Natural Selection

Her husband has not looked at her in forty minutes.

Lydia knows because she has been keeping track, a small exercise to occupy a mind that has already exhausted the limited entertainment of the carriage’s interior. The worn velvet of the seats. The way the light comes through the small windows in shifting patches as the vehicle sways. The new and still strange sights of Scottish countryside, which grows steadily more foreign with each mile, grey stone breaking through grey-green hills, the land opening into something vast and unconcerned with human presence.

Henry sits across from her with a book she cannot see the title of. She does not think he is actually reading it. His eyes do not move across the page the way eyes do when they are absorbing text. But he makes a performance of reading, which means he is making a performance of not speaking to her, which means she has somehow already failed at something she has not yet had the opportunity to attempt.

The silence has weight. It presses against her like the confines of the carriage itself.

She clears her throat softly. “How much further do you think?”

Henry’s eyes flicker up from the page, settle somewhere near her shoulder, then return to the book. “Some hours yet.”

The answer is less information than dismissal. But it is an answer, which means the door is not entirely closed. Lydia adjusts her skirts—new, stiff, chosen by her mother and paid for by Henry’s father through some arrangement she was not privy to—and tries again.

“I confess I’ve never been this far north. It’s very beautiful. Different from home.”

Home. The word sits strangely in her mouth. She has not had a home in any real sense since her father told her about the marriage agreement. The house she grew up in stopped being hers the moment she knew she was leaving it.

Henry grunts. Neither agreement, nor quite dismissal. Something worse, disinterest made audible.

The countryside slides past the window. They have not seen another dwelling in twenty minutes. The road is barely a road anymore, more a suggestion of one, and the hills on either side feel less like landscape and more like walls. She wonders if she could find her way back if she needed to. She wonders if anyone would come looking if she tried.

“What is Aldermere like?” She keeps her voice light, conversational. A reasonable question from a woman traveling to her new home. “Your letters mentioned the library. I look forward to— ”

“It’s a house.” Henry does not look up this time.

“Yes, of course. I only meant— ”

“You’ll see it soon enough.”

The rebuff is gentle in its delivery but absolute in its meaning. She should stop. She knows she should stop. But there is something in her, the thing her mother called stubborn and her father called difficult and she has always privately thought of as simply herself, that will not let silence be the final state of things.

She waits five minutes by her internal count. Then, “I brought several books of my own. I thought perhaps we might—”

“Lydia.” Her name in his mouth sounds like a reprimand. He closes his book with a snap that makes her flinch. “A wife is not required to be a conversationalist.”

The words land with the precision of something aimed. She feels her face go hot.

“I’m only trying—”

“I know what you’re trying.” He looks at her now, finally, and she almost wishes he hadn’t. His eyes are cold in a way that has nothing to do with the Scottish winter pressing against the carriage walls. “You’re trying to be impressive. Clever. It’s tiresome.”

Tiresome. The word finds something soft in her and presses down hard. Every governess who told her to ask fewer questions. Every potential suitor who smiled tightly when she expressed an opinion. Every warning from her mother that men do not like women who think they are more intelligent than they are. She had thought, hoped, perhaps foolishly, that a man who came from a house with a library might be different.

“I apologize.” Her voice comes out smaller than she intends. She hates the smallness but cannot seem to prevent it. “I’m only trying to be a good wife. I know this isn’t… I know we didn’t choose this, but I thought we might at least—”

She stops. She was going to say be companions. The words stick in her throat because his expression has already told her what he thinks of that possibility.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. The apology tastes like giving up.

Henry’s laugh is short and entirely without humour. “A good wife.” He leans back against the seat, regarding her in a way that makes her skin prickle. “Would you like to be a good wife, Lydia?”

Something in his tone makes the question not a question. She nods anyway, wary now, trying to read what he wants from her and coming up empty.

“Then make yourself useful.”

She blinks. “I… what would you like me to—”

He doesn’t explain. His hand reaches across the small space between them and finds her wrist. The grip is firm enough to be unambiguous. “Come here.”

“I don’t understand—”

But she does. Somewhere underneath the incomprehension, underneath the part of her that is still trying to parse his meaning as something domestic or practical or anything other than what it is, she understands perfectly.

He pulls her from her seat.

The movement is not violent exactly but it is utterly without gentleness. She is a thing to be repositioned, an object that has been sitting in the wrong place and must be corrected. Her knees find the floor of the carriage before her mind catches up to what is happening. The floor is hard and moving, the carriage swaying with the motion of the road, and the light through the small window falls across her in a way that feels exposing even though no one outside could possibly see in.

Henry’s hand moves to his trousers.

She understands now. What husbands expect. What wives provide. She has read enough to know, in the abstract, what this life would contain. But reading and experiencing are different territories entirely, and she is in the latter now with no map.

“You may begin,” he says, as though she is a servant being given instruction in some household task.

Her hands shake. She does not know what to do. The theoretical knowledge she has is suddenly utterly useless.

“I’ve never—” she starts, and hates the tremor in her voice, and hates that she has to admit ignorance about this, about anything.

Henry’s hand finds her hair. Not gently. His impatience is tangible. “Then learn.”

What follows is not the worst thing. She will learn later what the worst thing is. But it is the first thing, which carries its own particular weight. The carriage rocks beneath her. The road continues. Her knees ache against the floor. His hand in her hair is not tender, not guiding, it is controlling, correcting, treating her mouth as an instrument he is teaching to perform a specific function.

She retreats.

Not physically. Physically she is entirely, inescapably present. She feels the floor beneath her knees, the taste she has no context for, the ache in her jaw, his hand tugging when she does something wrong. But some other part of her, the part that thinks and observes and tries to make sense of everything, steps back slightly. Just enough to manage. She watches herself from a small distance and files what she learns under things that will be required now. She notes his preferences. She adapts her technique based on his sounds and his grip. She becomes, with disturbing efficiency, competent at something she did not know how to do ten minutes ago.

She has always been good at learning.

When it is finished, when he arranges himself again with the casual indifference of a man who has solved a minor inconvenience, she remains on the floor for a moment too long. Her knees hurt. Her throat hurts.

“Back to your seat,” he says, already returning to his book.

She rises with as much dignity as she can assemble, which is not quite enough. Her new dress is wrinkled. She can feel that her face is flushed and her hair has come partially loose from its pins. She looks, probably, like exactly what she is.

She sits and does not look at him. She looks instead out the window at the landscape that continues its relentless indifference. The hills have grown even larger. The sky has gone grey in a way that suggests snow is somewhere close.

The carriage rounds a curve and there, in the distance, at the end of a long road it appears. Aldermere.

She sees it through the bare branches of trees that are looking lifeless in winter. Stone. Dark stone. More imposing than welcoming. It sits in its valley like something that has always been there and will always remain, utterly unmoved by the small human dramas that play out within its walls.

Strath Dubh, she remembers from one of Henry’s letters. The locals call it Strath Dubh, though she does not know what that means. Something about valleys, perhaps. She had meant to ask.

She straightens her spine. Smooths her skirts. Tucks the loose strand of hair back into place with fingers that have nearly stopped shaking. She looks at the house growing larger as they approach and she makes a decision so quiet it barely registers as decision at all.

She will survive this.

Whatever this is. Whatever it becomes. She has no alternative and she has never been the sort of person who simply endures. She adapts. She learns. She becomes what is necessary.

The carriage turns up the long drive toward Aldermere’s gates, and Lydia does not look away.