This fanfic is an adaptation of the Novel of the same name by W. Somerset Maugham. Neither "Inuyasha" nor "The Painted Veil" belong to me
It had been an excellent day: first, Myoga had given him a telegram from the royal society with news of a three hundred pound grant to fund the diversion of clean water into Paibi. Second, Coronel Bankotsu finally became useful for something and managed to convince the bamboo merchant to drop his price by at least 30%, after the man greedily raised it when he saw that the British were eager to buy his wares. Lastly, he had a very enthusiastic lovemaking session with his wife that very same morning, finding out that kissing the small birthmark that she had on her pelvis made her moan with abandon, her heart-shaped mouth mewling in pleasure as his kisses went down to her dark curls and folds.
The memory set his face on fire. Walking briskly back to the convent, he could not help to be surprised at his own audacity, so different from his normally phlegmatic behavior. Having been raised in a traditional Japanese home, he knew little about lovemaking, much less about how to pleasure a woman in bed. It was only in Totosai's shop where he indulged his curiosity, crawling in the loft above the shop, looking at the Shunga wood prints that he had smuggled from Totosai's drawer chest. Young and restless, he wondered about the women in the pictures, faces drawn in ecstasy, legs spread while the men explored, sucked and touched parts that he only had seen in the anatomy courses in the school of Medicine.
Britain had been disappointing in terms of pleasure. Still reeling from their Victorian mores, and adding the suspicion that his Japanese ancestry caused among the locals, he withdrew in himself - and his heart, filled with longing, searched for a soft body to curl with and hide from the ever-present loneliness that surrounded him. When he saw Kagome -oh beautiful Kagome, with her prim green and white beaded dress! - he was enamored at first sight. It was only after they began their wedding preparations, that Sesshomaru realized that he did not know what to do with the pelt of the tiger he had killed. Fretting, and with the same diligence that he applied to everything he did, he poured himself in books, eager to find guidance - only to find encyclopedic treatises that pontificated about hysterical women and the wickedness of their pleasure. And when he first saw the terrified eyes of his wife on his wedding night, he did not know what to believe: the sanctimonious ramblings of western medicine or the graphic drawings of his teenage years. Not knowing what to do, he did the easiest thing and made love to her in darkness.
Seeing the roof on the convent, Sesshomaru wondered if he had not set a shadow on his marriage since the beginning. If there was something that he discovered in the last few weeks, in that his wife was far more complex than he had given her credit for, and to his chagrin, he realized that his reasons for marrying her were as shallow as hers. He liked her beauty and her wit, the way the curve of her bosom gave glimpses of the bounty beneath her clothes - but he knew little about her - and he had not bothered to know her in their almost four years of marriage. It was only in hindsight that Sesshomaru realized that his efforts to educate his wife were nothing but efforts in trying to replicate the easy confidence that his own mother had in domestic affairs, and without any intimacy other than the one that they had in bed, said comments were seen by Kagome as patronizing and self-righteous.
In this Kami-forsaken place, he saw Kagome with new eyes. What he mistook as thoughtlessness was nothing but ignorance, encouraged by an absent father that indulged and shielded her from the bleak reality around her. What he thought was snobbishness was nothing but her feeble attempts to create the home that her mother - eager to marry her to a marquis of some sort - had told her every man of station needed. Amazed, he discovered that Kagome was far from the shy virgin that he unflowered in a small victorian hotel near Bath: she was fiery and passionate, and after he let go of his old-fashioned prudishness, he relished on the athleticism of their bodies, who tangled and sweated together like two parts long lost.
In the orphanage, Sesshomaru was amazed at her capacity to care for others - from young Shippo to the nuns that were drawn to the beautiful woman with the pretty laugh - even when she lacked the means to make herself understood by most of the staff. She was light and she was kind, giving herself unreservedly to those that cared to love her with an open heart, and it filled him with shame that he had not given her the same courtesy when bleeding on her bed, she cried alone for their child - one that he did not have the heart to tell him it was a little boy when the doctor met with him when he had finished with the curettage.
Almost tripping with a loose paver stone, his thoughts went back to the previous night, when under the moonlight that filtered in the screens of their room, they conversed about everything and nothing, a soft intimacy that was born after the storm. Touching his chest with her not-so-soft hands, Kagome's melodious voice weaved hopes for the future, and he left himself dream, his heart no longer racing from her betrayal, but by his discovery of the woman that was lying on his side, who was more than the soft body he dreamed while in University, but a companion that filled his heart and his mind with something that he could only describe as love.
It had been a good day indeed. But seeing the worried face of Sango waiting for him at the entrance of the convent, one that he knew was not bound to last. Racing the stone steps towards his study as she directed, the first thing that he saw was Kagome, curled on the cot, sobbing inconsolably in the same bed were weeks ago, Shippo's mother had first be seen with clear signs of Cholera.