The Plain Bride by Chasity Bowlin
CHAPTER SIX
It was the last night of their journey, but the weather had turned. The sunshine had given way to great torrents of rain, and they’d been forced to seek shelter at an inn north of London. The White Hart at Welwyn was small and very crowded. Standing near the door of the taproom, waiting for her husband to procure their lodgings for the night, the rowdy atmosphere made her feel unaccountably anxious. The boisterous voices and the clanging of tankards against scarred wooden tables left her rattled.
It hadn’t escaped her notice that everyone had stared when they entered the room. Every place they had stopped along the journey, the reaction had been the same. He, with his obvious aristocratic lineage and well-tailored clothing, looked very much at odds next to her, in her shabby, drab garments and work-roughened hands. She could feel people staring at them both, from him to her and back again, as they tried to make sense of why the two might be together. Surely a less likely married couple had never been seen.
He doesn’t want to be married to you, regardless.That traitorous thought intruded in her mind, reminding her of all the reasons their current predicament was a disaster. The school-girl crush she had harbored for him—back when she’d only seen him from a distance and thought him wealthy and handsome and slightly wicked—had faded. He was too complex for such simple feelings to ever be sustained in his presence. She wasn’t even certain she liked him, let alone wished to be his wife. But wishes were irrelevant, as the deed was done, and all that was left was to make the best of it, whether they lived under one roof or if the breadth and length of England separated them.
At that moment, a loud bark of laughter was followed by an equally loud curse and a thud as one man knocked another to the floor. Beneath her simple woolen cloak, Althea crossed her arms, hugging them tightly about herself to still her shaking. It was the sort of place her father had often warned her against—the sort of place he’d told her she’d wind up serving far more than just ale if she dared leave his house.
A moment later, Sinclair returned to her. He carried a single key in his hand, and his expression was bleak.
“They’ve only one room left. They’re holding court here tomorrow,” he explained, “which means the crowd is here mostly for petty complaints and offenses. It isn’t safe for you to be alone anyway.”
“I do not care. I just want out of this taproom,” she insisted.
He frowned at that but nodded in agreement, leading her up the stairs. “I realize that I am a failure at being a husband, Thea, but I’m not going to let anything happen to you either. You are safe enough.”
She believed him, but it would be much easier to feel safe when there was a heavy door between her and the raucous clientele of the White Hart. Following closely behind him, she reached for his coat, clutching the fabric in her hand. At the top of the stairs, he turned to the right and led them down to the end of the corridor. The door was so low he had to duck to enter the room. Once inside, she realized it wasn’t just the door. The room had a low, sloped ceiling.
“This is certainly cozy.”
“For very short people and young children, I think it would be,” he agreed. “For myself, I’ll have developed a hunchback by morning.”
She smiled tightly at his jest. “Then, you should most certainly take the bed. I can sleep on the floor and spare your aching back.”
“Most certainly not. I might be dissolute, debauched, dissipated—some might even go so far as to call me an inveterate rogue—but I have never in my life made a woman, certainly not a gently bred woman, sleep on the floor.”
It would not have been the first time. Forcing her to sleep near the kitchen hearth had been one of her father’s favorite punishments for her. Whenever she had failed to clean the kitchen to his specifications or prepared a meal that he found lacking, he would lock her bedroom door and deny her access to its comforts. Somehow, she thought relaying that particular detail to her husband would not be well received.
“We will share the bed,” he said.
Althea wanted to protest. But, in truth, there was no good reason to do so. He was her husband. There was nothing inherently improper about them sharing a bed, despite the rather unusual nature of their married state.
“Will you step outside so that I might prepare for bed?” She asked.
“No. But I will turn around. I’m too bloody tired to care about your modesty or your state of undress,” he admitted, turning his back to her and settling on the edge of the bed to remove his boots.
Althea huffed out a breath in annoyance. “You most certainly are not a gentleman.”
“Indeed, I am not. If I were, circumstances would never have led us here,” he remarked carelessly.
Shrugging out of her cloak, she draped it over the chair to dry. Her hands trembled with both nerves and the chilled air as she reached for the buttons that closed the front of her simple dress. It would not be a comfortable night, as she could hardly remove her stays and petticoats. Sleeping next to him in only her shift required an intimacy that did not yet exist between them—and likely never would.
Draping the thick kersey traveling dress over the same chair with her cloak, she sat down on the bed to remove her boots.
“What the devil are you wearing?”
She gasped in shock as she glanced over her shoulder to see her husband staring at her. “You are not supposed to look.”
“What sort of device have you harnessed yourself into?”
“They’re stays.”
“I’ve seen stays,” he said. “I daresay I have a better acquaintance with ladies’ undergarments than you do…and those are not stays. It looks some sort of medieval torture device!”
He wasn’t wrong. Her father had insisted she wear such garments from the time she was a very young girl. He’d thought her figure too generous and insisted she looked vulgar, no matter how modest her dress. “They are restrictive but necessary.”
