Sorry it has been awhile. I was struggling with this chapter which didn't want to behave (with part of it that is now gone inspiring the second chapter of "Master of Pemberly, Servant of God" which I posted this morning). Much of my remaining draft has way too much summary and not nearly enough in scene, so I am working on fixing that now.
Chapter 32
Unlike Horace with his doubts about his wife Jane, Leonard was very happy to be married to his wife. He was certain he had made the wisest decision of his life in marrying Joanna, though he still was uncertain about how it had all come about. He could not really understand how he came to be married to her or how he deserved to be this happy.
He wished to think he was clever or that his conversation had made Joanna consider him further but did not see much in that which should be pleasing to a woman. He was neither handsome, nor rich, nor important. And he had been timid and diffident. It had been Joanna who had acted, who had confronted him, who had sought him out.
Why? That question haunted him. Why did she make him speak? Why did she wish it? Why would she leave behind her place in her husband's home for a decidedly reduced circumstance living among those she did not know? The only way it was possible is if the love she bore for him made all those sacrifices acceptable, let her see him with different eyes; but why did she love him?
Leonard knew that Joanna loved him and also desired him but did not really understand it. He knew all the deficits of his body. Both those that his life at sea and life as the master of an estate had wrought, but also those caused by time, the constant pull downward toward the grave. He saw nothing in his appearance that would attract a woman worthy of attracting.
Perhaps she missed the physical act which men could find outside of wedlock, but women could not if they were to remain respectable. However, he also had a sense that women did not need such things as much as men. But if it was truly all about that, why was she content with him regardless of whether he could perform? And eager to spend time with him in any capacity?
While the brief interlude of the first few days of their marriage provided much satisfaction for them both, Leonard found that after this initial period his desires and the capacity of his body did not match up as well as he would have liked. Joanna did not act as Leonard feared she might the first time that he wilted and could not finish what they had started. Instead, she was very understanding of the frailties of his age and did not seem unduly dismayed.
It undoubtedly helped that given all he had learned from his son, Leonard knew ways to please Joanna even if he was not up for the final act. Additionally, Joanna was not shy about telling him what she wanted, and he was ever eager to please her. But Leonard had the sense that even if he had rolled over and fallen asleep, she would simply snuggle close to him and do the same.
If Leonard had been asked by his son (the only one to whom he might have revealed his secret feelings), he would have said he was at least half in love with Joanna before he knew how she felt about him. He would have also said that after that first kiss when he proposed, he knew that he loved her. Yet, this love was mixed with physical desire and the pleasure of knowing she loved and likewise desired him (despite his looks). However, he also found that as time went on, the loving feelings toward Joanna only continued to grow.
The love he bore for Joanna was like nothing he could have imagined. Yes, he had grown to love his wife Elizabeth, but the love he had for her was gentle, affectionate, more subtle. It was love, he was sure of it, but the quality of his love for Joanna was overwhelming by comparison and there seemed to be no limits to how it could and was growing.
Leonard had loved his parents and his brothers, he loved his son, too. But this familial love was different also.
Leonard was sad when each of his family members had died. He had grieved; he remembered it all too vividly. He suffered especially when Elizabeth had passed; he felt life at Longbourn afterwards was only about duty and protecting his family's legacy for Horace. However, he never thought he would die from the grief of losing Elizabeth or wish to end his life from her absence. Her death mostly made him lonely and long to be elsewhere.
The sea had beckoned most powerfully then. It was as if he were a fish on a fishing line, being hauled in; though the fish might think it could escape, its capture was nearly inevitable, especially when the fish gave up fighting and let itself be brought closer and finally netted. He had known that he would return to the sea, though the exact moment that this would happen was unknown.
But then he had rebelled, struggled, fought. First there had been his attraction to Miss Gardiner and the idea of a return to physical satisfaction and earning the envy of other men. When he gave up all hope of her, he was then certain his fate would be once again the sea. However, Horace had impeded him with his promise to delay. During this time, he had cast his eyes round and they had landed firmly on Joanna. Though he felt hesitant, diffident, unsure, still he wanted to be with her.
When he married Joanna, he felt he was giving up the sea forever and yet, still it called to him. He felt its inexorable pull still. He had not escaped the hook, though the man reeling him in had tired and yet might let him break the line or the hook might rip from his mouth.
Leonard found that his love for Joanna had a completely different quality than that of his love for his first wife. He could imagine being struck down if Joanna died, or wishing to die himself. Even the thought of it, made him feel ill.
He had a certainty, almost a premonition, that if something happened to Joanna, he would be in the first port, begging the captain of a mere sloop hardly fit for hauling goods, to employ him as a common seaman. He would work tirelessly while the waves crashed and a storm threatened to overturn the craft and then at the height of a storm he would either have a sudden attack, his heart stop and die on the deck, to later be commended to the deep, or he would be swept overboard, make no struggle to remain at the surface and let the sea sweep into his throat and pull him below the waves to where the water was still, inky and in allowing death to take him he would have a final relief to his pain.
One night when they were in bed together, facing each other, the room lit by a single bedside candle, Leonard gave his wife a light kiss before asking her rhetorically, "Oh Joanna, how is it that I can love you so intensely, that how I feel is so much more than I ever felt for my first wife, though I lived with her far longer and am sure that I did come to love her?"
