A Loveless Marriage

Chapter 33: Daniel

I was not a monster. I was a man broken by love.

I had spent years dwelling on that moment with Mary, when I had given into the savage nature that all men had deep in their hearts and robbed her of her innocence. It had been a final desperate attempt to bring her back to me and it had failed. I remembered her sobbing pleas more than the act itself. It filled me with shame. I had discovered the only way to separate the shame from the pleasure was to remember that afternoon through a dose of morphine.

In my dreams she was my Mary again, as willing for my embrace as she had once been for my kisses. It was a dream that I knew I had lost.
This was a dream of lust not love, I knew that, but the love I felt for Mary was real.

When I first met her, she was surprisingly serious for a girl of sixteen, perhaps old before her time through caring for her father. There was a kindness and grace that I did not see in the rest of her family; Charles Burdett was avaricious, Lydia Burdett vain and her Cousin Harriet was over-indulged and under-educated. I had never met a girl like Mary before, who both knew Latin and how to make lace. My family, always keen to keep some distance between our more gauche neighbours, universally approved of her.

Not that my family was perfect. My father's gambling was the ruin of us all. From cards to the stock market, we lost everything due to his foolish compulsion. I had not yet turned thirteen when my father told me about the gentleman's agreement to settle his debt. When I came of age I would marry Harriet Burdett and the deeds to our ancestral home would all pass to me. It seemed like nothing at the time, I was too young to think about marriage and Miss Burdett was younger still. I put it out my mind and lived the life of any young gentleman; Eton then Oxford, gained a different kind of education with a married woman and spent a lively London season with debutantes. It was when I returned home from Oxford, I met the Burdett's young ward; Mary Taylor.

It had started with an idle flirtation with a pretty girl in the summertime, but my infatuation quickly took over. Every time I read a book, I took her a copy of the same so we could discuss them at length. I took my sister, Mary and Harriet out for picnics on the lake, just so I could watch Mary dip her ungloved hand in the water. I would dance two dances with Harriet, so Mary would allow me the first and last dance of every ball. I suggested she taught my younger sisters how to make lace, so she would come to our house every week and I had the excuse to escort her home. I wrote her love poems in Latin, so Harriet's prying eyes could not understand them. It was not enough.

We wrote frantic love letters to one another, concealed from the world in the boathouse. I let her tease me, torment me, make a lapdog out of me. I found moments in private to snatch a kiss, to tell her my love for her, to promise her the world. I watched her and I loved her and I saw no-one else. I saved money for a diamond ring. All thoughts of my father's agreement with the Burdetts had left my mind.

Then the first blow came; my father noticed my partiality to Mary and told me in no uncertain terms that there was only one woman I could marry: Harriet. There had been a fierce row, with things said that were best left unsaid. When my mother tried to intervene, my father quickly silenced her. This was a matter for men. I said nothing to Mary but planned an escape for both of us; I could wait until she was twenty-one or we could make a dash to Gretna Green. She would be my freedom, she would be my salvation.

Then it all cracked.

A note came from Mary to say she couldn't marry me and she returned the locket I'd given her for her birthday. It was like the world had stopped. I ran from the boathouse towards the Burdett's house, finding Mary and Harriet playing croquet on the lawn.

"Mary, I need to speak to you alone," I said urgently.

"Anything you want to say to Mary, you can say in front of me," Harriet said.