“She loves you, not that you deserve it,” Gill said.
“Who cares if I deserve it? I don’t want it,” Fletch said. “Our marriage is a sham and a fraud. That being the case, I’d rather that we both understood precisely where we are, rather than my wife pretending that we’re a normal couple. That we have”—he spat it—“any sort of life in the bed.”
“Almost no one does have an intimate life with his wife,” St. Albans said, apparently recovering his tongue after the shock. “Doesn’t mean he has to shoot her down in cold blood like that.”
“She sees the world in rose and gold,” Fletch said flatly. “I believe she actually thinks we’re happy.”
“She doesn’t now,” Gill said.
Fletch hunched his shoulders. “Good.”
Chapter 7
THE MORNING POST (CONTINUED)
There can be nothing more dangerous to moral fiber than a circle of women bent on achieving their desires, living a life of pleasure, and paying heed to no admonishments. This paper fears for the souls of every duchess in London!
Poppy never used to cry before she became a duchess.
Unfortunately, having a spouse had turned Poppy into a waterspout. She cried herself to sleep. She cried in the oddest moments, for example, in between meetings of the Charitable Society for the Reception of Repenting Prostitutes and the meetings of the board of Lady Charlotte’s Lying-InHospital. Now she ran down a long corridor of Beaumont House, wiping away the tears as they rolled off her chin.
How could he? How could he have said that, and in front of his friends? She knew they didn’t talk very much. She knew—she knew there was something terribly wrong.
But try as she might, she couldn’t make it work. She woke every morning determined to make Fletch love her again, the way he used to before they married. She never betrayed the faintest irritation at the way he stalked around the house. Never, ever, did she irritate him by pointing out that they would have no children, given that he visited her bed once a month, if that. She never commented when he grew a silly little pointed beard, though he knew well that she loved his dimple. In truth, the goatee was vastly becoming.
But it was like everything else in the past few years. Fletch had turned himself into a distinguished, incredibly beautiful stranger. He wore clothes of a kind that dazzled and frightened her. He wore that little beard. He hired a French valet and a French chef, and rattled away to both of them in the language.
While growing up, her mother had made her study pianoforte for hours a day, saying the skill was essential to marriage. But if she offered to play for Fletch after supper, he would get a look of grueling boredom on his face, cross his arms over his chest, and sit until she finished a piece. Then he would stand, bow politely enough, and say his goodnight. Without kissing her.
She slowed to a walk. When had Fletch stopped kissing her? The very thought made her hiccup with tears, but after a bit she found a handkerchief and tried to think about it. She couldn’t remember. The last kiss…she didn’t realize it was the last kiss.
The last kiss he would ever give her, perhaps!
It wasn’t until she discovered that someone was standing before her, touching her cheek and saying something that Poppy realized that she was leaning against the wall and howling. Literally howling with sobs.
“I—I—I,” she said, and peered through her swollen eyes. “Oh dear!” she wailed, collapsing into Jemma’s arms. “I’m so—so—”