Just a really really short piece because I haven't written Richobel for so long and I miss them.
He knows he shouldn't think of her in this way; the words he uses in his mind are beneath the dignity of a woman like Isobel Crawley. A man like him is, altogether, beneath the dignity of a woman like Isobel; she deserves better and he knows it. She should have married Lord Merton, there was a man who was equal to her, who could have given her everything he deserved. He could have given her far more than he ever could.
That's not to say that Richard Clarkson is not emphatically glad that Isobel Crawley did not marry Lord Merton. No more is it to say that he's not emphatically glad that soon after she decided against marrying his Lordship, she arrived on his own doorsteps, with such a look on her face as he had never seen before. Not altogether different from the look she had worn when they had heard that war had broken out, or that Matthew was gone- such a bemused look of loss that she could not as yet wrap her mind around, an incredulity as to how things could have gone so wrongly so rapidly. Or that when he offered her his hand, without thinking about it or knowing why, to help her across the threshold, she took it and held on tightly. Or that within the half hour they were lovers, at last.
He doesn't know if she loved Lord Merton. He hasn't asked her, but he knows the loss of him, the way she was made to part from him destabilised her deeply. He knows he loves her, that he's always loved her, and that is all that matters. He hopes that she can love him. It is quite amazing to him that he is able to have such a-…. non-verbal (because they certainly not silent) relationship with Isobel Crawley, who always had so much to say for herself. He doesn't tell her that he loves her either, he doesn't know if that's what she wants to hear. But he tries his utmost to show her.
They say so little, but they are together so much. They make love with a frequency he is amazed either of them is still capable of, but which delights him nonetheless. Everything about it delights him. He wanted to think that all she'd gone through over the recent years- all the change- had finally changed her, but when she makes love he realises how emphatically that is not true. She is still passionate, she can still- he can barely believe it when the word rolls into his mind, still less when it trips off his tongue as she rides him- fuck him like a woman who truly knows what it means to be alive. She hasn't changed. So much about her is still the same.
And that is why he believes her, he thanks the god he barely knows how to believe in anymore, when she whispers breathlessly to him; "Richard, I love you."
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