The first time they meet, he saves her. She wonders what would have become of her if he hadn't come along. Would her head have been split open at the hand of drunken father or at the hand of a drunken husband?
He needs saving too, she understands quickly. Like a drowning man lost at sea, he can't fight the current drawing him under. His tears must taste like seawater, she thinks.
She makes a home for him as best she can. There's nothing she would not do to please him. Anything to warm him up again. She starts to tend the hearth.
He seems to her like the hero of a story, handsome, strong, and noble. So very noble. Like the dashing prince from one of her songs. She watches him then. She knows when his smile reaches his eyes, the way he breathes when he is truly at ease, every inflections of his voice when he is happy.
She's so very young then, more child than woman, a little foundling, run-away from her father's house when she barely escaped the cradle, but sometimes she thinks of his hands, the smell of salt on his skin, the way his hair curl around his face and she feels her heart expand with something she cannot voice.
He loves his cousin's wife. Elizabeth is everything a lady should be, kind, graceful, beautiful. There's something not quite touchable about her, something almost regal about the way she moves.
When Ross looks at Elizabeth, Demelza feels something coil around her heart, something lodge itself in her throat.
"She saved me," he tells her one night they are sitting together by the fire. He is a little drunk and his tongue is looser than it usually is. "Without her memory to sustain me, I do not know if I would have made it through the war."
He smiles at her, a sad fond little smile, the shadow of the fire dancing on his face, and Demelza thinks If she saved you, why were you drowning when I found you.
They marry. Demelza is never quite sure how it happened, but she has become his wife. There are no words for how she feels, only the touch of her hands, the song in her heart.
Like a fish out of water she struggles to fit into his world. If she cannot make him proud to have her for a wife, she can at least not bring him shame.
Elizabeth is lost to him. This they both know, but Demelza is there, always there. She loves him as passionately and tenderly as any woman can love a man, and is that not its own wealth?
She keeps his home, bears his children; she hopes everyday that that is enough. She cannot offer him the perfection he seeks.
Sometimes, when she feels his fingers run through her hair as they lay abed, when she sees the gentle look in his eyes, she almost believes she is enough for him.
"Yes, you are dear to me," he seems to say. She wants to believe he means it as she does.
She is happy in those days. She likes to think he is too.
For a few words of love and some caresses, she puts her entire faith in his hands. In the end, he throws it away as so much dirt without an apology on his mouth or in his eyes.
He speaks of his devotion to another as if to say, "You always knew." She cannot deny the truth of it. She always did know.
So, she dances in the arms of other men and for a while tries to pretend like she is whole, new, and gay, but the music is too loud, the smell of Captain McNeil's skin feels wrong, and her feet hurt as if they are bleeding from a thousand invisible cuts whenever their sole touches the ground. She keeps on smiling.
Being second best was easier when she could pretend like she wasn't.
She learns to live with a fissured heart and bleeding feet. Her heart does not sing as it used to, and her steps are never as light, but life goes on. She adapts as she usually does.
Ross loves her. She knows he means it. He loves her like he loves eating lamb stew by the fire. Easy, comfortable, familiar. He loves Elizabeth like he loves his mines, with an almost brutal tenderness, like a madness in his blood. He smiles and laugh for Demelza, but he burns for Elizabeth.
Her son grows as does her garden. Her husband comes home to her at night. He promises he forever will. She must be content with that.
Somehow, she is not quite so.
No one had ever written her a poem before Hugh. Certainly not her husband. Truthfully, she never thought someone could. Who would write a sonnet about cornflowers when roses bloom so much sweeter?
"My Guinevere," he calls her once and her heart skips a beat. She wonders if that is how Elizabeth feels whenever Ross caresses her name.
She'll never love Hugh the way she loves Ross. She'll never feel her blood sing at the touch of his lips or her eyes burn with the sting of his slight. He can never make her heart feel whole again, but he cannot hurt her and that's plenty enough for her.
He keeps on whispering pretty words in her ears that ring true in a way they never have before and her only fault is that she does not stop him.
His Guinevere.
She feels the sting of the cold water as the waves hit her feet. She'll never dance with the same lighthearted steps, but she'll dance.
Ross kisses Elizabeth. He never tells her. She wonders if she was naïve to believe that his sharing her bed at night meant that he wasn't sharing another's during the day.
Her soul bleeds red once more. "You always knew," it says to her. She did. She lets the numbness envelop her.
Life will go on, she knows. A few new cuts won't change anything. She'll still have a home to tend, children, servants, and a husband to nurture.
But for a few hours, she allows herself the illusion of another path. For a small moment she is not Ross' second choice, not his wife.
She is in another's arms. She touches his smooth skin, sees the goosebumps on his flesh where her fingers trail. His heart beats fast. For her, only for her.
I want him, she thinks, and the realisation is enough to make her pause.
But Hugh looks at her with the same longing she always aches to find in the eyes of her husband and she presses her lips to his. With Hugh, she is perfect. There is no one else in his heart. No one she needs be compared to. Ross vanishes from her thought. There's only Hugh and her.
Her Lancelot.
He kisses her neck, caresses her breast and it stings like she is being washed by the sea. She hears the waves hit the shore, feels the blood rushing through her. The wind howls. She slips away. Under Hugh's caresses, she becomes sea foam.