Chapter 11 #2
“And yet, a recitation of those sentiments apparently makes you sad, Perry. You’ve said you don’t want to cry off, but I must put the question to you again. We have been engaged for more than a year. I know my mind and my heart and see no impediment to creating a joyous marriage with you.”
She sat back and stared at the carpet. “I should have known you wouldn’t.”
What on earth, on any heavenly sphere, could Hyperia mean?
“We need not set a date now,” I said, “but I wanted you to be aware that the duchess has grown politely insistent. She cares for the happiness of her offspring. She would not be a duchess if she did not also wish to see the succession secured.”
“We cannot blame her for that.”
We could. I did. A little. I rose, lest the conversation devolve into a parting of the ways, which I would do nothing to invite.
“Give the matter of a date some thought, Hyperia. We can always set a date to appease Her Grace and then move the date back.” A prevarication, which suited me ill. Losing Hyperia altogether suited me not at all.
But did I even have her? I helped myself to another pair of tarts, thinking to wrap them in my handkerchief for Atticus, and only when I went to secret them in my pocket did I recall Duquette’s letter.
I passed it over. “Whether or not you intended it, you appear to have another admirer.”
She took one look at the direction, set the letter aside as if it were a live serpent, and wrapped her arms about her waist.
“I wish you hadn’t seen that, Julian. Why on earth did you have to see that?”
The soldier in me urged retreat. I could make no further advance on any worthwhile objective, given that Hyperia had wanted to keep her correspondence with Duquette private, and private from me.
“Is he an impediment to our happy union? I will quit the field if that’s what you wish, Hyperia.” Honor was a damnable burden, but also a source of clarity in an increasingly muddled—tangled—situation.
“He is an impediment to my happiness,” Hyperia said. “I will be doubly damned if I let him be an impediment to yours.”
I was still on my feet, and she remained sitting, hunched over as if exhausted from carrying a great burden.
We would never have an opportunity to sort ourselves out in a situation that was convenient, relaxed, and comfortable. A soldier marched over whatever terrain lay before him and took up arms when the enemy was sighted. Convenience did not come into it.
I took a place on the sofa a good foot away from her. “Hyperia, can you explain?”
“You must not call him out, Julian. I forbid it.”
I would shoot to wound, I hoped. “I will not call him out, then.” He might challenge me, though, and I would accept.
“You promise?”
Her insistence smothered the last hope I’d cherished that a misunderstanding or minor scandal lay at the heart of the situation.
“I give you my word as a gentleman that I will not take his life or purposely put him at risk of harm over what you are about to say.”
“I give you my word as a lady that I won’t kill him either, but, Julian, I want to. I honestly, absolutely want to wipe him from my life and from polite society altogether.”
That might actually be arranged. “What does he know, or think he knows, that he’s emboldened enough to pester you here in the shires when you’re keeping company with a duchess and, indirectly, with your intended?”
The look Hyperia gave me was purely exasperated. “How do you reach the conclusion that Duquette has knowledge that troubles me?”
“You would not play me false, Perry, not with him, not now. If he is among your former amours, then marry me and let him bleat his calumny to the heavens. He’ll be smearing the name of a possible future duchess and earning the enmity of a possible future duke.
That will reflect poorly on him, to say nothing of what the present duke and duchess will make of Duquette’s behavior. ”
Hyperia seemed to grow smaller. She was diminutive in terms of height, but so substantial in her person that to see her looking and acting diminished made me truly angry.
“Julian, your defense of me is more precious than you can know, but it isn’t Society’s opinion of me that I value most.”
She was trying to convey information, trying to give me a clue. Whose opinion…? Mine?
What could possibly lower Hyperia West in my eyes? What could she have done, said, failed to do…? With whom might she have disported such that even she feared to tell me…
I went cold from the middle out, colder than I’d been in the stupid, icy pond. If there was one person whose name provoked Hyperia to impatience and distaste, that person was my late brother.
“This has to do with Harry, doesn’t it?” I spoke evenly, but my heart was hammering again, and the urge to destroy every stick of furniture in the room nigh overwhelmed me.
She nodded and curled in on herself more tightly. A shuddery movement of her shoulders betrayed that she was in tears without making a sound.
