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The unmaskings, the declarations, and the weddings are a whirlwind; she feels spun and spun again, dizzy and breathless and finally coming to rest in her new chamber--their new chamber--with Benedick's hands cupping her face, his mouth on hers, her hands at his waist and the whole world stilled, narrowed down to him, his skin, his mouth, the smell of him and the sound and feel of them both in the shadowed candlelight.
Their next few days are spent together, sending for food and drink, talking and teasing and loving each other as the light in their windows changes over the day--and how did she live before without his smile? Benedick's laugh is a victory: it startles out of him and she holds it to herself like a trophy, because she has been clever all her life, but to be clever enough to make Benedick laugh ... well, she must be the cleverest woman in the world. His eyes on her, calm and happy; his hands that still her while also waking her; his voice in her ear as he moves in her, broken and desperate and oh, she loves him, wraps herself around him and tries to tell him.
And she's thrilled, a secret searing thrill in her chest, behind her ribs, because he understands even though she no longer has the wit to speak plainly, and he gives her what she asks for, moves harder inside her as she clings to him, moans and shudders around him; he tells her he loves her as he clings and jolts inside her in his turn.
She brushes the hair from his forehead and he smiles at her, drowsy and so happy to look at her. Perhaps, she thinks, as her own lazy smile stretches across her face, she isn't the only one amazed and abashed in equal measure to find herself here, now, in this bed, delighting in this smile, leaning into this touch.
***
Beatrice holds grudges.
Benedick broke her heart once; they were young, practically children, but she held that grudge for years, used it as armor around the smallest seed of love of which she could not rid herself. She could not help its unfurling when she overheard Hero and Margaret, but she did not quite believe any of it, even when Benedick declared it, until, "I will challenge him," he said, and bid her comfort her cousin.
She knew what she had asked of him. Their eyes held until he left the church, and as she smoothed Hero's hair and whispered nonsense into it all night, she thought of his eyes and turned over the thought that he loved her, and let her grudge go because ... she trusted him, she realized. She always had.
***
When they emerge from their chamber, it's to cat-calls and teasing that they both respond to sharply; the prince jokes that had they realized what it meant to combine the wits of both Benedick and Beatrice, they might not have brought the two together at all. Claudio complains that they might as well have not left their chambers, they spend so much time together--leaning together at meals, walking the gardens, disappearing for an hour or two at a time and reappearing flushed and smiling.
"She is all I could have hoped for in a wife," Benedick tells him. "Is it any wonder I wish to enjoy my good fortune?"
Claudio, who spent a bare two days honeymooning with his Hero, laughs and claps Benedick's shoulder, assures him that, eventually, he shall return to the company of his friends and comrades, and relish it above all others; when Benedick relates this, later, to Beatrice she remarks idly that it is a wonder how Claudio, younger than Benedick and married perhaps a week longer, is now so knowledgeable on the subject.
"Does Hero say such things to you?"
Beatrice shrugs, her nightgown sliding off one candle-lit shoulder. "My cousin knows I am strange; I doubt she expected that to change once I married you, as doing do is, obviously, the most glaring example of my strangeness."
He tackles her then, pins her to the bed, and she laughs as he growls and pretends to bite her neck in revenge. He lifts his head and says, "Truly, my lady, I do love you strange."
"You are not so commonplace, either, my lord," she replies. "And I love you strange, very much."
***
Benedick is not like Beatrice.
She knew from the start of her hurt that, had she but spared him a kind word for so little as a day, he would have forgotten their feud and the two of them would have been friends again. He might armor himself from hurt in jokes and wit, he might attack one who was his enemy in word or act, but he was not born under a grudging planet and therefore is always willing to forgive.
As he smiles at the prince, and appreciates the revel he has staged for all his newly-married friends; as he claps Claudio on the shoulder and kisses Hero's cheek, laughing all the while, she watches him and knows that he is her opposite, that they are sun and moon, complementing one another.
The music plays, they dance together, whirl and smile and laugh. They eat and joke; Beatrice dances with her uncle and Benedick dances with Hero; then the hour grows late and finds them both in a shadowed corner, Benedick's head on Beatrice's shoulder, her legs thrown over his lap, hands entwined between them as they watch the dancers. They've been whispering together, kissing as well, but now the revel has reached its height and they have made a bubble of stillness around themselves.
