Chapter Thirty-Four Hélène
Chapter Thirty-Four
Hélène
It was nearly dusk, but Hélène didn’t care. She rode hard, mud flying up from Odette’s hooves as the mare hurtled down the paths of Richmond Park. Hélène wasn’t normally such a reckless rider, but she had no regard for safety right now. She didn’t really care what happened to her anymore.
The forest rushed past in a shadowed blur. Wind whipped at her face, bringing tears to her eyes. They were the only tears she had shed in the past week.
Eddy was gone, and Hélène still hadn’t wept.
It seemed impossible that he had died, that a young man in the prime of his life could be felled by an illness, just like that.
Hélène couldn’t bear it. She wanted to howl with grief, to scream at God for His unjustness in taking Eddy from her.
For the fact that there was an Eddy-shaped hole in the world where he should have been.
So she did exactly that: tipped back her head and let out a wild, ragged scream.
Odette reared in protest, her hooves waving in the air; then she fell back down and slowed to a walk. “No,” Hélène muttered, and dug in her heels once more. Maybe if she kept running fast enough, she could outpace reality. Could run away from what had happened.
Hélène would never forget the earth-shattering moment she’d heard the news.
She’d been at luncheon with Lord and Lady Wyclif, wondering when Louise would send for her: Louise had been coming daily to sneak Hélène over to Sandringham.
A footman had entered the dining room and murmured something to Lord Wyclif, whose gaze instantly darted to Hélène.
“Tragic news,” he’d said gravely, and looked down with a sigh. “His Royal Highness has passed.”
The message was wrong, Hélène had immediately thought. The footman was mistaken, because Eddy couldn’t be dead.
Later, she would read every detail about his final hours; the account was printed in newspapers all over the country, along with some awful photo Eddy had previously posed for with May.
It didn’t even look like him, Hélène thought each time she saw that image.
He seemed so miserable. Or constipated. Yet the papers kept printing it anyway, recounting how he had died peacefully, surrounded by his family, with his beloved fiancée, Princess May of Teck, holding his hand.
Somehow Hélène had made her way back to London.
She felt numb with shock. None of this felt real—except, impossibly, it was.
She knew because she came back to a city in mourning.
Church bells clanged in the cold winter air; shops were closed and shuttered.
Even the hansom cabs put black felt on their windows and black ribbons on the bridles of their horses.
He was so young, everyone murmured in hushed, somber tones; and to think that he died just a few months after getting engaged!
He was engaged, Hélène wanted to scream.
Not to May, to her. But May had become the personification of the nation’s grief: a desolate, romantic figure at the center of an epic tragedy.
There was even a drinking song making its way through the nation’s beer halls: “A nation wrapped in mourning, shed bitter tears today, for the noble Duke of Clarence, and fair young Princess May.”
Fair young Princess May—more like, the manipulative and heartless Princess May. As if it wasn’t enough for May to steal Eddy in life, now she’d stolen Hélène’s rightful place of grief.
Hélène was the one who should ride in a carriage at his funeral. Hélène should be the first to place flowers at his tomb. Not May, who’d never loved him at all, who had only ever wanted him for his title.
It was getting late. Hélène could barely see the trees to either side of the path. A chilly mist hung in the air, making the path feel otherworldly, matching her mood.
When hoofbeats sounded behind her, she cursed under her breath, twisting in the saddle. No one else ever rode this time of day. Then she saw who it was, and slowed.
“Maman?” she croaked.
Marie Isabelle was mounted in a man’s saddle, as Hélène was, rather than the sidesaddle that she should have been using. She was wearing a very loose gown that would have earned her a few raised eyebrows if anyone had seen.
“Hélène. It’s time we headed back,” her mother said gently.
Hélène just stared at her. “I didn’t know you rode astride.”
“There are many things you don’t know about me.
Mothers don’t tell their daughters everything.
Perhaps we should,” Marie Isabelle mused as she pulled up alongside Hélène.
“I kept things from my past from you, but you are not a girl who needs to be sheltered. You are a woman. And perhaps if I’d told you of my mistakes, you would not have repeated them. ”
Hélène’s hands tightened on the reins. “Eddy was not a mistake.”
“I’m not saying he was,” Marie Isabelle said evenly. She waved in Hélène’s direction. “But riding alone in the dark, at top speed, when Odette could stumble over an obstacle she can’t see—that is a mistake. Come home with me.”
Hélène’s lips pressed together, but she tugged Odette’s head around, starting back toward Sheen House.
Her mother fell into quiet step alongside her.
The sun had set; Marie Isabelle’s profile was more shadow than person.
