Chapter 15
“Are you ready?”
Clio startled—she was doing this so frequently these past few days—when Phoebe spoke to her from the doorway. How long had she been sitting at her dressing table, seeing nothing, thinking about nothing?
She was about to reply in the affirmative—she was replying to everything in the affirmative, just to avoid having to make any decisions—when Phoebe heaved a sigh.
“No,” she answered on Clio’s behalf. “You’re not.”
“Of course I am,” Clio replied mechanically. “It’s my wedding day.”
Phoebe huffed out a sigh, then crossed to Clio, pulled her up, and led them both to the side of Clio’s bed. Phoebe wrapped an arm around Clio and maneuvered the younger woman like a doll until Phoebe’s cheek was pressed to Clio’s head, Clio’s cheek to Phoebe’s shoulder.
“On my wedding day,” Phoebe said, “I had the most wretched attack of nerves. No,” she amended, “I was downright dreading it.”
Clio felt a flicker of what might have been fondness, though she still felt as though things were happening to her at a great distance.
It was better than the alternative. Ever since she’d returned to England, she’d felt like a rabbit in a snare; every time she tried to escape, it had only tightened around her with a more choking grip.
She just … wasn’t fighting any longer. It might not get her free, but at least it wasn’t getting worse.
“I remember,” Clio said, because it seemed like a response was required. “You and Aaron didn’t get on at first.”
“Indeed, we did not,” Phoebe agreed. “But I’m not telling you this to argue that you and Metford are going to fall in love and ride off into the sunset together.”
Clio actually felt the full force of that surprise.
“You aren’t?”
Phoebe pulled back enough to give Clio a smile that was full of horrible understanding and kindness. It made Clio want to cry, and she could not begin to cry.
“No,” Phoebe said gently. “It means that I understand why, even if you are marrying a good man, you might be grieving the other life that you lost by doing so.”
Something inside Clio stirred, and she worried that letting herself acknowledge it would break the dam she’d carefully built up.
“I think he is a good man,” Clio said quietly.
That was part of what she couldn’t understand. Hector was kind—well, he was annoying and persnickety, and he didn’t care at all about rules. But he’d been gentle with her when she’d let herself be vulnerable, and when she’d been left without choices, he’d tried to give some back to her.
And yes, perhaps it stung that he was willing to flee the breadth of England to avoid actually remaining in a marriage to her, but she understood that he intended kindness. His kindness was just … gruff.
But he was good. He was the kind of good that stopped to pull a woman from a carriage accident, even after she’d insulted him in a shop.
“So maybe,” Phoebe said, “you’re asking yourself why, if he’s a good man, you are unable to accept the idea of this marriage?”
“Am I horrible?” Clio asked, closing her eyes against the onslaught of something breaking inside her. “Why can I not just … be happy enough? Why am I always looking to something else, something further, something I can’t have?”
She was crying. Oh, Lord, this was the one thing she wanted to avoid, but here she was. She was crying—but Phoebe was there, pulling Clio in for a hug, rubbing soothing circles on her back like Clio was a child.
“Oh, dear heart, no, no, you aren’t horrible at all,” Phoebe soothed.
“You are just someone who has been pushed to make a choice before she was ready, and who is being asked to feel a certain way about it before you’re ready.
But you can take your time. It won’t happen any other way, really.
So just … be kind with yourself about it, all right? ”
Clio clung to Phoebe like she was the sole thing keeping her from being swept beneath a flood.
“And what if I can’t?” she sobbed into her sister’s shoulder, making a wet mess of them both.
Phoebe pressed a soft, maternal kiss on Clio’s hair.
“Then your family will be there to help, my love,” Phoebe told her. “And I suspect that you might even learn that your new husband counts among that number.”
“I feel like an idiot,” Ramsay said, tugging on his cravat for the twentieth time. Jonathan, who had tasked himself with fixing that cravat every time Ramsay ruined it, made a sound of distress. “This clothing is unnatural.”
“You look like a gentleman,” Jonathan said, slapping Ramsay’s hands away as Ramsay tried to ‘help’ repair the necktie.
“Aye,” Ramsay agreed, resigned. “Unnatural.”
“Will the two of ye close your gobs,” Hector snapped. He was trying to remain calm. He was trying to be resolute.
He would see Clio here today. He would marry her.
And he would try like hell to avoid doing anything else to hurt her.
“He’s in a right snit,” Ramsay commented to Jonathan, not even bothering to lower his voice. “Which is understandable, given that he is marrying a beautiful woman to whom he is so drawn that he can’t keep his hands off her long enough to say the vows. What man wouldn’t be miserable in his place?”
Hector made a rude gesture. Jonathan made another distressed sound, but this one was just for show.