I hated Harry for that. I wished he was alive simply so I could beat him to flinders for making Hyperia cry. Then I’d beat him to flinders all over again for trifling with her, then I’d beat him a third time because he’d had the bad form to die and escape retribution for his transgressions.
“Julian, I’m s-sorry. I wish… I’ve wished a thousand times…”
I passed her my handkerchief and cast around for what to say, what not to say. What to do. My inspiration came from the brother who was yet extant. Arthur would be pragmatic, leaving the furniture and the dignity of all concerned—not least of all his own—intact.
The coldness took a stranglehold of my heart. “You owe me an apology, Hyperia, not for sharing your favors wherever you pleased to—I certainly have done likewise—but for accepting my proposal without disclosing a former liaison with my own brother.”
Damn Harry to blazes for his conscienceless charm. Damn the war. Just damn everything.
“Julian, I honestly hoped an encounter with Harry would not matter, but then… your situation changed, and you want and deserve intimacies with your wife, and my conscience would not be silent. It wasn’t a liaison.”
“Whatever the relationship was, the whole business troubles you enormously, and that is why we ought to have discussed it sooner.” I was troubled nigh to rage. and the phrase ‘dying of a broken heart’ would never again be poetic exaggeration to me.
Hyperia dabbed at her eyes. “You don’t mind that Harry and I were intimate?”
“I mind terribly.” Especially when she was bent on denying me the same privilege she’d apparently granted my brother. “You say it was not a liaison. What was it?”
She sat up. Her eyes were sheened with tears, her cheeks rosy, and her usually composed features vacant with sadness. “Have you ever had absinthe?”
Eternal perdition was too good for Lord Harry Caldicott. “Once. I vowed not to repeat that folly. Stuff made me violently ill and parted me from accurate perceptions of my surroundings. Much like hashish, I’m told, but with full-on hallucinations and gaps and waking dreams.”
“I tried it once too.” She was assembling her composure moment by moment, and her composure meant a great deal to me. I was disappointed in Hyperia for reasons having to do with broken trust and surprise, but more significantly, I was also furious on her behalf.
Her father had expected her to manage without assistance when her mama had died, and Hyperia herself had been little more than a schoolgirl. Her brother expected her to not only contend with life more or less on her own, but also to pull him out of his endless scrapes and stupidities.
Logic insisted that Harry had taken advantage of her. Yes, Hyperia was independent, an adult, and in every way a capable person—every way but one. When it came to self-indulgence and excess, Harry had been an accomplished adept.
Hyperia had been innocent, and he’d amused himself at her expense.
“You tried absinthe once and at Harry’s urging. Tell me the rest of it.” If we were to move forward in any sort of charity, much less as an engaged couple, we needed to move forward honestly.
And bedamned to the late Lord Harry Caldicott and his nasty little games.
“You never came home on leave,” Hyperia said. “I missed you.” She was offering an explanation rather than an accusation.
“I missed you too.” I had not even carried her likeness with me. That would have been too dangerous when I was supposed to be a tinker’s Portuguese apprentice, shepherd, or itinerant farrier.
“You did not come home,” she said, “and you did not write, and you refused to engage yourself to me, and I felt a very great fool. I understand now that you had your reasons, and they were valid reasons, but I learned the larger context of your situation after it would have done any good.”
Said every sadder, wiser person ever. “I should have written to Healy, at least. Go on.”
“There was Harry, who understood my frustration, and who could make me laugh, and who… He is like you in some ways. He knows how to let a silence speak—knew how. He could be charming, though I well understood that Harry exerted his charm strategically.”
Harry had never been the sort of brother to break my favorite toy while I watched, but he’d taken my pony out a time or two without my permission and returned the beast covered in mud and with a tail full of burrs.
My grandmother had given me a little chapbook of nursery rhymes written in her own hand, some in French, some in English. Long after her passing, I would read the verses over and think of her.
Harry had accidentally spilled tea on my memento. He hadn’t ruined it, but he’d left it permanently stained.
His regret for having hurt me was always genuine, and I eventually forgave him, only to find he’d borrowed my favorite boots and left them half wrecked too.
Blasted weather. So sorry, old thing. Didn’t think you’d mind. The boot-boy will curse me into next week.