Chapter 14
It was an enormous problem.
Apparently, the maid was friends with the lady’s maid that worked for the red-headed woman—a Lady Clarissa, it transpired—and once the gossip followed that straight line, it was scattered to the winds.
The one thing to be grateful for, Clio supposed, was that she, Aaron, and Phoebe left the following day before the word had spread.
It was bad enough that she had to look into her brother’s devastated face across the drawing room in his London home.
Doing so for hours while trapped in a carriage together would have been untenable.
“Should I duel him?” Aaron asked, his head hanging as he leaned on his knees. “The thing is—I would win that duel, and then he’d be too dead to marry you.”
“And,” Phoebe interjected, too loudly to be ignored, “I will not be permitting you to get shot at.”
Aaron briefly ceased looking miserable long enough to spare his wife an offended glance.
“I wouldn’t lose,” he said, clearly hurt by the implication.
Phoebe was unmoved. “Yes, and duels are famously without accidents that leave people wounded or dead for the most foolish of reasons. What was I thinking? Surely, you should go.”
Her tone was so scathing that Aaron just dropped his head back down without a response.
There was a long moment of choking silence, during which Clio supposed she ought to offer something … but she just couldn’t. She felt as though something had a grip on her throat, suffocating her.
Everything just … kept happening. The situation just kept spiraling. And yes, she was making decisions—she was affecting the situation, to a degree. But it still felt as though the doors were closing around her with startling speed.
“I keep failing you,” Aaron said to the floor eventually, his tone so wretched that Phoebe let out a distressed little squeak and crossed to his side. She put a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“I keep doing the wrong thing,” Aaron went on. “I sent you away when I shouldn’t have. I made you come back when I knew you didn’t want to return. All I wanted for you … I just wanted you to be happy. Be safe. And now—and now …”
Clio knew she couldn’t keep silent, but her head felt as though it was stuffed full of cotton wool.
“I could still leave England,” she managed, her words sounding as though they were coming from very far away. “Let the gossip die down …”
“If you left now,” Phoebe said gently, “it wouldn’t just be traveling. It would be an exile. People would see that you are fleeing and take it as confirmation of their worst suspicions. You wouldn’t be able to come back.”
Clio hadn’t wanted to come back to England for this trip, and yet the idea that she would be banished from her home country made something in her chest go tight with panic.
Aaron, lost to his own panic, did not help.
“This kind of scandal will cross the ocean,” he muttered. “You will never be able to marry. You won’t have a husband. You won’t have a family. You’ll be alone.”
Clio only half stifled the whimper of distress that tried to claw its way from her throat.
Everyone had been asking her if she truly wanted to travel, if she truly wanted to leave behind her native shores, and while she couldn’t yet say that she was prepared to cast that dream aside …
she’d never wanted to be alone while she did so.
“Stop talking, Aaron,” Phoebe hissed out of the corner of her mouth.
It was too late, though. But then again, too late had passed the moment that maid had walked into Hector’s bedchamber and seen Clio.
Clio looked up at her brother, who looked devastated, and at Phoebe, who seemed torn between comforting Clio and remaining beside her husband. As she watched, she felt a strange sense of detachment, as though she was an uninvolved observer. It clarified things and kept the emotions involved at bay.
She couldn’t allow her brother and Phoebe to suffer for what she’d done. It was as simple as that.
“I won’t let the two of you face consequences for what I’ve done,” she said.
Her voice echoed in her own ears. “It’s time for me to take accountability for what I’ve done.
It’s not a mere necessity any longer; it’s an obligation.
I will marry Hector.” She swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. “That is, if he will still have me.”
It was like magic; even though Hector should have still been in the countryside, he was suddenly there, in the doorway of Aaron’s drawing room, looking like he’d ridden hard for hours to get there.
“Of course I will,” he said. “Of course I will marry you.”
Hector was braced for a punch. Surely Warson was going to punch him; he’d defiled the man’s sister, after all, at least according to the prudish rules of English Society.
He’d spent the ride back from one of the dukedom’s minor country holdings—a pell-mell race in which he’d switched horses twice but hadn’t stopped for so much as a wink of sleep or a bite of food—reminding himself that, no matter what happened, he was not going to hit Warson back.
After all, the man was probably entitled to shoot him. A free punch was the least that Hector could grant him.
But he hadn’t been at all prepared for the emotional punch of hearing Clio call marriage to him an obligation.
