Chapter Text
It was past eleven when Tom let himself in, and the house was dark in the way of a house that has given up waiting.
The footman had gone to bed. So, he supposed, had Mrs. Desmond, and the housemaid, and everyone else whose evening had been arranged around the reasonable assumption that the master of the house would return at a reasonable hour. He had not. He had instead spent the better part of four hours in a cold set of chambers in Lincoln's Inn arguing with a man named Pelham about a clause in a marriage settlement, and he had won the argument, and he had taken no pleasure in winning it, because winning it had cost him supper at his own table opposite his own wife, which was the only argument he had ever genuinely wished to win.
He set down his hat. He shrugged out of his coat in the hall and hung it himself rather than wake anyone, and he stood for a moment in the dark with his hand still on the wet wool of it, listening to his house.
There was a light under the library door.
Of course there was. He knew it before he saw it — knew it the way he knew the particular quality of her silences, the way he knew, after three years, the difference between the Mary who had gone to bed and the Mary who had said she would go to bed in a moment and had then been detained, indefinitely, by a sentence. She had a great gift for being detained by sentences. He had married her partly for it.
He crossed to the door and opened it without knocking, because it was his library too, technically, although in the way these things are decided without ever being discussed it had long since become hers — and he stopped on the threshold and looked at her, and the day fell off him like a coat.
She was in the chair by the dying fire. She had her feet tucked up beneath her in a manner that no one had ever taught her was permissible and that she permitted herself only here, only late, only when she believed herself unobserved. She had a book open against her knee and another splayed face-down on the arm of the chair — a thing that would have horrified her in any volume she respected, so the splayed one was presumably being punished — and she had a pencil in her hand and a smear of graphite along the side of it where she had been pressing too hard, and her hair, which she pinned with such severity in the daylight world, had been losing its argument with gravity for some hours and now hung half-down around her face in a way that made his chest hurt.
She had not heard him. She was deep in it — wherever it was — her brow furrowed, her lower lip caught between her teeth, the candlelight catching the lenses of her spectacles so that for a moment he could not see her eyes, only the small twin flames reflected there.
He stood in the doorway and looked at his wife and thought, as he thought most evenings, with no diminishment whatsoever in the three years he had been thinking it: I do not deserve this.
Then she looked up, and saw him, and the furrow vanished.
"Oh," she said. "You're home."
"I'm so sorry." He said it before anything else, because it was the truest thing he had. "Mary. I am so sorry. Pelham would not — there was a clause, and he —" He stopped. The clause was not worth the breath. "I am very late and I have ruined the evening and I am sorry."
"It's perfectly fine." She closed the book over her finger — not all the way, he noted; she was keeping her place, which meant he had not yet been promoted above the sentence, which was as it should be. "Mrs. Desmond has left you supper in the kitchen if you're hungry. Cold chicken, I think, and the rest of the pie. She was quite pointed about the pie."
"I'm not hungry."
"You always say that, and then at one in the morning you go down in your nightshirt and eat standing over the larder like a thief, and I have to listen to you trying to be quiet, which you are very bad at."
"I am extremely quiet."
"You knocked the copper pot off its hook on Tuesday and then stood completely still for a full minute as though that would undo it."
"You were awake for that."
"I am always awake for that, Tom. I have simply never had the heart to tell you." She was smiling now — the small one, the private one, the one that had taken him the better part of a year of marriage to earn reliable access to. "Come and sit. You look like a man who has been losing an argument."
"I won the argument."
"You look like a man who has been winning one, then. It appears to be much the same condition."
He laughed — the first time all day, he realised, that the muscles of his face had done that particular thing — and he crossed the room and did not sit. He came and stood behind her chair instead, and put his hands on her shoulders, and felt her go soft beneath them, the small involuntary settling of a person being touched by someone they trust completely, and he bent and pressed his mouth to the top of her head, into the warm disordered tangle of her half-pinned hair, and breathed her in. Lavender. And beneath it, still, after three years, the warm specific devastating smell of her, which no amount of familiarity had ever managed to make ordinary.
"What is it tonight?" he asked. His thumbs had found the knots at the base of her neck and begun, without instruction, to work at them.
