“Good morning,” she whispered. It wasn’t just a good morning: It was a great one, great and terrible. She’d agreed to marry him in a matter of some hours.
“See here,” he said. His mouth curled down with the look of a man who had been planning a speech for a while. “I have to say something. I know you don’t love me as much as I do you, but I’m going to change all that. I don’t care how long it takes.” He leaned in and rested his forehead against her shoulder. “You are going to love me.”
For the first time since they’d kissed yesterday, a cold chill ran through her. “You think I don’t love you?”
He snorted. “For Christ’s sake,” he muttered into her shoulder. “You married someone else. What was I supposed to conclude?”
She turned away from him. “That I didn’t want to be poor? That you were threatening to cart me off to Gretna Greene, no matter what I said? I didn’t know how else to stop you. I was in a panic.”
“I wasn’t threatening!” he said. And then, as if he remembered how hot his temper might have run, he threw out: “At least, not seriously. If you loved me enough, the money wouldn’t have mattered!”
He’d said that so many times, and every time, she’d felt a burden of lead collect in her belly. It was an old argument, this one. “I have a horror of being poor,” she said. “It wouldn’t have mattered how much I loved you. It wouldn’t have mattered how much you loved me. Only saints can love through hunger, and neither of us is a saint.”
He sat up, resting on his elbow. “You’re only saying that because you don’t know how I feel. If you loved me the way I loved you—”
She heard herself make an inarticulate cry, and she batted at his questing hand. “No. You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever really been hungry. You’ve never eaten bits of coal out of the refuse pile just to have something in your belly. You’ve never been so cold that you couldn’t sleep at night, and yet hadn’t the strength to shiver. It doesn’t matter how much you love someone. If you’ve not got enough, you resent every scrap that they have and you do not.”
He frowned at her. Her breathing had grown faster; her heart was racing. “We weren’t so poorly off when I was first born. But Papa lost everything, betting on the ’Change when I was eight. And after that… I remember ripping a crust of bread from my elder sister’s hands one time. I was practically an animal.” She shut her eyes. “When she died of diphtheria, I was sad. But part of me, some horrid part of me deep down, thought—‘Good. That means more for me.’”
He was staring at her in consternation now. “You were a child,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the same, now.”
She shook her head and drew her knees up, to curl into a ball. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t come to my aunt because my father died, you know. He kept trying to win his money back, and it kept going more and more wrong. At the end, just before I left, a man came one night. I heard him tell my father that he would settle it all if he could just borrow me for a week.” She could feel those old shivers taking her now. “I was ten, but I knew what he meant to do with me. So I left. I slipped out the window while they were arguing, before my father had time to consider how many debts he might put to rest with a ten-year-old’s virtue. It took me two weeks to walk the sixty miles to my aunt’s house. When I arrived, I begged her to take me in. That’s what it means to be poor. I shouldn’t have had to doubt whether my own father would sell me. But love is not stronger than fear.”
She drew a deep breath and looked at him. His eyes were round, fixed on her.
“It doesn’t matter. Just thinking about that—it still makes my stomach hurt. I told you I had a horror of poverty. I didn’t mean that I required silver-plated spoons and liveried footmen. I meant that I fear it, with every part of me. I have an absolute horror of it.”
“You’re shaking.” He put his arms around her. “God,” he said. “You’re cold. You’re so cold.”
His arms were warm. And perhaps he was not the only one who had stored up bitterness, because her next words spilled over from some wounded place, buried deep in her heart.
“You could have waited,” she said. “I asked you to wait. Wait until you had a trade of your own, until you could provide for us without begging your parents. But no. It always had to be now—today, and not tomorrow; this month, and never next year. Don’t tell me I didn’t love you. You weren’t willing to hold off a few years for something that mattered so deeply to me.”
He had grown utterly still as she spoke.
She drew another shuddering breath. “It was not all my fault. It wasn’t.”
“Oh, Ginny.” He kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was just…used to pushing at you. I thought it was just another aspect of the game we always played—my insisting on one thing, and your demanding another.”