Page 64 of To Marry and to Meddle
“What do you expect me to do, then? You’re the one who is so insistent that we make ourselves the model of propriety so that society will accept us. These are the people we need to win over. All the more reasonable ones, like Violet and Diana and their husbands, already care too little fortongossip to worry about us; it’s the ones like Lady Cunninge that will prove trickier, and I don’t see how you expect me to convince them that you’re not a scandalous reprobate if I don’t meet them socially.”
Julian rubbed his forehead.
“We’ll do without them, then,” he said tersely. “I don’t want you having to make polite conversation over tea buns with women like that one. You deserve better than that.”
She deserved, he felt in a moment of utter self-loathing, better than a husband who would put her in that situation in the first place.
“I don’t needyouto be the person deciding what I can bear and what I can’t,” she said pointedly. “One of the things I’ve always liked about you is that you don’t treat me like a child—that you let me make my own choices, that you trust me to know my own mind. I’m perfectly capable of defending myself, as I believe you just saw—I’m only feeling a bit put out that I haven’t been doing so for years, whenever some lady in the retiring room at some ball or another made a sly comment about Mr. Cartham’s escort, about my lack of dowry, about my brother’s scandal.”
“You cared about your family,” he said quietly, reaching out a hand to touch her knee through her skirts. “For better and for worse.”
“I stilldocare about them,” she said, clearly frustrated. “That’s the trouble. It’s not just about you wanting me to try to curry favor with these women—it’s that many of them are friends with Mama, and I don’t wish to insult them or embarrass her.”
“What has she ever done, Emily, to be worthy of such concern?” he asked, beginning to feel frustration to match her own.
“She is mymother,” she stressed. “She doesn’t have to do anything else. I love her, even if I don’t like her very often. I can’t just cut my family out neatly, like a bit of mold on cheese, even if you’ve done so.”
“We weren’t discussing my family,” he said, drawing back from her, stiffening his shoulders.
“You never wish to,” she said, still looking at him, her blue eyes wide and guileless, “and yet who are you fooling, Julian? Your father is the real reason I’ve been having miserable cups of tea and exchanging veiled insults for the past month. He’s the only reason you’re so fixated on gaining society’s approval again—you wanthisapproval.”
“And if I did, would that be so bad?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said simply. “If you’re trying to turn yourself into someone you aren’t, merely to please him. I’ve spent much of my life doing that—half the reason I married you was because it was so entirely unlike what the Emily I’d become would do. It was something for me alone, something I had control over. And yet here I am, watching you do the same thing I’ve done for so long, and it makes me miserable to witness it.”
By this point, Julian was barely even listening, his mind was so hung up on one word:miserable.
He was making her miserable.
Brilliant job, Belfry,he congratulated himself.You’ve married the loveliest, most sweet-tempered lady you could possibly hope to find, and she’s sitting beside you close to tears.
Abruptly, he stood.
“What are you doing?” she asked, blinking up at him, confusion writ plain on every inch of her face.
“I’m going—out,” he said, sounding like a complete and utter idiot, of course.
“But,” she said, then fell silent. “But we were talking,” she said, and if it was possible for Julian to feel like more of an ass than he already did, then he did so in that moment.
“I can’t talk to you right now,” he said, his tone blunt, realizing that he was dangerously close to allowing something approaching real emotion into his own voice, too. None of this was going according to plan—they’d had an arrangement, they’d had terms that they both clearly understood, and yet at some point things had become muddled. Here he was, acting like a damned fool, all because—what? Because his wife had looked a bit crestfallen?
Because she’d seen through him and realized what he truly wanted?
Nothing about this marriage was feeling terribly convenient—not the wide-eyed, tearful wife whose emotions he was suddenly dangerously concerned about; not the rush of feelings inside his own chest that felt as though they were pressing against his ribs, filling him to bursting. And not the fact that, five minutes earlier, he would have gladly thrown away everything he’d thought he’d wanted, if it meant Emily would never have to sit in a drawing room and be cunningly insulted ever again.
None of this was right, and he didn’t know how to make it so.
“Don’t wait up for me,” he said, and then he fled.
Nineteen
It would be considerably moretolerable to be making a mess of his marriage if he also didn’t feel like he was making a mess of his theater, Julian thought.
A few days later, he was seated in the auditorium at the Belfry, his eyes fixed on the stage, watching the rehearsal underway. It was the climactic scene, one in which Beatrice and Benedick each attempted to adopt some measure of the other’s faith, as a grand romantic gesture. It should have been emotional, exciting. But it was leaving Julian entirely cold.
“There you are.”
He turned his head as Laverre dropped into the seat next to him, his own eyes fixed on the stage as the dramatics continued apace. “I haven’t seen you watch a rehearsal in a while,” Laverre said after a minute or so had passed, his tone neutral.