"Hm? Oh." She glanced down at the book as though she had briefly forgotten it, which from Mary was an event of seismic significance. "An essay. On the education of women. It is very wrong about a great many things and I have been writing in the margins, which I know you disapprove of —"
"I have never once disapproved of it."
"You disapprove of it in your face, Tom, every time you see what I've done to a clean page —"
"I disapprove of nothing you do," he said, "to anything, ever," and he meant it, and he punctuated it by pressing his thumb into a particular knot just below her ear that made her exhale all at once, a long slow breath he felt move through her whole body, and the pencil slid out of her fingers and rolled off her knee onto the rug and neither of them moved to retrieve it.
"That," Mary said, after a moment, in a voice that had dropped half an octave, "is unfair."
"What is?"
"You know precisely what."
He did. He had learned, over three years, a great many things about the woman he had married — had learned them the way she learned everything, which was thoroughly, with attention, taking notes. He had learned that the knot below her left ear undid her faster than the right. He had learned that she could not think clearly when his hands were in her hair and that she resented this and craved it in roughly equal measure. He had learned that the surest way to derail Mary Hayward from a sentence was not to interrupt it but to do something kind to the back of her neck and wait, patiently, for the sentence to lose its hold on her, which it always, eventually, did.
He had learned, in short, the application of a body of knowledge it had once cost him such agonies to acquire. There had been a time — he could remember it, could remember it with a tenderness that bordered on disbelief — when he had not known how to get from here to there. When his arms had shaken. When the books had lied to him. That man seemed very far away now. He had been replaced, by slow degrees, over a great many nights, by a man who knew exactly what his wife liked and exactly how to give it to her, and who considered this the single most valuable education of his life, Lincoln's Inn very much included.
"You have been working too hard," Mary said. She tipped her head back against him, looking up, so that her face was inverted beneath his and her spectacles had gone askew. "You have that line. Here." She reached up and pressed a fingertip between his brows, where the day lived. "It comes when you have been arguing with men named Pelham."
"It's a very specific line."
"It's a very specific man." She held his gaze, upside down, and something shifted in it — the teasing thinning out, something warmer and more direct rising up beneath it, the thing he had spent three years learning to recognise and would spend the rest of his life being undone by. "Tom."
"Mary."
"Lock the door."
He had learned this, too — had learned that when Mary stopped softening, stopped qualifying, stopped wrapping her wants in the protective hedge of perhaps and if you would not mind, and simply, plainly, told him what she wanted, it went through him like a struck flint. Lock the door. Three words. No perhaps. No if you are not too tired. She had spent the first year of their marriage learning to ask for things and the second learning that she could ask without apology and the third — the third had been this. The plain imperative. The thing she wanted, named, in the open, with the door not yet even locked.
It still undid him. He suspected it always would.
"The servants —" he began, not as objection but as fact, because it was the sort of fact she liked accounted for.
"Are asleep. Three floors up. And it is our house, Tom, and our library, and I have spent the entire evening alone in it being very dull and scholarly and waiting for you, and I find" — she reached up again, and this time her hand found the open collar of his shirt, where his cravat had been loosened hours ago, and her fingers slipped inside it against the bare skin of his throat — "I find I have read quite enough about the theory of things for one night."
He crossed to the door. He turned the key.
The sound of it — the small definite click of the lock — seemed very loud in the quiet room, and when he turned back she had unfolded herself from the chair and was standing, and she had taken off her spectacles and set them on the open book, and the firelight was behind her so that he could not see her expression clearly, only the shape of her, the loose half-fallen hair, the line of her in the soft old wool dress she wore only at home, only in the evenings, only when there was no one to see her but him.
"Come here," she said.
He went.
He always went. It was, he had decided long ago, the simplest fact of his life, plainer than law, plainer than property: that when Mary said come here, he went, and would go, across any distance, for the rest of his days.
He crossed the room and took her face in his hands and kissed her, and there was nothing careful in it. There had been nothing careful in three years. The careful kisses belonged to a different couple — to the two terrified virgins in the candlelit room at the inn, who had not known how to do this, who had stopped and started and laughed and wept their way through it. He remembered them fondly. He bore them no resemblance. He kissed his wife the way a man kisses someone he has kissed ten thousand times and intends to kiss ten thousand more — knowing exactly where her mouth would be, exactly how she would tilt her head, exactly the small sound she would make low in her throat when he deepened it, which she did, on cue, the hum of pleasure he had spent three years learning to summon and would never tire of hearing.
