Lady in Rags

Chapter Eleven: When She Falls

Neil knocked on the door of Verity's cabin shortly before seven o'clock. After a moment, she answered sleepily, "Yes?"

"It's me. Can I come in?"

"Oh – yes, come."

He entered, and she was sitting up in her bed, tugging the neckline of her nightdress higher over her bust. Her hair was loose over her shoulders, and her face looked thinner and paler within its masses. He sat down at the edge of her mattress, as the only chair was occupied by a tray of cold tea and stale toast. The mattress sunk under his weight, and his thigh came to rest against hers. She shifted away slightly, but not uneasily; it was the normal British desire to maintain a polite distance. Not normal, between husband and wife, perhaps, but then nor were their circumstances. Still, it bit him.

He had hoped that the isolation and strangeness of the ship would allow some measure of intimacy to develop between him and his wife. It had been impossible during their courtship. There had always been somebody just around the corner, or behind the door – a servant polishing brass, or a maid shuttling a tray. On one occasion, when he had kissed Verity on the lips on parting in the hall, he had distinctly heard a whispered "Oh! He never!" from the top of the stairs. He suspected Lady Duvalle had put them up to it, for Lady Duvalle herself was always cheerfully content to let the young lovers, as she called them, alone – too cheerfully content for Armiger's cynical appraisal of her character to believe. But whatever the cause, his constant audience had made him self-conscious, and he had been too polite, and talked too much of the weather, and kept his hands almost entirely to himself.

But it was equally impossible, of course, to attempt intimacy with a woman who had her head buried in a bucket. And her illness had made her embarrassed, and she had refused to let him nurse her, and spent most of her time locked away alone in her cabin.

Casually, deliberately, he laid a hand on her leg, just above her knee, reclaiming the space she had taken. He wanted to see what she would do, but the idea had only come to him to test her reaction by his awareness of his own impulse to take the action in the first place.

She looked down at his hand, and then up at him, her eyebrows raised slightly, questioningly. The non-reaction was almost more disappointing to him than rejection. He squeezed slightly, to indulge his impulse, and then let his hand rest there.

"How do you feel?"

"I'm not so bad as I was." She was certainly no longer green, but she was still very white.

"Well enough to come to the dining hall with me tonight?"

"I...you could eat here with me, couldn't you?"

"I could. But I learned an old friend of mine is on the boat. She asked me to bring you to dinner with her. But you don't look well still."

Verity frowned. "I thought you didn't have friends."

"A few, but I've been out of the country for eight years. My relationships have waned. In fact, I haven't seen her for thirteen years."

The memory came to him, suddenly, of the very last time he had seen Jane. She,  running in her bare feet down the steps of his father's manor, nightdress pulled up above her knees, continuing at a breakneck speed down the drive, until she was suddenly, irretrievably, gone. Her father and his, shouting after her from the front door, calling her name over and over, until she disappeared. He and his brother, leaning out the library window, their tutor pretending to haul them back, as a pretext to watch the scene himself. What a summer that had been.

"We were both children, then," he added wistfully.

Verity's frown disappeared. She slid her legs up to her chest, out of the blanket and his grasp. He appreciated the sudden view of her white ankles and calves as she scooted around to plant her feet flat on the floor. Slowly she stood up, balancing herself with one hand on the wall. He rose with her, seeing how unsteady her legs were, but she refused his arm, and cautiously paced around the narrow cabin.