Page 94 of Dark Tides
“They were chosen by my first husband, a famed and most tasteful patron of the arts, out of all the things that he could have bought with his vast fortune. Each object you have here, he saw, and considered, and judged it to be worthy of his collection.”
“Could he have been misled?”
“No.”
“Could someone have substituted a false one for his good one, a copy of an original, perhaps after his death? Or when the goods were stored? Or when they were shipped here to you?”
“No,” she stated flatly, though they both knew she could not possibly know.
“It’s not likely that my brother-in-law is wrong,” he said very quietly. “He is an authority. If he says that some of the Caesar heads are copies, even very good copies, then we must listen to him. My dear, he is certainly right.”
“No, he is not,” she said flatly. “It is not possible that my antiquities are not good. And anyway, we do not have to listen to him. I certainly am not going to listen to him. He speaks to you, not to me. It is you who are going to have to choose who you believe. The brother of your dead wife, who resents your new happiness? Or your promised wife? Your betrothed wife?”
She saw the dilemma he was in and tightened it a notch. “You have offered me your good name and your fortune and I bring you all of mine. These are your antiquities now, are you going to undermine your own honor? Are they to be false, and you to be false, when you have spent your life struggling to be true?”
“A matter of honor?” He could hardly follow her. “How is it a matter of my honor?”
“They are your antiquities!” she exclaimed impatiently. “You are my husband! What is mine is yours. Would you handle anything but a true thing? Have you become some sort of mountebank?”
“Of course not!” he exclaimed. “Of course I am not!”
“Well! There you are!” she said simply, as if the discussion was completely ended and he had agreed with her.
They finished their wine in silence, and he glanced at her face to see if she was as his first wife had been: silently, chillingly sulky; but she returned him a radiant smile, as if there were nothing wrong, and then she asked him to show her around the house. As the mistress-to-be she wanted to see it from attic bedrooms to cellars, and his spirits rose as he showed her the wine stocks in the cellar, each carefully rackedand numbered. “Collected by my father and my grandfather and his father,” he told her.
She had seen far greater cellars in the vineyards around her home where they had been making wine for centuries and keeping only the best; but she nodded as if she were hugely impressed. “And nobody tells you they are not good!” she said, as if it were a shared joke.
He showed her the imposing rooms on the ground floor that led off the grand marble hall: the dining room, the parlor, and the receiving room with the double doors that could be thrown open to the hall.
“But this is a perfect house for grand parties!” she exclaimed.
“My mother and father entertained the king here,” he said. “The king and the whole court.”
“Oh, we will do that,” she said instantly.
“That was the old king,” he corrected. “King Charles, not his son. I don’t think the court is a suitable place for a lady now.”
She looked up into his face and reached up and patted his cheek. “We will be grand,” she said. “And we will entertain the king. There will be no impropriety in your house, but we will take our place where we belong.”
He felt a leap of hope that she might make his house the place that it should be, that somehow the king and the country would be as they should be, that the old days would be truly restored to him, that he would not have to feel so many doubts about this shallow polished replica of his old life. He took her hand to lead her up the stairs to see the bedrooms. They were all shrouded in linen sheets to keep out the moths and the dust. Only in his own room, facing over the garden and the river, was the bed made up, and the shutters open to the sunshine.
“You sleep here?” she asked, leaning against the bed.
“I do.”
“And not in the big bedroom with the four-poster bed?”
“That was the room I shared with my wife. It is too big for one man, and I don’t come to London very often.”
“But we shall use that one, the biggest bedroom?”
“Yes,” he said. “When we visit London. And we must decide when our wedding should be. We shall marry at my home, Northside Manor in Yorkshire. I shall go to my home and send for you and we shall have the banns called in my parish church.”
“I thought we would marry at once!” she said. “Didn’t we agree at once?”
“We did, but I cannot,” he started.
Her gaze was as sharp as a knife. “You promised me.”