Her hands went to his shirt. Not fumbling. Mary did not fumble anymore — that, too, belonged to the other couple, to the bride who had undone his cravat with such grave careful concentration on their wedding night. Her fingers found his buttons and freed them with the brisk competence of a woman who had done this many times and had developed opinions about the most efficient method, and she pushed the shirt off his shoulders and put her hands flat against his bare chest and made a small satisfied sound, as though confirming a hypothesis.
"There," she said, against his mouth.
"There what?"
"You. I have been looking at the spines of books for three hours and thinking about this instead, which is a great waste of an education, and now I have it." Her hands moved — down his chest, over his stomach, and then, deliberately, to his forearms, where she had pushed his sleeves up herself, her thumbs pressing into the tendon, the line of muscle, the place she had loved before she had loved any other part of him, the place she had stared at across drawing rooms and pretended she was studying. "And these."
"Three years," he said, "and you are still —"
"Do not," Mary said, "tell me I am still staring at your forearms. I am aware that I am still staring at your forearms. I have made my peace with it. It is the least scholarly thing about me and I refuse to be ashamed."
He laughed, and she swallowed the laugh with her mouth, and then her hands tightened on his arms and she pulled him with her, backward, until she came up against the bookshelves with a soft thud and a small displaced oh, and a single volume tipped sideways on the shelf above her head, and Tom caught it without looking and set it right, and Mary laughed against his mouth at the reflex of it.
"Even now," she said. "Even now you cannot let a book sit crooked."
"It was Hume," he said. "Hume should not be permitted to lean."
"You are the most —" She did not finish. He had bent his head and put his mouth to her throat, to the place where her pulse beat at the base of it, and whatever she had been going to say about him dissolved into a breath.
He kissed down the line of her neck. He pushed the loose collar of the old wool dress aside and bared the curve of her shoulder and kissed that too — and he felt her hands come up and grip his bare shoulders, her nails finding the muscle there, and he knew, from three years of learning her, that they did not have the patience tonight for the slow undressing, the reverent cataloguing, the inch-by-inch mapping of the early days. They had done that. They would do it again — would do it tomorrow, perhaps, in the proper warmth of their own bed, slow and unhurried. But not now. Now she had locked him in a library at eleven o'clock at night with her hair coming down and her patience gone, and what she wanted was not reverence.
What she wanted, he understood, was him. Quickly. Now. Against the shelves.
He could apply himself to that.
He got his hands under the loose dress — it was made to be got out of without assistance, he had long suspected, though she had never admitted to having chosen it for that reason — and he found the warm bare skin of her thighs and pushed the fabric up, bunching it at her hips, and his fingers found her already slick, already wanting, the heat of her against his palm a discovery that still, after three years, made his breath catch and his cock ache against the seam of his trousers. She made a sound that was half encouragement and half impatience, and her own hands left his shoulders and went to the fall of his breeches.
"Mary —"
"I am not," she said, working the buttons with a focus he recognised from her face when she was constructing a particularly difficult argument, "in the mood, this evening, to be patient. I have been patient since seven o'clock. I have been patient through an entire essay on female education that got nearly everything wrong. My patience is spent, Tom, I have none of it left —"
"Then let me —" He caught her hands, stilled them, and went down.
He went to his knees on the library rug, between her and the shelves, the old wool dress bunched in his hands, and he heard her breath stop — heard the small startled intake of it above him — and he looked up the length of her and found her looking down at him with her eyes very wide and her lips parted, the impatience giving way, for just a moment, to something softer and more astonished, as though even now, even after three years, the fact of him doing this still surprised her.
"Tom —"
"You said your patience was spent." He pressed a kiss to the inside of her knee, and then higher, to the soft skin of her inner thigh, his mouth open against her, his breath warm where she was warmest, and felt her hand fly to his hair, her fingers threading into it, gripping. "Allow me to spend the rest of it for you. Properly."
