He grimaced. “That pestilent Scottish doctor of Jemma’s, Dr. Treglown, advised me not to travel and, though it pains me to admit it, he was right. More importantly, how is manhood treating you?”
“Being a man is exhausting,” Harriet said with some feeling. “My rear hurts from riding, and my arm hurts from rapier play, and all my other muscles are sympathetically twanging as well.”
“I gather that Strange took my dictate to turn you into a man seriously. You’d better watch out; he’s likely to introduce you to a demi-rep this evening. Part of the training.”
“It’s all very well for you to laugh,” Harriet said. Then she put on a lofty air. “As it happens, I already have a lady friend interested in my company.”
“No! How I wish I could get out of this damned bed. Promise me you won’t dismiss her, at least until I see you being wooed.”
“I fully intend to avoid her.”
“That won’t be easy,” Villiers said. “Strange’s house parties are surprisingly large and yet intimate. I didn’t think you’d visit me.”
Harriet looked up. “Why not?”
“You have every reason to hate me.” He said it without any particular inflection. But there was much unspoken: the evening when he rejected her advances and dropped her out of his carriage in the middle of London, the fact that her husband committed suicide after losing to him at chess.
“I did hate you.” It was strangely restful to admit it. “I spent a great deal of time brooding over revenge. It was easier to hate you than to accept that Benjamin chose to leave.”
“Chose to leave is an odd way of talking about suicide.”
“How else would you describe it?”
He hesitated. He really had amazing eyes, black as pitch.
“You think suicide is cowardly,” she said when he didn’t speak immediately.
“Am I wrong?”
“I thought that at first too. I raged at Benjamin the first year: for being such a coward, for not loving me enough, for caring so much about chess that he gave his life for it, for being such a fool. But then I started to think that cowardice is just a point of view.”
“The counterpoint to courage?” His eyes were sympathetic but unconvinced.
“Something like that. Benjamin cared most in the world for chess. I hated that fact while we were married, but it was true. Though he was always amiable, and was certainly fond of me in his own way.”
Villiers didn’t say anything. Harriet made herself continue. “But chess was his passion. And while he was very good at it, he wasn’t the best. So let’s imagine that he had been that wildly in love with me—Don’t laugh!” she said fiercely.
He raised an eyebrow, surprised. “I haven’t the faintest impulse to laugh.”
“If he had been madly in love with me, or some other woman, and had killed himself because he failed to win her, would you call him a coward?”
“Merely a fool,” he said flatly.
“Perhaps.” Harriet couldn’t think where this argument was taking her. “But not a coward,” she persisted.
“It would have to be a grand passion, a love so great it was intolerable to live without the other person.”
“Yes, and everyone would have felt the grief along with him. Whereas if a person commits suicide for love of something other than a woman, no one shares their grief.”
“I count myself lucky to have escaped such a passion,” Villiers said. “I can picture it, but I haven’t been afflicted by it. Have you?”
“I—” Harriet stopped. “I loved Benjamin. He was the first man to pay me any attention.”