Chapter 12: Every Day

I got off him and put on my nightgown.

I did it very carefully, because I did not trust my hands.

Gervase lay on the bed with the cravat slack around his wrists.

He watched me and said nothing.

"Tell me," I said. "All of it. Sit up."

He sat.

He told it to the bedpost, mostly, in a flat quiet voice.

"Georgie lived at Fane Park, the next estate to ours in Kent.

"She was seventeen when they married her to Fane, and I was sixteen.

"She was kind to a boy who read too much and had a father who despised him.

"That was all it ever was. I have never loved her.

"I have been fond of her all my life."

"The desk," I said.

"My father told me at sixteen that I was nobody until he was dead and I was a title."

My throat tightened, and I held it.

"Go on."

"Fane drank.

"In March of the year five he broke her wrist, and a week later she wrote to me.

"I was twenty-two, and my father had been dead a month.

"I fetched her in my carriage at midnight in June, with her trunk on the roof.

"Fane came out into the drive with a horsewhip and the whole household behind him.

"He said, 'Whose is she?'

"A wife who runs from a husband is dragged back, Mina.

"The law gives her to him.

"A wife who has a lover is a different matter.

"She is ruined, and he takes damages, and the Lords free her.

"So I said it.

"I said, 'She's mine, Fane. Come and take her.'"

He touched his ribs.

"He laid the whip across me once, in front of them all.

"I did not lift a hand, and I didn't contradict it afterward.

"Fane took ten thousand pounds, the Lords gave her a divorce, and London gave me a name."

I had been standing at the window with my arms wrapped around me.

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