Devil in Spring

A high-waxing wave rushed at Pandora from behind, impelling her against him. Gabriel steadied her, his hands clamping at her waist. When the water had retreated, he put a hand at the small of her back and guided her back toward the shore, where his sisters were sitting.

“A wife trades her independence in return for a husband’s protection and support,” he said, his mind bristling with questions and arguments. “That’s the marriage bargain.”

“I think it would be foolish—no, stupid—of me to agree to bargain in which I would be worse off after I agreed to it.”

“How could you be worse off? There’s precious little freedom in long work hours and endless worry over profits and expenses. As my wife, you’ll live in security and comfort. I’ll settle a fortune on you, to spend any way you wish. You’ll have your own carriage and driver, and a house full of servants to do your bidding. You’ll have a position in society that any woman would envy. Don’t lose sight of all that by focusing on technicalities.”

“If it were your legal rights at stake,” Pandora said, “you wouldn’t dismiss them as technicalities.”

“But you’re a woman.”

“And therefore inferior?”

“No,” Gabriel said swiftly. He had been raised to respect the intelligence of women, in a household where his mother’s authority was heeded no less than his father’s. “Any man who chooses to believe women’s minds are inferior is underestimating them at his own peril. However, nature imposes certain domestic roles by making the wife the bearer of children. That being said, no man has the right to run his marriage as a dictatorship.”

“But he does. According to the law, a husband can behave any way he likes.”

“Any decent man treats his wife as a partner, as is the case with my own parents.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Pandora said. “But that’s the spirit of their marriage, not the legal reality. If your father decided to treat your mother unfairly, no one could stop him.”

He felt a tiny muscle in his jaw twitch irritably. “I would stop him, damn it.”

“But why must her welfare be left to his or your mercy? Why can’t she have the right to decide how she should be treated?”

Gabriel wanted to argue with Pandora’s position, and point out the rigidity and impracticality of her argument. It was also on the tip of his tongue to ask her why millions of other women had willingly agreed to the marital union she found so offensive.

But he couldn’t. As much as he hated to admit it . . . her logic was sound.

“You’re . . . not entirely wrong,” he forced himself to say, nearly choking on the words. “Regardless of the law, however, it all comes down to a matter of trust.”

“But you’re saying I should trust a man with the lifelong power to make all my decisions the way I would wish them to be made, when I would rather make them for myself.” With a touch of honest bewilderment, Pandora asked, “Why would I do that?”

“Because marriage is more than a legal arrangement. It’s about companionship, security, desire, love. Are none of those things important to you?”

“They are,” Pandora said, her gaze falling to the ground before them. “Which is why I could never feel them for a man if I were his property.”

Well, hell.

Her objections to marriage went far deeper than Gabriel could have imagined. He’d assumed she was a nonconformist. She was a bloody insurrectionist.

They had almost reached his sisters, who were sitting together while Ivo and Justin had gone to fill their pails with more wet sand.

“What are you talking about?” Seraphina asked Gabriel.

“Something private,” he said curtly.

Phoebe leaned toward Seraphina and said sotto voce, “I think our brother may be having a moment of enlightenment.”

“Is he?” Seraphina regarded Gabriel as if he were a particularly thrilling form of wildlife trying to peck out of its shell.

Gabriel gave them both a sardonic glance before returning his attention to Pandora’s mutinous face. He touched her elbow lightly and drew her aside for a last word. “I’ll find out what the legal options are,” he muttered. “There may be some loophole that would allow a married woman to own a business without having it held in trust or controlled by her husband.”

To his annoyance, Pandora didn’t appear impressed in the least, nor did she seem to recognize the enormity of the concession. “There isn’t,” she said flatly. “But even if there were, I’d still be worse off than if I’d never married at all.”

For the next hour, the subject of Pandora’s board game business was discarded as the group worked on the sandcastle. They paused at intervals to drink thirstily from jugs of cold water and lemonade that had been sent down from the house. Pandora threw herself into the project with enthusiasm, consulting with Justin, who had decided the castle must have a moat, square corner towers, a front gatehouse with a drawbridge, and battlement walls from which the occupants could drop scalding water or molten tar onto the advancing enemy.

Gabriel, who’d been instructed to dig the moat, stole frequent glances at Pandora, who had enough energy for ten people. Her face glowed beneath her battered straw hat, which she had managed to pry away from Ajax. She was sweaty and covered with sand, a few escaped locks of hair trailing over her neck and back. She played with the unselfconscious ease of a child, this woman of radical thoughts and ambitions. She was beautiful. Complex. Frustrating. He’d never met a woman who was so wholly and resolutely herself.