Nicola Cornick - The Notorious Marriage

She sighed sharply and moved away from the window. ‘How did you find me here, my lord? If you are but recently returned to England…’

Kit looked up. He raised an eyebrow. ‘I am sorry—did you not wish to be found? I must have misunderstood! I thought that you had just been strenuously explaining that you were not here by choice!’

Eleanor gritted her teeth with exasperation, wavering on the edge of abandoning the polite manners bred in her bones and upbraiding him as he deserved. She wanted to shriek at him, to beat at him with her fists and pour out all the hurt and misery of the past five months. Except that ladies did not—could not—behave like that, no matter the provocation. Self-possession was all. She screwed her eyes up tight and took a deep breath.

‘I dislike your double standards, my lord, but I suppose that a husband may do as he pleases, appearing and disappearing if he so chooses!’ The words came out with a kind of haughty desperation. She stole a look at Kit. He was pouring himself a glass of brandy and his face was quite expressionless. The misery that was squeezing Eleanor’s heart tightened its grip. She stared blindly out into the dusk, where Sir Charles’s carriage, its broken wheel spar miraculously restored, was just setting off down the road to London.

‘You may have been debauching yourself in all the bordellos from here to Constantinople for all that I care, sir,’ she added untruthfully, ‘but you could at least have warned me of your return!’

Kit stretched his legs out before the fire and took a long draught of brandy. ‘I am sorry if I have spoiled your fun, my dear!’ he drawled. ‘I had no notion that you had set up as a demi-rep!’

Eleanor made a sound of repressed fury. ‘All you can reproach me for, my lord, is indiscretion, whereas you…’ Her voice failed her. She could not even begin to put into words all the things that Kit had done wrong.

‘What was I supposed to do?’ she burst out. ‘Sit and wait for you? You might never have returned! At one point we even thought you dead!’

Kit’s expression was bleak. ‘And better off that way so that you could carry on a merry widow? You honour me, my dear!’

It was the last straw. With an infuriated squeak, Eleanor picked up the ugly clock from the mantelpiece and threw it at him. Kit fielded it with ease.

‘Glaringly abroad, my dear! One wonders why you did not use it against Sir Charles if his attentions were so repugnant to you!’

There was a heavy silence. Eleanor pressed both hands hard to her mouth to prevent herself from crying. She could not believe how close she had come to losing her self-control, nor how furious and unhappy Kit was making her. She could not see beyond the wicked coil that had enveloped her. Kit’s return had solved no problems for her; in fact it had generated nothing but trouble.

Kit rubbed his hand across the back of his neck. For the first time, Eleanor noticed that he looked weary.

‘Maybe we are both in the wrong, Eleanor.’ Kit’s tone was heavy. ‘May we not just sit down and discuss this sensibly? I know that I have been away for a space, but I sent you a letter as soon as I could, explaining what had happened. And then several more, after that. Surely you cannot deny it?’

The very patience of Kit’s tone grated on Eleanor’s nerves now, when all she wanted was to give way to impassioned recriminations. Perhaps if he had shown such calm forbearance when he had come in, matters might have been different. But he had not. And now…

She looked at him and wondered if she really knew him at all. Once, a year ago perhaps, she would have said that she knew Kit instinctively. There had been a recognition between them, sharp and exciting, as they had circled each other at Ton balls and snatched a dance or a conversation when her mother’s back was turned. Kit Mostyn was the type of man that all the chaperones warned against and under the veneer of well-bred sophistication, Eleanor had sensed a certain degree of ruthlessness in him that had made her feel in danger yet protected at one and the same time. She had not understood it but it had been desperately romantic—or so she had thought.

Now, though, she realised that she was married to a stranger. A very good-looking stranger, she allowed, as she studied him. The Mostyns, like the Trevithicks, were generally accounted to be a good-looking family and Eleanor saw little to argue with in that assessment. Like his twin sister Charlotte, Kit was tall and fair, but where Charlotte’s classical features were pleasingly feminine, Kit’s face was strong and unforgettable, aristocratic arrogance softened only by a rakish smile that had made her heart beat faster. But he was not smiling now. The arrogance, Eleanor thought furiously, and not the charm, was decidedly to the fore.

She walked over to the fire and made a business of checking her cloak and gloves to see if they were yet dry. The steam was still rising from her dress. Eleanor felt as though she was going through the washing process still inside it. And strangely she was suddenly aware of how every damp fold clung to her figure, yet when she had been intent on preventing Sir Charles’s seduction she had not even noticed it. But it was Kit who was watching her now, his smoky blue gaze appraising as it rested on her. Eleanor’s nerves tightened with misery and anger.

She swallowed hard. ‘Several letters!’ she said incredulously. ‘Thank you, my lord. I fear I never received them.’

Kit sighed again. It was clear that he simply did not believe her. Eleanor felt another hot layer of anger add to the volcano inside.

‘Very well,’ he said wearily. ‘I am quite willing to explain what happened and where I have been…’

Eleanor clenched her fists to prevent herself from screaming. So now he wanted to explain—when it was too late! If he had arrived at Trevithick House one evening rather than catching her in flagrante in such a ridiculous situation, if he had been remorseful rather than accusatory, if she had not felt so wholly in the wrong and yet so furious with him…Eleanor shook her head. It was impossible to sit down and discuss matters quietly now.

Visions of opera singers flitted before her eyes and she tried to swallow the tears that threatened to close her throat. She did not want the humiliation of hearing Kit justify that a man was permitted to come and go as he pleased, to take his pleasure where and when he chose, whilst expecting a different standard of behaviour from his wife. She had heard all of that from her mother when she had been a débutante and had thought it so much nonsense—except that now it appeared to be true. She had had such romantic notions of marriage, whereas her husband evidently did not expect it to interfere with his existing way of life.

Eleanor pressed her hands together. Her pride would never permit her to tell Kit her true feelings—how she had waited for him, heartbroken; how her mother had made matters irredeemably worse by broadcasting intimate details of her situation to the Ton; how she had been reviled and made a laughingstock, her hasty marriage and even swifter abandonment the on dit on everyone’s lips. It was Kit who had left her at the mercy of every rake in London then made matters worse by apparently parading his amours elsewhere. And deeper than all of these things was the secret suffering that made it impossible for her ever to forgive him his desertion.

Explanations…There were some that she would never make to him. And Kit was clearly incapable of expressing any kind of remorse. He had not apologised, not at all, and with every minute that went by Eleanor resolved that she would not, could not, move to make matters right when he clearly did not care. She turned away and hunched a shoulder against him.