Work Text:
Marianne's engagement, like her affection for the colonel, had come on slowly. Yet, for all that it was slow, it was also inexorable, an inevitability. Marianne found she liked the feeling of fate; it had something of the romance and tragic destiny of the stories of her youth, but tempered by her more cultivated acquaintance with the world. She felt steadfast and contented as she slid from girlhood to womanhood, from daughter to wife.
Elinor, preceding her sister into the married state, was able to furnish Marianne with some coded advice on the eve of the wedding which disturbed Marianne's tranquility at the eleventh hour, like ripples on still water.
"But will he really want… all that?"
Marianne recognised now, with the worldliness of her nineteen years, that a gentleman past thirty-five was not decrepit nor even necessarily past his prime. Yet reason would not allow her to consider him a young man either, nor possessing a young man's energy, even if his flannel waistcoat now conjured only affection for him rather than scorn.
"Oh, I dare say." Elinor's mouth opened again as though she had more to add, but she closed it as she somehow flushed redder.
"What?" asked Marianne. "What aren't you telling me?"
But Elinor would say little more and retired for the night, leaving Marianne intrigued and with her imagination alight.
Marianne was not repulsed by the idea of the marital act, in the delicate terms in which Elinor had described it. It did not even shock her. The idea of some greater bodily intimacy made her breath catch in her throat when she thought of it while she was alone; there was a teeming in her blood, an anticipation. She had known the touch of Willoughby's hand on hers, felt it as something like the sparks from a tinderbox. When the colonel took her hand, as he had done on occasion during their engagement, there was not that spark but more of a low warmth, like hot coals stored under ashes through a cold night.
It was a feeling that promised steadiness rather than flame, and she was surprised to find how much reassurance, even contentment, lay in that quiet flicker between them.
When the wedding night came, Marianne found herself briefly alone in the best rooms of a fine coaching inn on the road to London. The fire was laid and burning well in a narrow iron grate surrounded by tile, its amber warmth turning the pale wallpaper the colour of honey. Shadows swayed in the room behind her, rhythmic like breathing, and the sharp scent of clean linen cut through the faint aroma of wood smoke and fresh kindling.
Beside her on the table was a bottle of wine and a plate of fruit. She poured. As she tasted, she recognised the wine at once: something familiar, something she had enjoyed at the table at Delaford. She knew little about wine, but she knew she liked this. The fruit, too, was familiar: a selection of plump, ripe figs, the pale veins in the purple-brown skin almost invisible by firelight. They, too, were something she had praised at Delaford, when she had tasted them for the first time last summer.
It was many hours since the wedding breakfast and she broke the fruit's delicate skin with her fingers, revealing the deep rose flesh within. It yielded easily and her eyes closed as she turned over the flavours on her tongue: crushed green leaves and sweet summer air, like seeded sunshine.
They must have been picked that very morning, and required such care to transport such a distance.
And such a distance it had been, from Barton Cottage to this room and this hour in these circumstances. Marianne looked into the fire and thought back to the year or more that had passed since she had last been to London.
After Cleveland, she had heard her mother and Elinor discussing how her hand would be a fine reward for the colonel's kindness and solicitude to their family, for his being a good man who had walked a hard path with honour. But Marianne, then and now, was determined to be more than reward for qualities every gentleman should cultivate, and had resented it. Yet she could see the worth in that kindness when it was turned on her. She could see the sense in it.
Marianne was not reward for gentlemanly behaviour. She would marry only for love, with genuine regard; how could she permit any other course? And she had thought that if she could not find so deep an attachment as to Willoughby, then she would simply not marry. She did not need to be practical yet, at barely eighteen. If she thought of how much had happened in the year past, then it did not feel as though the path she walked might not branch in some unforeseen way in that next year or the one after that.
Time had passed. She had heard, and then she had seen, the depth of emotion in Colonel Brandon. Her mother had confided something of that terrible journey from Barton to Cleveland when they had feared for her life. That had been enough to open her curiosity. Elinor had told her of the duel with Willoughby, which opened the crack in Marianne's heart just enough to allow room for another to creep in and any remaining poison to seep out.
