“Be fair,” Adrian said. “The men who decided this are all dead, too. It’ll be a different set of men.”
Camilla looked up at him. Her eyes narrowed. She wasn’t going to laugh. “Is this amusing to you?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not. It’s why my uncle’s help is of the utmost importance. If they think we are upstanding people, they’ll be more likely to treat our story, outrageous as it is, with belief and kindness. If they don’t…” He shrugged. “Well, you’ve seen it. This all would be dead easy if you were a lady; we could play the lady and the utter blackguard for the court, and the annulment would come too swiftly for us to blink. They’d find a way to make sure you weren’t tied to the likes of me.”
“The likes of you.” Camilla blazed out. “If they say anything about the likes of you, I’ll beat them, too. As if these idiots could judge anyone’s character. I hope she hit him.”
“You hope who hit whom?”
“Miss Tabbott.” She gestured. “Sir William. Of course.”
And then the words he’d spoken came back to her—if you were a lady—and she remembered. She tried to think of her past so little that it no longer registered as a truth about her, not even when he said it aloud. This all would be dead easy if you were a lady.
Of course. He didn’t know.
How could he know? She hadn’t told him. She hadn’t wanted to look back.
They might be able to end this tomorrow, without any of this rigmarole. All she had to do was tell him the one thing that she no longer wanted to recall.
He would thank her; she could let him go without letting him see how much she hurt.
Or…she could keep silent and have him for a little longer. For company. For tea.
She looked over at him across the table. For a moment, she wavered on the edge of indecision. Was it even a lie, if she simply chose not to tell him the truth?
No. It wasn’t a lie. Camilla shut her eyes.
“Camilla? Is everything all right?”
It hurt to remember it. She could not be anything except a scandal to her family. The truth of her birth had no relevance here. She didn’t have to tell him.
It wasn’t a lie.
But it wasn’t right, either.
She exhaled slowly. “There’s something I should tell you.” Her eyes opened. “I didn’t mention it earlier; I didn’t know it would be of use. But… You should know that I used a false name on the registry.”
He blinked. “That doesn’t invalidate the marriage, you know.”
“My family name is not Winters. I was born Camilla Worth.” She kept her eyes down. “My father was the Earl of Linney, and he was hanged for treason, so my family name has no real value. Rector Miles convinced me to use a different name, so that the shame of who I had become would not further damn the rest of my family. They’ve made it out of this mess. I don’t… Even if they don’t want me, I don’t want to hurt them. But you said we could use it, so…” She shrugged. Her throat felt hoarse. “Here you are.”
“The shame of who you are?” he repeated. He said the words slower, enunciating them, grinding them into her soul.
“Please don’t make me say it. I don’t even like thinking it.”
For a long moment, he didn’t speak. She could hear the tick of a clock behind them. She shifted uncomfortably.
“I know you don’t believe me. But…I thought I should tell you.” She lifted her head to look at him.
He was watching her, his eyes dark and intense. “It likely wouldn’t help, you know,” he said slowly. “Your sister hasn’t talked to you in years, and you’d need her to vouch for her.”
“Well. Then.”
“But you didn’t have to tell me. Why did you?”
She shrugged one shoulder. She could not speak, not with that lump in her throat.
“I…” He shook his head and leaned forward and set his hand atop hers. “Camilla, I know how hard this has been for you. At this point, you have seen where I come from, what I have. I have several homes, horses, and ready funds. You have nothing. All you would have to do was lie, once, to the examiners, you realize, and there would be no annulment. I would be legally obligated to supply your needs for the rest of your life.”
“Please don’t point it out.” Camilla didn’t want to be tempted.
“And I know what you want. You want permanence. A place to stay.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes. “Someone to care about me, just a little.”
“And yet here you are, helping me win an annulment that leaves you worse off.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I can’t help but know it.”
“Why, then?”
Because she didn’t want to hurt him. Because she made bad choices. Because… “You told me the other day, that someday someone would love me for who I was?” The room felt large around her. Or maybe she felt unbearably small. “I shouldn’t believe it. There is no evidence it can be true. If it could happen, would it not have done so, once?”
“Camilla.”
“I should not believe it, but I do. I have no reason for hope, so I hope beyond reason. I keep hoping, that someday, someone will care. I believe that I deserve it, even though I know I cannot. I have known for years that it cannot be, and yet I refuse to stop hoping. You are the only person in the world who has ever told me that I should keep on hoping. I’m not going to repay that kindness with cruelty.”
He was watching her so intently, some fierce emotion in his eyes that she couldn’t quite interpret.
Now that she’d given voice to that hope, it rose within her, strong and indomitable. She was going to be loved, damn it. Someday. She was going to.
It wouldn’t be him. She knew that, the way she knew that she wished it would be.
“You can’t steal love,” she told him. “You can only earn it. And I want to be the kind of person who can still believe, after all this time, that I will deserve it.”
