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His heart beat too fast, and he was too hot, suddenly, but if she noticed, she didn’t say a word. She stroked his chest, soothing him, and soon he calmed.
“What was his name?” she asked softly.
“Samuel.”
He focused on her hand, the warm pressure skating over his ribcage, resting familiarly on his belly.
“What was he like?”
He had pictures, no words. She moved, her hair feathering him, her mouth finding a spot just above his collarbone.
“He was a little whirlwind,” he said. “He wouldn’t walk if he could run or jump or skip. He wanted to know everything about everything. I never realized how much I didn’t know, until I had to answer his questions.” He stared at the dark, seeing those images of the past, fearing he would lose them. “Bram sent this tiger-skin rug from India: his idea of a joke. Rachel thought it was horrific, so of course I used to put it out on the floor to annoy her. Samuel loved it. He’d have long conversations with it, and we’d find him asleep on it, hugging the tiger’s head. We called him our little tiger.”
When he stopped, she did not ask him anything more, but waited patiently for him to speak again.
“After he died, Rachel…She needed something to do. We had housing for all our workers—following Robert Owen, you see—but she became obsessed with providing decent housing for everyone in Birmingham, fixing up derelict buildings. One of those buildings collapsed.”
“Oh heavens. Joshua.”
“I razed them all. Built them anew. It didn’t bring either of them back.”
Here in the dark, with her, the world receded and he felt he could tell her anything at all. She stroked his hair, and he let her comfort him.
And as he drifted off to sleep, he had the odd thought that maybe the void inside him had nothing to do with the loved ones he had lost.
Chapter 19
Joshua came to her the next three nights too, sliding naked under the sheets with wicked words and teasing hands. She marveled at his passionate response to her, and her fevered response to him, at the way their lovemaking left her feeling at home in her own body as she never had before.
Afterward, they chatted quietly. He spoke of his businesses and associates and ideas; she spoke of her friends and garden and Sunne Park’s famous pigs. Fearful of breaking their fragile accord, she never mentioned their families, their past, or their future; neither did he.
Most of all, they never spoke of children, and though she dared not mention it, she secretly wondered if she might already be with child, for they made love two or three times each night, sometimes him on top, and one time he turned her over, and other times he pulled her on top of him. “Riding rantipole,” he called that, and teased her for being lazy, and demanded to know why he had to do all the work, and urged her to ride him faster, which she found difficult when she was laughing.
“Be greedy with me,” he whispered to her. “Be greedy and selfish and rude. Do as you please, take what you want, and for mercy’s sake tell me if I do something you don’t like.”
They slept wrapped around each other, but he awoke early and she awoke alone. During the day, they went their separate ways, but at odd moments—usually highly inappropriate moments—a memory of their lovemaking would flash across her mind and heat her insides, and she would think that she did not recognize herself. Which she also knew was a lie.
It made her feel stronger, somehow. She felt more equal to dealing with the swollen household and to waging their social war.
And to putting up with her sisters’ ceaseless complaints. About how London was boring, and Cassandra was selfish, and how, Lucy grumbled on the fourth day after their arrival, as the three sisters sat in the drawing room, “it is utterly stupid that we came all the way to London and we cannot even go to Vauxhall Gardens.”
Lucy stopped tearing through the pages of a magazine and threw it across the room. Apparently, she found that diverting, for she immediately threw another.
“Or the theater,” Emily chimed in, her tone sounding more like Lucy’s every day. “It’s stupid not to go to the theater.”
“You’re not meant to be in London at all,” Cassandra pointed out for the thousandth time, as she sorted through the gratifyingly large number of invitations, deciding which would be of most use. “Letting you go out would be like rewarding you for misbehaving.”
“So we must stay locked up like scullery maids whileyougo out all the time,” Lucy said.
“Not at all,” Cassandra said. “I would never lock up a scullery maid.”
“No wonder you do not want us here. You want to enjoy town without us.”
Enjoy? This social whirl, and the effort of making herself popular, was exhausting.
But her social campaign seemed to be working. The impending trial was earning her hundreds of hours of gossip, as society and the press debated which party was telling the truth, and battle lines had emerged between Bolderwood supporters and DeWitt supporters.
The Bolderwood camp spun a story of a naive wife and wicked seducer, with the noble husband willing to forgive his wife for her foolishness but determined to punish the seducer for his crime. It was a fine and convincing tale, but Arabella, who had appointed herself general of the campaign, reported that the DeWitt army was stronger, for Cassandra was well-liked, her parents had been adored, and everybody disapproved of Lord Bolderwood’s elopement in the first place. Furthermore, gentlemen wished to remain on Joshua’s good side, as he was their connection to industry and the new money that it promised, and when Joshua joined her at evening events, the consensus was that Mr. and Mrs. DeWitt were fond of each other.
