Dark Places by Kate Grenville

his hands had trembled so much as he lifted the veil that his bride had had to help him, and their kiss had been like a promise of a lifetime of coming to the rescue.
    Or there was Mallory, poor boob: he had actually dropped the ring tinkling on the floor. Everything had to wait while he scrabbled around for it; but then he rose to the moment, and held up the ring between thumb and forefinger for everyone to see, grinning all over his blushing face with silly triumph, like a boy with a marble, and a ripple of good-fellowship had gone around the church. Mallory had been able, in that moment of mortification, to draw on some reserve of self and make the moment his own. When he was dead and buried, people would still be smiling at the way Mallory had held up the ring.
    On the morning of the wedding I woke with my heart shaking the walls of its chest. If I were to drop the ring, or fumble the veil, or fart audibly as Simpson had done, I knew I would be lost: I was no extemporiser. If anything of that sort happened to me, I knew I would simply be exposed. Everyone would know that I was just a husk that had learned a few tricks.
    Mother certainly seemed to be on the verge of seeing through me. ‘Why, Albion,’ she smiled at breakfast when I dropped the jam pot, and knocked over the milk jug with my elbow, ‘I think you must have a little touch of bridegroom’s nerves, my dear,’ and she smiled warmly into my face, and laid a hand over mine, and waited for me to lay bare my fears.
    But I was a grown man in charge of a household and a business, not a little boy about to break down and pour out his troubles to his Mamma. ‘Thanks, Mother,’ I said, and decided against any more breakfast. ‘But I think I am all right. If you have finished, I will ring for Manning and go up, I think.’
    Mother shed a few tears at the wedding, and Kristabel supplied her with a lacy hanky. My sister looked surprised when she caught the bouquet, and clutched it ungraciously, as if catching it had simply been a reflex action, as well it might have been, for she had always been more interested in ball games than in marriage. Norah tittered and blushed prettily: women seemed to know instinctively what sort of thing was expected of them. But after the champagne she grasped my elbow in a bold way and cried, ‘Oh Albion, I am silly with happiness!’ I did not titter: it does not become a man, much less a bridegroom, to titter. But I was glad of my moustache to hide behind.
    We were married in the rain and my bride’s hair smelled of orange water and rain when I deflowered her. Her pleasure in me was so great she writhed and arched beneath me like a hooked fish. ‘Albion! Ah!’ she cried, and I heard amazement in her voice, and the lust of every woman, for she had been hollow and now she was filled with my bursting passion.
    Tears are the ultimate smile: Norah shed them on her wedding-night, ah, such tears, and as fast as I licked them off her face she produced more. I would have liked to say, ‘Norah, how well your tears become you!’ but, modest maid as she was, she covered her face with her hands, or turned away from me, so I had to grasp her wrists and force her arms down to her sides, and then I could approach my face to hers, and feel her tears cool on my own cheek, feel them salt on my tongue.
    How I loved the feel of her arching away under me! How I loved to hear her hiss when I seized her delicate throat in my hands, and bent her backwards over herself, so her breasts became flat and her ribs tensed with strain! I grasped her like a stick across my knees and longed to snap her in two, such was my pleasure in her fragility, and the wire-sharp tension that filled her body in passion.
    My own body rang with joy then, hearing her cry out with the pleasure of that pain, trying to whisper because she was a lady on her wedding-night: ‘Albion! Please, Albion!’ My love for her at that moment