Chapter 13
Should I go to her?
Henry eyed the words he had subconsciously written on a piece of paper that was supposed to be a letter to one of his business associates.
He grabbed the paper and crumpled it into a ball, tossing it toward the fireplace.
It landed in the flickering flames and though he had a mountain of work to be getting on with, he paused and watched as the paper curled and blackened, run through with veins of glowing red, before it became ash and crumbled away.
“This is bloody hopeless,” he muttered and sat back in his writing desk chair.
Closing his eyes and expelling a strained breath, he ran his hands through his hair and listened to the irksome ticking of the clock on his bureau. It was almost midnight.
After returning from Farhampton, Thalia had gone up to her chambers without a word to him, escorted by Mrs. Fisher.
Seeking distraction, he had come to his study to try and make a dent in the correspondence and contracts that were stacking up with each passing day, but his thoughts had not received the same instruction.
For hours, he had put quill to paper and written nothing, his mind wandering constantly to his wife upstairs.
“I was too cold with her,” he said, as if there were a friend in the room.
My conversation with Kenneth could have been done in private.
He grimaced, wishing that he had not said so much in front of her.
There was a time and a place for revelations, and that had not been it.
Thalia had gone to her family home to seek comfort and familiarity, not to be bombarded with unpleasant information and suspicions.
“I have undoubtedly made things worse,” he lamented, groaning. “She looked as if she were in great pain. What if my actions have wounded her mind even more? What if she loses even more of her memory because I could not keep my concerns to myself for one afternoon?”
His eyes opened and he stared at the now-empty desk, realizing that he would get nothing done tonight. The letters and contracts and ledgers and dossiers and arrangements would have to wait.
Why am I so incapable of being softer toward her?
He would have given anything to have Owen and Luke there with him, to offer advice. Then again, they had attempted to do that at Rowley’s Gentlemen’s Club and he had not heeded a word, certain that they did not know what they were talking about.
“I cannot woo my own wife,” he groused as he scraped his chair back, got to his feet, and padded out of the room.
He did not bother to collect his tailcoat from the back of the nearby armchair, for who would be awake at such an hour to see him so casually dressed?
Who would care, even if they were awake?
Although, he had to admit that his staff had seen him in fewer clothes over the past few days than they had seen him over the course of his thirty years at the manor.
I should have kept her here for a few more days, he reasoned as he walked, heading up to his chambers. I rushed it. I rushed granting her permission to see her family so that I would not…
Halting in the hallway, he shook his head vigorously in the hopes of dislodging all of the wayward thoughts that kept sneaking into his mind.
Yet, short of shaking his head so hard that he snapped his neck, he knew he would not be able to remove the memory of last night, when he had glanced at Thalia’s lips and wanted—intensely, urgently, maddeningly—to kiss her.
Aside from a chaste peck on the cheek immediately after the wedding, he had never kissed his own wife.
Astounding, really, now that he thought about it.
Then again, the impulse to take one’s wife into one’s arms and kiss her so fiercely that the very idea made his heart quicken was easily kept at bay when they were never in the same manor together, much less the same room.
In the last four years, he could count on two hands the amount of times he had seen his wife. He could probably count the same for the amount of times he had spoken to her, too.
Even for a marriage of convenience, that must be some sort of pitiful record…
The notion haunted him as he made his way through the maze of hallways, toward the staircase that would lead him up to the peace of the North Tower.
He was just passing a door he never entered, when a sound brought him to a slow standstill: a sharp, sudden sniffle, as of someone trying to gain control of their tears.
For a moment, he stayed there, unmoving, listening to see if the sound would come again.
Instead of soft sniffles, a mournful cry reached his ears, and a strained noise, as if the person were in some pain. Fast breathing followed, as he realized that he had not taken a breath at all.
“Is someone in there?” he called through the door, certain it was Thalia on the other side.
No one else would be in her beloved library at such an hour, despite the fact that she permitted the servants to borrow whatever books they liked.
Baxter had told him that. Indeed, Baxter had informed Henry of that particular detail with more enthusiasm than Henry had ever seen from his butler in the entire decade he had worked at Holdridge.
“Thalia?” Henry said hesitantly.
It would be terribly embarrassing if it was a servant on the other side of the door, interrupted in the midst of some emotional distress.
“Thalia?” he repeated, but no one answered.
Not in words, at least. Just those awful, pained sounds that prickled up the back of his neck like a phantom touch.
It is likely nothing, he told himself, his hand instinctively reaching for the door handle. But what if it is not? What if she has fallen again? What if her struggle this afternoon has become something more troubling?
It was enough to make him push open the door and step inside.
Thalia lay on a long, wide, rectangular cushion by the dying firelight, a sort of chaise longue without the usual legs and height, but she did not appear to be in the depths of a restful slumber.
She thrashed and writhed upon that Arabian-style divan, twisting a blanket around herself with every strangled breath she took.
A nightmare… A bad one.
She had not had one of those for years, if his sources were correct.
Henry approached slowly, struck by the agony upon her sleeping face and the tears that trickled down her cheeks though her eyes were closed.
There could be no denying that she was asleep, but it was the kind that she needed to be awoken from at once; he could not bear to see her suffer another moment.
“Thalia?” He was at her side in an instant, his hands on hers, prizing her fingers away from the blanket. “Thalia, you need to wake up now. You are having a bad dream. Thalia, can you hear me?”
Once her hands were free, he carefully moved his grip to her upper arms, shaking her just a little.
“Thalia?” He heard his voice grow more urgent. “Thalia, come to me. Wake up. Come to me. Please, Thalia, if you can hear me, then come to me.”
Her eyes flew open, wide to the whites, her hands shooting up to cover her ears as she stared at him.
Not seeing him but staring straight through him as her tears persisted, great gasping sobs wracking her chest as she lay there, seemingly still partway between the realm of her nightmare and the land of the conscious.
Unable to think of anything to comfort her, Henry did the only thing he could do; he scooped his arms beneath her and pulled her into his chest, cradling her there in his embrace with all the softness he possessed.
“Hush, my wife,” he murmured, rocking her slightly. “Hush now. You are safe in your library. You are surrounded by the books you love so much. You are awake and alive and safe among their stories. Can you not smell their pages? You cherish the scent.”
Her nostrils flared for a moment, and a shaky breath left her lips. “I… do like that scent.” Her throat bobbed and she inhaled again. “I must have… fallen asleep.”
It was only then that Henry noticed the open book lying beside her, half hidden among the twisted blanket. He could not see the spine to note the title. but it appeared that she was almost halfway through it, an impossible feat to achieve in so few hours.
Did she pick up where she left off? Does she remember?
“I remember,” she whispered thickly, as if reading his mind. “Oh, Henry, I remember.”