or really anywhere else rather than this godforsaken tomb. But no, Phillip had his own particular reasons for which this room had been the setting of such misery. His children didn’t share any of that. They belonged in the damned schoolroom and he was beyond annoyed that they weren’t.
He went back down to the library and took out his frustration on the brandy bottle, so he was mildly drunk and execrably lonely when his gaze strayed to the pair of portraits on the wall by the hearth. Even in oil paints, Caroline was almost tangibly competent. Her competence was all over the house, from the neat arrangement of chairs against the wall to the way the servants tapped precisely twice on the door before entering.
Suddenly he resented Caroline for having died, which he realized was a ridiculous thing to do, but he did so anyway. He missed his boys in their matching short pants and his daughter with her neat plaits. And it was all Caroline’s fault. Bloody scarlet fever.
Phillip wanted to beat his hands on the paneling of the wall. This was all wrong. This was not what he wanted. He was angry with Caroline for having died, he was angry with himself for not having returned sooner and not knowing what to do now that he was here, and he was angry with the bloody vicar for simply existing even though he knew none of this was the man’s fault. God, he had never missed Caroline so much in his life. Or, which was worse, in her own life. He could add taking her for granted to his list of sins.
She had written to him, like any dutiful wife, and he had McCarthy read her letters aloud to him when they were alone in his cabin. He would dictate a reply for McCarthy to copy out. Christ, just thinking of it made him feel like he had somehow betrayed both of them at once.
