Page 118 of The Sainted Duchess
“For my what?”
“For your love.”
“You cannot ask me to love you and then tell me I must be less than I am to do it.”
“Less?” His mouth tightened. “To live a full life with me is to be less?”
“To live a life that excludes the very thing I have only just dared to hope for,” she said, “is to be set aside by my own husband’s vow to a dead man.”
“I would not set you aside.”
“You already have,” she answered. “You hauled a past horror into our present and crowned it king.”
He drew breath as if to argue. But then when he spoke again, his voice was soft.
“I fell in love with you,” he said, “I did not plan it; I did not want it; I tried to be careful with it and failed. We can have everything but children. We can have peace. Laughter. A home that is ours. You and me. Do not throw it from you because of one part we cannot add.”
She stared at him, astonishment transmuting to anger.
“Stephen,” she said, “you made me want the very thing you now tell me I cannot have. You taught me what it felt like to hope, to imagine, and you kissed me as if a future were possible, and now you offer me an incomplete version because your father’s portrait still snarls in your head.”
He closed his eyes again. “You are not wrong.”
“Then be brave,” she said fiercely. “Be braver than he was.”
“I do not know how.”
“I cannot teach you,” she said, and knew as she said it that a thread inside her was snapping. “Not while I must stand here and trade my dreams for your vow.”
“Maria…”
“I cannot do this,” she said, and the words surprised her with how calm they sounded, “I cannot live in a house where my husband loves me well enough to hold me, but not well enough to face what love asks of him.”
He went very still. She saw him reach for some argument that would not be selfish, not be false, and not be cruel. She watched him fail to find one.
“Do not go,” he said, and in that moment, he sounded like something lost.
She did not move for three heartbeats that felt like years. Then she curtsied and turned toward the door.
“Elinor,” she said, “my cloak, if you please. And tell the coachman I will require the carriage.”
Elinor had been hovering just out of sight. The woman appeared with the cloak already over her arm. “Your Grace…”
“Now,” Maria said gently. “Please.”
Elinor fastened the cloak with hands that trembled only a little. “Shall I wake a footman?”
“Two,” Maria said, because she would not be a fool with her safety, “And Thomas to drive.”
Stephen had not moved.
“You mean to go out at this hour?”
“To my brother’s house,” she said. “It is my house too. They told me so. I am going to find out whether they meant it.”
“Maria…”
She lifted a hand, not to silence him cruelly, but to spare them both another word they could not bear.