He shouldn’t have been surprised. Indeed, he supposed that surprise wasn’t truly what he felt. She hadn’t, after all, agreed to marry him. He’d told her he meant to ruin her for all other men, and she’d said just this once.
Well. Fate had intervened on his behalf, in the form of gossiping Society women. He was going to get to keep her.
Now all he had to do was figure out how to do so without clipping her wings in the process.
“Hector,” Clio breathed when he stepped into the room and reiterated his intentions to make her his bride. She looked pale and weary, and something protective and long-dormant within him wanted to cross to her, the way Warson’s wife was offering the other duke comfort.
But Warson’s face was twisted into a snarl of fury, so Hector didn’t dare press his luck. If he was going to marry Clio, he’d prefer not to do so with a broken nose, courtesy of her rightfully furious brother.
“Yes, you bloody well will marry her,” he snapped, clearly needing a place to vent this rage. Hector felt strangely commiserative with the man, even though they were technically at odds for now. He felt just as angry with himself for failing to protect Clio from wagging tongues.
But Hector, at least, had something to do about it. Soon enough, he would get to call Clio his.
“I am at your disposal,” he told all the members of the family. He wished to speak with Clio alone, but he knew that he owed something to her family first.
Ramsay, who had ridden back south with him, hadn’t shut up about that fact the entire ride.
“We will arrange for a wedding as quickly as possible,” Warson said, looking relieved to have something to do with himself. “You will need to obtain the special license immediately.”
“I can do that,” Hector said, by which he meant that he would ask Jonathan how to do that. There were times—well, there was this one time, at least—where not having the traditional ducal education was a hindrance.
“Good,” Warson said. “I’ll send word when we know the time and place. If you are late, I will find you, and I will shoot you.”
Hector’s mouth twitched. Warson’s didn’t.
“Understood,” he said.
There was an uncomfortable silence when he waited for—for anything. For Warson to say more, he supposed. But mostly for Clio.
Clio, who still looked ashen, had a distant look in her eye. Clio, who never let anyone determine her future …
Except for right now, when she was silent.
Warson was looking at Hector like he was considering advancing the shooting bit to right now if Hector didn’t leave. Still, Clio’s distress weighed more heavily upon him than did threats to his personal safety that would hopefully never come to pass.
“Clio,” he said gently; she startled, like she’d forgotten he was even there. “Can I speak with you for a moment, lass?”
Warson made a slight movement like he planned to protest, but his wife’s hand landed on his wrist, a featherlight touch that stopped the former admiral in an instant.
Hector tried to think of ever seeing his parents—the only aristocratic couple he’d ever known well—touch at all, let alone with such effective, unspoken communion. It was laughable. Of course, he couldn’t.
He looked at Clio with new understanding. A marriage of convenience must have seemed an intolerable condition to her after seeing such love and affection. It might be rare in Society, but to Clio, it was home.
It was as though he was seeing her in the light for the first time, for when she summoned a weak little smile, he suddenly saw that it was because she loved her brother, because she didn’t want him to worry.
Her eyes still held that distance, though.
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll show you to the front parlor.”
He followed her. And while he did, noting the defeated slope in her shoulders, he made a decision.
He wouldn’t keep her, no matter how much his inner urges demanded it. He would protect her …
And then he would set her free.
She looked through him when they reached a space of relative privacy, though the door remained pointedly open. Since they were well beyond the point of making nods to propriety, he could only assume it was because she didn’t want to be here with him.
“Clio,” he said. He couldn’t seem to stop saying her name. It was the only liberty left to him.
She turned in his direction, but she still looked glazed.
“Listen,” he urged. “I’m not going to let this ruin your life; I swear it.
We will marry. I’ll give you the protection of my name.
And we’ll do our duty—give talk time to calm down.
But then, I’ll let you do as you please.
I’ll give you your freedom. You can travel as you wish, or, if you prefer to stay in London, I’ll return to the North. You won’t feel trapped.”
The words spilled from him in a flood. He wasn’t sure he’d ever spoken to anyone like this, like he needed his words to matter.
But they didn’t. They mattered now as little as they ever had when he’d asked his parents for an explanation or for leniency. They had as little effect as when he’d whispered into the dark of night his questions about why he’d been sent away, why he hadn’t been enough.
Clio blinked at him as though she had never seen him before, let alone now.
“Very well,” she said in a voice that didn’t even sound like hers. “I’ll see you at the wedding, then.”
When Hector left the house, he felt as though he was leaving something precious behind. Something that he feared he would never get back.