Just a quick 15-minute scribble. Sorry for any mistakes.

A PINCH

Margaret sat on her bed and stared ahead, as if in another world.

She did not blink. She did not move. She simply sat serenely still.

Margaret felt like she was in a dream. She even looked like she was in a dream, swathed as she was in her white nightgown and white bedsheets.

With her head slowly moving from side to side, she tilted her chin and then bowed it, regarding her features from every angle.

'You look very serious,' came a low voice, one that was teasingly sombre to match her own severe expression.

Margaret allowed herself a small, self-conscious smile to have been discovered in this brooding attitude.

'I thought you married me because I was serious,' she said to her husband, reminding him of how, when she had asked him why the most eligible bachelor in all of Milton had not wanted instead to marry one of the fine ladies of the town, he had replied, 'Because men of sense do not want to marry silly wives.'

John Thornton set himself down on the bed, and draping his arm around Margaret's shoulder, he settled beside his wife.

He too looked at the mirror and was bewildered to see the way she continued to stare at herself with a strange, and perhaps, even, a critical eye.

'Can you see something I cannot?' he asked, whispering into her ear, trying to uncover whether she had any hidden warts or wrinkles on her face, but all he could see was the gentle rise and fall of the prettiest complexion he had ever seen.

Margaret blushed under his ardent inspection and rubbed her head against his shoulder.

'No,' she said plainly. 'I am what I am. I am what you see,' she told him, for Margaret was, if nothing else, entirely herself.

It had always been so, ever since the day she had gained any semblance of self-awareness, Margaret had been nobody but what her own character and conscience decreed, and this was, even more so, the case now that she was Mrs Thornton, this name suiting her perfectly.

Yes, since he had slipped that golden band on her finger, binding one to another through the sacred bond of a symbolic circle, Margaret had never felt more like Margaret.

'Then what are you looking at?' he wondered aloud, curiosity getting the better of this cat.

At this, Margaret turned her head and peered up at him, and John furrowed his eyebrows to find that she was analysing him with the same intense interest.

Lifting a finger, Margaret traced the lines of his face, gently skimming the long shaft of his nose, the velvety smoothness of his lips and the defined sculpture that was his jaw.

'I am just thinking,' said she with quiet gravity, 'that I do not always recognise myself in the mirror,' she disclosed. 'And as for you…,' she trailed off, her eyes searching for that scowl he used to wear, only to find it was gone, and in its place, he wore a smile that was so warm, it melted her heart like butter on toast, 'you too are entirely different.'

If John's eyebrows had been knitted before, they now unravelled in surprise.

'Is that so?' he said. 'Well, then, wife, I think you had better explain, because while I'm no fool, it seems I am not nearly clever enough to follow your meaning.'

Returning her gaze to the mirror, Margaret shuffled so that she was crouching on her knees, and this let her head be at the same height as her husband's excessively handsome one, her brown ringlets cascading down her back and ticking the bare skin of his arms.

'I just sometimes cannot quite believe it,' she described, pressing her face against his, wishing to be as close to him as physically possible. 'I cannot believe that we are really here. Together. Married. As one.'

John grinned. 'Well you had better believe it because it is true' he murmured into the nook of her neck, taking her in his arms and pulling them both down onto the bed so that she lay on top of him.

'There is no denying it, Mrs Thornton,' he went on. 'You are my wife, like it or not, and I am your husband, for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, and no matter how much my infernal sister annoys you, you are stuck with me, like it or lump it,' he jested and Margaret laughed.

'Yes,' she replied, nibbling her lips playfully. 'And as terribly taxing as it is to be your wife, husband,' she smirked, 'that is not quite what I meant. No, what I meant is, I just cannot believe that after everything we went through, after all we said and did to each other, and after being torn apart so far and for so long, we managed to find our way back to each other.'

The truth was that Margaret could not help but wonder: what if?

What if Mr Bell had not left her his fortune? What if the mill had thrived and John had not needed her financial assistance? What if she had not had the courage to come to him? What if he had been too proud to accept her help? And what if...Margaret felt her soul shudder as a dark shadow of what might have been crept through her mind…what if one or both of them had married somebody else?

It did not bear thinking about. Such thoughts sought to cast their bleakness over her soul and eclipse the joy she shielded within.

She shivered, and on sensing her distress, John held her tight and rolled her over so that she lay under him, and he covered her with his body so that she might feel safe in the shelter of his embrace.

As he felt her small frame tremor beneath his own, John's mischievous manner disappeared and his face was overhauled by a much more earnest expression.

'Can you not?' he asked seriously, his voice thick with emotion. 'Because I can,' he professed, and Margaret could hear the worry that he was trying hard to hide, that fear that even after all these months of blissful harmony, she was still not as in love with him as he was with her.

There was a hush, a hollowness of silence in which all that could be heard was her deafening hesitancy.

John's heart beat faster.

'I do,' she said at last, 'it is only...I sometimes need to pinch myself.'

John sat up abruptly and stared at her. 'Pinch yourself?!'

'Yes,' Margaret nodded, 'for you see, I do not feel I deserve to be this happy. It must be wrong. I feel like I have stolen all the happiness from the world, as my own heart is bursting with it, overwhelmed as I am with joy to have made a life here with my John,' she defended, her palm reaching to rest upon his chest.

'That is why I was looking in the mirror,' she said, no longer feeling the need to look back at it, for everything she needed to see was right before her.

'I feel so content, so wonderfully complete. I have never felt more myself, only, I do not always recognise this woman. She is not the girl I grew up with, the woman I saw in the mirror every morning in Helstone, London and Crampton. She has changed. She is...everything she never dared hope she could be. I so want to make her proud,' she admitted.

John lifted his hand to caress his wife's cheek.

'And you will, Margaret, by just being yourself, trust me' he reassured her. 'By being the brave, bold and beautiful woman you are, my love.'

She smiled back at him, but then her gaze seemed to pass right through him, as if she were looking behind him, into the past.

'We are not the same, are we?' she murmured pensively. 'We are not the same two people who met each other three years ago?'

John snorted, all the worry of moments before having left him.

'No, we are not, thank God!' he acknowledged with more than a mite of gratitude. 'We have both changed, for the better… and for each other,' John breathed, his breath ragged with longing as his lips brushed the delicate petals of her own.

'I suppose that Margaret just cannot believe how happy I am, that is all,' she replied, her body quivering as she felt it respond to him.

'Can I tell you a secret?' he requested.

'Please do.'

'Nor can that John,' he confessed.

It was true. If anyone had told him three years ago that he would meet and marry a woman as indescribable as Margaret, he would have laughed and called them mad.

But here he was. Here she was. Here they were.

Sometimes, just sometimes, our reality is more divine than our dreams.

'So how about this: How about, when either of us doubts ourselves, doubts our right to be so very madly, deeply, perfectly in love, we give each other just a little pinch?' he suggested, his finger and thumb gently clinching her wrist.

After watching him for a moment, Margaret lifted herself onto her elbows, and kissing him with the soft and slow passion of lovers who know they have their whole lives ahead of them to be together, she whispered: 'Then I will be pinching myself every day for the rest of my life, dear heart, because I will never stop loving you and never stop loving us.'

The End