That night in their chamber, their silence is weighted, heavy and crushing as the stones of a cathedral roof.
She can still feel his kiss, her skin raw where his beard rubbed it.
She sits upon the mattress, still dressed, while he stands before the hearth. She looks at the curl of his shoulders, his fisted hands at his sides. Her throat is tight. In her ears, calls of Sauvage! ring like war cries.
He is a performing bear, she thinks. And she has become part of the act. How has he endured such jeering, all the stares and the sneers?
“Why,” he says suddenly; and though the word does not rise as a question ought, still Catherine knows he means it as one.
“I . . .” She shakes her head. How to tell him that the duke was pleasing, that his attentiveness was pleasing? That he spoke to her, and not merely when her questions required it.
He turns his head so that she can see his ear, his cheek, the arrow of his nose. “You are my wife,” he says, and there is possession in his voice; and something else, something like the rawness of a half-healed wound. “I am your husband. Do you not think I feel when you carry on so with another man. With—with my friend?”
Now—he talks to her now, Catherine notes, as if from a distance. But all he seems to say is mine, mine, mine. Each mine crashes in her ears. Her back and shoulders tighten; her jaw is steel.
“And I am your wife,” she says, her voice a sudden avalanche, rocks hurtling toward the earth. “You are my husband. But you will not—you will not let me know you. I do not know anyone here at court, I am alone, alone, and yet you do not care—”
He is motionless, his head still half-turned so that she cannot fully see his expression. The anger that fills her is almost frightening in its potency; for a moment, she thinks she might start screaming and not be able to stop, all the screams she’s been stoppering since the day her father’s fortune tumbled to the bottom of the sea. Why will he not look at her—
She swallows down the screaming urge, though it struggles all the distance down her throat. When at last it’s sitting clod-like in her stomach and her voice has rolled itself up tight and controlled, she tries again to speak.
“The duke was kind to me,” she says. “That is all.” And then, when he remains stiff and still: “You have not said a word about Nevers and—and me,” she says, for she knows, she knows how plain it must have been, how she sought Nevers out, started conversations, found things to say to make him linger. “Why?”
He turns, looks at her; and then his eyes are drawn to her left ear. No—to the amethyst hanging from her left ear. He stares at it, the wink of it in the firelight.
“We are—the same, you and I,” he says, and ignores the sudden press of her brows above her nose, the twist of her mouth. “You were sold as surely as I was. I thought—I did not feel I’d the right to gainsay you, if you found something that . . .”
You were sold as surely as I was. The anger that rose inside her with such frightening ferocity seeps away, leaving her tired. She touches her amethysts. Her dowry. Her worth. Thinks of her father’s debts, repaid. “Who sold you?” she whispers.
He shakes his head. “I—do not know his name.”
So many questions. They clog her throat. But before she can choose one, he has turned away; she recognizes the closed look on his face, like a locked trunk, a closed tomb, and sighs.
He does not touch her that night. They lie beside each other for long minutes in the darkness before he says, “I wish—you would not. With Nevers. That is—”
He can speak. He can feel. He is a man.
“I won’t,” she says.