She answered him indirectly. "Leonard, I too, have wondered how I can love you as I do. I know I came to love my husband. I begged him not to leave me; I begged God to spare him. All I wanted was to stay being his wife. But he did die, and the years passed and then though you had always been around, I finally saw you with new eyes. What I feel for you is more, more intense, more amazing, more sacred. I do not understand it myself."
He added, "And words are inadequate to explain it. I wonder how I could go through all my life as it was before without your love and mine toward you."
She answered, "Poets have tried to write about it."
He nodded. He was not a literary man; he did not read poetry as his son did. He wondered if they had found a way to express what his words lacked.
She added, "But nothing I have read can capture it."
He noted, "I have noticed that anytime I enter a room where you are, your eyes find me and without fail there is always a small smile would gracing your lips."
She smiled back at him then, with an unseemly full grin, the white of her teeth shining in the dimness. "You must notice me, as your eyes are always seeking me out first. You, too, smile every time you see me."
"The love I have for you, it is so intense and overwhelming. I wonder how I can possibly deserve you." His voice trembled a bit on the final words, from the emotion he was feeling. "I had long ago given up all hope of loving and being loved so deeply."
"I don't think it is a matter of deserving it but being blessed with it." She touched his face back so tenderly, stroking along his scar and then down his face.
Leonard caught her hand in his as it left his face. He brought her hand to his lips so he could kiss it. Then he could not resist imparting a row of kisses along her wrist, arm, shoulder and neck until he finally alighted on her lips. They softly kissed, with no urgency.
When the kiss finally ended, he added, "Well, I don't deserve to be blessed with it, then, I have seen all you have given up for me. Your home, your status, everything that was familiar. You try so hard to give us a happy home. I have seen your efforts in trying to help with Jane, to teach her what she should know, to shore up her marriage to my son. Do you know that it is my fault that Horace is saddled with her?" Leonard then shared how Jane came to be married to Horace.
Joanna was sympathetic and did not condemn him as he felt he deserved to be condemned. She told him, "It may be selfish of me, but I am so glad you did not marry Jane."
He smiled then, a genuine happy smile, then impulsively added, "But perhaps Horace would had taken note of you and asked you to be his bride."
Joanna shook her head in negation, "Horace is a fine young man to be sure, but I would not be happy to be married to him. It is you I fit with; you I wish to be with."
They kissed a little more and then Joanna blew out the candle. They held each other for a long time, until finally they parted a little and then drifted off to sleep.
As they slept, Leonard dreamed of the sea again. These dreams were common, always the rolling deck beneath him (whether beneath the sky or beneath other decks), sometimes a storm, sometimes relative calm, sometimes routine tasks and sometimes an attempt to take another ship or defending his own. He often saw his crewmates from long ago but at times was working with sailors that were unknown to him.
This time it was different, however, as Joanna was there, plumper than usual, sitting in a tiny cabin with some sewing. She was making what looked like a gown, but it was far too small for her.
When Leonard awoke, he understood what Joanna had been making in the dream. It was a gown for a baby. Joanna and he had never talked of children. He knew she wished for them, had seen the longing on her face at times when she held one of Jane's daughters. Leonard knew that his wife Elizabeth had always longed for more children and he wondered how much worse it must be to never have any at all.
His mind was half occupied with this thought while another part of him was simply feeling how the sea was calling to him again. Its call had never fully been silenced, but since his marriage it had been muffled by his affection and delight in his wife. Being parted from her would be far too high of a cost.
Joanna awoke only minutes after Leonard did. He asked her, "May I tell you about my dream." She consented and he discussed the images he had seen and added, "When I awoke and realized you were sewing a gown for our child, I was a bit disappointed that there was in truth no child and that we were not aboard a ship."
"I wish your dream had been true," she told him honestly. "I would gladly sail with you and birth your child even if it be in a foreign port. However, I know both things or even one, are most unlikely."
After they dressed for the day, Leonard tried to go about his business and renew his efforts to ignore his favorite painting so that he could once again tamp down on his desire for sailing and the sea. He resolved to walk past the painting without giving it more than a glance. He had stared at it so often that it was already firmly affixed in his mind, easily called up whenever the present was dull. Before he had a wife, often he fell asleep thinking of it, and aspects of it invaded his dreams.
Later that day, though, Leonard found Joanna standing before the painting, eyes fixed upon it. When she heard his step, she turned her face and smiled at him, but then her face snapped back to regard the painting, the small boats, the iceberg, the ship.
Joanna heard that same call of the sea herself, but it differed in that it was all imagining. The tales she had told Leonard of that childhood desire still bloomed in her, stoked by all the stories Leonard had related to his early life aboard a ship. The painting, which Leonard had described to her before she ever beheld it, drew her in. But while she still longed to have the experience of being aboard a ship of exploration, she knew it was not particularly realistic, even less so now than before. After all, were not all the sailors in the painting men? A woman was not intended for such a life; it was not in her nature.
Then Leonard was beside her, placing an arm around her. Together they stared at the painting. "I wish we could go," he told her.
"It perhaps is just as well," she told him, "Horace and Jane, and their children, need us here." Still, they stayed and stared at the painting for quite a long time together.