Free The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith

gone back to watching the water below, swaying and black and glittering.
    In her room, the bed had been turned down, the carafe of orange water set down beside it. The maid had done it before she left for the evening.
    She began to undress. With difficulty, she reached around and tried to unhook her gown — it was nearly impossible. There was no one to ask for help. Always before, George would have done it, or Brett, the maid. She struggled, twisted her body around, and at last managed to undo the dress. She removed her corset and petticoat and unrolled her stockings.
    Putting on the nightgown, she lay down on the bed on top of the covers. She thought about the events at the concert, the way his body had become so rigid, his strange humming. And his anger at the gondolier? The man was only asking if he’d like to go out again.
    At first, he’d noticed her new dress, her effort to look attractive for him, but then she seemed to vanish for him, and he’d gone tensely into himself.
    The nightgown stuck to her flesh. There was a faint stirring of air from the window, a moment of relief from the heat. She felt a coolness on her arms and thighs, between her breasts and on her stomach.
    “I will accept whatever terms you want,” he’d said at the beginning. “However you wish it to be between us …” There had only been her fear, her shyness. And his eagerness to marry her.
    She wondered again, had he loved another woman before her? He swore that she was the only woman he’d ever loved. But his answers to all such questions were sparse, he volunteered nothing. He’d look into her eyes and smile, telling her without words that she mustn’t ask anymore. He’d never spoken of other women, though he’d talked about the years when he was a young man living in New York with his brother, all the parties and the social life. Had he evermade love before to anyone? This was a question that she’d never dared ask him, even in the intimacy of marriage. In some way, she realized, she didn’t want to know the answer. He was such a fine-looking man, it was impossible to believe that … to believe that he’d been celibate all those years. She knew that young men went to certain women before they married. It was understood. But if he hadn’t gone to those women, if he had never had any relationship with a woman, then what did that mean? Did that mean there was something wrong with him? That he wasn’t … “natural”? He’d been silent about all that. The “terms” of their marriage … there’d been no understanding between them as to whether the terms were mutable, whether they could change.
    As she lay there in the heat, the perspiration smoothed her skin, softened the dryness of age, made it feel youthful again. Gradually, the quiet and the breeze calmed her and the events of the concert faded from her mind. She was here in this magnificent and sensual city, in this palace.
    And she remembered being young, the summer night, outside in the darkness the sound of crickets and cicadas, the desire to be touched. Here in the humid Venetian night those feelings that she’d almost forgotten were revived, feelings that had been taken from her by the long months of George’s illness, by the urgency of caring for him, by the blow of his death, and by her own age, exhaustion, and illness.
    Within this body, there’d once been such a need for love. Before George, the men to whom she’d revealed that pent-up yearning had been so surprised to discover it.

PART II
In a Dark Wood

Chapter 6

    C harles Bray was the first. She was twenty-one when she and her father moved to Coventry. She’d been torn by the roots from everything she’d ever known. Isaac was married, Chrissey too.
    Her father had taken a lease on a new house, Bird Grove, on Foleshill Road. It was white stucco, semidetached, on a hill above the squalor of Coventry, set amongst fields and meadows. “This lease will send me to the poorhouse,” he said, “but