Corners
Tamasi is bowing her head to the inevitable. The marriage proposal is the real deal, and the consequences of not accepting it are worse than those of accepting it, so she’s going to accept it. Little though she likes it.
She’s been widowed a while; she was married disgustingly young, and he died not too many years after. You learn what that marriage was like from her mental comment, “The second marriage could not very easily be worse than the first had been. She found some small comfort in that.”
The question is how, exactly. I’m pulling back from my earlier house-of-horrors conception of it (the less said, the better, believe me), because I really was being excessive. Still. It wasn’t a good marriage.
Looking at the context of it, it’s not hard to see why. A venal man whose father was a philandering blusterer, whose mother played the Noble House Slave Saint, who married the girl out of sheer perversity because she (unlike her two elder sisters) did not want him. A too-young girl unthinkingly accustomed to respectful treatment, who did not want any marriage at all (much less this one), who was backed into a corner by people she respected and told to accept it as fate, who had to cope with culture shock at the same time as marriage shock… put these two together, and the result is Not Good.
I suppose that’s enough, really. Nobody needs to know the gritty details. Pirion is going to have to work to overcome Tamasi’s understandable reticence about marriage—if he cares to do so at all, that is—and that’s all there is to it. She’s been cornered again. She has accepted it, but she doesn’t have to like it.
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