Chapter 31 #2
“I see.” Her tone suggested she saw more than he wished. “And you’re here alone, drinking yourself into oblivion while staring at a portrait you’ve spent seventeen years refusing to acknowledge. How very productive.”
Theodore’s jaw tightened. “My marriage is not your concern.”
“Your happiness is always my concern, whether you appreciate my interference or not.” She leaned forward, her gaze sharp enough to cut. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Theodore Yeats, I’ve known you since you were in leading strings. Don’t insult my intelligence with transparent lies.” She paused, studying him with unsettling perception. “She left. Why?”
He could deflect. Could make up an acceptable excuse about estate business or social obligations. But the exhaustion that had settled into his bones made dissembling seem impossibly difficult.
“I told her she meant nothing to me,” he said flatly. “That our marriage was merely a contract to satisfy your meddling and her father’s greed.”
The silence that followed was profound.
“I see,” Lady Seymore said eventually, her voice carrying an edge he couldn’t quite identify. “And did you mean it?”
“Yes. No.” Theodore dragged both hands through his hair. “I don’t know. She was prying into things that weren’t her concern. Touching things I’d explicitly forbidden. She uncovered Charles’s portrait, and I—” He gestured helplessly to the portrait propped against the wall. “I reacted poorly.”
“Poorly.” His aunt’s repetition held no inflection.
“You told your wife—a woman you’ve been sharing a bed with, a woman who by all accounts has been trying desperately to build a true connection with you—that she means nothing, because she committed the grievous sin of being curious about your family. ”
Hearing it stated so bluntly made it sound worse than it had felt in the moment.
Theodore reached for his glass, remembered it was empty, and settled for glaring at the decanter instead. “She had no right.”
“She had every right.” Lady Seymore’s voice sharpened. “She’s your wife, Theodore. Your Duchess. This is her family now, whether you like it or not. And you cannot expect her to live in ignorance of the very history that shaped you simply because you find it too painful to discuss.”
“Some things are better left buried.”
“Are they?” She gestured to the portrait. “Is that what you’ve been doing these past three days? Burying it? Or finally confronting what you’ve spent seventeen years running from?”
Theodore said nothing. The accusation landed too close to the truth.
“Tell me about Charles,” Lady Seymore said quietly. “Not the version you’ve constructed in your guilt and shame, but the actual man.”
“I’ve told you—”
“You’ve told me the facts. The affair, the duel, your father’s death. But you’ve never spoken about what it felt like to discover that someone you loved had betrayed you.”
Theodore’s hands clenched against the arms of his chair.
“It felt like everything I believed about people—about trust, about loyalty—was a lie. Charles was the one person besides you who’d treated me as though I mattered.
And he used that affection to manipulate me into silence while he destroyed our family. ”
“He did,” Lady Seymore agreed. “And that was unconscionable. But Theodore, my dear boy, you must understand something crucial.” She leaned forward, her expression intent.
“What Charles did—what your mother did—those were their choices. Their moral failures. Not yours. You were seventeen years old, confronted with an impossible situation created by adults who should have protected you instead of using you.” Her voice softened without losing its firmness. “You did nothing wrong.”
“Your father might have challenged Charles anyway. You know his temperament as well as I do. He wasn’t a man who tolerated betrayal with quiet divorces and discreet separations.
” Lady Seymore held his gaze. “The duel might have happened regardless of when you spoke. Or it might have happened sooner and ended in the same tragedy. You cannot know, Theodore. And you must stop punishing yourself for variables you could never control.”
Theodore stared at Charles’s painted face. The warmth in those eyes, the charm that had fooled everyone. He’d spent so many years convinced that his attachment to his uncle had blinded him, that caring about people inevitably led to devastation.
But now… Now things were different.
“I know,” he said. “I can see that now.”
Charles had been weak. Whatever affection he’d held for Theodore, it had not been worth keeping his honor. A man willing to betray his brother, manipulate his nephew, destroy his family—that wasn’t love corrupted by passion. That was simply a lack of character dressed up in charisma and charm.
“She didn’t do anything wrong,” Theodore heard himself say.
“Cressida. She was simply curious about a covered portrait in her own home. And I…” He closed his eyes.
“I saw her reaching for what I’d hidden, and I panicked.
Because letting her see Charles felt like letting her see every failure, every mistake, every reason I’m fundamentally incapable of being the husband she deserves. ”
“Oh, Theodore.” Lady Seymore’s voice carried such tenderness that it made his throat thicken. “You’re not incapable of anything except honesty. With her and with yourself.”
“I don’t know how to be what she needs.”
“She doesn’t need you to be perfect. She needs you to stop hiding behind walls you built when you were too young to know there were other ways to protect yourself.” She stood and leaned down to place one hand over his. “Do you love her?”
He missed her voice at breakfast. Her opinions on estate matters that she’d researched without being asked.
The way she’d argued with him about tenant improvements, passionate and informed and entirely unbending when she believed she was right.
He missed the warmth of her beside him at night, the sound of her breathing in the dark, the way she’d reach for him without waking.
He missed the way she’d looked at him sometimes, when she had thought he hadn’t been paying attention. As though he was someone worth knowing, despite all evidence to the contrary.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “God help me, yes.”
