“What do you mean?”
“He cares deeply for your well-being. He views you as the blameless party and he does not want any action on his part to injure your future happiness.”
Millie began to understand. “You are worried that I won’t let him go—that I will resort to tears to keep him with me.”
“I am not saying you would,” said Mrs. Englewood. “But in your place I might have. It is so easy to fall in love with him and so difficult to let go.”
“It is a good thing for everyone, then, I am not bound up in him.”
Mrs. Englewood stared at Millie, her gaze as heavy as a boulder. “Do you not love him?”
No one had ever asked her a direct question on this matter—and therefore she’d been spared the lying.
“Lord Fitzhugh and I married because he needed my family’s fortune and my father wanted a titled son-in-law,” Millie said carefully. “That we get along as well as we do is odds defying enough. Love would have taken it into the realm of fiction.”
“You don’t find his person appealing?” Mrs. Englewood sounded incredulous.
“He is very agreeable.”
“I mean, do you not think he is extraordinarily handsome?”
“He is handsome. But so are a number of his classmates and his new brother-in-law, the Duke of Lexington. If I fell in love with every toothsome fellow I came across, I’d be frequently and needlessly in love.”
“But he is also kind. Considerate. Willing to shoulder all burdens. Being married to him all these years, you’ve never wished that he would have eyes only for you?”
Millie forced herself to hold Isabelle Englewood’s eyes. “Not everyone is meant to fall in love. Lord Fitzhugh and I are good friends and nothing more.”
“Then, you will let him go?”
“I have never restricted the freedom of his movement, not once in our married life.”
“Even though the two of you will have six months of intimacy? That changes things, you know.”
“If that alone were enough to make people fall in love, all the wives in this country would be in love with their husbands—and vice versa.”
Mrs. Englewood set down her teacup and rose. She walked to the open window and looked out to the street beyond. It was a quiet street, no hawkers, street musicians, or the constant hoof clacks of hansom cabs looking for custom. Fitz had clearly put a great deal of thought in the house he’d selected for her.
She turned around. “I am afraid, Lady Fitzhugh. I’ve been at the receiving end of life’s caprices and it’s not a kind place to be. But I have no choice, do I? I must trust that you are a woman of your word.”
Millie had not given her word to Mrs. Englewood. She had not yet conceded Fitz. Did a faithful wife of almost eight years not have some claims to her husband? She deserved a level playing field, at least.
“So he was there at my wedding…” whispered Mrs. Englewood, as if to herself. She blinked, her eyes brilliant with unshed tears. “I knew I sensed his presence.”
How foolish Millie was: There was no such thing as a level playing field. She would always be the usurper, the spoiler of dreams, the one who caused such grief on Mrs. Englewood’s part that to this day it was writ large in the very alignment of her features.
“You are the one he has loved all along,” she heard herself say. “There has never been anyone but you.”
Helena gazed at the adorable ducklings a minute longer—Miss Evangeline South was a talented artist—before rising from her seat, her notes in hand. She opened the door of her office and handed the notes to her secretary.
“I need these typed, Miss Boyle.”
“Yes, miss.”
Susie was in her spot—Helena could swear the woman never needed to use the water closet. She retreated back into her office and shut the door.
She didn’t know why it should be so, after a day and a half with the ducklings and turtles and fish of Miss South’s pond, but her hands reached on their own toward the drawer into which she’d stuffed Hastings’s manuscript.
And when she had the manuscript before her, she did not begin from where she’d stopped, but opened to a random page.
Her skin is dusky in the candlelight. I trace my fingers up the side of her ribcage, over her shoulder, then along the length of her arm to her wrist, fastened to a slat in the headboard with a silk scarf.
“Aren’t you weary of looking at me like this, tied up always?” she murmurs.
“No,” I answer. “Never.”
“Don’t you want to be touched?”
“I do. But I don’t want to be scratched.”
She licks her lips, her tongue pink, moist. “What is a good time in the marital bed without a few scratches on your back, darling?”