A/N – The chapter title is from a quote by Cicero.

I know that this is a P&P fic., but please remember that this story has a (barely required) M rating, so there will be some adult situations.

I don't have many reviewers but one lovely lady has made the point that some of my dialogue would not be deemed suitable in polite Regency society and she's very, very right. I'm not great at polite conversation even in RL so please try to think of this fic as a Regency version of EastEnders and you'll get the gist.

Disclaimer – All original P&P characters belong to Jane Austen

Chapter 7 – Any Man Can Make Mistakes, But Only An Idiot Persists In His Error

When Charlotte and William returned from dinner at Rosings Park, they immediately went to warm themselves by the sitting room fire. Charlotte wished to talk to her husband in detail about their visit with Lady Catherine but a bleak, sad-eyed William informed her that he wished to read quietly before dinner and proceeded to lock himself away in his study.

Charlotte returned to the sitting room to begin reading a book which Lydia Bennet had given her as a bridal gift. To her surprise the book, Clarissa, was not the expected treatise on how to be a good wife and mother but was instead a truly scandalous novel.

Charlotte knew that she would have to hide the book from her husband, who she was sure would disapprove of the tale of a chaste gentlewoman forced into all manner of unsavoury shenanigans whilst attempting to guard her chastity; but the more Charlotte read the more she found the book titillating in the extreme. She was very glad that she had begun to read whilst alone as her glowing face, wide eyes and unsteady breath were sure to have given away her state of mind.

When Emma came through to announce dinner, she informed Charlotte that William had called through the study door that he was not hungry but that Charlotte should go ahead and eat. Instead of sitting in the dining room alone Charlotte had Emma set her a place with her at the kitchen table. Over dinner she told Emma in very broad stokes of her first impressions of Lady Catherine. Emma commiserated with Charlotte on that lady's poor manners and plied her with more mashed potato to cheer her up.

Charlotte later returned to the sitting room to recommence her reading, but after another few chapters she felt herself become strangely restless and she decided to turn in early after tucking the book underneath the latest project in her embroidery box.

She didn't know how much later it was, but she was awoken by someone climbing onto the bed with her and sliding between the sheets. It was pitch black in the bedroom and she could smell strong drink wafting from her bed-fellow.

"William...,"she began.

"Shush Charlotte, it's only me wife. Shush now." He suddenly lifted her night-shift to her waist and pulled her left knee widely to the side as he positioned himself unsteadily between her legs.

"Hush sweet wife, don't be afraid," he slurred as she felt him lift his own nightshirt and lay on top of her. This was the first time she had been in contact with any naked person let alone a man and the course hair on his legs and nethers was scratchy against her skin. He lay his head in the crook of her neck and kissed it once briefly, his breath hot and wet.

He began to move his hips against her thigh, tentatively at first, but then with more and more speed and force. Charlotte lay on her bed with her eyes and mouth tightly shut and her hands clasped at her sides; the room was quiet except for William's laboured breathing and occasional unintelligible mutterings.

Charlotte felt her husband's organ becoming hard against her leg and startled at this she tried to move away from him. William rose up slightly and grasped her shoulders. Maybe it was because of her shock at the situation but, despite her greater size and strength, he managed to hold her firmly in place.

His breathing and movements under the covers became choppy and after an interminable period of time he gave a great gasping groan and Charlotte felt his completion land on her thigh and belly.

He fell heavily onto her and began to sob loudly. "Oh I am sorry wife. You do not know...you cannot know.. I am a beast...an animal...a inhuman wretch and you do not deserve to be married to a sinner such as I."

Charlotte reached up to stroke his hair which was matted with sweat. "There, there husband. Do not take on so. You have not harmed me and it was not such a terrible ordeal. Hush now.."

She continued to pet and calm him until she found that he had fallen asleep on top of her. She rolled him gently to the opposite side of the bed and once she was sure that he was sleeping deeply she rose from the bed and finding the wash basin she had utilised earlier that night by touch alone, she took the still damp wash-cloth to clean off her lower body.

She knew from her farmyard knowledge that what had just occurred would not get her with child, but she was unsure as to whether or not William knew this. She would have to think of a way to ascertain his level of comprehension without either embarrassing him or showing herself in a poor light.

He was definitely the worse for drink and she did not like to think that he found her so unappealing that he had to become insensible to have relations with her.