“That’s it.” He stood straight up and closed his notebook of sketches. “That’s what I’ve been missing—the last three plates, of course—we’ve been trying to tell the wrong story.”
“Your pardon? Adrian—we should talk about whether we use this—”
He almost ran to the door. “Sorry—I have to fix this now. It’s—ah, sorry!”
He was putting on a coat and hat, and Camilla was utterly bewildered.
“I’ll tell you when it’s done.” The smile he gave her was painful and brilliant and so warm that it felt like it could burn her. “I’m sorry,” he apologized one last time. “I have to go.”
* * *
Adrian barely saw her for days once he understood what to do with the plates. It didn’t matter.
He gradually came to realize that he had a problem over the course of those days.
He spent most of his time at Harvil Industries, working with his artists. Refining, looking for everything that was wrong, shaping the china designs again and again until the story meant more and more to each of them.
He came home for late repasts.
Camilla was always there. She’d tell him about something new she’d read in the ecclesiastical reports or another idea for when he had time again. They would talk, and he would like it, and he didn’t have time to think about how much he was liking it. He really didn’t.
He’d go to sleep and he’d think about china designs—about tigers chasing dreams, and…
And the plates weren’t about her. Really, they weren’t. Every one of the artists involved had a different opinion of what they meant. Mrs. Song didn’t precisely cry when they decided on that first plate, a tiger cub chasing that stylized dream over a waterfall into new and strange terrain, but it was close. Adrian felt a strange compression in his chest when they planned out the last one.
The plates weren’t about Camilla. They were about everyone.
Yet somehow, Adrian had started thinking of her as part of that everyone.
That yearning just got worse with ever
y passing day.
Adrian had a problem, he realized after he’d been working on the design for so long his head was spinning with lack of sleep.
Truth be told, he’d had one for a while, but he admitted it to himself for the first time on a long night, while they were on the verge of finishing their designs.
He realized it at night, in bed, when he was alone.
It wasn’t cold, and he wasn’t lonely. Not in any traditional sense of the word. He wasn’t one of those sordid creatures who claimed that it was impossible to go for any length of time without having intercourse: any man who claimed such a need was hardly a man.
Adrian had nobody to blame for his problem but himself, and he should have seen it coming.
His problem was this: Adrian liked Camilla.
He more than liked her; he’d noticed that first dizzying swirl of sexual interest the first day they’d met. She was pretty and so easy to talk to. She listened to him and had her own thoughts. She’d adjusted to the whirlwind that they’d embarked on with a grace that few would have managed.
He knew what she’d gone through; he’d watched Rector Miles and the others she had worked with for only a handful of days, and even that alone had been mildly painful to watch.
She’d told him everything she had experienced, and as bare as her recital had been, he’d heard her loneliness, her worry. He knew how much she yearned.
And still, she’d looked him in the face and told him that she believed she would be loved.
It had sunk into his skin. Every moment he spent with her, he found himself wanting—just a little. Every minute in her company, his heart seized with an almost painful gladness. Tonight, she had talked about something else she had found in that book of ecclesiastical law that she had started carrying about. He’d found himself leaning forward, smiling, wanting that future happiness for her, so much that…
That he’d gripped the arms of his chair to keep from reaching out and touching her himself.
He let out a sigh.
Oh, he had a problem. If they weren’t semi-legally married, it might be different. He might have moved his hand to touch her tonight. He might have asked if he could kiss her, just so he could taste the determination in her voice. If they hadn’t been married, he could have explored this—slowly, sweetly.
But they were something like married, and he didn’t want to be. They had to not consummate the marriage. And if they started kissing and touching… No. A bad idea all around. He knew it was a bad idea.
More importantly, he knew how much Camilla wanted affection; it would be the cruelest thing he could do—to give that affection she wanted to her, when he didn’t want anything aside from that momentary affirmation. That footman she mentioned had done just that to her—used her and then discarded her.
He wasn’t cruel; he just didn’t want to be married to her. He wouldn’t want to be married to anyone like this.
He liked her. And he wanted her. He shut his eyes and let himself imagine a different conclusion to their talk this evening—or any of the evenings they’d spent together. He imagined her eyes, sparkling in the lamp light, the fierce determination on her face as she looked across the room and said that she wasn’t going to steal love, that she was going to earn it.
He imagined that they weren’t semi-goddamn-why-me-legally married, or whatever this was, and he could tell her the truth: You deserve the world at your feet.
She would look at him with the confidence that had begun to creep up on her, a look that suited her as if it had been perfectly tailored for her. She’d tilt her chin up.
“Oh?” He could just see how she would say it. “Why don’t you show me?”
Now he was veering into fantasy territory, but—he knew this for a rationalization—it was better to get the fantasies out of his blood than to indulge in more of this foolishness while watching her over supper.
God, he wanted to show her what it was like to be desired. Camilla wasn’t the sort to lie there passively, not if she were interested as well. He’d do his best to listen to her, to watch her awakening desire and to stoke it until she was gasping beneath him.