"That is not —" Her voice had gone unsteady. "That is not what I — I meant we should simply —"
"I know what you meant." He kissed higher. He felt her legs shift, an instinct, making room, and her grip in his hair tightened to something just short of painful, which he had learned long ago meant yes, meant do not stop, meant the opposite of everything her sentences were attempting. "But you are very rarely patient with yourself, Mary, and someone ought to be, and it is going to be me, and it is going to be now."
He hooked one of her legs over his shoulder, opening her to him, and put his mouth to her.
He had learned this, too — had learned it slowly, with attention, the way she had taught him everything, by her gasps and her silences and the particular involuntary tightening of her hands. He knew exactly where to put his tongue. He found the small swollen point of her and circled it, slow and deliberate, the way she liked to begin, and he felt the jolt of it go through her — felt her hips press forward into his mouth before she could think better of it. He licked into her, tasting her, the slick heat of her on his tongue, and then back up, and he settled into the rhythm he knew drove her past speech: steady, unhurried, his tongue working her while two fingers slid into her and curled, and her grip in his hair went from firm to frantic. He knew the rhythm she liked and the one that drove her to distraction and the precise moment when distraction became unbearable and she would begin to say his name in that broken descending way that meant she had lost the thread of language entirely. He had spent three years learning the geography of her, and he was, he thought with a flicker of something that was not quite pride and not quite gratitude but lived somewhere between them, very thoroughly versed in it now.
She did not last long. She had not been lying about her patience. He felt it build in her — felt it in the way her thighs clamped around his head, in the way her hips rocked against his mouth in helpless little jerks she no longer had any say over, in the way her free hand came down and gripped the edge of a bookshelf so hard he heard the wood creak — and he flattened his tongue and pressed harder and crooked his fingers, and heard her start to say his name, Tom, Tom, oh — and then she was past words, her head tipped back against the spines of a thousand books she had read and a hundred she had written in, and she came against his mouth with a cry she was too far gone to muffle, her whole body shuddering, clenching tight around his fingers in long pulses he felt against his tongue. He held her up by the hips as her knees gave, and he did not stop — gentled, but did not stop, working her through it, drawing it out — until she pushed weakly at his head, oversensitive, trembling, until the aftershocks had run through her and she was sagging against the shelves, breathing in long ragged gulps.
He rose. His knees protested — he was not, he was beginning to understand, going to be a young man forever, and the library rug was thin — but he rose, and he gathered her against him, and she came willingly, boneless, her face pressed into his bare chest, her breath hot and uneven against his skin.
"Oh," she said. Into his chest. "Oh, that was —"
"Good?"
"You know it was good. You are insufferable. You know exactly —" She lifted her head. Her face was flushed from her cheeks to her throat, her hair entirely down now, her eyes dark and dazed and brilliant, and she looked at him with an expression of such helpless, wrecked affection that he felt it land in his chest like the word wife had landed there three years ago, too large for the space it had been given. "You did not used to know exactly," she said. "I remember. You used to have no idea at all."
"I had read certain books," he said gravely. "Medical texts, mostly."
She laughed — the real one, the one underneath — and it shook through her whole body, and she pulled his head down and kissed him, deep and unhurried, tasting herself on his mouth and not minding it, which was its own kind of education she had given herself over the years.
"The books were useless," she said against his lips.
"Catastrophically."
"It was practice that did it."
"A great deal of practice."
"And now —" She drew back just far enough to look at him, and there was the smile again, the bold one, the one that still, after everything, could stop his heart. Her hands had returned to the buttons of his trousers, and this time he did not stop her, and this time they gave. "And now I think we may call it application."
"Application," he repeated. His voice had gone rough. Her hand had pushed past the loosened fall of his breeches and closed around him, warm and sure, and the touch nearly buckled his knees in turn, three years of marriage having done nothing whatsoever to diminish what the simple fact of Mary's hand on his cock could do. She stroked him once, slow, deliberate, watching his face as she did it — she had learned the power of that, too, learned what it did to him to be looked at while she touched him — and he had to grit his teeth and breathe.
"Theory, then practice. Then application. It is how one masters any subject." Mary said, and she guided him to her, and turned them, and put her own back against the shelves.
