“I heard it from the gentlemen in the box next to ours at the theater,” she said.
He closed his eyes briefly. “Abby,” he said.
“It’s all right,” she said quickly. “I know I am not lovely. You did not make any false claims when you offered for me.”
“You have felt guilt over withholding information from me?” he said. “I have felt no less guilt over choosing you so glibly to fit a cynical ideal that I thought was desirable. Shall we just forgive each other and get on with our lives?”
He saw and heard her swallow. “Yes,” she said.
“You are nothing whatsoever like the woman I thought you were that morning,” he said. “It would serve me right if you were. As it is, I could not have chosen better if I had spent a whole year searching with my heart.”
She looked at him warily.
He smiled into her eyes. “Is it all over now?” he asked. “Is everything out in the open at last? All the sordid details that we did not really wish to share with each other?”
She nodded, her eyes on his neckcloth.
“And we have survived,” he said, “and are still together. And, gracious me, yes—we are actually in each other’s arms. Do you think there is hope for us and our marriage, Abby?”
She nodded and leaned her forehead against his neckcloth.
“But how foolish you were,” he said, “to believe that I would think the worse of you if I had known all the truth about you. What I have heard has only deepened my affection for you. Will you lavish as much love and loyalty on me and our children as you did on your own family, I wonder.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Will you, Abby?” He tightened his arms about her.
She pushed away from him after a few moments. “Do you mind if I don’t embroider tonight after all?”she asked. “The day has been a busy and an emotional one. I feel ill again.”
He looked at her in immediate concern. “The headache?” he said. “Cramps? Do you feel bilious?”
“Yes,” she said. “Don’t let me disturb you, though. I see you have your book ready to read. I shall go to bed.”
“Your own?” he asked. “I hoped to have you in mine again tonight, Abby. Let me come with you now, shall I, and hold you until you sleep. The book can wait. I would rather be with you.”
She shook her head. “I will be more comfortable alone,” she said.
He drew her back into his arms and kissed her warmly on the lips. “Go on, then,” he said. “I shall have a warm drink and some laudanum sent up to you.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Good night, Miles.”
“Good night,” he said. “I am glad we have had this talk, Abby, and cleared the air between us. I am just sorry that the tension of it all has made you ill again.”
She smiled and turned away from him. He watched her leave the room, and stood for a long time where he was, thinking, his hands clasped behind his back.
He frowned.
• • •
ABIGAIL HAD NOT LIED about feeling ill. She vomited after reaching her room, until she felt that she must surely die, and felt quite shaky with weakness afterward.
She lay two hours later on top of the covers of her bed, diagonally across them, her face buried against a blanket. The cup of chocolate that Ellen, her new maid, had brought her had grown cold on a side table with the laudanum. She had rejected Ellen’s offer to undress her and put her to bed.
She was not going to sleep that night. That much was clear to her. She was cold, yet felt too listless to get up long enough to change into a warm nightgown and climb beneath the blankets.
She was not going to tell him. She had thought she could. Downstairs, when it had become clear that Boris and Sir Gerald between them had told him everything else, she had thought that she would tell him that one last detail.
But she had not. He had talked of how they had brought everything into the open and of how they had survived and of how there was still hope for their marriage, and she had made the mistake of thinking before she spoke. Usually she was guilty of the opposite, but each was equally unwise in its own way.
What if that one last detail made all the difference? she had thought. What if he could overlook everything but that, forgive her silence on everything else, but not on that? What if, after all, she should lose him?
She would die, that was what.
She could remember how it had felt to kiss Bea and Clara good-bye and to watch the stagecoach take them on their way to Bath and out of her life. It had felt like death, only worse, because there had been intense pain.
She could not go through that again. She could not bear to lose him now. Not when hope had been kindled. He had spoken to her earlier as if he really cared, as if she were precious to him. All that nonsense about his having married her because she was plain and uninteresting was just that—nonsense. It had been true but was so no longer.