Another year of our lives has passed as my atlas now gathers dust. Ann will hear no talk of travel and I concede to her. We remain hidden away here at Shibden and still she laments for all that was and can only look back, despite our lives together and all the potential for our future lying before her. She is only thirty-five but seems so much older; she acts as if her life is done with. She believes she never deserved the happiness we once had, as if it no longer stands before her, and I am left pleading with her to open her eyes and see me.

I even write to Mariana for advice, but she has none. What a pair we make, Mariana and I, both of us wedded and both of us trapped. If only Ann were twenty years my senior, like Lawton is to Mariana… what an awful thought.

I pace around my cage of Shibden, sometimes avoiding her altogether for an entire day, busying myself in the grounds, checking on the new lake and sitting in the new gatehouse with the doors locked so that I can be alone behind the castle walls I have created. I make it quite cosy in there and no one knows as they pass by on the busy road outside that the owner of Shibden Hall cowers inside. It is my new Moss House, this time built with stone walls and only I may enter.

How has my life come to this? I am more alone than I have ever been. Had I swallowed my pride and faced my own fear of being single I would now be free to leave, perhaps court someone new. The irony of it makes me laugh at my own situation; I am a husband trapped in a loveless marriage. Is that not what I dreamed of, to be wed? And here we are, like all other couples, wondering how we ever tolerated each other. I take pleasure by myself, imagining we are back in the Moss House together, but it is harder to concentrate, the pleasure takes time to rise in me. I allow myself to think of Mariana instead but that does not always help. My body is in league with my mind, both full of torment and unable to quieten, unable to find release. Sometimes the pleasure does not come to me. I circle and push against myself, become rough with myself. She has broken me.