“That is for me to worry about,” Talbot smiled, enjoying needling her as she sat down and started removing the pins from her hair. “How are you? With your…” he waved his hand up and down her body to avoid mentioning her courses.
Elizabeth lowered her eyes briefly. “Much better, thank you.”
“Did you have a nice day with your friend?”
Her smile was an answer in itself. “Yes. She’s already helping me so much just by being here.” She then seemed to remember something. “Oh! Do you know what I’ve decided? Instead of bothering with my hair every morning, I shall start wearing a cap!”
Colin raised an eyebrow at her. “Absolutely not.”
“What?” she whirled around to see him better. “Why not?”
“Because you are not my elderly aunt,” he replied.
“But my hair is so heavy, my scalp hurts every night.”
“I can massage your scalp whenever you need it. Or just wear your hair loose at home.”
“No,” she frowned, “even I know that is not done.”
Colin shrugged. “No caps.”
Lizzie shook her head and returned to the pins with a sigh.
Chapter 20
As Stevenson shaved his face in practised and deft strokes, Talbot let his mind wander and, as it usually did, it settled on his wife. We’ve been married almost a month now, he realised. Sometimes, he felt like she had always lived here with him.
After his bath, as Stevenson handed him his body linen, then his necktie, waistcoat, coat, and finally, his boots, all of those items carefully brushed and polished, he took a good look at his faithful companion, the man who was among the rare few who knew him the longest, and, not for the first time, wished he could cross the barrier between them and just be open with him.
He ached to talk about his wife, to sort through the confusing feelings and thoughts he was grappling with.
Instead, like an animal that had been mercilessly taught not to approach a fence and was thus adept at avoiding it, he only said, “For tomorrow, have my fishing boots and two angling rods ready. I shall teach my wife to fish.”
Stevenson nodded dutifully, but it seemed to Talbot that he was fighting a smile. What was the man who, for years, had suffered under the task of selecting and purchasing jewellery for his master’s paramours thinking now?
While Stevenson knew of and had seen multiple of his women coming and going from his London home (Colin had always known only his duchess would be allowed to enter Norwich), Talbot had no idea about his valet’s private life.
Did Stevenson have a steady woman, or did he simply visit courtesans on his days off like most men in service did? Did he desire to be wed? Did he believe in love?
As Talbot made his way to his study, his thoughts turned to his own woman. Their shared passion seemed to only become more pronounced as the weeks went by, and the last time Talbot found his mind drifting to carnal relations this often was when one of the boys at Eton had somehow managed to obtain a copy ofFanny Hill.
But Elizabeth wasn’t a piece of fiction – she was a real, hot-blooded woman with a snug, hot centre that he entered and found release in every chance he got. Being inside her felt like a revelation, especially since Talbot had never enjoyed a woman without usingcundumsbefore his marriage.
Ever since an older student took him, Hawkins, Pratt, Brandon, and Stone to anestablishmentin what would end up being his last year at Eton and warned them never to let themselves enjoy a courtesan without one of Mrs Phillips’s implements of safety if they wanted to avoid by-blows and the French disease, Talbot had religiously followed his schoolmate’s advice aboutcundums.
His thoughts wandered to the made-up, unenthusiastic face of the young woman he’d almost bedded that day; he could still clearly picture her thinness, her stained teeth, and recall the stale, slightly animalistic smell of the room she lived and did her business in.
He reviewed the memory with faint distaste but profound gratitude because, although he was unable to follow through with his brothel conquest (the girl was, of course, handsomely paid to say otherwise), thanks to his friend's advice, Talbot was more than prepared for intimacy when his mother’s widowed friend helped him briefly forget his grief the following summer.
Colin chuckled at the idea that he believed himself in love back then, now that…Never mind that,he thought.
In his rare moments of clarity, he worried he would lose his mind and all his faculties if he continued obsessing over relations with his wife in this manner. He’d never been with anyone so eager, so passionate. He sometimes wondered whether her passion was roused by him or if it was something that she’d always had in her, something innate, inherited even.
Was that how her mother ended up ruined, by the same natural passion her daughter had? Talbot remembered seeing her mother on their wedding day.She didn’t seem that kind of woman, he mused.
Perhaps it had been Elizabeth’s father’s trait. Talbot remembered how devastated Nicholas had been after the duke’s death by the discovery of the exorbitant sums spent on the multiple women who’d accepted the late duke’scarte blanche.
Whose father was worse?Talbot wondered. His own sire’s fatal flaw hadn’t been carnal passion or adultery, but rather hisromantic obsession withonewoman. It was too frightening for Colin to even begin to consider the traitshemight have inherited from his own father.
