After a few long minutes, his thrusting slowed and his teeth left my skin and my vision finally began to clear. The three of us fell backward on the bed into a tangle of limbs and panting, Mr. Markham still buried inside of me.
“Thank you for sharing yourself with me,” Silas said, all gentlemanly politeness, despite the sweat on his forehead and despite the sleepy cock currently pressed against my thigh.
My eyes seemed to close all on their own, and a happy sigh escaped me when Mr. Markham’s hand reached around me to cup my breast and Silas laid his head against my shoulder.
“It was my pleasure,” I said, and those words had never been truer.
I woke twice that night. The first was to Mr. Markham moving against me, his shaft seeking entrance to my cleft, and I sleepily parted my legs, resting one on his hip as my breasts pressed against his chest. I felt lips on my back—Silas was kissing me there—and for several long minutes, there was nothing but slow dreamy thrusts and the press of Silas’ erection against my ass and the sound of skin rasping on fabric. When my orgasm came, it was gentle and sweet, and I was drifting back into sleep even as Mr. Markham shuddered and released into me.
The second time I woke, the floor-length curtains had parted and the blue-black light of early morning limned the window frame and the balcony outside, along with a tall figure. I knew without looking that the man still in bed with me was my own Mr. Markham, but the warmth of the room made the pre-dawn air look cool and attractive, and so in a moment, I was standing next to Silas, wrapped in Mr. Markham’s dressing robe.
He’d pulled on his trousers but nothing else, leaving his ridged and slender torso exposed to the open air. He leaned against the railing, surveying the street below, seeming amused by the early morning bustle of food delivery wagons and street vendors and sporadic hansom cabs.
“Too warm?” he asked, not looking at me.
I affirmed that I was and leaned against the railing as well. The world was a different place in the early morning, when the debauched had finally gone to bed and the industrious were barely awake.
/>
“He’s in love with you, you know,” Silas remarked, still not looking away from the road.
I flushed, wheeling around to make sure Mr. Markham was well asleep and couldn’t hear us talking about him. Satisfied that our conversation was not being eavesdropped upon, I turned back to Silas. “I know.”
Now he turned and braced his back against the railing, folding his arms across his chest. On any other man, the gesture might have seemed hostile or aggressive, but Silas made it seem friendly. Casual. “Do you really?” he asked.
Defensiveness rippled along my skin like invisible chain mail, but I couldn’t refute Silas. It had only been a couple of months, and by any standards, that was too short a time to claim to know someone, however intimately. I barely knew him and I now barely knew myself—I’d always been the girl who had done whatever she wanted, sure, but how could I know that marriage to Mr. Markham wouldn’t cage me instead of free me? I wanted to be next to him always…but what if the institution of marriage, the boundaries that came with it, the expectations…what if they poisoned that love for me? For the first time, the ring on my finger felt more like a shackle than a promise.
Yes, I wanted to say. I knew that he loved me. But there was so much complication surrounding it all that I couldn’t actually find the right words.
Silas and I didn’t speak for a long moment, staying quiet in the breeze.
“He married his first wife in the York Minster,” Silas finally said, nodding his head toward the cathedral towers spiking up above the other buildings. “He loved Arabella, you know. People often think he didn’t, because it was arranged between their parents, but he did. He was wrecked after her death.” He sighed.
I thought of Arabella, of how Mrs. Harold had accused Mr. Markham of intentionally moving her to a climate that would force her death. I wanted to know more about her, about their marriage. “Did he know her before they married?”
Silas nodded. “Her family is well-known in the county—moneyed and connected—and she was the inevitable match for him from her birth. The right breeding and the right dowry. But they had a genuine connection too. They exchanged letters while he was at Oxford and even while he traveled…I think he found something refreshing in her. Something sweet. I would say it was her innocence, but I think it was something slightly different. Rather, I think he felt like she would accept his worldliness, his jadedness, knowingly, and still remain as she was. Much how he feels about you, I suspect.”
I glanced back into the dark room, where the long, languid form of Mr. Markham still stretched across the bed.
“But I’m hardly innocent,” I said, gesturing between me, Silas and the bed. “Certainly not in the unspoiled, untouched way that Arabella must have been.”
Silas shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean that your sense of self—your ability to love and experience and live—it can persist, despite proximity to darker things. Women like Molly, they can get hard. Cynical. They stop trusting and eventually they stop opening their hearts. They calcify, slowly, into living stone. Your cousin was much the same,” Silas said, drawing my thoughts away from Molly. “She was also the opposite of Arabella. Passionate and strong, or so she seemed. And in you, I think Julian has finally found everything he was looking for, the synthesis of what he worshipped about Arabella and craved from Violet. The passion and also the ability to remain unsullied by the world.”
I should say thank you, I should feel flattered. My brain fumbled looking for the appropriate response, all as my heart sank under the weight of this expectation.
I could be Mr. Markham’s lover and I could be his wife…but could I be his moral anchor? Could I bear the weight of another’s heart and mind leaning on mine?
And what if I didn’t remain unsullied? What if I grew hard like Molly or Violet? Despite my determination to never see him with Brightmore, I had never deluded myself into thinking Mr. Markham would remain physically loyal to me for our entire marriage—everyone knew that husbands strayed, even those who were less sexually rapacious than my future spouse. But if he did, could I remain unhardened by that? Could I even remain with him? I wasn’t, after all, bred to endure quietly the way most women were. When things grew painful, my instinct was to flee.
And Silas had mentioned Violet, and that brought to the surface the most pain, the most powerful urges to flee.
“What’s wrong?” Silas asked. “You’ve gone pale. I can see it even in this light.”
I knew that this was one of those situations where I should demur, say something polite and reassuring, but there was no girlhood grooming to take over when my mind and tongue failed, and so the truth came out instead. “There are times when I doubt…when I doubt us. Our future. One moment, I think I can stay next to him forever, and the other moment I feel trapped by it. I feel terrified of him sometimes, that he’ll wound my heart or betray me or—” Or kill me. And grooming or no, I absolutely knew I shouldn’t voice that last out loud, not to his closest friend.
But I couldn’t not stay my tongue either—not completely. I had no one to talk to about this, no one to seek advice from. “The night he proposed,” I said, keeping my eyes on the shadowed bedroom, worried that Mr. Markham would overhear, “he made me promise never to ask about the night Violet died. Why would he do that, Silas, if there wasn’t something awful that he’d done? That he had to keep hidden from me?”
“Ivy,” he started, but I cut him off, pacing.