Claudio, with a roaring laugh, lifts Hero by her waist above his head; she plants her plams on his shoulders to keep herself steady and her own laugh rings out across the room as he spins her.
"Even when we hated one another," Benedick says softly, "Even then ... I'd have known your silhouette from Margaret's in that window."
Beatrice tightens her fingers in his, takes a breath, says nothing. But smiles, feels something in her ease that she had not known was not easy, and kisses through his hair where she can reach without moving.
***
No one talks about Hero and Claudio's first wedding. Once John the Bastard is exiled, the matter is shut and forgotten. But Beatrice finds herself excusing herself from table when Claudio joins them for meals. She bites her tongue around the prince in ways she never thought to, before--at one point they were jolly friends, teasing and flirting a bit, but now she saves her jokes and observations for Benedick, and spends more time watching the rest of the court than speaking to its members.
She does not know how Hero smiles so much. How she looks so happy as her husband takes her hand, kisses it, as they disappear for their own hour or so on an afternoon.
The next campaign the prince and his men undertake lasts two weeks, and Hero is despondent at the window for three days until Beatrice forces her up, takes her to town and the marketplace, pulls out the fine mending that the servant girls can't be trusted with--only Hero's perfect stitching will do--and takes her on long walks.
"Don't you miss Benedick?" Hero asks her with a sigh as they read together outside.
"I do. But I see no reason to be miserable while he's away. He will come back, after all--we're not at war."
"I feel uneasy when I don't see Claudio," Hero says softly, going back to her book.
Beatrice says nothing, since all she could say is I would be, too, were I you.
The men return a few days later. Hero runs to Claudio, who kisses her hard and spins her round to the laughter and a little applause from the rest of court. Beatrice smiles because Hero smiles, then she turns and finds Benedick's eyes on her, his own smile wide, and she goes to him as if pulled. "Do you still plan to eat all I have killed, Lady?" he asks her when she gets close.
She leans into him, whispers in his ear, "I might eat you, my lord, I have quite a hunger." When she pulls back, his eyes are dark and his grin is appreciative.
"Well, my lady, let me but put my horse up and bathe--"
"Put up your horse, yes ... but you need not bathe," she says, and kisses his cheek. Then turns, and walks back toward the villa and their chambers. She hears him, his voice strained, call for the stable boy, and soon he is stumbling to a near halt as he matches her stride and takes her hand with a grin.
"I do love you, Beatrice," he says, and then they both break, laughing whenever they catch each other's eye all the way to their bed.
***
Beatrice bathes him; pours water over his head and washes his hair until he groans and pulls her into the tub with him. She refuses to let him do more than kiss her, though: "You stink of horse and sweat, and now that my initial weakness has passed, you must be cleaned, Benedick." And so he leaves her to it, because they both enjoy her hands on his skin. Finally he sighs, tilts his head back, and she asks, "How went the campaign?"
"Surprisingly well," he says to the ceiling. "Things are calm in the countryside; John the Bastard seems to be keeping to himself for now, there's no unrest." He snorts. "I think half the men were disappointed."
"Were you?" she asks as she washes between his fingers, rubs the palm of his hand.
"God, no." He lifts his hand and smiles at her. "I wanted to come home as soon as I could. I had someone waiting there, whom I missed very much."
Beatrice's mouth slants in a smile, though she doesn't look up from soaping his arm. "She missed you, as well."
He pulls her toward him, then, through the water, and says, "It wasn't just ... I missed you, I missed speaking with you and reading in the same room with you and making you laugh--I saw things and would turn to tell you about them, but you were never there to tell."
She grins at him, kisses him. "Do you think I didn't miss those things, myself? Margaret has begun a romance with the new stablehand, and I've no one to tell who will find it as exasperating as I do."
"The tall one?"
"No! The short one!"
"With the nose?"
"Yes!"
"He writes poetry," Benedick says, eyes wide.
"My lord is passing generous," Beatrice replies gravely. "But for the sake of argument, we shall call it that. And whatever we call it, he is writing some of it for her. And I have been ... lucky enough to hear it recited. In the moonlit depths of the night. From the courtyard."
He tries to hold in the laughter. He succeeds enough to say, "I certainly hope he will grace us with his rhyme whilst I am home," before it bursts out of him and his wife splashes bathwater at his face.
