Guilt sagged his shoulders. “I didn’t know she was expecting.” His excuses didn’t matter.
When he woke up one morning and realized he’d fallen out of love with his wife, a mere three months after their marriage, he hadn’t known what to do. It had happened suddenly. Just as quickly as falling in love with her.
One morning Mark had been at Hyde Park, newly arrived on the Marriage Mart and looking for a rich and pretty bride. He’d caught sight of a vision in pink, a lovely, brown-haired girl laughing at two birds fighting in front of her as she walked down the path with her mother. And Mark had fallen madly in love in that moment, seeing joy etched across those laughing features. When he’d discovered she was the daughter of a rich steel manufacturer, he realized he had to marry her.
And then, one year and one month later, Mark was sitting at their breakfast table, trying to find the best English word to translate his own version ofThe Iliad, when she had giggled at something silly their cat had done. Fallen off his perch, or something stupid.
Three days previously, he’d taken her to a dinner party with friends from Oxford. His old professor, Duncap, and his wife were there. The few women at the table were used to philosophical discussions and linguistics dominating the conversation. Ellen hadn’t been.
“Word has it that the English faculty are considering opening spots to women,” one friend had remarked. The young men glanced at one another and chuckled at the absurdity.
“English has always been full of soft-minded men,” another former classmate said. “The women will likely fit right in there. It’s the poor man’s Classics, after all. It’ll never amount to much.”
Edward, Mark’s closest classmate from the program, snorted. “Gods, do you remember, Mark, when we saw that burlesque here in London?”
Mark racked his brain. “We attended several.”
Edward’s lip curled with disdain. “They had the gall to advertise it as part of theIliad!”
“Oh, that’s right.” Mark chuckled. “They had Homer orating from the corner of the stage as a street sweeper. And wasn’t Ajax a…?”
“Butcher,” Edward sneered. “I washorrified. It was sacrilege.”
Mark hadn’t been horrified. Amused, even curious, to see how the masses had interpreted and adapted the Classics. He opened his mouth to say so when Duncap cut in.
Duncap leaned back in his seat, stroking his thick mustache. “Sounds like an enthusiastic yet ultimately pathetic attempt to understand the Classics.”
“They seemed to understand the themes of theIliad,” Mark said uncertainly. Duncap was his favorite lecturer, the professor of the department.
Duncap smiled affectionately. “My dear boy. Clearly the lower orders keep trying to understand the Classics, as we can see by the Cockney Classics movement sixty years ago. But you’ll notice that while they might champion a playwright every twenty years or so, none have ever been good enough to join us at Oxford.”
Mark wasn’t sure about that. The Cockney Classics had spawned some truly intelligent men, like the Shoemaker’s Poet, who’d taught himself Greek and Latin.
Edward brayed a laugh. “These working class men think they can sneak in the back door, but we can always tell. There’s no way someone from the lower orders can understand the richness of the Classics.”
Duncap nodded. “Take for instance, theTwelve Labors of Herakles.The hero?—”
Ellen suddenly burst into laughter. Anxiety jolted through Mark when everyone paused and turned to her.
“Oh, heavens,” she said through her giggling. “Mark named my mother’s cat Herakles, and I’d thought it was a play on words, like hair-and-fleas.” She turned her big brown eyes on him. “Andit just occurred to me that it might have to do with his fiddling in all those old Greek poems. It is Greek, isn’t it?”
Mark had burned with embarrassment. Conversation resumed after a tense, horrified pause, but he hadn’t been able to put it from his mind. He’d been growing dissatisfied with her lack of ability to hold a normal conversation—or really, have any interest in the greater antiquities—and the humiliation in front of his favorite lecturer had been the last feather that broke the horse’s back. Later, Edward consoled him by saying wives didn’t have to be intelligent, they were wives. They were supposed to look pretty and run households so men could focus on the important things. It was little comfort to Mark, who didn’twanta pretty wife with nothing between her ears. He wanted someone he could talk to, learn from, exchange ideas with. A marriage of intellectual equals. That night he tossed and turned, wondering if he’d been too hasty in his marriage. A pretty, rich wife was good enough, but now he wanted more.
For three days Mark had tried to put the embarrassing incident aside, to forgive her. He couldn’t. And when she’d giggled again at Herakles the cat, Mark’s attention snapped, as well as his temper. He looked up and saw the beautiful girl he’d married and realized she couldn’t tell the difference between Greek and Latin to save her life. He hated stupid people and giggling girls, and somehow he’d married both.
They’d wed too soon, courted too little. Married too young. He’d been a fool.
Mark hadn’t the courage to go complain to his father, who would merely scoff and tell him that he’d made his bed and needed to lie in it. He knew complaining to his mother wouldn’t get him anywhere either, since she would probably take Ellen’s side. For some reason, she liked Ellen, even though she was sensible and Ellen was not. Perhaps because his mother had birthed six boys and this was the only daughter-in-law she had yet. Matthew was traveling Europe, and most of his younger brothers were far too young to care about Mark’s marriage. So he’d turnedto Luke, the third brother, the one two years younger than him. Luke was busy moping after one of the handsome footmen their father employed, rather than getting ready to study at Sandhurst like he should’ve been doing, but he had given this one piece of advice: “Join the military. I’ll be an officer after I finish Sandhurst. Why don’t you?”
Mark had rejected the advice at first. “But I want to be a Classics professor one day.”
Luke had laughed, clapping his older brother on the back. “You are certainly dreary enough to be a don. Seriously, though. Join the military. Defend the Queen, see the world, and get away from anyone you can’t stand to be around.”
So, panicking over what he thought was the biggest mistake of his life, he had. Thankfully, he had a cousin in the Admiralty who helped position him as a midshipman on theHMS Black Princefor four years, and he’d set sail three days later. He hadn’t even known Ellen was pregnant yet.
Mark of today, who’d spent eight years drilling and breathing both honor and duty, couldn’t believe what an arse Mark of 1879 had been. Even if Ellen had been the worst young woman in England, he’d behaved abominably. He could see that now.
“Constance,” he murmured aloud now. “You have a terrible father.” She would’ve been seven years old now, if she’d lived.What are seven-year-olds like?He could scarcely imagine it.I wonder who named her.Mark had known the name Constance, both from a letter from his mother and his mother-in-law, but he hadn’t known her middle name was Persephone. He’d assumed Ellen had named their daughter, but she hadn’t been involved with burial plans, so he couldn’t assume she’d done the naming either.