She searched his face and a hesitant smile curved her lips. “A little, I suppose.”
His muscles, coiled for battle since she had walked in, relaxed a fraction. “Good,” he said. “As for France. Why can’t you just take a holiday, why such secrecy?”
Her face shuttered again. “But it isn’t a holiday,” she said, “first because I don’t know for how long I need to be gone—”
“Oh, but I need you to know this.” For the first thing that sprung to mind was that if she stayed away for more than two years or so, she could properly divorce him on grounds of abandonment …
“But I don’t know how much time I shall need,” she said, stubborn now. “More importantly, I must feel certain you cannot just order me back.”
“I wouldn’t,” he said. “Why would I?”
She gave him a speaking glance. “You bodily dragged me from my path to France once before.”
The crowded platforms at Victoria Station flashed before his eyes. He had grabbed her, and she had called him a miserable brute. But that was different, he wanted to say … though it would not look to her that way, would it? And would he really stand by and let the time lapse until she could properly divorce him, should she fancy it? As her husband, he had the right to demand she live where he lived before it came to that; he could enforce it, too …
“Then what do you propose?” he said, and the glinting edge to his voice made her hesitate.
“A separation,” she finally said. “A mensa et thoro.”
There it was.
“You are asking for a divorce, love.”
She shook her head. “It merely entitles me to be absent from your bed and the marital home.”
Merely. “You would call that semantics,” he said, and she shrank a little from the bitterness in his voice. A mensa et thoro, “from bed and board,” was granted by the church for all he knew. She would be free to stay away if she wished, and there’d be nothing he could do. She could take lovers … yes, his selkie was flying toward her freedom. And in every legend, all good people would rejoice for her. It felt as though his lungs were on fire. Breathing hurt.
“What about Oxford?” he asked.
“I sent a note today that I’m taking a sabbatical,” she replied. “I have missed a few weeks of term already.”
She had planned it through and through.
“And what of the scandal,” he managed, “of being legally estranged?”
She raised her chin and seemed inches taller. “I shall weather it,” she said firmly. “After having a pistol pointed at my head, and seeing it pointed at you, I shall weather slander.”
He took her in, how she was standing up to him, with the proud tilt to her head, with red hair moving around her face like liquid flame, and he could not contain his emotions.
“You must know that I love you,” he said. “Deeply.”
The slight quiver of her soft lips betrayed her feelings, but there was steel at the bottom of her eyes. “What I know is that I wish to be courted by the man I love,” she said. “I wish to be wooed. I wish for him to go down on one knee and have him ask whether I would grant him my hand in marriage. I wish to live without a single doubt that I did not fall in love with my captor because I had no other choice, but that I am freely, truly loving my husband. Marriage costs me my rights. If I were to give them up, I need a choice.”
A choice. Clearly, she had not forgiven him their crooked beginnings. Is da thrian tionnsgnadh—well begun is two-thirds done. He gave a hollow laugh. “I’ve spent half my life making the impossible possible,” he said. “What I cannot do is turn back time.”
“I know that,” she said. “But you never even once said you were sorry.”
His smile spread over his face, black and viscous like tar. “Because I cannot find it in me to regret it,” he said. “I was a captor to you, but you have given me my only hours of true happiness.” His hands clenched by his sides then, as if to hold on to the stolen bliss, but his fingers curled over emptiness. “To me,” he said, “you were the light in the dark place to which I’d bound myself.”
Her determined expression faded into compassion. “You were not my only jailer,” she said. “I’m standing up against everyone who forced my hand: my father; my mother, my sister, a whole society that colludes and agrees that it is morally better for a woman to be chained to a stranger than to be forgiven for leaning in for a kiss. I’m taking a stand against this mortal fear they ingrained in my bones, a fear that something terrible would happen if I refused you.” An exhausted smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “And now I have taken a lot of time out of my day to explain my situation to you.”