Lady Seymore’s expression softened with something that might have been relief. “Then you need to tell her that. Not in some grand gesture designed to avoid actual vulnerability, but honestly. Completely. In a way that makes it clear you understand what you’ve done and what you’re asking of her.”
“She won’t forgive me.”
“Perhaps not immediately, but Cressida strikes me as someone capable of extraordinary grace when given genuine cause.” She squeezed his hand. “The question is whether you’re brave enough to give her that cause.”
Theodore looked at Charles’s portrait one final time. For seventeen years, he’d let this man’s choices define his own. Seventeen years of walls and distance and careful control, all designed to prevent the kind of devastation that had destroyed his family.
But in protecting himself from potential pain, he’d guaranteed a different kind of destruction. The slow erosion of everything that made life worth living, until he was nothing but duty and isolation and the hollow performance of existence.
Cressida had offered him something different.
Had pushed past his defenses with her curiosity and her arguments and her stubborn refusal to accept his coldness as an immutable fact.
Had made him want things he’d sworn never to want again—connection, intimacy, the terrifying vulnerability of being known.
And when confronted with that vulnerability, when she’d touched something he’d kept hidden for nearly two decades, he’d lashed out with the cruelest words he could conjure.
Had reduced their entire marriage to a transaction because facing his own capacity for feeling was more frightening than any external threat.
“What your parents and Charles did was not your fault, Theodore,” Lady Seymore said softly. “But what you do next, whether you let their failures define your future or choose something better, that is entirely up to you now.”
Theodore stood abruptly. “I need to go to Cressida.”
“Yes, you do.” His aunt’s smile held approval. “Though perhaps you should bathe first. And change your clothes. You look like you’ve been sleeping in your study.”
Theodore cleared his throat and decided not to say anything, no matter that she had hit the nail perfectly on the head.
“Definitely bathe.” She moved toward the door, then paused. “Theodore? When you see her, don’t lead with explanations. Start with an apology. A genuine one, without qualifications or justifications. She deserves that much.”
After Lady Seymore left, Theodore stood alone in his study for a long moment. The afternoon light slanted through the windows, catching dust motes in its path and gilding Charles’s portrait with false warmth.
He’d kept this painting covered for seventeen years. Had refused to look at his uncle’s face because confronting it meant confronting his own shame and guilt and the terrible conviction that caring about people inevitably led to destruction.
But Cressida had pulled back that curtain, literally and figuratively. Had forced him to see what he’d been hiding from—not just Charles’s betrayal, but his own fear of becoming like his uncle. Of letting passion override reason until he destroyed everything good in his life.
Except he’d managed that destruction anyway. Not through passionate excess, but through its opposite. Through cold calculation, careful distance, and the deliberate refusal to let anyone matter enough to hurt him.
The irony was almost funny.
He headed upstairs to make himself presentable, his aunt’s advice ringing in his ears.
The castle felt different somehow, lighter despite the afternoon fading toward evening.
Or perhaps that was merely his own perception shifting, the weight of seventeen years’ denial finally lifting from his shoulders.
Mrs. Agnes appeared as he emerged from his chambers, freshly shaved and dressed for travel.
“Your Grace.” Her expression carried cautious hope. “Shall I have the carriage prepared?”
“The horse.” He needed speed more than comfort. “Have Atlas saddled and ready in ten minutes.”
The housekeeper’s face brightened considerably. “Right away, Your Grace.”
Theodore descended to the entrance hall, pulling on his riding gloves while his mind raced ahead to London.
To Bardwell House, where Cressida was no doubt convinced he’d meant every word of his cruel dismissal.
Where she was trying to piece together some kind of future from the wreckage he’d made of their marriage.
He had no illusions about what awaited him. She would be justifiably furious. Might refuse to see him entirely, might tell him to leave and never return. He’d earned that response and worse.
But he had to try. Had to find the words to explain what he’d been too frightened to admit even to himself: that somewhere between their forced proximity at Ashmere and her stubborn determination to build something real between them, he’d fallen completely and irrevocably in love with her.
And that loving her terrified him more than anything else in his carefully controlled life ever had.
A groom brought Atlas around, the stallion snorting impatiently in the cooling air. Theodore swung himself up into the saddle, gathering the reins, and urged Atlas forward.
The ride to London would take hours at the pace he intended. Hours to rehearse what he’d say, to imagine every possible response, to steel himself for the very real possibility that he’d destroyed something irreparable with his fear and his cruelty.
But as Ashmere disappeared behind him and the road opened ahead, he felt something unexpected settle in his chest.
Hope. Fragile and tentative, but unmistakably present. He’d spent seventeen years convinced that isolation was safety. That walls were protection rather than a prison.
Now, riding through the fading afternoon toward London and Cressida and whatever future they might salvage, he understood the truth his aunt had been trying to tell him for years.
The real courage wasn’t in keeping people out. It was in letting them in despite every fear, despite every past hurt, despite the absolute certainty that loving someone meant risking devastation.
Cressida had been brave enough to try. To push past his defenses and offer him something real, something worth having, even when he’d given her every reason to stop.
The least he could do was match that courage. So, he urged Atlas faster, the countryside blurring past as evening settled over England.
Somewhere ahead, in a London townhouse, his wife waited.
And Theodore Yeats was finally ready to stop running.