Lady in Rags

Chapter Fifteen: An Air of Abandonment and Waiting

A spell of bad weather kept everybody indoors for a week. Despite that, Verity managed to avoid Armiger so well that she wasn't entirely sure if he wasn't also trying to avoid her. They hardly ever seemed to be in the same room of the house at the same time. And if they were, it was never alone, except for the one time she had come into the library and found him asleep on the couch, a book fallen to the floor beside him.

She watched him in silence. His chest rose and fell with his sleeping breath, the buttons of his shirt pulling against the fabric, and then falling slack again. One of his hands was lying over his belly, the same hand she had stabbed with the needle. The bandage was gone now, and the wound was so small as to be invisible.

She hadn't really meant to do it. It had been a reflex, more than a reaction, and as soon as she had done it, she had been filled with an all-consuming, painful remorse. Even now, she felt guilty for it. But her guilt couldn't compare to her sense of betrayal.

He had sworn to her, in the early days of their courtship, that he believed implicitly in her honour. Now that one word – lovers – spoken in the heat of the moment seemed to prove to her that deep down, he didn't. Deep down, beneath what he believed he thought, there was something he felt: doubt. And she realized, now, that she could never prove it to him, that Harlan had not taken her chastity, or, worse, that she had not given it to him. And she burned with the indignity of needing proof at all. She had thought he had some faint measure of faith in her. He did not.

His hand moved, his eyelids fluttered, he woke, and looked sleepily up at her.

"Verity." His hand pulled coaxingly at her skirt, inviting her down to the couch with him.

"I only came to get my book," she said, and swept away, without it.

The atmosphere of the house was oppressive. Outside, rain fell in sheets upon the mud-browned lawns. Indoors, Mrs Prothero's baby kept everyone up at night with its colic, and Mrs Prothero's mother and sister bickered ceaselessly in French.

One merely damp morning at the breakfast table, an argument between the two reached new heights of temper and volume. Verity stared at her plate and tried to pretend she wasn't there. Armiger buried himself in an apparently fascinating letter.

"Vous n'êtes pas ma mère!" The daughter shrieked across the breakfast service. "Vous ne l'êtes pas! Vous ne l'êtes pas!"

Chair legs screeched backwards against the terracotta floor. Something crashed against a far wall.

"Ça suffit!" Prothero shouted.

He was standing up. It was he who had thrown the coffee cup against the wall, where it had shattered, and sent an ugly brown splatter over the pale yellow wall paper. Slowly, droplets of coffee began to ooze down the wall.

Verity froze in her chair. She had never known the amiable Englishman to shout, let alone to be so angry. Everybody was silent, even the old Madame Gagnon and her daughter.

Prothero wiped his hand over his face. He shrugged, and said something in rapid French. Mrs Prothero protested, Armiger interjected. There was a discussion that Verity could take no part in. Eventually, something was decided. Mrs Prothero and her sister swept from the room. A maid wiped the coffee stains off the wall, and picked up the pieces of broken cup.

Verity looked anxiously around her, wondering what was going on.

"We're going on a picnic," Armiger said, seeing the question in her eyes.

She looked doubtfully out the window, at the iron grey skies.

"It'll clear up," Prothero said forcefully. "Sun'll come out. March weather always changes quickly."