He sighed. “I don’t think I’ve been a very good husband to you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“It hasn’t been what you expected, this marriage. I know that. You dreamed of a marriage of love, and I haven’t been able to provide that. You wanted children, and I can’t give them to you.”
“I’m trying to understand,” she said. “I accept that this is what our life is, Edward.”
“But you shouldn’t have to. And now this. Dancing is such a simple thing, and the fact that I can’t even offer you that…”
She was anxious to distract him from his unhappiness.
“Tell me this,” she began. “I understand why you couldn’t face the idea of dancing after what happened to your mother. I understand why that hurt too much. But when did it become a vow? I can imagine you avoiding the conservatory and making excuses every time the idea of dancing came up, but at some point, it must have grown bigger than simple avoidance. What happened?”
“Margaret happened.” A new bitterness crept into his tone.
“Margaret? What did she do?” Lydia asked.
“I’m not sure if I ought to tell you. The two of you are such great friends.”
Now, there was no mistaking it. He was definitely irritated about something, and Lydia was beginning to understand what it might be.
“You and Margaret don’t get along,” she observed.
“You noticed that?”
“It’s hard to miss. Your demeanor changes whenever she enters a room. It’s as if you’re always angry with her. What happened? What did she do to upset you so much?”
“Again, I worry that it might be a bad idea to tell you about it,” Edward said. “Little though I like her, I see that your relationship with her has been a good thing for you. It’s helped you to have her to look up to as you’ve gotten used to this life. I don’t want to take that away from you or risk changing the way you feel about her. So, maybe I should keep it to myself.”
“Of course you should tell me what happened,” Lydia corrected him. “Margaret has been a very good mentor to me, I won’t argue that. But you’re my husband. Whatever she is to me, you mean much more, and my relationship with you is the most important one in my life.”
“Even though I haven’t been the sort of husband you were hoping for?”
“You’re my husband,” Lydia repeated. “I might have been wrong about what that would look like, but I haven’t been wrong about the kind of wife I want to try to be. I will always be on your side.”
He looked at her. “I think I’ve underestimated you.”
“You wouldn’t be the first person in my life to do that,” she said evenly. “So, what happened with Margaret?”
“When she married my father, it was immediately obvious to me and to Colin that she was trying to replace our mother,” Edward explained.
“It must have been hard for her to come into an existing family the way she did and to see you all still grieving such a loss,” Lydia suggested. “I’m not sure what I would have done if it had been me.”
“You’re very gracious,” Edward said. “You make it sound very benevolent. Maybe it does sound benevolent to someone who wasn’t there—as if she was trying to make up for something two young boys had lost. But it wasn’t like that at all. She contradicted things my mother would have wanted. Colin and I would try to explain to her—we were allowed to play by the creek, and it was all right if we came inside with muddy knees. And Margaret would disagree.
“We were the sons of the Duke, she’d say, and perhaps we had been raised with no manners up until now, but that wasn’t going to be allowed to continue now that she had come into the house. She was going to set us right.”
“In other words, she was going to fix what your mother had done wrong.” Lydia was shocked, but perhaps she shouldn’t have been. Margaret had always been a forceful personality. She had always been certain of what she wanted from people and unafraid to demand it. “What did your father say about it all?”
“Father was grieving,” Edward said. “I think he forgot he had sons for a few years. By the time his attention returned to his family, he wasn’t the man I remembered. It was as if both my parents had been lost, and I was left with only Margaret.” He shook his head. “One day, she tried to teach Colin and me how to dance. Colin went along with it. He had always warmed to her a bit more easily than I ever could. But I’d had enough.”
“And that was the day you made your vow?”
“I shouted at her. I warned her never to try to force me to dance. She told me I would need it one day, and—this haunts me still—she told me my mother would have wanted me to do it.”
“She had no right to say so,” Lydia said.
“You don’t think so?”
