Not Quite a Husband (15 page)

He was still and silent, his eyes lowered beneath his dark, straight brows, his chiseled features in shadow.

She was shaking again. She felt raw, torn open, and deeply, deeply ashamed—almost as ashamed as she’d been in the hours and days immediately following what she’d witnessed in that house on Upper Berkley Street.

“What did you see?” he finally asked.

“Your face in the mirror.”

“In flagrante delicto?”

“Not yet.” He’d approached Mrs. Hedley’s bed; he’d been not in it but beside it. And he’d still had his shirt on, his braces strapped firmly over his shoulders.

“Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Stop
you?” In all the intervening years, the thought
had never occurred to her that she could have made her presence known. One did not stop a flaming wreck. One ran as fast as one could. “I’m afraid that as my illusions shattered left and right, I did not have that kind of presence of mind.”

He passed his hand over his face. When he looked at her again, his eyes were blank. “Why didn’t you call off the wedding?”

She blinked. She’d asked that question of herself many times and it was always the point at which the pureness of her righteous indignation began to be adulterated with the complicity of her own frailty in this matter.

She had not called off the wedding because he was the one great prize of her life other women of her social station would forever covet. Because she feared the aftermath of a broken engagement so close to the wedding. Because she’d convinced herself that she was magnanimous enough to forgive him; that she forgiven him already.

Vanity, cowardliness, and delusion—faults in her character that she hadn’t even known, precipitated by the crisis.

“I thought I could forgive you,” she said. The human mind was capable of infinite self-deception.

Except she’d never forgiven anyone in her entire
life. Her heart was made of glass: It could break, but it could not expand.

“And when did you realize you could not forgive me?” he asked, his voice soft and bleak.

She turned her face aside. Within the first hours of their marriage she’d realized it—that she hadn’t forgiven him at all, that her whole body revolted whenever he touched her. But by then they were already married, and it was too late.

Shame. Self-loathing. Frustration. They churned in him, each enough to drown him outright.

She sat back down on her camp bed again, her face pale as bleached bones. “Was she your mistress?”

He shook his head. “No. We were lovers in Cairo for two weeks when I was nineteen. The day I was to go to France, after I left your hospital, I stopped at a stationer’s. That was where I ran into her.”

“And she proved irresistible. I see.”

Mrs. Hedley had congratulated him warmly. And then, once they were outside the stationer’s, she’d winked at him in her bubbly way, and asked if he’d like one last tumble before he became a respectably married man.

He’d turned her down. As he’d turned down other women who’d wanted to be his last lay.

“She was far from irresistible.”

“You went with her.”

The incontrovertible truth. He had gone with Mrs. Hedley in the end.

“I had a case of cold feet.”

“About me?”

“About you.”

“And that is your excuse?”

“That’s not my excuse. That was just what happened.”

“Very convenient, don’t you think, to have a case of cold feet just when you run into an old lover.”

“It was not like that.”

“Then what was it like?”

What
had
it been like?

“I suppose—suppose—I—” He took a deep breath. He’d never stammered in his life. “I suppose there were always doubts in the back of my head. That I’d made too hasty a decision. That you and I hardly knew each other. That we might not be as well suited as we both wanted it to be.”

She stared at the hem of her nightgown. “And then what?”

“Then I went to say good-bye to you at the hospital. I thought it would be interesting, to see the hospital. But I’d never been in a hospital before and it unsettled me.
You
in that hospital unsettled me.”

He’d arrived at a bad time, possibly. There had been some kind of food poisoning going around, patients were vomiting in the lobby of the hospital, faster than the unfortunate cleaners could mop the messes away.

He should have been reassured by her coolness—she’d walked through the lobby as if it were a flower garden in spring—but it had only further heightened his sense that he truly knew nothing of her. The triumphal, proprietary air she took on as she introduced him to her colleagues also bothered him. He would have expected some such from a society miss, but not from her, whom he’d believed to be above such boastfulness.

“What about me that unsettled you?”

“Your aloofness, which I’d always liked before. Your vanity, which I’d never known existed.”

She laced her fingers together. “I see.”

He wanted to evaporate, to simply cease to exist. His reasons were in every instance pale and stupid—even more mortifying spoken out loud. But he had no choice now. He owed her this much.

“On my walk to the stationer’s, I was—I was suddenly swamped with doubt. I questioned whether my decision to marry you wasn’t as lunatic as everyone said it was, whether I was really resigned to a life without children of my own, whether we wouldn’t
end up in a few years with nothing to say to each other.”

He stared at his hands. “And the wedding was in a week.”

Outside Imran called to a coolie to take more care with the bathtub. The river babbled cheerfully. The ayah softly hummed a tune that seemed to be a temple song.

