Free An Infamous Marriage by Susanna Fraser

she’d been helpful in making a match between the Ildertons’ eldest daughter and the new curate who had replaced Giles.
    She never expected to become friends with Lady Dryden, though they spoke to each other with every appearance of civility when they met at church or when calling at others’ homes. Elizabeth asked how the older woman’s children were—all but the youngest daughter were married, and all but the eldest son had left Selyhaugh to do so—and Lady Dryden asked her how recently she had heard from Jack.
    Jack faithfully wrote once a month—he’d even written twice while at sea, though those letters arrived the same day as the first from Canada—and she did likewise. Their conversations were necessarily disjointed by the long distance and the fact their letters regularly crossed paths somewhere in the Atlantic. She looked forward to each new letter and found herself growing fonder and fonder of her long-absent husband, though she felt her letters must be a sad bore to him, telling as they did of the same place and the same people while he roved across Upper and Lower Canada, dancing at balls in Quebec City and meeting Indian chiefs around council fires at the western edge of the settlement.
    Elizabeth never regained the blissful, expectant happiness of her bridal week with Giles, but as her second marriage passed its first anniversary, she was content with her lot. She had a home, one where sheep now grazed the upland fields while horses frolicked in the pastures below. The aching fear that had haunted her since her father’s disgrace, of being abandoned and homeless, had at last begun to fade. She had friends to enliven her quiet country life. And she had a husband she prayed every day would return safely so they could make another generation to live at the Grange.

Chapter Six
    January 1812
    On a dull, gray morning a few weeks before her second anniversary, Elizabeth sat in the parlor before a crackling fire and tried to think of something new to write to her husband.
    She had the last letter she’d received from him, written some three months ago, spread open on the sofa beside her. He must have written at least once since then, a letter even now on a ship crossing the Atlantic or making its way down the St. Lawrence River. She liked to imagine that he might be writing her at this very moment, thousands of miles away, telling her how he’d passed Christmas among his fellow officers and the handful of settlers farming Upper Canada. It was romantic of her, foolishly so, but she’d taken a great fancy to Jack for the sake of his long, amusing and affectionate letters. He had the gift of painting pictures with words, and anything he wrote about could hardly help being of interest to her because it was all about places she could only dream of ever seeing herself.
    She’d even set aside a marquetry keepsake box just for his letters, and in the privacy of her bedchamber she often took them out and read them in order, kissing each missive as she refolded it and put it away. And on those nights she always had trouble falling asleep, but she didn’t mind, because she lay awake imagining Jack’s homecoming, when surely they would finally consummate their marriage.
    More and more, she suspected she’d fallen in love with her husband. That idea filled her with dismay, for she had no reason to believe he returned her sentiments. The affection in his letters was comradely, brotherly, full of gratitude for the care she was taking of his mother and of Westerby Grange, but never passionate.
    It made composing her replies dreadfully difficult. She longed to send him clever, entertaining letters that would make him fall in love with her, too, but she didn’t know how. She’d never been a gifted letter writer.
    His latest spent two pages describing a council with chiefs from half a dozen Indian tribes. He couldn’t tell her what they’d discussed, he said, which led her to conclude it must have been about wooing