Isidore raised her eyes. “You think—”
“I think,” Jemma said firmly. “It’ll be a matter of one beckoning glance and you’ll have all the gentlemen you want on their knees before you.”
Isidore sniffed again. “Then why isn’t my own husband that way, Jemma? I’ve tried kissing him, and putting my arms around him like the most frightful hussy, and he just pushes me away.”
“I don’t know,” Jemma admitted. “I’ve never encountered anyone precisely like your husband, Isidore.”
“I suppose I should be glad he’s unique.”
“It would be much easier if he weren’t,” Jemma pointed out. “I prefer the lapdog model of husband myself.”
Isidore managed to smile at her. “The kind of husband you have, you mean?”
“I didn’t say I had one of them. Just that they were enormously appealing.” Jemma’s smile was a rueful acknowledgment that her husband, Elijah, had never come at her whistle.
“Lady Farthingward is having a ridotto tonight,” Jemma said. “You can bask in adoration.”
“But Simeon won’t be here to see me get kissed. He bid me goodbye, in the politest of fashions. It’s been two days and he hasn’t come to London.”
“Perhaps not tonight,” Jemma said. “But soon. It won’t take him long to think through your final conversation, Isidore. He’ll be here.”
Simeon didn’t come to London that night. Nor the night after, nor the night after.
A whole week had passed.
Fine, Isidore told herself. It was fine. She wanted a man who would care about her. Simeon said he loved her, but she started to doubt her memory. Had he said he loved her? Was it a fevered creation of her brain?
Probably. Because if he loved her, he wouldn’t have let her go. He would lie awake the way she did, thinking about the way he smiled, or the way his brow furrowed when looking at one of his father’s absurd letters. He would wake damp with sweat, the sheets twisted around his legs, having dreamt that she was caressing him.
She longed with an ache that seemed not in the heart but in the bones, for something she couldn’t have.
For a husband.
For wasn’t that what she always wanted from him? To be a husband. To come back from Africa, bed her, love her, acknowledge her.
After another week she set her jaw and started looking at men in earnest. There were men, lots of them. All of England seemed to know that her marriage was to be annulled, thanks to the dowager duchess’s vivid descriptions of her son’s brain fever. Isidore hardened her heart against worrying about what Simeon thought about his mother’s betrayal.
He had made his own bed, as the dowager had said. He must lie in it. Alone. Of course, he was likely happy, practicing the Middle Way, organizing the household…
Another week passed. He was never coming. Jemma finally admitted that she must have been wrong.
“It’s not his fault,” Isidore said helplessly. The nights of lying awake had clarified things. “He really can’t help being a person who hates disorder. I think it must be because he sensed what his father was like, even as a boy.”
“How could he not, given the stench of the sewer?” Jemma said. She had taken a sharp dislike to the entire family. “His mother is extremely common, given those letters she is writing.” The dowager had not been sparing in her description of Simeon’s fighting skills. “His father was a complete rotter and cracked to boot. And he is—”
“Don’t,” Isidore said swiftly. “Don’t.”
Jemma sat down on the bed. “Marriage is an enviable state,” she said. “You will enjoy it, the next time.”
“I’ve thought so for years,” Isidore said.
“How long will this annulment take?”