“You have to admit, Your Grace,” he said, shooting Ramsay a superior look at this excellent show of manners, “that you have done rather well for yourself. I’ll allow that there was a bit of a scandal—” Even Hector, who was clinging to self-control with both fists, had to let out a snort at this understatement.
“—but you’ve only been back in London for two weeks, and you already have a lovely bride from a good family.
And you didn’t even have to take an old one. ”
“I’m assuming you aren’t married, Jonathan,” Ramsay said casually. “Given your sweet nothings when it comes to describing ladies.”
“I am married to my work, sirrah,” Jonathan retorted.
Hector ignored them. It was astonishing to think that it had been only two weeks since he had met Clio. How was such a thing even possible? He’d once spent four straight weeks on a specialized joinery project, and the whole thing had gone by in a flash.
But these weeks … they’d changed his life. And today, he’d swear to that, in front of God and man.
Though not many men, really. Even though Hector was a duke and Clio a duke’s daughter, they weren’t going to be married in one of the city’s great churches. Instead, they had found a small chapel and issued invitations to family only.
For Hector, this had meant inviting nobody except Ramsay, since Hector and his brother despised one another, and Matthew’s wife sniffed in disgust every time they happened to cross paths in the house.
For Clio, that apparently meant inviting half the bloody ton.
“Who are all these people?” he grumbled when his patience ran out.
Bless sweet Jonathan, who grinned like he’d been waiting his entire life to answer this exact question.
“These,” he said grandly, “are the Lightholders.”
There was a pause and then.
“I am wasted on the two of you,” the butler muttered.
“Right. So that one there—” He gestured subtly at the central man, who held himself with all the regal confidence of a king, even though there was a young girl on his knee who was busily using his forearm as a stage for her rag doll to do a dance.
“—is the Duke of Godwin, Xander Lightholder, the head of the family. Next to him is his wife, Helen. Then there’s David Nightingale—if you think you have started a scandal, you should hear some of his exploits—and his wife, Ariadne. She’s a Lightholder by birth—”
“I regret asking,” Hector interrupted. Even the noise inside his own head was better than the walking and talking Debrett’s show that Jonathan was putting on.
By the time the crowd of well-to-do Londoners, all apparently members of the family that Hector would join in a moment, settled into their seats, Hector had been clenching his fists for so long and with such force that his knuckles ached.
And then, finally—or perhaps too soon, Clio entered.
She looked perfect, and she looked all wrong. Hector’s chest twisted with the contradiction.
She was always beautiful, of course, but there was a redness to her eyes that suggested that she’d been crying. Hector had never been bothered by women’s tears overmuch before he had met Clio, and yet now he found that the very idea of her weeping unsettled him.
Once more, he was seized with the unstoppable urge to comfort her. He took half a step forward before he caught himself.
Even waiting one more minute to have her at his side was agony.
But finally, Clio and Warson reached the pulpit—Warson only glared twice, which felt like progress—and Clio’s hand was there, where it belonged, wrapped in Hector’s protective hold.
It was something, even if she still wasn’t properly looking at him.
He forced his fingers not to clench too tightly. He had to remember that he needed to let her go.
“Dearly beloved,” intoned the vicar, an ancient fellow with cloudy eyes who beamed at Hector and Clio like they were the most beautiful couple he’d ever seen, not a scarred duke leaning on a walking stick and a woman who had recently been weeping, “we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony …”
The vicar droned on, his slow method of speech making the sermon all the longer, and Hector was torn between longing for the shortened version he’d witnessed in the village chapel in the North and naked gratitude that he got to stand here with Clio for just a little bit longer, her fingers limp in his.
When Hector spoke his vows, he prayed that Clio could tell that he meant them … all except for the part about to have and to hold, he reminded himself sternly.
And when Clio offered her vows in return, he scoured her face for signs that she loathed him as much as she seemed to.
“I, Clio Warson, take thee, Hector Ferrars—” He couldn’t even take proper pleasure in her speaking his name.
“—as my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part.”
They were lies, all lies—they would not cherish or care for one another, neither in sickness nor in health—and, yes, countless couples had told these same lies in this same manner because they’d been forced to wed, especially the aristocratic ones …
But suddenly, it felt profane to Hector, who had never been particularly religious in the first place.
He could not banish the bitter taste in his mouth, and the perfunctory kiss that they shared did nothing to soothe him. It was … cold. Nothing like their previous touches, even from the very beginning.
It was almost as though Clio wasn’t even here at all, as though her body was present, but her soul was absent.
The moment the ceremony was over, she let go of his hand. Somehow, he managed to release her fingers in turn.
She was his wife now. So why did she feel farther away than ever?