“Ah. So we’re discussing only miserable wives today,” he said disdainfully.
“Why do you say that?” Lizzie asked, and then hastened to add, “I’ve just now realised that you’ve never really spoken to me about your parents, beyond the generalities.”
“I happen to have good reason for that. They were two unhappy people who were not meant to be together, so they thought it best to infect everyone around them with their misery.”
Lizzie knew something about such parents, but she let him talk because she suspected he had his own wound he needed to drain.
She didn’t know what she had expected him to say, but it certainly wasn’t the following:
“My father won my mother in a card game,” Colin said as he moved the curtain to be able to see through the carriage window.
“Pardon?” Elizabeth hoped that she had misheard.
“It all started with a house party, as such things often do. My maternal grandfather, who was a hopeless gambler, had invited a lot of very rich men to his home in the hopes of marrying off his oldest daughter to one of them, as well as fleecing at least some of them at the card table. My mother, Charlotte, was only seventeen years old and wasn’t even out in society yet. They were not only waiting for her older sister to marry, but there was anunderstandingof a peculiar nature that my mother would marry her cousin Edward, who was twenty years old at the time, so there was no rush. Everyone who knew them said they had been made for each other.”
Elizabeth’s body leaned forward without her permission, so strong was the pull of the deep sadness in her husband’s voice.
“My father, who was two and thirty, saw the beautiful Charlotte outside in the garden once during his stay at her father’s estate. I believe he even briefly spoke to her. And he was hopelessly gone from that day onward. You notice, perhaps, that I keep using the wordhopeless.You shall soon see how integral it is to this story.”
“One night, the men played cards until dawn. My grandfather was losing miserably, and, unbeknownst to everyone but my father, he was already playing with borrowed money, namely his older daughter’s dowry. This party was his last chance to recover financially, but he lost it all to my father. So when my father proposed forgiving his debt and even paying off the previous one for him in exchange for his younger daughter’s hand, mygrandfather didn’t even need five minutes to consider the offer before accepting it.”
Elizabeth gasped, but Colin’s gaze never moved from the window.
“They decided to marry them right then and there to seal the agreement, but to give Charlotte several more months at her parents' estate to allow her to get used to this change of circumstance. Both men thought that would be enough for her to accept her fate. She would be a rich duchess; what was there to complain about?”
“How did she take it?” Lizzie asked.
“Surprisingly well in the beginning,” Colin said. “She still lived at home, still had her friends, still saw Edward regularly, and my father was this distant idea of a man who would some day come and take her away. But that day came sooner than she had thought. At first, she was impressed by the life in London, the balls, the plays, purchasing new clothes and furniture and whatever else her young heart desired, but once the shine wore off and she was confined in Norwich about to be delivered of me when she was 20 years old, things started to deteriorate.”
“My father was obsessed with his wife, and she hated him more and more with every passing day,” Colin said with a weary sigh. “They both lived in their own hell. From what I’ve been told, the event that irrevocably changed everything was Edward getting married when I was two years old. I don’t know if my mother had held out hope until then, although if she did, I don’t know what it had been for, escape? My father’s death? Edward’s love? Who knows. But that was when she started being unfaithful tomy father, insulting him openly, and just overall making herself and everyone around her even more miserable.”
“Why did your father not separate from her?”
“I told you, he was obsessed. It was rather unhealthy, and that had been clear to me even as a young child. It was like any sort of life with her was preferable to a peaceful existence without her. I didn’t understand it back then,” Colin replied.
“Do you think she hated your father more than she loved Edward?”
“I honestly, to this day, don’t know whether she’d actually loved Edward or if her behaviour was all just a response to this chaos she was thrown into. She had been raised from childhood with this one idea, that she would be Edward’s wife, and that she would be living here and like this,” Colin explained, waving his hand to speed up the story, “and then to wake up one day and be told that it was all for nothing, to forget all about this future you’d built your entire identity on…”
“That must have been devastating. And disorienting,” Lizzie remarked.
Colin nodded.
“On the other hand, I sometimes think that perhaps it was a question of character, and that she would have behaved like that with Edward as well. Doctor Cooper claims that there are illnesses of the spirit and the mind that affect certain people, so it could have been one of those. I don’t know.”
“I’m so sorry, Colin,” Lizzie said as she squeezed his arm compassionately.
“Don’t be. I don’t deserve your compassion. The irony is not lost on me that I am, indeed, my father's son. Seems like we cannot wed a woman without trapping her in some way.”
“It’s not the same!” Lizzie found herself protesting.
“Really? How am I any better than him? I’m not.”
Elizabeth wanted to say something, to contradict him somehow, but how could she? He had, after all, taken away her choice in the matter. Did the fact that she had rather liked being married to him change anything?
“What happened with your grandparents?” She asked instead of dwelling on that impossible riddle.
“As far as I know, my grandmother is still alive. But I’ve never had any contact with them, my mother refused to see them after her marriage.”
