Of Moths and Butterflies (31 page)

It is the wife who is the most affected by marriage: as a woman she has many legal disabilities, as a wife, she has more; her liberty is taken from her; her position is altered; her duties and cares; nay, her very existence, is changed, and she enters upon an era of unknown troubles and responsibilities. Let her look before she leaps even into a promise of marriage, lest she may regret the step when she finds herself upon the other side.

Charles E. Baker, Husband and Wife, and the Married Women's Property Act, 1882.

February 1882

HE COUPLE
, newly arrived, stood within the Abby’s dimly lit entrance hall, side by side but with several feet of distance between them. Imogen examined the interior as though she had never seen it before. Of course she had. She did not seem pleased to have returned. Under the circumstances, she had every right to doubt that her residence, as Archer Hamilton’s wife, and mistress of the house, would be a much happier one than when she had lived here before. As a servant.

Wishing to reassure her, Archer came to stand beside, placing a hand at her elbow. She looked at him. It was not a pleasant look.

“Are you tired?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “Very.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I’m not sure I have much of an appetite,” she answered and looked toward the stairs, prepared, or so he imagined, to take flight at the first opportunity. Her eagerness to be away from him was plain. And it galled him.

“Your uncle does not join us?” she asked.

“Why should he?”

She did not answer, and he found he did not wish her to. As Sir Edmund had orchestrated the affair, arranged, at least, for the marriage to take place, perhaps it was natural that she should wonder that he had not returned with them to make sure all the formalities—and informalities—were properly dispensed with. All the ends tied up and secured.

“He will return at the end of the month.”

“Two weeks? No longer?”

He regretted the answer, regretted, far more, the fact. “Sir Edmund feels there’s too much to do just at present to allow for a proper holiday.”

“No honeymoon, then,” she said with such a mixture of resentment and relief that it rendered him helpless to answer.

The sound of a clearing throat interrupted them. Archer turned to find that the housekeeper had appeared.

“You remember Mrs. Hartup, of course,” he said. “Mrs. Hartup, will you see that Mrs. Hamilton is made comfortable?”

“Mrs. Hamilton,” she said, rather more tersely than was either necessary or appropriate, “if you’ll come with me.”

*   *   *

Imogen followed the housekeeper as she mounted the staircase to the upper rooms, down passageways familiar, and toward the once abandoned west wing of the house. She had known these rooms well. They were the rooms she had been employed to clean and to decorate—to prepare for the welcoming of a new mistress to Wrencross Abbey. She never could have guessed, not in a million years, that they should ever be intended for her. As she had appointed them, they suited her taste perfectly. And they were comfortable. Perhaps the finest in the house.

She should be grateful, she supposed, and would be under any other circumstances. But with the evidence mounting, it was becoming harder to deny that Sir Edmund Barry had known all along that she was the beneficiary of her uncle’s fortune. But what did that say of Archer? Was he truly the innocent pawn he would like her to believe him? At present it didn’t seem possible. But what opportunity was there to know for sure? Fourteen days was hardly sufficient to form a relationship based on mutual respect. The time they needed to find their proper footing was not to be had.

If only she knew what she might expect. If only she knew how to feel.

*   *   *

Archer sat below in his uncle’s library. The gloom cast by Imogen’s apparent reluctance to be near him thrust him deeply into his own thoughts. In time, Mrs. Hartup came with his meal, but he could not touch it. Instead he arose, and after pouring himself a drink, he wandered the library floor. The more he thought of her, the more he thought of her in her room. And his thoughts carried him on, turning in time to increasingly disquieting ones. This was his wedding night. He should be with her.

He felt his necktie strangling him, and so he removed it and unbuttoned his collar. It wasn’t enough. He poured himself another drink and then went out into the night air. Consumed in his thoughts, he paced the expanse of lawn for a time, blowing great clouds of air and thinking, wondering what he ought to do. Should he go up to her? The thought of her submissive to him, the reminder of the lips he had once felt against his own, determined him. He looked up at her room in time to see the curtain drop. Yes, he would go.

*   *   *

Imogen turned from the window having closed the curtain on Archer. Her husband. Would she ever get accustomed to calling him that? She had watched him walking below, wondered what it was he was thinking. And then understood as he looked up at her window. He was thinking of her, of course. And what more?

He had been good enough to grant her some time to herself, yet his absence was not the relief she had expected it to be. The tightening of her chest warned her that her heart had not yet done breaking. Exhausted, she sank down onto a nearby chaise. Despite the fire that burned in the grate, the room was frigid. She arose to retrieve her mother’s shawl, but, upon settling once more, found it did not offer the comfort she was used to finding.

Once more she arose to wander the room, unable to rest. To entertain any hope of sleep seemed impossible, tired though she was. What she needed was a distraction, something to get her mind off of her anxieties. She left her room in search of the second story book room.