“I could have drunk myself into a stupor. I could have unburdened myself to Will. But Mrs. Hedley was there, and she wanted a tumble, so she was the distraction I chose.”

Ironic, that in what he’d done out of fear that they might be unhappy together lay the cause of the greater part of their unhappiness.

“If it’s any consolation to you, I regretted my choice even before I entered her house. Afterward I thought myself a hundred kinds of stupid. I came back from Paris determined to make something beautiful of our life together, because you were the only one I wanted.” Suddenly he had to speak past a lump in his throat. “I suppose it was too late.”

She said nothing.

“And if it’s any further consolation, I haven’t been with anyone else since I married you.”

She spread her hands open over her knees. “I would like to dress now, if you don’t mind.”

He rose from the corner. “Certainly. I beg your pardon.”

At the tent flap he turned back. “You are right: I was a callow youth. But I never meant to hurt you. I’m sorry that I did—in such a despicable way, no less. Forgive me.”

But he already knew that she would not forgive him.

I
t took dozens of one-hundred-eighty-degree turns for the road to zigzag up the steep slope leading toward Lowari Pass, ten thousand feet above sea level, a narrow gap in snow-peaked mountains that towered thousands of feet higher to either side. From the top, looking down at the way she’d come, Bryony thought the dirt path resembled so many hairpins that a careless goddess had dropped. The mountains, like a choppy sea, stretched blue and jagged toward the horizon.

She tugged her coat more tightly about her—Leo had warned her it would be cold at the top, but it was even colder than she’d supposed.

“Here, drink this.”

She accepted the hot tea he offered with a murmured “Thank you.” She didn’t know how he had
managed to get the cook up to the top first—so that there was hot tea for everyone—but he seemed very efficient at this sort of thing.

A gust of wind blew. She shivered despite the hot tea in her gloved hands. He took off his coat and draped it over her shoulders. She waited another minute, until she heard his voice much further away, before she turned her head for a glimpse of him without his coat, standing by the mule train, listening to a gesticulating coolie.

She wanted to cry.

In the isolation of her own imagination, what he’d done had seemed so much worse, one example of a large, pernicious pattern: liaisons all over London during their engagement; and after their wedding, adulterous affairs left and right.

When it was nothing of the sort.

What he did was still atrocious and wrong. And she would have been well justified in jilting him. But she hadn’t jilted him; she’d married him. Were wedding vows but so much confetti, an ephemeral sparkle in the air, to be swept away as rubbish the next day? Had she not owed him something more than cold shoulders and locked doors?

Would they have been able to patch things together if they’d had this awful but necessary conversation while they were still married?

She didn’t know.

And now she would never know.

The face of the ravine was black rock; the downpours of rainy seasons past had stripped all soil and almost all vegetation from the steep slope. The bottom of it, far below, was barren and rock-strewn, without a trace of the water that had so forcefully shaped the landscape.

Their path was a narrow passage scarped into the very cliff itself: on one side, an implacable wall slanting outward, on the other side, an approximately one-hundred-fifty-foot drop straight down, and in between, a roughly gouged trail that promised sprained ankles, if not a plunge right over the edge.

They’d lost a mule not an hour ago. The poor creature had tumbled over and landed, after a fall that seemed to last a whole day, in a splat of exploded flour bags and what sounded like an almost human whimper.

And then, the horror, it was still alive, broken but alive, its limbs convulsing in agony. Bryony stood with her hand over her mouth, helpless.

A gunshot rang out. With almost frightful precision, a spot of blood appeared between the mule’s eyes. It jerked once and went slack.

Bryony turned to see Leo extract a spent round from a breech-loading rifle. She’d known, somewhat vaguely, of the sporting exploits of his youth—his godfather, an enthusiastic sportsman with no other sons, had taken Leo everywhere with him. But she had never seen him operate a firearm—and until this moment had paid no attention at all to the two rifles he had with him.

The deadly accuracy of that single shot astonished her. This man had been her husband. Yet she’d only known him as the drawing room favorite who occasionally produced incomprehensible monographs on some arcane finer points of mathematics.

Perhaps the mule’s unfortunate demise colored her perception; perhaps the road truly turned more difficult: Once they resumed their progress she’d found the going hair-raising. She tried to remind herself that 16,000 men had marched northward on precisely this same path to relieve the Siege of Chitral two years ago and that messengers regularly traveled this route with mail and dispatch. But with every wobbly step, she thought only of the whimper of the mule as it hit the scabrous ground far below. And the bullet between its eyes.

The path, following the contour of the cliff, turned abruptly. The already meager width of the trail narrowed to no more than eighteen inches at
the turn. Worse, the trail, always uneven, now tipped toward the drop at what seemed to her an almost forty-five-degree angle.