***
Late that night, when the candles are out and only moonlight illuminates the room, he traces her shoulders and collarbone with his fingers and says, "Do you ever tire of your uncle's house?"
She's not sure what his ends are, and so, warily, says, "It is a lovely estate, and I have been happy here."
Which is exactly the opposite of what he's asked, and they both know it; his shadowed face is equal parts annoyed and affectionate. "You were happy here as a maid, but as a married woman ... ?"
"Is this--Benedick, you are the Prince's companion, and Don Pedro will not stay in Messina forever. I know this. I'll go without complaint--where you are is my home, here or in Arragon."
"Or Padua, perhaps?" His voice is far too casual.
"Padua?"
"I am a lord; I have my own estate and responsibilities therein."
She laughs. "That you have long avoided--what has turned your head toward Padua?"
He sighs, turns onto his back and fusses with the blanket, the picture of petulance. "I am tired of court." He sits up, looks at her again. "Think you, had our friends and kinsmen not gone to such lengths to trick us, we'd have found each other out? Been married?"
It's her turn to fuss with the blanket. But she had promised herself, and her husband, that she would always be honest; there's no need for the armor of lies, for keeping herself safe. "I am very stubborn, my lord," she offers. "And though you are quick to forgive, I know I am not. But ... I loved you always, even when we were not friends. And you ... you believed my cousin, when she was slandered." She puts a hand over his, looks at him. "You challenged Claudio because I asked. Because you believed me. If you asked me when I knew I loved you, when I forgave you, I would not say that afternoon in the garden, overhearing Hero and Margaret. Plots and schemes might always go wrong, end in more misunderstandings and hurt." She stops, takes a breath. "I knew in the church, looking at you over my weeping cousin's head." The moment feels too fraught, bringing up as it does things none of them talk about. So she shrugs. "I suppose, then, that Don John the Bastard is owed the thanks for our happy union."
Benedick's face, so serious and vulnerable, breaks into a grin. "Well, I hope I'll be forgiven for not paying that debt."
"So, then. What has you so full of thought?" she asks, and pushes and turns him to that he leans against her and her arms may wrap around him.
"I have grown very tired of being told I owe my current happiness to a joke played upon me by our loving family and friends. As well, I am exceedingly weary of being told I shall eventually tire of your company and long to be away from you, as if my preference for my wife--who, they are so fond of reminding me, is only my wife thanks to their intervention--bothers them. They're like boys who do not wish their playmates to play with anyone else." He's quiet for a long while, and then says, more softly, taking her hand and studying it, "And I do not entirely trust them, anymore."
Beatrice nods against his temple, breathes in the scent of his skin. "You are not alone in that, love."
She tightens her arms around him. "So tell me about our home?"
"Mmm. I'm afraid if I tell you of the duties we'll have, you'll change your mind." He settles back into her arms, nudges their feet together. "But my grandparents kept a cottage, out in the countryside--there are trees all around, but it's in a meadow. I remember the light there shines golden in the mornings. And Beatrice, I have thought of your hair in that light for far longer than I ought to admit." He kisses her wrist, turns a bit to look at her. "That's where we'll go, when we can. When we want to." He sits up, turns to face her, cups her face in his hands and tangles his fingers in her hair. "There's no one nearby, and I thought, quite often when I was gone, of laying you down in that meadow, on a morning, and seeing the sun on your skin," his voice grows darker as he leans in to kiss her, "and hearing the birdsong beneath those noises you so sweetly make in my ear, and the ones that are not quite so sweet that I think I prefer ..."
His lips brush over her ears, her neck, and she holds onto him because she's swaying, dizzied by his voice, by the things he's told her, the thoughts they share. He bites her neck, hard, and she pushes him down onto the bed and climbs on top of him. "And will I be able to take you there, from time to time, when I have thought of your skin in that morning light?" She mouths his neck, and says into it, "Or perhaps I'll like the evening light better."
He gasps as she kisses his belly, moves lower to run her tongue up his length, and says, "You may take me anywhere, wife."
She stops her ministrations for a moment, looks up at his flushed face and smiles. "Let's go to Padua, then," she says. "You have made an excellent case, and I find I am intrigued by your home province and the many places I may, it seems, take you within it." He's laughing as she puts her mouth back on him, and for the first time in longer than she cares to think, Beatrice is completely happy.