She might never have noticed before, but now she noticed herself studying the colonel, looking for the minutiae. She saw him feel as well as hear music when she glanced up from the sheets he brought her. She induced him to read to her and saw words move him, and in turn he moved her with his voice.
She saw strong feelings ripple through him like the current of a wide river, strongly but silently expressed, yet never overcoming him. She caught herself admiring him and studied the feeling. She regretted her harshness to him of years past. She cultivated generosity of her own in his image, of mind and spirit. When she looked, she may not have found genius but she found a worthy mind at work. He had spirit, she saw now, but it was bruised by long disappointment. His voice certainly had expression when he read poetry.
She found herself lying awake at night, cold and alone now with Elinor gone to Delaford as Mrs. Ferrars, contemplating the differences between the different words and trying to match their definitions to the quiet, heavy thump of her heart in the dark.
Regard, attachment, love. Affection, tenderness, warmth.
Which did she feel?
When, in time, he had made her an offer, there was such fervour in his countenance and the trembling of his fingers, belying his steady voice and measured words, that her inability to precisely define her own affections signified little. Marianne had accepted him warmly and with pleasure, and then their neighbours pressed in with their feelings at such volume that Marianne could hardly hear her own.
With no material obstacles to marriage — she had long known about the five sitting rooms on the ground floor at Delaford, or the colonel's two thousand a year — the engagement had lasted only a few short weeks, in which Marianne was drenched daily in the gushing delight of their friends and neighbours. For all that she had been — and was — determined not to be moved by consideration of anyone's feelings but her own and those she truly loved, she enjoyed the approbation. She had also been pleased to discover the colonel on that short list.
They married at last, the ecstasies of their friends and neighbours reached a crescendo, and then the carriage door shut on the cacophony and plunged them into silence on the road to London.
Marianne was not sure which of them could claim to have been most reserved. They had spoken very little on their journey, although she must concede that neither had done much to draw the other out. She was certainly nervous, but so was he. She had watched his hands, the way he would lace his fingers together when he caught himself in unconscious movement.
No, it was not accurate to say that she was nervous. There was no apprehension but the rational kind, no fear or distress. Rather, she was excited and intrigued and eager to begin this new life, and grieved little that was irrevocably left behind.
Her husband joined her in their room before she had finished the fruit, and she offered him the final piece. As he took it from her fingers, he captured them and pressed her hand to his heart. She felt its thunder, and it called her own to gallop alongside.
How did one speak to a husband? In much the same way as one spoke to any intimate, she supposed, at least at the start. Gentlemen could not be so very strange to speak to alone. She had never paid so much attention as Elinor to the cultivation of impeccable manners and the formulae of precisely what one must say in a situation. As such, freed from any restriction on that score and with no rubric to contain her, she said:
"May I call you Christopher, when we are alone?"
His stillness made her think she had somehow done wrong, but then he lifted her hand and pressed it to his lips, and she found herself frozen. Her ears were ringing; she did not hear his murmur, receiving only the impression of warm assent.
He was almost handsome in his scarlet uniform. Marianne watched, breath caught in her throat, as he removed the outer layers, sword and hat and coat. The click of scabbard against the stone floor thundered in her ears with the rushing blood, the anticipation of something she could not name or articulate. Her fingers went to her bare neck and felt the throb of her pulse there, and it sped as his gaze drifted from her eyes to the hand at her throat and then lower and lower.
Marianne wondered if she was supposed to feel beautiful.
She had always been conscious of her hair, her expression, her figure, her attire, but this was something greater: elemental, fundamental. She wasn't thinking about the curl in her hair or the drape of her dress when he looked at her like that. Her skin burned; she felt heat rise all over, far beyond the provocation of the little fireplace.
She didn't know what to do.
It must have been written on her face, because when his eyes returned to hers he stepped closer.
It all moved so quickly then. Marianne would not be able to remember everything later; only flashes. She was turned around. She remembered the icy cold of carved wood under her fingers as she gripped the post while the colonel untied the ribbons on the back of the gown and her outer layer began to slip down her arms.
In her ear, he murmured, "Will you take down your hair, Marianne?"
