Hilde
“Lady Croft!” sobbed Lady Isobel, her shoulders shaking beneath her coverlet-turned-cloak. “I’m so sorry to disturb you.”
“Here, now, Lady Isobel, don’t weep so,” she said. “Let me get you a handkerchief.”
She got one and handed it to Lady Isobel, who pressed it ineffectually against her sodden face.
“I had to go out into the storm to attend to a small problem and my clothes were muddied. Now, come, tell me why you are crying.” She didn’t mean to be curt, but all she wanted was to put on something warm and dry and then go and see if Elmwood was waiting for her in her study.
Lady Isobel dabbed at her face again. “I am so sorry to trouble you at this late hour, but I find that I am quite in need of counsel.”
Counsel? From Hilde?
“Would it not be best to confer with your chaperone? She is surely better poised to advise you than I am.”
Lady Isobel shook her head vehemently. “My dear Auntie Floret cannot help me in this matter. You see, I seek advice of a more…romantic nature, and Auntie has never been married or in love with anyone. You, dear Lady Croft, are a married woman, and given the differences in background between yourself and your husband, I must assume that the marriage has a great love affair behind it.”
Hilde tried not to grimace. She wasn’t certain how Lady Isobel knew about Thorgoode and their differences in background, though she supposed Miss Floret was the type to ferret out all the sordid gossip of any given locale before visiting it.
Or perhaps Hilde’s country manners made it obvious that she wasn’t a real lady.
“Will you advise me in matters of the heart?” prompted Lady Isobel. “Oh, please say that you will!”
Matters of the heart? Hilde’s own heart was like a clay brick lodged inside her rib cage.
If anyone had asked her a month ago if she understood love, she would have said yes, but now she wondered if she was even capable of love, or if everything that she had felt had been delusions and lies that she told herself so often they seemed like truth.
“I think I would be a poor tutor in such matters,” she managed to croak out.
Lady Isobel’s delicate, clammy hand emerged from the pink coverlet to clasp Hilde’s.
“I have no one else to turn to. My darling Erol has refused my advances at every turn, and I fear…I fear he does not love me as I love him. You have won the love of a lord, and bound him at the altar, and kept him for your own. I must know your secret! Please, tell me what I must do.”
Hilde almost laughed. To be asked the secrets of marriage on this, of all days…
but then, Lady Isobel’s interest was not truly in Hilde and her marriage.
This was about Lord Elmwood, who was being stubborn out of some misguided sense of morality when it came to Lady Isobel.
It would be the actual death of him. Anything Hilde could do to push them together, she ought to do, if she wanted to be any sort of true friend to him.
But for some reason, the understanding of Lord Elmwood that she had come to hold felt private.
She battled with the desire to keep it for herself, even as she knew she ought to share it for his own benefit.
“I think that Lord Elmwood is very cruel in the way that he judges himself,” she said at last. “He believes that all the terrible things that have befallen him are his due. He does not feel worthy of your affections, so he cannot see fit to receive them.”
“You are saying I must make him feel worthy?” said Lady Isobel, sounding eager, the sorrow purged from her voice. “How do I achieve that? Whenever I try to embrace him, he pushes me away. Perhaps if you could advise me on something better to do with my hands when I…”
Hilde had a flash of Elmwood’s hands coming up and gripping her own arms to stop her from kissing him, and she flushed with embarrassment and regret.
She had been just like Lady Isobel, touching him for her own ends rather than out of any interest in what he might need or truly want.
She shook her head and cut Lady Isobel off before she could continue.
“Lord Elmwood is beautiful. I suspect that many people have seduced him, or tried to. They may have even told him that they loved him, but he has still found himself alone in his troubles.”
“Am I not to express my desire for him?” said Lady Isobel. “How can I not, when I yearn for him so! I think I shall die if he will not love me.”
Hilde wanted to think that was all the silly drama of youth, but some part of her understood. There was indeed something about Lord Elmwood that provoked yearning.
“Actions of care speak much louder than kisses, Lady Isobel. Elmwood needs you. Marrying him will save his life, and even if he does not trust in your affections now, he will come to believe them in time.”
“I do not want to wait any longer! I want him to adore me and love me now!”
Hilde was suddenly quite irrationally angry. She yanked her hand away from Lady Isobel’s clutch.
“I suppose you are accustomed to getting what you want, Lady Isobel, but Elmwood is not one of your horses, prepared to jump whenever you kick him. He is a person of great feeling, and if you truly want his love, then you must find some way to earn it.”
Lady Isobel’s mouth shifted from a pout into a thin, firm line, the expression quite foreign on her face. It somehow made Hilde like her better.
“Have I not earned it enough, remaining true to him for all these years, even when I heard nothing from him? Have I not shown him my dedication by risking my reputation to find him, and coming here to the ends of civilization to marry him? How can a man require more?” said Lady Isobel, her eyes blazing at Hilde.
Hilde held her gaze. “Those all sound like things you did to get what you wanted.”
Lady Isobel stood quite abruptly. “Thank you for your advice, but I think that perhaps you were correct in your assessment of your tutelage.”
“Very well,” Hilde said, tiredly brushing straggling fringes of hair away from her face. “I do sincerely wish you luck.”
Lady Isobel went to the door, but she turned back at the threshold.
“I’ve never met a horse I couldn’t ride, and I don’t see how men can be all that different.”
With that volley, she departed, leaving Hilde alone wrapped in her damp shift and unspoken retorts.
She wasn’t alone for long. No sooner had she pulled her shift over her head and dropped it disgustedly onto the floor in a pile than the door that led into Thorgoode’s retiring room flew open, spilling someone into her chamber in a scramble of golden hair and cane.
Lord Elmwood.