He got his hands beneath her thighs and lifted, and she rose into it, her legs coming around him, her arms locking behind his neck, and the shelves took her weight against her back, and a slim volume of something tipped and fell to the rug with a soft thud and neither of them spared it a glance. He pressed her against the books — against the whole accumulated weight of everything she had ever read, everything she had ever underlined, everything she had ever pressed her clever furious mind against in the long lonely years before him — and he held her there, and he paused, his forehead against hers, both of them breathing hard.
"All right?" he asked. He always asked. It was no longer the fearful question of the wedding night, the we don't have to do anything if you're not ready — it had become something else over the years, a smaller and surer thing, a touchstone, a habit of care worn smooth as a stone in a pocket.
"Tom Hayward," Mary said, against his mouth, with the fierce plain tenderness that had undone him at the inn and undid him still, "if you do not stop asking me whether I am all right and apply yourself, I am going to be forced to write a very harsh review."
He laughed, and she laughed, and the laughter caught and turned into something else, the way it always had with them, the way it had since the very first night — and then he guided himself to her and pressed forward, and she was so wet and so ready that he slid into her in one long unbroken stroke, all the way, until his hips were flush against hers — and the laughter stopped, and her head went back against the spines of the books, and the only sound she made was his name, drawn out and broken on the last of her breath.
They had done this in beds and on the floor and once, memorably, in a folly during a rainstorm in the Lakes. But there was something — he thought, dimly, in the part of his mind still capable of thought — there was something in particular about doing it here. Against her books. In the room that was most entirely hers, surrounded by the words of every clever dead man and woman she had ever argued with, the air thick with the smell of leather and dust and beeswax and her. The shelves creaked with every thrust. He held her pinned against them, his hands gripping the backs of her thighs, holding her open, and he drove up into her in a steady deepening rhythm, and she met every stroke, rolling her hips down to take him, her heels digging into the small of his back to pull him deeper still. No fumbling now, no shifting weight wrong, no slipping apart — only the long fluent ease of two people who had learned each other so thoroughly that there was no division left between the doing and the being done to, who had become, as she had once put it in a sleepier moment, a single thing, doing itself. He could feel her clenching around him already, the slick tight clutch of her, her breath breaking into small ragged sounds against his ear with every thrust.
"Tom —" Her voice was high and breaking, her arms tight around his neck, her heels pressing into the small of his back. "Tom, I —"
"I know," he said. He knew. He knew the exact pitch of her voice that meant she was close again, and he shifted his weight, and angled his hips, and found the place — he knew where it was now, he had not always known where it was, there had been a catastrophic and beloved learning curve — driving against it with every stroke now, and Mary gasped against his throat and her whole body tightened around him, her nails raking down his back, and a row of books shuddered on the shelf above her head.
"Do not let Hume fall," she managed, wrecked and laughing and trembling all at once.
"Damn Hume," Tom said, with great feeling, and snapped his hips hard against her, and felt her laugh and gasp at the same time — and then she was coming apart again, clenching around him in tight rhythmic pulses, her cunt gripping him so hard that he felt his own control fray and snap, her face buried in his neck and her cry muffled against his skin. The feeling of it — the warmth, the closeness, the helpless fluttering pulse of her around his cock — undid the last of him, and he buried himself to the hilt and followed her over, spilling into her in long shuddering waves, gasping her name into the loose tumble of her hair, holding her against the shelves until the tremors had run through both of them and there was nothing left but the two of them breathing in the firelit dark.
He held her there a moment longer, neither of them moving, his face in her hair, her arms loose around his neck, the books steady and silent around them.
Then, carefully, he eased her down. Her feet found the floor. Her knees were unsteady and so were his, and they leaned into each other, foreheads together, sharing breath, and Mary began — helplessly, silently — to laugh.
"What?" he murmured.
"The —" She could barely speak. "Tom. Hume. You said damn Hume. In the library."
"He was being very disruptive."
"He has been dead for fifty years."
"That is no excuse for poor shelf discipline."
She laughed harder, her shoulders shaking, her forehead pressed to his collarbone, and he held her up while she did it, his arms around her, grinning into her hair like a fool, like a man who had spent four hours that evening arguing about a clause in a marriage settlement and could not, now, for the life of him remember a single word of it.
