Ultimately, as she kept nervously picking on a thread on the edge of the coverlet, her mind wandered to the last night she’d spent in this room, which had been the night before her wedding. She could instantly taste the old despair, the hurt, the humiliation and the powerlessness she had suffered because of the man who, for months, had led her to believe that…
What?She asked herself.What did he lead you to believe, Elizabeth?
In the end, the one thing she was certain about was this: Colin Talbot had deliberately and knowingly prevented her frommarrying the man she’d given her word to (a good, kind man!), he’d stained her reputation and undone her efforts not to be like either of her parents, and he and her brother had then browbeaten her into marrying Talbot.
She was still unclear on his reasons for the whole thing. (As if men like him needed a reason!She scoffed.)
She also considered the conundrum of Colin lying to her. Had he lied, or had he just omitted the truth? If a liar admits they’ve lied, is that the truth? Would she ever believe a word out of his mouth again?
Ultimately, she decided not to believe his words about wanting to marry her all along, and she didn’t want to even think about his claims that he’d been burning up or unable to get her out of his head, or whatever else he’d said during that terrible fight.
Instead, she held onto that one thing she was certain about with all her might and, with its help, managed to fall asleep some time before dawn.
*
Elizabeth woke up a few hours later with a raging headache. Not in the mood to talk or smile or make herself look pretty, she simply rebraided her hair, pulled on a grey wool morning dress, and headed downstairs. She soon realised that part of the discomfort was having missed the daily bath she had become so used to during her marriage for two days in a row.
She heard voices coming from the morning room, and when she drew closer, she heard her husband cheerfully chatting over breakfast with her traitor of a mother. The pain of feeling betrayed by both of them cut her so deep that she almost slammed the door into the wall as she flung it open.
“What is he doing here?” she asked through clenched teeth, her headache threatening to push her eyeballs out of her skull.
Her husband looked at her with worry apparent in his bright eyes (they looked grey again today), but she didn’t let that soften her.
“I live here, wife,” he replied gently, despite not having been asked anything.
Her mother stood up and excused herself with an apologetic look at her daughter, who was now ignoring her.
“Since when?” Elizabeth asked her husband, her first words to him in days.
“Since my wife moved here.”
There it was again, that soft, endless, annoying patience in his voice.
Elizabeth sat down in a chair, grabbed a piece of toast and started breaking it into smaller pieces, trying to contain the frightening wave of her rage somehow.
“Why do we need to live in the same house?” She asked, and as she was saying it, she knew she was being deliberately obtuse and belligerent, despite generally not being inclined to such behaviour, but her headache and fatigue were getting the best of her. “I don’t want to live with you or be around you,” she added.
She knew her husband rather well by now. Whenever he’d felt disrespected or threatened in the past, he would lash out with his words or resort to bitterness, and if she was being honest with herself (which she wasn’t), she’d admit that she was trying to get him to fall for her provocation, to prove all her unflattering opinions of him right.
A huge fight full of angry, hurtful insults was just what she needed to, once and for all, label her husband as a monster unworthy of her love.
Love?She thought, startled.Why am I bringing love into this?
But the man who’d taught her to fish wasn’t taking her bait.
“You had almost 20 years of living without me, and you got one more day yesterday. I think that’s quite enough time away from me.”
“I disagree,” she said petulantly.
“I seem to recall a certain young lady once lecturing me on the importance of the marital vows one pledges on their wedding day,” Colin said playfully, but his face grew more and more serious as he went on. “And I’ve since come to realise that she was right. I’ve given my word and I’ve entered into a covenant with you, and we are bound to each other for as long as we both shall live.”
Lizzie wrinkled her brow in thought.
“The vows don’t state we have to live together. Besides, if I remember correctly, you also vowed to endow me with all your worldly goods? Does that mean the Norwich estate belongs to me now?”
“Everything I have belongs to you now,” he said solemnly, but she looked heavenward and shook her head.
“You’re not the only one who remembers our conversation about vows. I rememberyoutelling me that all you cared about in life was whether society approved of your actions. Wasn’t that why you did what you did? You obtained society’s permission to marry me despite how abhorrent the idea was in light of your world-view or how wrong it seemed in the eyes of your peers?”