He gave up on pretending. He took hold of his hardening cock and imagined her hand on his, the warmth of her exhaled breath in his ear. He imagined her kissing down his neck, her body brushing his lightly at first, and then with more certainty.
She’d slide down on him so wetly, so perfectly.
His hand was an imperfect substitute, but it would do. He strained up into it, thinking of her, of the little noises she would make as her hips met his. She would smile as he found every sensitive spot with his tongue—ears, breasts, everywhere he could reach. She wouldn’t play coy; she’d give herself to him with all abandon. She wasn’t the sort to hold back.
His hand moved faster; his whole body seemed afire. God, he was an idiot; he couldn’t be thinking about her this way. He was going to have to see her tomorrow; he couldn’t be wondering what it would be like if she—if they—
And then he wasn’t thinking at all. His body tipped over the edge, filled with heat and desire. He painfully swallowed his own grunt of pleasure before it came out sounding like her name.
He lay in bed afterward, far too warm and more than a little embarrassed. Not that there was anything wrong with masturbation. If it were actually possible to go blind from it, he’d have lost his sight long before he turned eighteen.
It was a bad idea, thinking about her like this. It was possibly the worst idea he could have had.
She’d had enough done to her. She’d been hurt too much. She trusted him. He wasn’t going to be the person who took her confidence, not when she had so little of anything in this world.
And the fact that she might, possibly, be willing to give…
…That was unthinkable. Because with her, with the way things were, there could be no idle kissing, no mere enjoyment to be found together. If he came to her wanting this, he was married to her for life. He had a problem, but that’s what real men did—they had problems on their own, where the solution required a hand towel to clean up afterwards, and not an apology to someone for ruining her life.
Well.
On the bright side, masturbation was limited only by his refractory period. And it made less of a mess.
* * *
Camilla didn’t realize she was changing until she was almost at the end of her transformation.
It started with Miss Laney Tabbott, the woman who was seduced and abandoned by the horrid, lying Sir William.
She read the court’s account again and again—first, she thought, to learn what was happening and how she could do better. Then she started reading it with her crochet hook in hand, thinking and wondering and crocheting without truly knowing her own thoughts.
She imagined that she was Miss Laney Tabbott, born a century and a half before, betrayed by the man she loved. It was easier to imagine herself angry on behalf of someone else than to think of her own situation. The anger she felt for Miss Tabbott was almost unbearable.
So she crocheted and she imagined.
She imagined herself facing the ecclesiastical court and giving testimony as Miss Tabbott had undoubtedly done.
Camilla wouldn’t beg for them to not annul her marriage with a man who clearly didn’t want her. No; Camilla as Miss Tabbott would wreak maximum embarrassment.
“No,” she imagined herself saying with confidence, tilting her wrist just so. “Of course we didn’t consummate the marriage. He wanted to, but I took one look at his private parts, and… Syphilis, you understand. Poor thing.”
They said that hell had no fury like a woman scorned, but they were wrong. Women were scorned again and again and again. It was only after the seventieth scorning that they let loose a fraction of their righteous anger. Frankly, men had no idea how lucky they were that any woman was rational at all.
Day after day, Camilla honed Miss Tabbott’s speech, muttering it to herself as she paced in the library or as she walked thro
ugh the little clumps of trees along the riverbank. She honed it as she crocheted, finished her scarf, and ripped it apart again for yarn.
She wasn’t sure when she started delivering her own words—when, instead of the sordid details of Miss Tabbott’s unwelcome ruination, she started talking about what had happened to her instead.
“I just wanted to do what was right,” she told a stand of willows. “I was trying to do what was right, and they ruined me.” She thought of the look on the rector’s face. “They made me feel shame for my friendliness, for my willingness to trust others. They made weaknesses of my strength.” Her eyes stung with hot tears, and she clenched her hands together.
“I won’t let them,” she said blindly, through the hot veil of her tears. “I won’t let them have me. I won’t let them make me weaker or stupider. I’m not going to let them take me away.”
She imagined Miss Tabbott standing at her side as she spoke.
Three days in, she looked at her crocheting and thought of old Mrs. Marsdell—the woman who she’d tried to impress by learning to crochet.
Adrian had told her that she should try to look back eventually. Every time Camilla thought of Mrs. Marsdell, she remembered those sniffs and suspicious looks. Camilla had opened her heart, and…
And she’d learned to crochet. The feel of yarn beneath her fingers gave her strength; the activity let her think in ways that simply sitting did not.
She had tried to give, and giving had made its own form of return. Once she started thinking of it that way, she could look back a little more. Camilla had read a book of fairy tales to Baby Angela; when times were hard, she still thought of women who kept on going, even when there was no reason to do so. Camilla had learned to kiss from Larissa. She had learned to put a square sheet on a bed from Kitty.
Camilla was a collection of things she had learned from the people she had loved. They hadn’t loved her back, but she’d taken everything she learned with her any way.
All this time, she thought she’d found nothing all those years.