It was easier this way, perhaps. Hélène could ignore her mother and pretend she was alone.
Or better yet, pretend that Eddy was the one riding alongside her.
“It’s all right to cry, you know,” her mother finally said. “Don’t keep it bottled inside the way these Englishwomen do; the pain festers and turns to poison, burns you from within. You need to let it escape your body. Even if you must scream again.”
“You heard that?”
“I was tempted to join in,” Marie Isabelle said flatly. “You think you’re the only woman who’s ever screamed into a forest? I am a daughter of Spain. My ancestors, when they grieved, used to shout into the Pyrenees with such anguish that people thought dragons lived there.”
“Eddy and I were engaged.” Hélène was surprised to hear herself speak. “We had reconciled and were once again planning to get married. We were about to ask permission from his grandmother.”
“Oh, Hélène. I’m so sorry.” They walked in silence for a few moments, and then her mother added, “I suspected that there was no lovers’ quarrel.
That something else was going on, something you couldn’t tell me.
” She paused, offering her daughter the opportunity to speak if she so chose. But Hélène wasn’t ready.
“I loved him so much,” she said simply.
“I know.”
They walked quietly in the direction of the stables. The horses sensed that they were almost home; they grew restless, tossing their heads, their hooves prancing lightly over the ground.
Hélène’s mother let out a breath. “I will not do you the disservice of saying that everything will be all right. I love you too much to tell you a lie.”
Startled by her mother’s words, Hélène looked over. Marie Isabelle was staring into the distance. “A loss like this…It cleaves your life in two. There will be the time before and the time after. I wish I had a way of making it easier. If I could trade my life for Eddy’s, I would.”
That last had been spoken simply, without drama, as if Marie Isabelle had been remarking on the weather. Hélène knew her mother loved her, but to hear her say such a thing—it made that love fiercely, wildly clear.
“You will always carry him in your heart, and it will always hurt. But eventually the pain will lessen. Eventually, someday, you will be able to smile again.”
Hélène couldn’t imagine wanting to smile ever again. Her very soul felt splintered in two.
“After the funeral, I want to leave London,” she told her mother.
“I assumed as much. Your father and I have already started making the arrangements.”
Hélène nodded, aware that she should be grateful, but her gratitude was buried too far beneath the pain.
“I was wondering if we could go to Rome. I’d like to enter a convent.”
At that, Marie Isabelle looked over sharply. “Hélène, no. You aren’t serious.”
“I won’t marry, all right? I refuse to do it! You cannot make me!” Hélène’s voice had become wild, erratic.
Her mother leaned out of her saddle, reaching across the shadowed distance to put a hand on Hélène’s arm. “I won’t ask you to get married. But, Hélène, you would hate being a nun.”
“It sounds like a relief, escaping from the world. Living in quiet isolation.”
Marie Isabelle made a skeptical sound. “All those rules and restrictions, bells chiming at all hours, labor with no reward? You would hate it.”
As if marriage wasn’t all about rules and restrictions, and labor with no reward. But Hélène hadn’t minded any of that, back when she was marrying Eddy.
Everything had felt different with Eddy. He made the entire world seem brighter, livelier, full of promise. Hélène couldn’t begin to imagine how she would move forward without him.
She felt grief sinking its claws into her. As if some feral animal had awoken in her chest and wanted to shred her heart from the inside.
“I cannot even publicly mourn him,” she said helplessly. “I was his fiancée, his real fiancée, and instead everyone is grieving with May!”
“When did you start caring what everyone else thinks?” her mother demanded. “Eddy knew what was in your heart, and so does God. What else matters?”
“It matters because I want to mourn him!”
“Who says you cannot? You are mourning him now, here, in a place he loved. Which is far more appropriate for Eddy than a grand funeral procession.”
Her mother was right. They had reached the stables; it was fully dark, and peaceful, the only sounds the whickering of horses and the wind rustling the branches. An owl hooted deep in the forest.
Hélène dismounted swiftly. A stable hand stepped forward, but Marie Isabelle caught his gaze and shook her head.
“The Princess Hélène and I will stable our own horses tonight,” she murmured. “You may go.”
Sorrow was rising sharp in Hélène’s throat as she unsaddled Odette, found a set of combs, brushed her coat until it shone. There was something soothing about the repetitive motion. Odette leaned around, sniffing Hélène’s hands in search of a treat, her breath warm.
The shock or anger, whatever was holding back Hélène’s tears, began to crack.
Hélène sat down on the ground. And there, in the warm darkness that smelled of hay and horses, she wept at last.