“Yes, I do!”
“You sent away all our furniture, never thinking where my mother would eat her nightly meal. You bought bolts of cloth from the village thief and paid him a small fortune to deliver them. You anointed a bad-tempered smith as the mayor. You nearly instigated a robbery and assault on my mother because you couldn’t wait five minutes for me to finish my letter.”
“That’s not—”
“You are irresponsible and heedless in your actions toward others,” he said steadily. “You are used to getting your way in all things—”
“So are you!”
“Be that as it may, you have constantly forced my hand.” She looked a bit white, and more than a bit angry, he noticed dispassionately. “I dislike having a wife who has no respect for my opinions.”
“That is a different matter,” she said, cutting across his voice like a knife across butter. “You may disparage me for acting as you see it, without foresight. It may be simply that I think faster than you do. After all, my bolts of cloth managed to salvage relations with the village. My anointing of a mayor assuaged a man who hated your father due to the deaths of his wife and baby.”
Simeon narrowed his eyes.
“There’s no medical help in this village,” she said. “I’m sure I need not detail the reasons for the village’s impoverishment. The smith drove to the next town to beg for help from the surgeon; by the time he returned, his pregnant wife was dead. You may think that my methods are unorthodox, but they are effective.”
“I want to make those decisions,” Simeon said stubbornly.
“And your wife has what role in your life?” Her face was now utterly white, and Simeon knew that he was seeing Isidore at her most furious.
His wife had always been an illusory, shadowy creature, the docile sweetheart whom his mother had created in letters, the lass who sat in the corner of the room weaving lace as delicate as moonbeams. That maiden wouldn’t want to make decisions. She chose to sit in the corner of the room and be as fascinating as dirt.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“I do. You want your wife to be nothing more than a child who listens without question to your every word. In fact, I think it would be better if your wife didn’t even speak your language. I can’t imagine why you didn’t marry some foreign lady you encountered in Abyssinia, perhaps the princess you told me about.”
He felt his face freeze, just for a second, but Isidore was smarter than any woman he’d met, smarter by far than the princess, for all that lady’s ability with languages. She actually laughed. “You did! You thought about marrying a woman who didn’t even speak your language. That’s just perfect. She could sit in the corner translating poems, while you rampaged about making all sorts of asinine decisions. Luckily she would never question you because she wouldn’t even understand what you were doing!”
“What makes you think that I make asinine decisions?” he enquired.
There was a moment’s silence.
“Have I put you in harm’s way?” he said mildly. “Taken the furniture out from underneath you?”
“You’re trying to make me into some sort of silenced African princess, and you’re asking me if I think you make asinine decisions?”
Well, that was clear. Simeon thought he’d heard enough. His jaw tightened, but before he could say a word, she took a deep breath. “This marriage will never work. Never.”
He opened his mouth again, but—
“I thought if I could help you, that you would grow to like having me as a partner,” she said. “What a fool I was! It matters to me to be with a man who respects my opinions, who actually wants to be with me, who—”
Simeon met her eyes. “I do like you, Isidore.”
“You know, I really wish I believed you. Alternatively, I wish that it didn’t matter to me. But it does. Somewhere in these last ten years we spent apart when we should have been married, I kept thinking about whether I’d like you, but I never considered you not liking me, who I am. I suppose it was vanity.”
“I do like you,” he said.
She went on without even hearing him. “It’s probably my fault. Maybe I would have been more docile when I was sixteen. But it’s too late now. I can’t stop being a person just because you want a wife who doesn’t speak English.” She whipped around. “What stopped your marriage to the princess?”
“I was promised to you.”
“Correction,” she said scathingly, “you were married to me. But that’s all right. As the solicitor so obligingly told us, we can have this marriage dissolved.”
“No, we can’t. We’ve consummated it.”
“I am not pregnant,” she said, through clenched teeth. “Not pregnant.”
He almost asked how she knew and the words died in his throat. “Oh.”
“No one need ever know that I foolishly—impulsively as you would no doubt characterize it—took off my clothes before you, inspiring an ill-advised intimacy. My next husband will be understanding, I’m sure.”
“Your next—”
Her eyes met his. “You don’t want to be married to me, Simeon.”
“I—”
He was destined never to finish a sentence around her. Her eyes were as fierce as those of a trapped animal. “I don’t want to have to earn love by giving up my ability to make decisions that determine how I live.”
What could he say to that?
Her lip curled. “There’s a woman out there for you. I would say that youth should be a prerequisite for you. Perhaps your mother can find you someone, rather than making up stories about me. I’ll leave tomorrow morning.”
“What?”
“In London, I’ll inform the solicitor that we’re going ahead with the annulment, on whatever grounds he feels will be the most timely.”
“Is there a need to be so hasty?” Simeon said, feeling peculiarly sick.
“Yes. I’m twenty-three,” Isidore said. “Most brides are sixteen, Simeon. Sixteen. I’m twenty-three. You’ll forgive me if I make haste.”
He grabbed her arm. “You must be insane.”
“Undoubtedly,” she snapped. “Why I didn’t annul this marriage years ago is beyond my understanding.”
“You are mine.”
“Don’t try to act as if I’m a desert princess you can scream at.” Isidore jerked her arm out of his hand.
“You and I—”
“There is no you and I.”
“You didn’t think so last night.”
“Neither one of us knew anything about bedding until recently,” she said, rolling her eyes. “It’s nice that we learned to be together and share reasonable pleasure, but let’s not pretend that it was unique, shall we? Likely the next time will be even better.”
Next time? Next time? There was a howl in Simeon’s soul that would terrify Isidore if she knew. He felt his teeth baring, like some sort of wild animal. She had no bloody idea what they shared. None.
“I don’t understand why you’re so quick to leave,” he said. “I think you don’t like the way you feel about me.”