She entered to find it dark, the only light coming from the fireplace. She took a nervous glance about and was relieved by what the darkness disguised. Archer’s insect collection. In the light of the fire’s glow, she could see little more than a hundred squares of reflected light. No insects. No pins.

She crossed to the great bookcase. In the near darkness it was difficult to make out the titles, and the collection was not well organised. Having made one or two random selections, she took them closer to the light, only to find that they would not do at all. She placed them on the table and sat down in the armchair, leaning back as the cushioned leather embraced her. She closed her eyes and, resting her head on the wing, inhaled the scent of he who had so often sat here. She opened her eyes again to observe a stack of books beside the ones she had placed. The topmost caught her attention. It looked familiar to her, and well it should, for upon examining it more closely she found it to be the book from which he had once read to her.
Ode to Psyche
. Why had he chosen that poem?

Psyche had been a mortal woman whose beauty aroused Venus’ jealousy to such an extent that she sent her son to curse her. While attending his errand, Cupid pricked himself with his own arrow by mistake. He fell deeply in love with her. Selfishly, he arranged to have Psyche for himself, and, employing the assistance of the West Wind, he had her carried to his home to be his bride.

Was it coincidence that the mythological tale and her own had so far fallen in line? There was more to it, of course, but in the end it had worked out well for Cupid and Psyche. That all should turn out well for her was really too much to hope for. The vital questions yet remained: at what point had these arrangements come into existence? And when and to what extent was Archer culpable?

As she sat thus, her head resting once more against the wing of the chair, she resisted the idea that it was Archer’s adoration alone that had brought her here. She did not believe in it. At least she dared not do it. She recalled that other tale of Greek romance. Another god. Another wind. Boreas too had fallen in love with a mortal woman, and had tried to persuade her with tender speeches. But the girl would not submit, and so, in light of her refusals, he carried her off by force.

Imogen had dared once to believe Archer loved her, had dared to submit to him when in the end it had never mattered whether she submitted or not. She had been captured as surely as one of his insects.

These dark thoughts churned through her mind until at last they began to blur and become disjointed. When at last the confusion settled, she saw herself as if seen by another—as Archer had first seen her—walking leisurely through a field of poppies and cornflowers which danced in the breeze as the sun shone down. But the sky quickly darkened and the breeze grew more determined, ferocious, sending her hair and her skirts flying and accosting her with everything its ethereal hands could grasp and throw. Leaves, twigs, and the occasional winged insect all became projectiles, stinging her face and blinding her. She tripped and fell, and was caught, but by no hands that wished to help her. They held her and would not let her go, raking her hair, pawing at her, groping, feeling in the darkness for that which was hers that they wished to have for themselves.

“Imogen?”

She awoke with a start to find Archer kneeling before her.

“Were you dreaming?” His brow, as he looked at her, was furrowed heavily.

She blinked in an effort to cast the remnants of her nightmare away. Her heart was beating wildly. “I must have been.”

“Come,” he said and held out his hand.

She would not take it, but arose from the chair.

“What are you reading?” he said, taking the book from her to examine it. “Ah.” He smiled and handed it back.

She refused it.

Clearly deflated, he laid it down on the nearby table. He gestured then for her to lead the way out, presumably to her room—or theirs. But she was not prepared.

“Are you Boreas?” she asked him, both stalling for time and desperate for answers.

“I’m sorry?”

“Do you know the story?”

His brow furrowed again, but in anger this time. At least in irritation. “Are you trying to draw some absurd comparison?”

“I want to know.”

Defensively, he answered, “You did accept me. Have you forgotten?”

“I agreed to marry you, yes, but had I known…”

He made no attempt to reply.

“Would it have been different had I refused?”

His jaw tensed but still he did not answer.

“Would I still be standing here now, had I rejected your offer?”

“Perhaps you would be with your darling cousin, happy and warm in his embraces.”

She returned this with a look that matched the pain his answer had inflicted and swept from the room.

“Imogen!”

But she did not stop. Not until she was in her own room and the door was closed. It soon opened, however, and Archer stepped inside. He looked a little wild with his shirt collar unbuttoned and his brown hair rumpled from drawing his hands through it as he did when he was anxious or troubled. As he did now.

“This is not how I wanted it to be; you know that.”

She remained resolute, unmoved and unmoving.

“I could not know my uncle would announce his intentions like that, so unfeelingly upon the heels of my proposal.”

“So you would rather I had been deceived?”

“No, Imogen,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “No. I wanted the matter to be between us, that’s all. A choice you and I made together.”

“But what difference would it have made, truly?”

“I had hoped it would make all the difference.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“It isn’t that difficult.” There was a renewed tenderness to his voice, but she ignored it.

“No, I suppose it isn’t.”

He took a step or two nearer. “What I mean is—”

“I know what you meant.”

“Do you?”