The heat of the modest fire only extended so far, and Marianne shivered as she obeyed despite the heat singing under her skin. The use of her Christian name had sent a thrill from her heart to her toes. Her fingers shook and she dropped as many pins as she retained, but she dared not stoop to fetch them. She stood, four pins in one hand with the unusual blossom of loose curls falling down her back, facing away from the light and her husband, rooted in the moment.
Perhaps husbands knew what to do, as it seemed wives did not. Marianne should have asked Elinor that: how would she come to know what to do? But how could she have anticipated this? This breathlessness, this invisible grip on her insides that made everything so loud inside her mind?
One large hand rested on her waist, warm even through her layers, and drifted down to her hip; she could feel each fingertip over the pattern on her gown and the boning of her stays. Scorching fingers brushed her curls aside and she felt lips touch her neck from behind. She made a noise that she could not define, part squeak and part gasp, and then her husband made a sound of his own against her shoulder that felt like a lightning strike.
What was she supposed to feel? She had no frame of reference. No work of literature had ever prepared her for the bombardment of sensations, for fervour and rapture beyond her capacity to name each perception.
It was beyond her to maintain her composure at such a moment. She must give way to sensibility, even to sensuality. This was no arena for thinking; here, she could only feel.
Her heart and her body knew, even when her mind did not.
She turned and let the outer layer of her gown drop to the floor, then removed her petticoat and her stays until all that remained was chemise and stockings. There was a nightgown somewhere that had been intended for her wedding night, but she did not care to locate it. She wrapped her bare arms around the colonel's — Christopher's — neck and pressed her lips to his; this was nothing like the kiss that crowned the wedding service, or even like the one kiss they had shared during their engagement that had occupied her night-time curiosities for days. It felt right and she let instinct guide her, and when she drew that lightning sound from him again she was vindicated and the dregs of her shyness and modesty dropped away.
It was cooler away from the fire and Marianne shivered as the skin on her arms puckered into gooseflesh. Each touch of her husband's hands scorched her as they ran over the sides of her chemise and she imagined feeling his heart thundering in tandem with hers, their chests pressed together with so few thin layers.
Her very soul was febrile as she was walked backwards towards the bed, a strange echo of dancing at a ball, being led by one's partner and by instinctive knowledge, the strings and percussion of two hearts setting the rhythm.
And there she remained, on the precipice of something unknowable, as she learned her new husband and the nature of marriage with hands and lips, lying entwined, side by side on the cold sheets of the wide bed.
She yearned for something more, but she had no conception what. Blood was pooling in parts of her to which she had given little thought before this never-ending moment, and she found relief only when she pressed them against him, chasing a rhythm of her own, her voice crooning some primal song.
No, this was not right. This was not all. Elinor had told her so. Marianne had no capacity for complex thoughts. Only feelings, only instinct.
She grasped Christopher's hand, pressed it against the part of herself that sang with want, crying out like she was holding down the sustain pedal of her pianoforte to let the chords ring. But that was not the climax of the piece; she found herself frantic for the crescendo. What was the matter? She was certain it was not want of knowledge on her husband's part that was frustrating this. But what?
She spoke without thought. "Christopher? I need more."
His eyes, which had been closed, snapped open. Marianne fell into them. How could she ever have missed their depths, the way his soul seemed to call to hers from the bottom of a great abyss? She inhaled unsteadily, opened her mouth to speak again — but now, as he removed her chemise and lay her back, there were no words at all.
After, covered in a fine sweat and trying to catch her breath, she looked up at the beams of the four-poster bed and breathed deeply. The smell of beeswax lingered in the air as the final candles were snuffed and the room was illuminated only by firelight, narrowing her world to the bed as shadows swallowed the wider room. Only the two of them remained in the world; even thoughts of others had been banished.
How foolish she had been, to disbelieve in second attachments. Yet her youthful notion that there were some feelings that defied restraint, where there was no disgrace in unreserve, was vindicated. She need have no reserve here. The past Marianne, unbruised, unblemished and righteous, blazed back in the dark to lie alongside her steadier self.
To love is to burn, and Marianne gave herself entirely to the conflagration.