She returned to bed feeling very perturbed. She knew that as a lady she should be outraged or disgusted with his drunken behaviour but she just felt mildly disappointed with the whole event. After reading that salacious book earlier today she was sad that her first foray into the marital niceties was not more...well, not romantic as she was not in the least romantic, but she would have wished for a little of the high passion Lovelace exhibits towards Clarissa.

She sighed. What did she expect; except for being a maiden she wasn't anything like the much admired beauty Clarissa. Then again William was not in any shape or form similar to the dastardly handsome rake that was Lovelace.

Charlotte eventually slept, happily dreaming of being pursued through the empty streets of Meryton by a bare chested lovelorn Lovelace. When she awoke early the next morning William was still asleep next to her, snoring gently, his forehead gathered with worry lines.

She dressed quickly and left him in peace, taking her soiled nightdress to place in the wash whilst not under Emma's watchful eye. Unfortunately Emma had risen even earlier and was sat at the kitchen table nursing her first cup of tea of the day. She watched Charlotte knowingly as she took the dirty linens to the copper in the wash-house.

Even though she was a married woman Charlotte still felt vaguely ashamed, possibly because even a virgin such as she knew that the events of the previous night were not the normal way a man and woman lay together.

There was no-one she could discuss this with - not her dear, saintly mother or the unworldly Elizabeth. She couldn't even bring herself to ask questions of the kindly and no doubt experienced mother who currently sat in her own kitchen. No, Charlotte would have to try to figure out what to do on her own.

The morning passed as usual except for William showing up late for breakfast and returning to bed with a headache after lunch. Charlotte had queried after his health and he could barely look her in the eye as he responded.

He came down for dinner and looked a little brighter, but took himself off to his library immediately after finishing the meal. Charlotte spent another night alone in the sitting room but decided not to take up her book but instead finished off a shirt she was making for a member of the parish. She did not wish to give fuel to any more fervid dreams.

To her shock William turned up in her room in an inebriated state once again and she was woken to undertake the same fumblings as before. This went on night after night for several weeks; Charlotte too tongue tied about the subject to raise it with her husband and William too ashamed to talk to her about his actions.

Eventually Charlotte decided that she had had enough. She found that she missed discoursing of an evening with her kindly husband as he repeatedly avoided her by hiding in his locked study, took himself off to Rosings Park or was too incapacitated by drink to leave his bed.

The days were steadily turning to milder, spring weather and after an interesting discussion with Emma on how her boys were busy in the stockyard with a longhorn bull on loan for breeding from a neighbouring farm, Charlotte believed she had found a way, a rather obtuse way to be sure, of pointing out the error of his ways to her fumbling husband.

Charlotte had discovered the ways of nature from her observations and she hoped that her husband was quick witted enough to do the same. So one bright, warm Saturday afternoon she sat down to luncheon with her husband before he left for his now almost daily visit to see Lady Catherine and made a request of him to visit the farm on his way home from Rosings.

The situation with Lady Catherine was becoming intolerable. They were expected to dine with her sometimes twice a week and although Charlotte found each and every second she spent with that odious woman an excruciatingly horrific experience, she found that she could weather Lady de Bourgh's malicious tongue by following her siblings example and imagining hundreds of horrible tortures for the woman. In some instances these musings delighted her so much she had to stop herself from laughing out loud at the dinner table.

The two favoured topics of Lady Catherine's monologues were how William was a terrible parson who didn't deserve his position and why was Charlotte not yet with child. Charlotte did not want a child with William and would do everything in her power to prevent this from occuring but she could not say this to Lady Catherine. Nor could she say that her having a child would be a physical impossibility as her husband was 'missing the mark'.

Although Charlotte loathed the woman she could not bring herself to lie directly to her face and say that they were actively trying for a babe; therefore until William became competent at what she thought should come naturally to a man, Charlotte could only come up with weaker and weaker platitudes for the great lady.

So on a beautiful cloudless March afternoon Charlotte sent her husband off to the Rosings stockyard, ostensibly to invite George and Lester Kendall to a birthday tea for their mother on their next Sunday afternoon off, but truthfully to learn first hand about the birds and the bees – or in this particular case the bulls and the cows. She prayed that William would prove to be a quick and apt student.