“I was laughing at the idea that I used to be a passionate and generous lover before marrying you, because I now see that I never was. I’ve never experienced anything like this, Elizabeth, not with anyone but you. I don’t know what it is about you, but you set my blood on fire,” he said, looking away in order to hide the love he was certain was obvious in his eyes, and thus not seeing how his wife’s whole face transformed and softened, illuminated by the inner glow of her own feelings.
“All right then,” she said, and he looked at her only to find her running her tongue over her teeth to unsuccessfully stop a self-satisfied smile.
“Is that all you have to say to my eloquent reassurances?” He asked, only half-joking.
“Aye,” she teased.
“So a man is not to expect any reassurances in return?” He asked, and she slowly shook her head in mock regret.
“You’re not a man, you’re a duke,” she teased.
“My wife is a cruel woman,” he lamented with a small smile, happy that her eyes were glinting in amusement again.
“I must go dress now, husband,” she stood up and smiled at him, and he let her go.
Some ten minutes later, he abandoned his philosophical musings on how a married duke might succeed in making it a habit of taking his wife in his study every day –but not immediately after breakfast, no,he concluded before standing up and taking in the mess that the two of them had made.
Not wanting the maids to witness (or gossip about) it, he rang for Stevenson instead.
The usually stone-faced valet raised an amused eyebrow at the state of his master’s desk and the ruffled man himself. Talbot was filled with a sense of manly pride that one would expect from a younger, less sophisticated man, but wasn’t today all about shedding the oppressive robes of manners and society?
He, who’d always viewed marriage as a necessary, if strategic, evil, was now genuinely enjoying every aspect of having a wife.
And he had made a good match after all, he thought, for she was a duke’s daughter herself!Base-born,he couldn’t resist amending mentally,but blood is blood, isn’t it?
That evening, like every evening, they retired into the library after dinner, each engrossed in their own book. On some evenings, Lady Burnham joined them, sometimes he read to her, but they also left each other to their preferences a lot of the time.
A good match indeed,Talbot reaffirmed to himself, as he looked up from Sir Joseph Banks’s account of his travels to Iceland at his (frowning) wife.
He continued stealing glances at her until she (rather violently) shut her book and rubbed the spot between her eyebrows with her left hand. Talbot found the glint of her wedding ring to be very becoming to her complexion.
“IsUdolphonot to your liking, wife?” he asked, amused by her apparent exasperation.
“No, I -” She was startled by his question, clearly having been lost in her thoughts.
She sat up and laid the book down next to her on the chaise longue.
“Thank you for ordering all these novels for me. I know you don’t personally enjoy them.”
“But?”
“I just find myself disliking the heroine, Emily. She cries too much, even though she really has nothing to cry about! And her father keeps encouraging her spoiled behaviour with his attentiveness, -” Elizabeth stopped herself, looking ashamed at something she’d said.
Colin understood where her feelings were coming from and why she, perhaps, found fault with all fathers.
Or is she simply envious of young women who are not fatherless?He wondered.
He then briefly thought about his own parents, the cruel mother and the weak father who had run off to war to escape the unhappy home he had created for himself.
Didn’t my experiences with them forever shape my views on marriage and family?
*
Two days later, when he set off on his (by now habitual) mid-morning search for his wife, he found her in her preferred drawing room (the one they had defiled on their first morning at Norwich two months ago) with tears streaking down her lovely face.
“What happened? Has someone died?” he asked, glancing at the letter in her hand.
A gentleman always looks away from someone’s open letter;the long-ago words of his tutor rang in his head but were quickly followed by,Devil take it.
