Reader, I Married Him. Tracy Chevalier

the house.

      He and I scarcely spoke of it again, but he divorced me in the end, when the children were off and happy. I protested and tried a little, but in my most hidden thoughts I understood what it was about me that had driven him away. I wanted to die of the shame, though I was older, and the disgrace did not hurt as terribly as it would have done in previous years.

      So Mary and I had our dangerous walks at night where no townspeople could catch us, along the old quarry tracks, the pony beatings, the tunnels between the gorse; or the other way, over the scarred fell tops where the wind might tip you into the air, but the race to her was faster.

      Reader I married, married, married him.

      John Tay-Mosby asked me outright to become his wife soon after my divorce, no preparatory courtship, no hawk gaze on the horizons. I said yes, I would. Yes, I will marry you. He was old by then, half-sprightly, half-bowed, with a cluster of cooks, nurses, day-help to serve him, and oh he was the merry gentleman with a twinkle in his eye, the naughty-boy lord of the manor to be flirted with and pampered and wiped down.

      We were married in the chapel on his land, no parents left to witness the event they had frocked me for, and later in the evening, I turned to him, and said, smiling at my feet, “Our real marriage must be on the moor. Where we were all those years ago, Tarey Carr where you took me.”

      He laughed. “I have a bed that the scurrilous eighth Edward is rumoured to have owned,” he said in the game-fed tenor that seemed to emerge through his nose. “Although I suspect that is apocryphal. But it’s a fine bed with a superlative mattress.”

      “I want Tarey Carr, the heather flowers and the skies. It’s a warm evening.”

      He laughed. The guests had gone; the staff had retired to leave us to our pleasure. I began to walk that way, through the garden gate past the vegetables, out past Gibbeswick Fell, and he had to follow.

      “This is madness.”

      “It’s what I want.”

      I turned my back on him, and only looked once to see he was following me, stumbling with that stick, the modern version, Ranger Boy and Ranger Son long dead. I brought him round the fell towards the marshes of Tarey Carr, where he had shot golden plover.

      “You’re beautiful,” he said the one time I looked at him, and he followed me.

      ‘Even now?’ I murmured, but I didn’t turn.

      I thought of Mary as I walked. The way she traced her finger over me for lingering minutes, how I kissed her curves; her beauty, her contradictions, her gentleness. My legs softened as I thought of her, even after so many years. Oh, that I could live with her in the bracken: me, her, my children, who were grown, always visiting. I loved her as you shouldn’t. We both knew. We knew what was to be and what was not.

      I saw two girls once in town, much much younger than me – decades, an age – holding hands. Quite openly on the causey, just like that. I never forgot them. They were young ladies, not the foreign young women you sometimes saw arm in arm, but young women in love, and they made me want to cry.

      I lay down on our marriage bed.

      “This is insanity, my dear,” he said, but I pulled him down on the sheet of sweet asphodel covering the rocking watery ground of Tarey Carr beside me, and stroked him, and he moaned a little and closed his eyes.

      He became excited, at once, soft and hard, but not hurting, not that scream that the marsh had swallowed so many many years before, and I curved over him, a cat, in the evening-scented breeze, to perform our marriage rite, our vows, and he was grunting like a small animal, a calf whose vocal cords were not formed as I pressed into him.

      “Do it,” I said, arching further, and all the delightful little mud fountains sprang up around him, like points of a crown, springs of a bed, and I cat-lay all over him, a puma, moor beast, stretching over his length. “Do it, then,” I said, pressing against him, into him.

      Do it as you did when all I had was a young body.

      “Marriage is one flesh, you said it then.”

      I ground into him, and the calf vibrations deepened, and all our bed’s mud swelled over us, like the breaking of a membrane, the tear before the gush, but it was cool, and I pressed myself into him, his face, his body, covering his fowl-eating lips that were blackening with marsh, my hair falling over him as my hair had fallen on him so long before, when I was a girl, but in long strands and hooks then, curled by my mother, mud-knitted. I stretched and rubbed myself against him, splashed by swamp-scented Tarey Carr, almost covered as I lay over him with my weight. “Happy, my dear?” I said, his own long-ago words slipping on the air as it chilled. Sheep’s breath was loud beside us. His voice was a dying bittern in the mud. The sky darkened, his skin the colour of where he lay beneath me.