She shook her head, uncomprehending. “What?”
“You have all the choices in the world. I was not truthful when I told you that before; I deceived you, as you realized. But now, with Katherine’s acknowledgment, it is true—beyond dispute. Beyond my power to alter. And I mean to make sure you realize that.”
He retreated a pace and linked his hands behind his back. In measured, formal tones, he said, “Daughtry can end this marriage for us. Not on the grounds that you are a fraud, of course—but that I coerced you into marriage. It would be easy for him to do so. I am willing to give him those instructions. The choice is yours.”
He was putting this choice on her? Wasn’t that the easy way! “You want to be free of me, do you?”
“Free of you?” His lips rolled together into a flat line. He turned away, then wheeled back with a savageness that made her flinch. “Tell me,” he said, low and sharp, “why I am the one who must answer that question? You have left me once already. I came after you. I have said that I love you. Tell me, what maggot in your brain still insists that I am the one who wishes to be free?”
“I …” Because I’m the factory girl, and you’re the lord.
These words, even in her mind, sounded small, pathetic. They sounded afraid. She could not speak them.
“You want to stay married?” she whispered instead. He did not blame her for abandoning him?
“Enough of what I want,” he said flatly. “What do you want? Do you wish to spend the rest of your life with me?”
Yes.
She took a breath to say it but fear stopped her dead. A cold revelation washed through her.
She’d always known that Simon could not be for her. She’d been waiting for the unhappy ending. Only a fool, a woman weak enough to deserve the bad end coming for her, would have dared instead to believe that miracles could come true.
Sitting in jail, she had despaired, but she had not for a moment felt surprise.
She looked down to her hands, her square-tipped fingers knotted so tightly together. She squeezed them harder yet, focusing only on the ache. So Katherine would acknowledge her as Cornelia. But this wouldn’t change the past. She still would be a woman who’d been raised in Bethnal Green, who could not take fine dresses for granted, who knew nothing of music—who might, like a beast trained to do tricks, grow less amusing to the audience over time.
“I love you, Simon.” The hoarse words seemed to be jerked from her by some outside power. She froze, panic and dread leaping up inside her.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “But do you want to stay here with me?”
She forced herself to look up. His steady gaze seemed to drill straight into her skull.
He saw her so much more clearly than she’d seen herself.
She wanted to stay with him. But to stay here? That bridge she’d walked across to reach this world—it supported no middle ground. But in jail, faced with that sneering inspector who had learned all about her from his daily newspapers, she had come face to face with the truth: a girl could never leave the past behind. It would follow her across the bridge.
“I’ll never belong here,” she said. “You know that.”
“But here is where I live.” The roughness of his voice startled her. “If you think there is a better place for you, then go look for it. I will not stop you; I have no interest any longer in playing the tyrant. But if you want me, you will have to take my world along with me.”
“It’s so easy for you,” she choked. He would never have to walk that bridge. Whatever rebellions and infamies he’d committed, they were born of the world in which he already lived. In the future, he would not be tested at every turn, every day, by those who knew how little prepared he’d been for their judgments.
His jaw muscles flexed. “Yes,” he said. “Very easy. Because it is my world—not their world, Nell, or that lot’s world, or the do-gooders’ world, but my world. And it requires you. I require you.” He took a long breath. “However, if you doubt that we could carve a space in which we, together, might belong … then you underestimate my love, or I have overestimated yours. In either case, your decision seems clear: you must leave and be glad of your freedom.”
She gaped at him. “Glad of it?” The idiot, the arrogant bastard; of course she would not, could never, be glad to leave him! “You can’t be such a fool.”
“Can’t I?” He made an impatient noise and took her arm, pulling her to her feet. “Come, let me remind you how such decisions are made. One simply—walks out.”
She tried to yank free but he propelled her toward the door in an iron grip. In the hallway, he released her, looking down into her face and snarling, “You see? One goes. You did it once: was it so difficult then?”
As he started to turn away, she lunged toward him and caught his elbow, yanking him back around. “It’s my decision! Not yours! I’ll go when I’m ready to go!”
They stared at each other. Down the hallway, from some remote reach of the house, came the faint sound of laughter, as puzzling and foreign to Nell’s ears as the language of a distant land. There was nothing to laugh about.
The look that fleeted over his face—frustration, grief, resignation—made her go cold. “My God, Nell. You would stay for days … years, no doubt … if you thought that to leave me is to admit your own weakness.” He shook his head. “I could goad you into staying forever—and God help me, I am tempted to do it. But I won’t,” he added with a shrug. “I won’t do it, Nell.”
That shrug paralyzed her breath. It seemed so completely … indifferent.
He turned on his heel and began to walk away.
She stepped back against the wall, her shoulder knocking a vase, setting it to wobbling. Her hands balled into fists as she watched his back. Damn him for a coward! He was giving up. He was already leaving but she hadn’t even gone yet.
The next second, all her rage turned on herself. He said he loved her. She knew she loved him. What was his fault in this? It was all hers.
