Chapter Ten
Honeymoon
The next day, Rosalind felt much stronger, fortified by the Maria Reginas’ strong mugs of tea and hearty soups. The ladies told her Lord Marlow had gone into town, and brought her outside into the sun to await his return.
It was a lovely day to stroll outside and explore the cottage’s tidy garden of vegetables, flowers, and herbs. The storm had taken the heaviness from the heat and left behind soft breezes and broad blue skies. Still, she couldn’t feel fully at ease with Marlow gone. What if something happened to him, wherever he’d gone? What if he got lost? What if he never returned? She had only the vaguest idea where she was in relation to London. Even traveling to Florence seemed a long, complex task. An impossible task, without him…
But he did return in early afternoon, calling and waving to her as the fisherman’s wagon rounded the lane to their cottage. He wore a new set of clothes, buff trousers and a plain shirt like that of the other men, as well as new boots and a dark hat. He came toward her smiling and took off his hat with a flourish. It took a moment to realize his hair was gone, nearly all of it. She gasped, blinking at him.
“What do you think of my transformation?” he asked.
Her companions clucked approvingly, pretending to admire his new clothes, which on closer inspection were a bit worn and secondhand. Rosalind searched for words, but she was so surprised at the change in his appearance none would come.
“We needed money for the journey,” he said. “So I sold the lace and trim from my shirt, as well as one of my rings, but it was not quite enough and I didn’t wish to part with the other ring, so I sold my hair. They were wild for it at the wigmaker’s. I suppose my sort of blond is hard to come by in these Sicilian regions.”
“You sold your hair? I didn’t know such things were possible.”
“They are. I think I’ve made enough for us to pay our rescuers for their kindness and still reach Florence, if we do not travel luxuriously.”
She stared at him. How different he looked without his blond, curly mane. There was more of his face, his ears, his masculine features. He looked more mature with the sides cropped close, although the merciful wigmaker had left a little length on top.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said as she continued to gawk at him.
“No. You look perfectly fine. It’s only…you look nothing like the old Marlow.” She moved closer, searching his gaze. Was he embarrassed that his hair was shorn off? Upset? “It’s like seeing a stranger. But you still look wonderful.”
He did look handsome as ever, a bit more traditional perhaps but in a dashing way. It felt rude to stare at him, but he was her husband now and a wife could do such things. A wife could touch him… She reached and turned his head, and ran her fingers over the short, tapered hairs along the back of his neck. “It was a great sacrifice,” she said softly. “Thank you.”
“It wasn’t so great. It’s just hair. We’ve got to get to Florence somehow. I’ve bought you a change of clothing too, a new gown and some sturdy boots for traveling. They’re secondhand but there isn’t time to have anything made.”
Nor money, for bespoke items were expensive, and they were terrifyingly poor at present. She blinked back tears as he handed her the dress, for it was finely made all the same, in pale green with lace. He must have looked so very hard to find her something she would like.
“It’s perfect. I adore it.” She held it against her front, figuring it to be precisely fitted for her measurements. “How on earth did you know my size?”
He gazed at her a moment, then away, coloring slightly. Of course, they had spent those torrid hours in one another’s arms. If pressed, she could probably guess at his size too, from the way she’d committed the breadth of him to memory.
“The color too,” she said, speaking past the sudden catch in her voice. “It will be nice to wear something other than black.”
“You’re looking better now than yesterday.” He glanced past her to smile at the ladies. “The sun here makes one feel strong.”
Marlow looked strong in a new and strangely affecting way, wearing a countryman’s clothes rather than his London finery. “I’m feeling very well,” she said.
“Well enough to travel tomorrow? I should like to go home.”
There was so much emotion tied up in those words. To go home. To leave behind the sea and its calamities and go somewhere safer, although it was hard to say now how they’d be received by society and their families. At least they could go home together, no matter how things turned out.
“Yes, I will be ready,” she said, clutching her new, old green gown with its empire waist and pretty lace decoration. No more black, no more mourning. They were alive and had each other, and they must return home.
*
They traveled from Santa Maria di Leuca to Maglie for free in a fisherman’s wagon, then by public carriage to Lecce, where Rosalind wrote a letter to Felicity explaining their situation—all of it, from her decision to run away, to the ship’s sinking, to her marriage beside the fire in the fisherman’s cottage. She concluded the letter by begging her sister to expect her sometime within the next few weeks. She wrote another letter to her parents relating the same events, and she and Marlow both signed their names to it since they hadn’t enough money to send a separate letter to his parents.
Unfortunately, there was no way to post the letters in Lecce, so they rode on to Bari where, finally, they were able to put them in the mail. Their days took on an air of unreality as the first week bled into the second, endless traveling along dusty, hot country roads. Marlow got them lodgings each night at small Italian inns, registering them under his family name, as Mr. and Mrs. Bernard, since it seemed ludicrous to present as Lord and Lady Marlow in their current bedraggled state.
Through it all, they tried to keep their spirits up, though their situation often felt lowering. The inns were not always clean; the ways were not always scenic. The weather was not always sunny and when it stormed, Rosalind woke up trembling in the night.
Marlow called their meandering northward tour their honeymoon, and kissed her each night as they lay together, but did nothing more, nothing like the close, intimate things they’d done the night before the ship sank. Then her courses came on her and Marlow seemed relieved.
She understood then what they had done together on the ship, and felt foolish she hadn’t made the connection before, because she knew horses better than most proper ladies did, had witnessed their mating and birthing because she’d spent so much time in the stalls. “Lying down together” in marriage meant mating. She and Marlow had mated, not like horses or dogs exactly, but she realized now that was why married people “lay down together.”