Zemnian Nights

Chapter Twenty-Four

As the days passed into weeks, Wilhelm had to admit his wife was a rare thing. She had, without complaint, stood for hours while the seamstresses pinned and poked and attempted to ply her with the latest fashions and the richest fabrics only to wind up selling her just one elegant dress in case she might need to attend a court function, three new simple day dresses, a working apron, and a heavier cloak edged in rabbit fur, as well as mittens for when winter struck. The fabric chosen for her room was simple and sturdy fabric of dove gray accented with deeper heather and soft white. To his delight, she also bought a bolt of sunshine yellow with tiny white daisies she confessed was to outfit the nursery when the time came.

He had no doubt she would take up the reins of the household ably, and she did so, employing a mixture of generosity and steel-edged demand for one's best. She was gracious but unyielding and the castle had never run better. The rooms were immaculate. Every dust bunny hunted to extinction and every ghostly ancient cobweb banished. The windows, which were all but opaque with the buildup from years of being ignored, were cleaned to the point that he began to consider buying draperies to protect the furnishings from all the sunlight they were now being bathed in. She was at once both the sort of woman he expected she would be and a never-ending source of surprise.

That which amazed him most as time passed was her unparalleled dichotomy. When they were anywhere that could be considered public, she was warm, but only just. She gave no winks, no innuendos, no hint of the woman she was when he would retire at night, hanging on tenterhooks waiting for the sound of the door to his study opening, the sign of her making her way to him to share his bed with passion and exuberance. She was a keen student of reciprocity. The firebird of passion that tumbled into his arms at night awoke each day a gentle dove. Her cool facade outside of that room was, to him, torturous.

He began to see things as seduction that he knew were not done with the intention to cull a response of that sort. The brushing back of a loose strand from her cheek as she read in the library set his stomach to clench. His body heated at the stretch of her body reaching up to scratch a horse behind his ear. He fantasized about being the spoon her soup rode to her soft lips upon. One afternoon, as he was meeting with a trio of local vintners about their crops, he found his attention kept shifting to her as she sat in the corner of the sitting room with her embroidery hoop. The needle thrust into the fabric, the slither-tickle of thread drawn slowly tighter, slender fingers capturing the tiny steel shaft as it was driven upward, in... out... in... over and over, tension building with each tight stitch until he was forced to excuse himself to seek respite in a private spot, driven to take himself in hand until he was able to keep his mind on grapes.

They played what she called 'the copper game' often, though it was really only an excuse to gain insight. He was not always comfortable talking about the things she asked, for she did not shy from places that were dark or deep, but he found that speaking of his youth, of his father, of his time in Rexxentrum, made it somehow easier to think about in retrospect. Like a child who feared a monster beneath the bed was freed of his fear when he took the risk to look and see there was nothing there. He began to see his father as a flawed man, fearful in his way, stubborn and foolish.

"He did not have the wisdom to know your brilliance, Wilhelm." She reassured him, his head in her lap, her fingers petting through the strands at his temple. "It is the strong man that acknowledges that there are many paths to the same goal. That someone is on another path does not make your road less correct. That is your vengeance, Wilhelm. He died ignorant. You live enlightened."

He had often replayed those words in his mind. They were the counterspell to the dangerous voice from the past that told him he was without value. He trusted her opinion, and she thought he was more than acceptable. When he needed her, she was there. Never did she not come to him when he desired her, save for those few disappointing days each month when her body denied them both the joy of knowing their union had been fruitful. The disappointment of that arrival was always met with a renewed desire to keep trying when it had passed her by.