Not Quite a Husband (6 page)

They stopped for the day at the edge of an orchard
and waited for the coolies to catch up so they could strike camp. Bryony sat atop a waist-high retaining wall, fanning herself with her straw hat. He stood with his back against the same wall, facing the slender blue river below.

The river looped half a circle here, near the tapered southern end of Chitral Valley. The arable land on either side of the sinuous bend was terraced to cultivate tiers upon tiers of rice, maize, and fruit trees. But the scale of human occupation was dwarfed by enormous crags that jutted skyward on three sides.

“You still don’t speak to your father?” he asked.

The question snapped her out of her determined contemplation of the river. “I’ve never
not
spoken to my father,” she said.

He looked up from the pear he was peeling with a pocketknife. Again she noticed his hard-worn hands. But their motion was still elegant: The peel of the pear fell in one long, unbroken curl.

He’d bought the fruit from the owner of the orchard. Bryony liked pears very much. But she was damned if she would ask him for any. Perhaps later, when he was busy supervising the setting up of the tents, she’d slip away and buy a few for herself.

“You don’t care whether your father lives or dies,” he pointed out.

His hat sat at a careless angle on his head. His clothes could surely use a thorough ironing. And he seemed far too fatigued to be awake, let alone standing—she was very glad she’d chosen to limit his exertion by refusing to ride more than twenty miles. But she could not stop looking at him, standing there, peeling his pear, his jacket hanging loosely about his frame. And she could not help feeling for him something close to tenderness, as if he were a weary, lost traveler Fate had cast at her doorstep.

“Geoffrey Asquith is a stranger to me.”

“Fathers shouldn’t be strangers.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes they are.”

“Like husbands?” he said, not looking at her, smiling oddly.

But apparently he did not expect her to answer that question, for he handed her a slice of pear. She hesitated, then stripped off one glove and accepted. The pear was cool and juicy, sweet with a trace of that faint bitterness particular to pears.

She’d never imagined they’d be strangers. Sometimes she wished Miss Jones had never fallen prey to food poisoning. Then she would never have been called upon to perform the caesarean section in Miss Jones’s stead at that house on Upper Berkley Street. Then her illusion would have remained intact.

And they might still be married, and today she might still be ignorantly content.

She put her hat back on and tied the ribbons firmly under her chin. “So how was my father when you saw him last?”

Unlike her, Leo had always been on the best of terms with everyone in her family. He seemed to find something to like about each one of them; and they admired him ardently in return.

He raised one straight brow. “My, and here I thought you were completely heartless.”

She stiffened. “Maybe I am. Maybe this is merely a pretense to converse.”

He snorted. “You don’t know how to converse. Sometimes I think the spaces between the stars are filled with your silence.”

“That’s not true. I talk.”

“When you are forced to.” He offered her another piece of the pear. She had half a mind to decline, but the pear was very fresh and just the perfect ripeness.

“When I dined with your family at the beginning of the year, your father seemed hale enough. Before I left, he presented me with a copy of his new book on Milton. I read it crossing the Red Sea.” He glanced at her. “You’ve never read any of his books, have you?”

She shook her head. She’d never read them, but she’d burned some copies when she was eight or
nine, when she still cared that Geoffrey Asquith had all the time in the world for his books but none for his daughter.

“It was an excellent book, with much insightful analysis.”

“I am sure it was. How was Callista?”

“Same as always, full of quirks and oddities of her own. And still not married.”

“She takes after me then. Everyone else?”

“Your stepmother looked somewhat frail. She’d fractured her wrist the previous winter and hadn’t gone out in public for a while. Paul was the same. Angus was nursing a broken heart over having his marriage proposal rejected by Lady Barnaby.” He offered her yet another slice of pear. “But you don’t really care about them, do you?”

He didn’t know her at all. And yet sometimes he knew her so well it frightened her.

“How is your family?”

He gave her a bemused look, but answered. “Well enough. Will and Lizzy have moved back to London. Matthew is commanding astronomical sums for his portraits. Charlie has decided he will marry any living, breathing woman willing to become a stepmother to his vast brood. And Jeremy is just busy being the earl.”

His siblings all adored him, their baby brother.
And both of his late parents had been devoted to him. The favorite, the beloved, who knew nothing of neglect and desperate loneliness.

“And Sir Robert, is he well?”

He is the finest young man I know, and you without question, the stupidest woman
, Leo’s godfather had coldly informed Bryony on the eve of the granting of the annulment.

“Quite well. It’s a good time to be a banker with all the gold wealth pouring in from South Africa.”

She nodded. In time, a good chunk of that wealth would go to Leo. Would she still have had the courage to propose to him had she known of his place in his godfather’s will, known that he didn’t really need the money she’d bring to the marriage? Yes, probably. Once he’d kissed her, all she could think about was kissing him again and again—and doing everything else that had, until then, seemed ridiculous on paper, acts that ought to cause civilized people to die of embarrassment.

“You should have saved a few of your questions,” he said, biting into the stump of the pear. “We will have nothing to say to each other for the rest of the trip.”

She looked at him, looked at her now-empty hands, and realized that he’d given all the good
pieces of the pear to her, that he himself hadn’t eaten any until now.

And she suddenly had one more question—because it was far easier to tell him that he no longer existed for her than to actually make it so. Because the tides of her heart demanded it.

“And how have
you
been?”

He tossed away the core of the pear. “What do you care?”

She compressed her lips. And shrugged.