Why did she find despair so much easier to depend on than happiness? For love of Simon, she had turned down five thousand pounds; she had returned to the Green; she had given up all her hopes. Love had been a sound and sustaining reason to endure despair. Love had given her the strength for it.
Why was it so much harder to make love the reason for hope? Why could it not give her the strength to believe in their future joy?
“I’m a factory girl,” she whispered.
He was ten paces away now.
Somehow he heard.
He turned on his heel and fixed her in a calm, grave look. “Yes,” he said. “A factory girl. My wife. The Countess of Rushden.”
She put her hand to her throat, because panic was swelling there. “I wouldn’t be a lady like the rest of them. I … won’t care for drives in the park.” Each word grew harder to say, peeling away another strip of her skin, exposing her messy innards and ugly yellow guts. “Small talk at parties won’t interest me. I’ll never know how to do it. How to charm people as you do. How to care so much about music. I won’t want to attend other people’s concerts so often, because it …” The words burst from her: “It seems a waste of time and I’ve got other things to do.”
“Such as?” He was watching her very closely, but his tone revealed nothing.
“I mean to buy that factory, but—” She wet her lips. “Only as a start. I’m going to buy as many as I can, I think; I’m going to improve all of them.”
He nodded and took a step back toward her.
“And I’m going to do something about doctors for poor women, too.” She hesitated, startled by how fluently these intentions spilled from her. They felt familiar, intimate, as though they had been born and molded in the sleeping parts of her mind, and now sprang free fully grown. “That doctor today … I mean to build a hospital where such men will tend to women like my mum.”
“I see,” he said slowly.
“Do you?” The world didn’t want to hear that she ha
d loved Jane Whitby. Very well. She would show it she had.
“I think so,” he said.
They stared at each other. Dimly it surprised her that she didn’t feel foolish for speaking such ideas aloud. Then, with a little shock, she wondered if it was because he was listening that these ideas seemed so good and true.
“You think I can do it,” she said. “You do.”
“Of course I do,” he said.
She nodded once, carefully, because something was swelling inside her, and it felt huge and powerful and able to knock her off her feet if she moved too suddenly. Until she had met him, her dreams had been small by necessity.
“You made me think I could do it,” she said. If he hadn’t pushed her to dream bigger, to think about power, to ponder what wealth could do, these larger ambitions might never have occurred to her. She might have been content to give Hannah a violet dress every spring. “But the point,” she went on quickly, “is that I won’t hold myself away from it like the do-gooders tend to do. I’ll be in the thick of it, making sure my money won’t go to waste. It won’t be proper at all.”
“The best things rarely are,” he said gently.
A choking little laugh slipped from her. “You certainly aren’t,” she said. “You’re …” The kind of man that life in Bethnal Green hadn’t prepared her to imagine.
Maybe, to dream these things and feel these things, she already was living in his world.
She saw him swallow. “So,” he said. “Shall I show you to your sister, now?”
“No,” she said.
He opened his mouth. Hesitated. Put his hands into his pockets and looked at her.
Loving him would not be easy. It would mean never again completely belonging anywhere—save with him.
But she would belong with him. He would be her home, she thought. And with him at her side, she would do—anything. Anything in the world would be possible.
He shifted his weight and she realized suddenly that he was not waiting calmly. He stood rigidly, biting his tongue with visible effort, his hands in his pockets clenched now.
He was not at ease in the slightest.
The astonishing prospect of Simon St. Maur at ill-ease unearthed a very odd impulse: she giggled. And then slapped her hand to her mouth, hearing the slightly hysterical note in it. “Simon,” she said through her fingers. “I can’t leave. I love you. I can’t go.”
He nodded, his lips white. “But do you trust me, Nell?”
She was too full of feeling to even fathom the meaning of doubt. “Down any road, as far and as long as we travel. You’re mine and I’m keeping you, Simon.”
She heard the long, slow breath he blew out. “You,” he said as he came toward her, “are the most incredible, extraordinary, stubborn woman—”
A hiccup—a squawk—some curious noise came out of her. “Remind me,” she said. “Remind me.” She stepped forward and took hold of his shirtfront and pulled him to her.
There was nothing delicate or refined about this kiss. It was dark and rude and heedless of the world; only him beneath her hands, his hair now clutched in her fingers, his body pressing hers into the wall. She had no interest in anything but this.
“I beg your pardon,” came a horrified voice from behind them. Nell recognized it: Mrs. Hemple, beholding a faux pas of unforgivable proportions.
Simon paid no heed. Nell laughed into his mouth and kissed him harder, while a disgusted snort, followed by the clip clip clip of heels, announced Mrs. Hemple’s passage onward.
When, after a minute or more, they finally broke apart, breathing hard, she smiled into his eyes. “I am going to be a very vulgar wife,” she said. “Terribly, terribly vulgar.”
He laughed back at her. “I do hope so,” he said.
Oh ho! She took him by the wrist and pulled him back toward his bedchamber, saying in his ear, “No use in hoping where his lordship can be certain.”