Her words prompted a flood of description from Lucy. Kate was so distracted that she only caught the occasional bit of coherence. Mr. Penrose was apparently both dignified and nervous. Solemn and soulful. Though he didn’t speak much, she could read volumes in his eyes. And despite his reserved nature, he seemed to be much younger than Aidan York.
Kate’s brain spun around the words Aidan York, and seemed to get caught there. This situation was fast becoming intolerable.
Lucy’s voice broke through her thoughts. “But it’s just as it should be. I’m far too young to catch his eye at any rate.”
“What?” Kate asked. “Who?”
“Mr. York, silly. You’re closer to his age, I should think.”
Funny that Aidan had seemed old enough to be unobtainable when she’d first met him. She’d thought him so mature and manly. Now she felt old enough to be his governess. She smiled at the strangeness of it all. “Men always like young women, Lucy. It doesn’t matter how old the gentleman is. They’re attracted to girls who are bright and lovely and untouched.”
“Untouched?” Lucy raised a saucy eyebrow, but even as Kate laughed, Lucy’s smile faded. “And that’s the reason I shall never marry.”
“Oh, I don’t mean a man won’t love you once you’ve aged. There are plenty of husbands who don’t stray.”
“That’s not what worries me, Kate. It’s the brightness. It seems an awful trade to make. I don’t want to fade away for the sake of a man. And I think that might be the unavoidable cost. My friends, my sister, and . . .”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but Kate knew how faded she’d become. “And me,” Kate finished. Lucy didn’t know the half of it. Sometimes in Ceylon she’d looked down at her own hands and marveled that she couldn’t see right through them.
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“I know. But it’s true. My husband wasn’t cruel though. He rarely required anything of me, and yet, in that place, I was nothing more than his wife. I filled a role that didn’t truly exist. So sometimes it seemed that I didn’t exist.”
Tracing the edge of her cup, Kate realized that whole months had passed like that in those early years. Months when she’d felt nothing. But that seemed another life now. These days she felt so much. Too much.
She looked up to find Lucy watching her with a frown, her teeth worrying her bottom lip.
“What is it?”
“You said ‘wasn’t.’ He ‘wasn’t’ cruel.”
Panic wrapped her chest and seemed to crush her ribs in its grip. She’d grown too relaxed and tripped herself up. “I—I . . .”
“I suspected you’d left him for good.”
“I . . . What?”
“Your husband. You’ve left him, right? That’s why you returned to England.”
Miraculously, Lucy assumed the same thing that Aidan had. Perhaps that only made sense. Who would ever suspect that a woman would pretend her husband was alive when he wasn’t?
Lucy seemed to take her silence as an admission. “I wish my sister would leave her husband. She comes home sometimes, but she always goes back.”
“Perhaps he’s not so bad.”
“No, he’s bad. But they have two children now. If she’d left the first time he hit her . . . But she didn’t. And even if he weren’t so bad, I have to wonder if marriage isn’t all the same. Have you ever known a woman who wasn’t diminished by it?”
Kate thought about it. She sipped her cooling coffee and riffled through her memories. Her own mother had been cowed by her husband. She’d never stood up to him over anything, not even her daughter being shipped to the other side of the world.
Only a very few of Kate’s friends had married before s
he’d left England, and she’d had no friends in Ceylon. Still, she could not say she knew any woman whose marriage had made her more lively or more vibrant. So was every woman diminished? It seemed so.
She opened her mouth to answer, but then she thought of Aidan’s mother. There was a woman who seemed in no way diminished. She was filled with wild emotion, and by all accounts had only grown more vivacious with every passing year. Though her husband had died when Kate was still in England, he’d been alive when Kate had first known the family. They’d been a fairly happy couple.
“Yes,” she finally said with a smile. “Yes, I have known women who were undiminished by marriage. Perhaps we should only be more careful in our choice of husband. Or perhaps we should be stronger ourselves.”
“Or . . .” Lucy drawled, “perhaps we should avoid the problem entirely and treat marriage like the plague.”