“Ah, I forgot, you are but conversing,” he said, with a tilt of his lips that wasn’t a smile. “I would say I have done exceptionally well. I have traveled the world, met interesting men and beautiful women, and been feted and toasted wherever I went.”

She could very well believe that: a simple return to his glamorous bachelor life.

He wiped his hands with a handkerchief. Stowing the handkerchief back in his pocket, he braced his hands on either side of him. The hand closest to her rested in the shadow cast by his own person. Out of the direct reach of the light, the cuts and bruises on his knuckles weren’t so prominent, only the elegant shape of his fingers.

During their extremely brief engagement, he’d called on her every Sunday afternoon. And whenever they were left alone in her father’s drawing room, he
would set those long, tapered fingers upon her person. She’d let him hold her hand, but his fingers always stole further north. On his last Sunday call, he’d managed to not only unbutton her sleeve, but kiss her on the tender inside of her elbow. And she, trembling with newly awakened desire, had not been able to sleep a wink that night.

“And you, how have
you
been?” he asked, as if it were an afterthought.

Outwardly, other than her hair, she had not changed much. She was still more or less the same cool, aloof woman who garnered more respect than affection. On the inside, however, it had been impossible to return to the person she used to be.

She’d been content. She had not wanted to marry. Nor had she much interest in the largely empty rituals of Society. Medicine was a demanding god and she a busy acolyte in its vast temple.

Then he had come into her life. And it was as if she’d been struck by lightning. Or a team of archaeologists had dug up the familiar scenes of her mind to reveal a large, ancient warren of unmet hunger and frustrated hope.

It took her some time, after leaving him, to realize that she could never go back to the staid, narrow obliviousness that had characterized much of her twenties, when she’d been blithely unaware of all the
secrets and upheavals just beneath the surface of her heart.

But except for a curious restlessness that had her pack her bags and move to the opposite end of the globe every year or so, she’d coped—if she hadn’t been at peace, then at least she wasn’t at war with herself.

Until he’d abruptly reappeared in her life.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I suppose—I suppose I have survived.”

Leo had lied. The happiest hour of his life was not his wedding. The week before the wedding he’d been away, giving a series of lectures at the Académie de Paris. And when he’d returned and they’d exchanged their vows, it had been the first time Bryony wore that expression he would later name The Castle, wooden and emotionless. Until the moment the Bishop of London had pronounced them man and wife, he’d had a lump of fear in his throat that she would suddenly jilt him
.

No, the happiest hour of his life had been when she proposed
.

He’d last seen her when he was fifteen. He never thought that eight years later, when he met her again, it would be as if no time had passed at all, that he’d still be as enthralled with her as he’d been as a boy
.

More, if anything
.

For she had become even more beautiful than he remembered. Cool and self-possessed. Capable and accomplished
.

He wasn’t so shabby himself. London celebrated him as a new kind of Renaissance man at the dawn of a new age. But he feared that he’d become too frivolous, that he was a little too tainted with the glitter and gloss of Society for her lofty soul
.

But at least she’d come to hear him speak at both the mathematical society and the geographical society. And had watched him with such grave attentiveness that he’d nearly lost his place in the lecture both times
.

He was completely enamored of the severely cut jacket-and-skirt suits she wore, so serious and put together—his lady knight, in her armor of crisp silk, ready to do battle with London’s microbes and infirmities. He adored the tarry-sweet whiff of carbolic acid, the great antiseptic beloved by her profession, that always clung to her hair—not that he often got close enough to smell her. And her quiet, so composed and assured, intrigued him far more than the endless babble the other young ladies were so fond of unleashing
.

At night he lay awake and thought of her prim little hats, her utilitarian walking boots, and the buttons that strained just slightly at the rise of her breasts. Thought of her unkissed lips, unlicked nipples, unpenetrated thighs
.

Then his lust had gotten away from him at the soiree musicale. He’d kissed her, not once, but twice, where any one of a hundred guests could have walked in on them
.

He had no idea what to do next. Should he call on her
and apologize? Should he call on her and not apologize? And it wasn’t a simple matter to call on her, since she worked and kept no at-home days
.

So here he was, on an overcast, drizzling London morning, too cold and dismal to be called spring, pacing his brother’s library in a strange agitation, flipping the card she’d given him between his fingers
. Miss Bryony Asquith. Internist. Anesthesiologist. Senior House Surgeon—New Hospital for Women. Lecturer—London School of Medicine for Women.

Someone knocked. “Sir, Miss Asquith would like to know if you are home,” said Jeremy’s butler
.

“Which Miss Asquith?” It was a stupid question to ask. Only the eldest daughter of the family was referred to solely by her surname
.

He tried to think why she’d come to see him. Probably to berate him, which he deserved, of course, but he’d rather that she not be displeased with him. Perhaps she had a lecture of her own to give somewhere and wished to invite him to attend. But then again that could have been easily done with a note
.

He gave up and told the butler to show her in
.

She was so pretty. Raven hair, porcelain complexion, a natural blush of the palest rose on her cheeks. His heart had taken to beating faster when he was around her. And he was all too aware of the indent of her upper lip, the richness of her lower lip, the whole shape and curve and softness of her mouth
.

They spent a minute or so standing in the drawing room, exchanging platitudes. He offered her a seat; she thanked him but made no move. He offered her tea; she turned it down outright
.

He gave her a mock severe look. “You don’t want a seat and you don’t want tea. Is there anything you do want, Miss Asquith?”