Revenge had been of more importance to Anna, it seemed, than good taste or personal dignity.
She had been looking her loveliest and most ravishing. Con had been at his most charming and his most mocking - both very familiar facets of his character to Elliott. He had never expected during his youth, though, that one day he would be one of Con's victims.
Vanessa would surely be waiting for him, he thought suddenly, bringing his mind back to the present. He was probably keeping her awake. If he was not going to go to her tonight, he ought to have told her so.
Was he really not going to her then?
He had actually enjoyed the day - morning and evening - right until the moment when young Merton had called their attention to the presence of Con in the box opposite and Elliott had looked and seen not just Con, but Anna too beside him. His eyes had met hers, and he had read a challenge there despite the distance between them.
He had been enjoying himself until then. For some odd reason he had been enjoying his wife's company. There was something inexplicably fascinating about her.
His fingers drummed harder against the windowsill for a moment.
He moved away from the window and wandered through to his dressing room, leaving the door open so that the light from the candle would shine in.
What he ought to do was walk firmly into Vanessa's room and tell her what she wanted to know. She wanted him to give her a good reason for his quarrel with Con, a good reason for her to avoid him. He should simply give it to her. Con was a thief and a lecher. He had robbed his own brother, who had trusted him totally but had not been mentally capable of knowing that his trust was being abused. And he had debauched servants of the house and other women of the neighborhood, something no decent gentleman would ever do.
But how could he tell Vanessa, any more than he had ever been able to tell his mother or his sisters - even though he had sometimes reasoned that they /ought /to know for their own good? How could he betray his /own /honor as guardian to Jonathan? How could he breach the confidentiality of such a trust? Besides, he had no incontrovertible proof. Con had not denied the charges, but he had not admitted to them either. He had merely lofted one eyebrow and grinned when Elliott confronted him, and had invited him to go to the devil.
How could one blacken someone's name to another person when one only had suspicions, no matter how certain one was that those suspicions were well founded?
Dash it all, it was /still /hard to accept that Con was capable of such villainy. He had always been up for any mischief and tomfoolery and devilry - but so had Elliott until fairly recently. He had never been a rogue, though.
And it was hard to accept that Con could hate him so much - and that he could be willing to risk hurting Vanessa in order to demonstrate that hatred.
He opened the door into his wife's dressing room. The door into her bedchamber had been left partly open, something she had done each night since demanding that he knock upon closed doors. There was the glow of candlelight beyond it.
He went to stand in the doorway, remembering another occasion when he had done so without an invitation. This time, though, she was asleep in bed.
He crossed the room and stood looking down at her. Her short hair was untidy and spread about her on the pillow. Her lips were slightly parted. In the light from the single candle her cheeks looked flushed.
She looked slight, girlish. Her breasts scarcely lifted the sheet that had been pulled up over them. Her arms and hands were slender.
For an unguarded moment he thought of Anna and made the contrasts. But strangely they were not thoughts he had to make any great effort to suppress.
There was something about Vanessa. She was not beautiful. She was not even pretty. She was plain. But there was something… She was not voluptuous. If there was an antonym for that word - he could not think of any at the moment - then she was that. There was nothing about her that should be sexually appealing.
And yet somehow there was.
He had desired her almost constantly during what she called their honeymoon - ghastly word! He had desired her every night since even though he had made their encounters brief and businesslike because…
Well, /why /exactly? Because she still loved her dead husband and he felt slighted? Hurt? No, certainly not that. Because he had wanted to punish her, to make her feel that she had only one function in his life?
Was he really so petty? It was an uncomfortable thought.
He desired her now. He had done all day, in fact - right from the moment she had appeared unexpectedly in George's office doorway before breakfast.
What /was /it about her?
He set two knuckles against her cheek and drew them lightly across it.
She opened her eyes and looked sleepily up at him - and smiled.
That was definitely a part of her appeal, he decided. He had never known anyone else whose eyes smiled almost constantly with genuine… what?
Warmth? Happiness? Both?
Was she happy to see him? When his behavior toward her in the bedchamber for the last several nights had been little short of insulting? "I was not sleeping. I was merely resting my eyes," she said, and laughed.
And there was her laugh too. Genuine. Warm. Al most infectious.
Some people seemed to have been born happy. Vanessa was one of them. And she was his wife.
He undid the sash of his dressing gown and shrugged out of it. He was wearing a nightshirt, something he had done each night since coming upon her in tears that afternoon at Finchley. He pulled it off now and dropped it to the floor while she watched him.
He lay down on his back beside her, one forearm over his eyes. Was there such a thing as a good marriage? he wondered. Was it possible? The thing was that no one in the /ton /ever expected it, not if goodness equated happiness anyway. Marriage was a social bond and often an economic one too. One looked elsewhere for sexual pleasure and emotional satisfaction - if one needed it.
His father obviously had. And his grandfather.
She was lying on her side, he was aware, looking at him. He had left the candle burning tonight. "Elliott," she said softly, "it has been a lovely day. It is one I will long remember. Tell me it has not been an utter bore for you." He removed his arm and turned his head to look at her. "You think me incapable of enjoyment?" he asked her. "No," she said. "But I wonder if you are capable of enjoyment with /me/.
I am not at all lovely or sophisticated or - " "Has no one ever called you lovely?" he asked her before she could think of another derogatory word to apply to herself.
She was silent for a moment. "You," she said, "at the Valentine's ball." She laughed. "And then you added that every /other /lady was lovely too, without exception." "Do you love springtime?" he asked her. "Do you think it loads the world with a beauty not found in any other season?" "Yes," she said. "It is my favorite season." "I called you a piece of springtime this evening," he said. "I meant it." "Oh." She sighed. "How lovely. But you /have /to say such things to me.
You are my husband." "You are determined to see yourself as ugly, then?" he said. "Has anyone ever called you that, Vanessa?" She thought again. "No," she said. "No one in my world would have been so cruel. But my father used to tell me that he ought to have called me Jane since I was his own plain Jane. He said it with affection, though." "With all due respect to the late Reverend Huxtable," he said, "I do believe he ought to have been hanged, drawn, and quartered." "Oh, Elliott." Her eyes widened. "What a dreadful thing to say." "If I were still unmarried," he said, "and had to make a choice among you and your sisters based upon looks alone, I would choose you." Her eyes filled with laughter again, and her lips curved into a smile. "You are my gallant knight," she said. "Thank you, sir." "I am not a simple mix of coldness and irritability, then?" he asked her.
The laughter held. "Like all humans," she said, "you are a dizzying mix of things and you ought to take no notice of me when I say you are all one thing or even all of two or three things. I daresay you are thousands of things and I will discover hundreds of them during our marriage. But not all. We can never know another person completely." "Can we know even ourselves?" he asked. "No," she said. "We can always take even ourselves by surprise. But would life not be dull if we were all unfailingly predictable? How would we ever continue to learn and grow and adapt to new conditions of our life?" "Are we talking philosophy again?" he asked her. "If you ask questions," she said, "you must expect me to answer them." "You know how to change me for the better," he said. "Do I?" She looked uncomprehendingly at him. /"I will think of ways. I am endlessly inventive." /He quoted the words to her, just as she had spoken them at the theater earlier. "Oh." She laughed. "I really did say those things, did I not?" "While you were lying here just now," he said, "not sleeping but resting your eyes, were you /thinking/? Were you being /inventive/?" She laughed softly. "If you were not," he said, "I believe I am doomed to be cold and irritable for the rest of the night. I shall lie here and see if I can sleep." He closed his eyes.