For a while last night, with the telling and what had followed, they had seemed to grow closer. He had held her after they made love, and when she had felt his inability to relax and sleep, he had allowed her to rub his back and work upon his knotted muscles with untrained, instinctive hands and fingers to the extent that she had soothed herself as well as him. She had put him to sleep and had lain gazing at him for a while afterward before her own eyelids drooped and she slept too. It had felt as though they had crossed a barrier and drawn closer to being . . . married.
But she was no doctor for the soul, she realized today. Something had definitely changed and then changed again, but the changes were not necessarily for the better. Perhaps he resented her for forcing him to talk and remember. Perhaps he regretted allowing himself to relax and lower his guard under her ministrations. He had even laughed with her. But early this morning he had looked at her with her hair down and had seen someone different from the quiet, unemotional, undemanding wife he had bargained upon getting.
But it was not she who had let down her hair. It was not she who had been tense and unable to sleep.
The day drew to its inevitable end after all the outside guests had taken their leave. The worst of the ordeal was over. The houseguests drifted off to bed until Chloe felt herself able to withdraw too. She went up with Lady Ponsonby and Lady Trentham again, both of whom she liked. Ralph stayed downstairs with his fellow Survivors. It felt just like last night, except that the funeral was over and a certain emptiness had settled over the company during the evening.
She was not going to wait up tonight, she decided. She was so weary she hardly knew what to do with herself. And she did not want to see what look Ralph would have in his eyes when he came to her room—if he came and if there was any expression there at all. But she found herself lingering at her dressing table and gazing into the mirror, trying to decide whether to don her cap or not, whether to coil her braid about her head or leave it hanging down her back, whether to braid her hair at all. It was such a foolish indecision. Was she trying to decide which choice would better please her husband? What she ought to be asking herself instead was what she wanted to do. But she was too weary to think.
No, she did know what she wanted. She wanted hair as dark as Lucy’s and her mother’s and Graham’s and her fath—
Which father?
She hated more than anything else these moments when such doubts got past her guard. Papa was her father.
Papa was her father.
Oh, her hair was to blame for everything.
And finally she decided.
She had nothing very large in the room with her. The best she could come up with was her sewing scissors, whose blades were not very long. But they were long enough. And they were sharp enough. She had sharpened them herself just before coming to Manville Court.
She cut off her hair to the bottom of her ears. She considered cutting it even shorter, hacking it off all over her head, but by that time her breathing was ragged with panic, and her hands were shaking and tingling with pins and needles. She turned on the stool and looked at the hair scattered along its length and heaped on the floor all about her. There was far more of it than she had expected. She felt suddenly sick to her stomach. She dared not lift her hands to feel the remaining hair. But she did not need hands. She could feel its absence. There was a lightness about her head, and the air felt cool on the back of her neck.
She was sitting facing out to the room, surrounded by hair, her scissors still dangling from the fingers of one hand, when a light tap on the door heralded the appearance of Ralph.
* * *
Good God!
Ralph came to an abrupt stop inside the door, looked at Chloe, looked at her scattered hair, and shut the door softly behind his back.
“Chloe?” he said.
She burst into noisy, gulping tears.
“I am not sorry,” she gasped out. “I hated it. I hated it. I am not sorry.”
All that glorious hair.
Gone.
He could do nothing but stare blankly for a few moments and gaze upon his wife’s distress with incomprehension.
He had almost not come tonight—because he had been thinking of this moment all day. Despite all that had been going on, despite his genuine grief over seeing his grandfather finally carried out of the house, making the end of an era final, and despite the necessity of holding together his dignity in the face of all those who had come to pay their respects to one dead duke and to look with critical curiosity upon the successor, despite his concern for his grandmother and, to a lesser degree, for his sisters, despite his realization that this was a difficult day for his wife—despite everything, he had wanted only for the night to fall so that he could come to her again, bed her again, be with her again.
And his very longing for the night, for her body, for her, had almost kept him away. For frankly he was a bit bewildered and more than a bit alarmed by his eagerness. He had to tell himself sternly that it was all because of the turmoil the death of his grandfather had caused in the past week, that soon now they would be able to settle into the routine of the marriage they had both bargained for.
More than anything else he wanted himself back to himself. He would share himself in marriage for all the essentials—the creation of children, the joint running of a home, though that would not be difficult since presumably she would run the house and he would run the estate. He did not want to share anything else of himself. Or of her. Such was not part of their bargain.
They must share a social life, of course.