When she had recovered herself she bent — wincing slightly, a hand at the small of her back — and retrieved the fallen book from the rug. It was not Hume. It was the essay on female education, knocked from its place on the arm of the chair somewhere in the proceedings, its pages splayed open and bent.
"Look at this," Mary said, with deep satisfaction, smoothing the abused pages. "I have ruined it. It deserved it."
"You ruin all of them."
"I improve all of them." She set it on the shelf — crooked, deliberately, and looked at him sideways, and he twitched toward it and stopped himself, and she laughed again. "There. A test. You passed. Barely."
He pulled her back against him. She came, settling into the curve of his body with the ease of long practice, her cheek against his bare chest, and they stood there in the dying firelight, in the locked room, in the smell of leather and lavender and the two of them, and Tom rested his chin on the top of her head and felt the day — Pelham, the cold chambers, the clause, the hours stolen from this — fall away entirely, until there was nothing left of it at all.
"You should eat," Mary said, into his chest, drowsily. "Mrs. Desmond was very pointed about the pie."
"In a moment."
"You will go down at one in the morning in your nightshirt and knock over the copper pot."
"I will be," Tom said, "extremely quiet."
"You will not. And I will be awake. And I will lie there listening to you trying to be quiet, and I will love you so much I can hardly bear it, the way I do every single night, even the ones when you come home late and ruin the evening." She tipped her head back to look at him, her chin on his sternum, her eyes soft and dark and entirely without guard. "You did not ruin the evening, by the way. I should like that noted. For the record."
"Noted."
"The evening," Mary said, "turned out very well."
He bent and kissed her — slowly, this time, with no urgency left in it, only the long ease of a man kissing his wife in their own house at the end of a long day — and when he drew back she had that look on her face, the stunned-tender one, the one she had worn on the very first night when he'd named the mole on her hip, the one that meant she was being seen and had not, even now, entirely got used to it.
And then, from three floors up, faint and rising, came the thin wavering complaint of a child waking.
They both went still. They listened. It came again — that particular fretful note, gathering toward a proper wail, the one that meant their daughter had surfaced from sleep and found the world insufficient and intended to register her objection at length.
"I will go," Tom said.
"No." Mary was already drawing back, a hand flat on his chest. "I will go." She rose onto her toes and kissed him — quick, soft, certain. "Go and eat. Mrs. Desmond was pointed about the pie, and one of us ought to honour the pie."
"But I already ate," Tom said.
It took her a moment. He watched it land — watched the words arrive and the meaning behind them arrive a half-second later — and then the colour climbed from her throat to her cheeks in a single hot rush, and her mouth fell open, and a sound escaped her that was half outraged gasp and half helpless laugh.
"Tom Hayward," she said, "you dog —"
"I was simply confirming that the obligation had been discharged."
"That is vulgar, that is the most vulgar thing you have ever —" But she was laughing now, properly, the real one, the one underneath, and he caught her face in his hands and kissed her again — slower this time, swallowing the laugh, feeling it shake through her and into him.
"Mary," he said, against her mouth. "Go and sit. Ruin another essay, do whatever it is you do in here at one in the morning that you think I do not know about." He kissed the corner of her mouth, her cheekbone, the line of her jaw. "I will go and attend to our daughter. And I will read her a poem — something dull and Romantic and full of fells and daffodils — that will send her off to sleep inside ten minutes. And then I promise" — he drew back, his forehead against hers, both of them still a little unsteady — "I will go down and eat my dinner. My actual dinner. Standing over the larder, in my nightshirt, like a thief."
He kissed her once more — quick, and sure, and full of a thing too large to say at eleven o'clock at night with a child wailing one floor up — and then he found his shirt where it had fallen and pulled it on, and he went up the stairs two at a time, toward the small furious voice that had his nose and her stubbornness and her brown eyes that would need, the doctor said, spectacles before long.
Behind him, in the library, Mary stood among her ruined books with her hand still pressed to her flushed cheek, laughing, in love, entirely happy — and she listened, as the wailing eased and faltered and stopped by degrees, to the low murmur of her husband, reading their daughter a poem.
Serene will be our days, and bright, she thought, and happy will our nature be.
She had finally understood it, that night at the inn.
She understood it better now.