The staysin question were the most confounding item of clothing he’d ever seen. He’d yet to see his wife in anything that did not cover her from her chin to her ankles. There was never a hint of bare shoulders or décolletage, which suddenly made much more sense. Her stays covered her entirely, and they were laced so tightly that he could barely fathom how she breathed. In the washstand mirror, which allowed him to see the front of the garment, he could see that her breasts were completely flattened. The fabric was cutting into her skin in such a way that it could only be painful.
“Take it off,” he insisted.
“It would be indecent,” she protested.
“It’s painful to look at! Good lord, woman! I’ve seen breasts before. I’ll hardly fall on you like some ravening beast at the mere sight of them,” he snapped. “Take that blasted thing off, or I will cut it off of you.”
Mayville wasn’t entirely certain what happened. One moment he was making only partially idle threats, and the next he was ducking flying footwear. She’d hurled her boot at him in a fit of a temper. Looking on incredulously, he saw that she held its companion in her hand and was brandishing it threateningly. “Are you mad?”
“Mad? Perhaps, but not insane. I’ve been bullied, belittled, and badgered my entire life! By my father and now by you!” she shouted. “I don’t care if you don’t like my clothes or my face or my hair or anything else about me. But I’ll not be snapped at and threatened into silence and blind obedience.”
His own temper flaring, Mayville rose and advanced toward her, closing the gap. As he rounded the bed, she let the other boot fly, and it struck his shoulder with a loud thud before falling to the floor. Weaponless, she faced him with her hands curled into claws, clearly ready to scratch his eyes out. Rather than give her the chance, he simply scooped her up, tossed her face down onto the bed and, with a simple flick of the knife he always carried in his boot, cut the laces on the offending garment.
All the while, she kicked and squirmed, shrieking at him like a madwoman. Through the course of their struggle, she managed to turn over so that they were facing one another.
It didn’t escape his notice that the position was blatantly carnal, even if their current thoughts were not. She was beneath him while his straddled her, pinning her arms to the bed. And, against all odds and probabilities, he found himself responding to her—wanting her. Bully, he might be, but he was not a monster. Letting go of her, he backed away instantly.
“Now, if you can be reasonable, we’ll talk. No doubt having adequate circulation to all parts of your body should improve your disposition,” he stated.
She did not have the anticipated reaction. He’d thought it would spark her temper, that she would come at him like some wild creature. Instead, she just stared at him in horror. And then she began to sob. Not soft sniffles and pretty tears like other ladies of his acquaintance, who still had a mind to their appearance. These were not the tears of a woman who used them to manipulate. These were the tears of a woman who had held them in far too long. Great, gulping sobs wracked her body. The tears streamed down her face unchecked as she drew her knees up and hid her face against them.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he insisted, guilt gnawing at him for having made her weep so. “But you cannot wear such a thing. Whoever made you—”
He stopped there. He knew who had made her wear it, just as he knew she’d likely faced bitter consequences for any refusals to do so. Her father. And what had he done? He’d been a bully and a brute, just as she’d accused him of. Instead of offering her an alternative, he’d simply manhandled her and acted like an arse.
It didn’t last long. She managed to pull herself together and once more take control of her emotions. Such displays seemed out of character, though given what the last week had held for her, was it any wonder? From having a strange man sneak into her room, a forced wedding, and disownment by her father, only to now be the source of hateful gossip? She had every reason to cry.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” he said softly, settling himself on the bed. “I’m not very good at this.”
“At what?” she asked.
“Being a husband. Being a decent human being,” he admitted. “I do not, as a rule, spend my time with very good people. Or kind people. I forget how they behave towards one another. I shouldn’t have bullied you. Why on earth did he make you wear such a thing?”
She still hiccupped every so often, though the sobs faded. After a moment, she patted her cheeks to dry the tears there and said softly, “He said that my figure was unseemly and that it did not reflect well on a man of God to have a daughter whose appearance could only ever be described as vulgar and fast.”
“I really hate him,” he said. “I always did, just on principle, but now… When next I am in Boston Spa, I mean to plant him a facer that will send him sprawling into the dirt.”
“It won’t matter. You cannot undo what he has done,” she said. “Knocking him down will only make more people whisper and gossip about me. I’ve been invisible all my life. It’s very difficult to have people look at me now, whatever their reasons.”
“You should not have to be invisible, but you shouldn’t have to suffer the stares and whispers, either. All of this—contrary to what I may have said to be intentionally provoking before—is my doing. I have ruined us both, I fear. Now, take that blasted thing off and toss it into the fire. You’ll have proper stays in the morning.”
“Where on earth will you find stays in a crowded inn?”
“A bit of coin can talk many ladies out of far more than their stays,” he replied with a grin. “Now go to sleep. You’re beyond exhausted, and so am I.”
