Fire crackled across the room, turning her story into a song sung around fires in ancient days, a Greek tragedy come to life.
“The man and his friends approached me. I’d no idea who they were. But they knew me from the picture in the papers. They all agreed it was a good likeness, and they all wondered how a woman became… how a woman became a third wife.”
She pulled her hand in from the rain and wiped it on her skirts, but they were wet, too; useless to sweep the rain from her skin.
She clasped her wrist behind her back and walked in the other direction toward an arched window with no glass, one of the castle’s many blind eyes. “One fellow said I must be lusty. Another suggested that my husband must be insatiable to take three wives at one time, and that he wanted a taste of one of the women who could quench the thirst of such a man. Then…thenI was horrified, a naïve little thing. Now, I’ve heard much worse.” She shrugged. “Seems rather tame. They had little imagination. As does Mr. Stewart.”
He stood and went to her, pulled by an impulse stronger than any thought or desire in his body. Every word was like a cloud dissipating from a stormy sky. The clear blue truth of her spread out for miles before him now. He stopped when he stood right before her, but he did not touch her.
She tipped up her chin and smirked. “I was married just before I turned twenty to a man who could refill my parents’ coffers. I was alone for much of the time after that. He kept me in a small house on the outskirts of London near no one I knew. My parents never visited. He rarely visited after the first six months. How was I to know I’d married a bigamist?”
Bloody hell. That was certainly one possibility he’d not considered. Who would?
“I think you know all of me now.” She lifted her chin high and met his gaze with a challenging spark in her eye. She would not stand for fear or pity.
Jackson gave her rage. “If I could, I would open the very earth and throw your tormenters inside. Your husband, was he tormenter, too?”
She shook her head. “He was always kind and, when home”—she blushed—“quite affectionate. Only, he was not often home, and I did not know what he was about during his absent days. And nights. Until I did. A fellow knocked on the door of our little home one day, sat me down in the sweet little parlor I’d had painted bright pink. I was wearing pink too. I remember that color so well, how pale and meek it was. Is. He sat me down and told me my husband had two other wives. Still living. One in France and another in Scotland. You see, I was his London wife, his ton wife. Ha. I should have known when none of his family attended the wedding that something was wrong. He seemed too genial a fellow to have angered them. It did not take much for him to court me. Sweet words, smiles, kisses. He won my father’s approval—and my own—in a fortnight. We were married four weeks later.
“The first time I saw him after I found out, I asked him. Demanded to know the truth. I’m sorry. The tale is not coming out in order, but it all runs together in my mind. If I were to paint it, nothing would be where it should be, some images bigger and others smaller depending on how much anger or fear I felt in the moment. Loneliness too.”
She bent her head, and the gold of her hair, burnished dark by the rain, glowed new and multifaceted in the firelight. No golden sun, no pale moon. More of a candle reflected in a thousand mirrors, over and over, hypnotic and unreachable, ever burning but cold.
When she finally lifted her head, anger had burned her sea eyes to ice fields. “When I confronted him, he smirked. He laughed. He assured me I’d been a good time for him. Then he left. That was the last I saw him outside of a courtroom. There was a trial. I can only assume the reason you seem to know nothing about it is that you were out of the country.”
He shook his head, reaching through memory to six years ago. “Yes.” The only word he could speak in his shock.
She nodded. “The book Mrs. Whitlock gave me will tell you all about it, I’m sure.” She pointed to a low, rubbish-strewn table beaten and bruised along the edge of one wall. A book lay there, one he recognized. His mother’s scrapbook. “But I will recount the details if you wish. Each word makes the next easier to say.”
He shook his head, his hands finding the shape of fists, and his fingernails pinching his palms.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“That I would like very much to run a dagger through that man’s heart. That you deserve a future better than your past. And that … I love you.” What else could he say? Those three words were the only ones that mattered, and they ran true through his entire body. He held his breath, not sure what his thorn, his moon, would say to such a declaration.
She stood so close, yet they did not touch. The air between them was thick with words and wanting, with the past and the present. Then the corner of her mouth hitched up, and her body swayed toward him. Her fingers found his lips, the pad of her thumb brushing lightly over them.
“I love these lips,” she said, “that say such things with such ease.” Her hands moved to the corners of his eyes. “And I love these eyes that always look on me with affection.” Her fingers slipped into his hair, slicking it back against his skull. “And I love this mind that holds humor and knowledge and loyalty and… love. I… I love you, Jackson Cavendish.” Then she went up on tiptoe and melted her lips to his, sealing her declaration with a kiss so soft and bright it would light up Jackson’s world forever.
She was not leaving, and she’d come to him one final time, each step bringing her closer, more surely to his side. Where she would stay this time.
He kissed her back, wrapped his arms around her, pulled her away from the hole in the roof, from the never-ceasing drops swallowing the floor.
She wound her arms around him, broke the kiss, and rested her head on his shoulder, hugging him back, a gesture of comfort, of acceptance, of coming home.
Her body shook, but when he looked down at her, he saw a smile, and laughter left her lips. “You do not care. I tell you I was married to a bigamist, and you tell me you love me. Ha! I… I knew you would not care.”
“If that is true, then why wait so long to tell me?” he asked. Good to know she had faith in him, but what had held her back for so long, even with that faith?
“I am not that girl anymore. I do not want to be her. Speaking of her brings her back. Best to leave her dead. Drowned in the Thames.”
“Then you do not wish for me to call you Mary?” Was it the time to tease?
“I will cut your tongue out if you do, Jackson Cavendish.” She said it as if she were telling him the rain was letting up.
He chuckled. There she was, his surging flame of a woman, his sharp-as-a-needle partner.
Who hung her head once more. “I’m sorry I have been such a coward. When you called me such, I hated it, but I knew it for truth.”
