“Good morning. Have you slept well?”
“I did, thank you. Have you?”
“Extraordinarily well. There is something about this inn,” he teased. “I wonder if it’s impressed by everything that we’ve learned since the last time we stayed here,” he laughed as he folded his hands under his head.
“Colin!” She hid her face in her hands.
“Don’t hide your face like that,” he said, appearing deceptively helpful, “better take the pillow you used to muffle your cries last night.”
“You are utterly horrible,” she pinched his exposed underarm and laughed at his yelp.
*
“Baker handed me these just as we were leaving yesterday.” She pulled some letters out of her reticule and lifted them to show Colin when they were settled in the carriage. “Do you mind if I read them now?”
“Go ahead,” he said magnanimously.
“Oh, this one’s from Elinor,” she exclaimed happily, and he enjoyed watching her as she opened and started reading it.
Soon, however, she looked surprised, and then slightly worried.
“Oh, my,” she said.
“Has something happened to your friend?” Talbot inquired.
“In a way,” Lizzie said vaguely, then sat in silence for a few minutes. “Amelia has eloped to Gretna Green with Corporal Harding.”
Colin was momentarily terrified of the possibility that his wife was jealous.
He took several deep breaths.
“Elinor doesn’t know all the details, but it seems to have been Amelia’s idea,” she said, still frowning a bit, like she was focused on untangling a knot.
“That does not sound like something Lady Fairchild would do,” Colin said carefully.
“Well, yes and no…” Elizabeth trailed off. “She heard you, you know.”
“Pardon?”
“At her parents’ ball, Lady Amelia was on the balcony with me. She heard all yougentlemenmaking fun of her, saying she’d never get married. It most likely affected her more than any of us can ever know. I wonder how big a part it played in her decision to arrange her matrimony with the Corporal.”
Colin didn’t want to think about that wretched evening, nor of the cruel words he had so harshly spoken about his now-wife. He wished, not for the first time, that he could put them back in his mouth somehow.
You were very concerned about her status and their opinion back in the Fairchilds’ library,a voice in his head mocked.What changed?
Did I change, or did she change?He wondered.
He remembered being at Eton and struggling with the lectures on Aristotelian logic and classical philosophy, particularly The Principle of Non-Contradiction.
A proposition and its negation cannot simultaneously be true.
The image of her pale face informing him that she would no longer be his friend was still burned into his brain. He turned his face away from her and squeezed his eyes shut to get rid of the image.
“I’m sorry you both heard that. I... Men talk like that sometimes, it doesn’t mean anything,” Colin turned back to her and said in what, for him, was an apologetic tone. “No wonder she was so nasty to me when I asked her to dance that one time,” he added after a while.
“Well, you deserved a bit of nastiness,” Lizzie said with a small smile, and he was relieved.
“I’m happy for them, and not only because I feel less guilty now,” Elizabeth then said, and Colin was hit with immense relief at the honesty in her face. “I hope Amelia will be a better wife to the Corporal than I could have been.”
