Chapter 19
Helen was utterly beside herself.
“Oh, Clio,” she said, pressing up on her toes to kiss Clio soundly on both cheeks as she and Hector were shown into the Godwin Estate drawing room.
“We are so pleased to have you! I can’t blame you, of course, but you were far too busy at your wedding breakfast, and I feel that I hardly got to speak with you at all!
And after you have so recently returned to England!
Oh! And Letitia is a darling; thank you for sending her to us, we simply adore her—"
“Helen,” Xander said, coming up behind her and laying a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “If you don’t take a breath, you’re going to swoon.”
Helen, a plump woman of hearty Northern stock, cast her husband a disgusted glance.
“I’ve never swooned a day in my life,” she said, appalled.
But she did pause for air, which Clio thought likely for the best. “In any case, we’re very pleased to have you.
And especially you,” she added to Hector, who looked rather taken aback by this show of familial effusiveness, “because it’s been far too long since I’ve heard a proper Northern accent. It sounds like home.”
“That’s very kind of you to say, Your Grace,” Hector said with a smile that came so easily that Clio might have been jealous—if not for the fact that Helen was one of the most happily married people that Clio knew.
Besides, Hector was standing at Clio’s shoulder just in the same way that Xander was standing beside Helen. It was hard not to enjoy such a thing.
“Are you dreadfully tired from your journey, or would you like to have something to eat before resting?” Helen asked, already bustling over to the bell to ring for refreshments.
Bustling was rather Helen’s default mode. She wasn’t the polished Society darling that everyone had expected to become duchess to the great Duke of Godwin, but Helen was, in Clio’s opinion, absolutely perfect for Xander.
They all agreed that refreshments would be just the thing, and Helen’s businesslike management was so effective that Clio had taken her first bite of a truly delicious scone before she realized that this had all been a ploy to extract gossip.
Goodness. Helen was a bloody mastermind.
Because the woman waited until drinks were poured and cakes were served before she looked at Clio and Hector with an eager smile.
“So,” she said. “There have been whispers, but I demand to know the true story. How did the two of you really meet?”
Hector blinked at Helen, regarding her the way one might look at a stick that had moved and revealed itself to be a poisonous snake. Clio, who really should have expected this, just laughed.
“Well,” she said, taking advantage of her husband’s shock, “I was minding my own business in a toy shop—I’ve gifts for the children, by the by—when Hector appeared out of nowhere and started being most abominably rude.”
Xander narrowed his eyes, like he wasn’t certain if he should object to this, but Helen swatted his knee without even looking at him.
“And then he came along and smashed my carriage with those great arms of his—” Xander, finally understanding that this was a joke, relaxed. “—just for the express purpose of causing a scandal.”
She didn’t know what it was that made her feel free enough to tease like this, let alone with an audience. Maybe it was the country air. It was supposed to work wonders.
Clio turned to her husband and fluttered her lashes at him.
“Isn’t that right, dear?” she simpered.
Hector picked up his teacup, took a sip, and placed it exactly back down on the saucer.
“That,” he said, “is the biggest pack of lies I’ve heard in my life.”
“See what I mean about the rudeness?” Clio asked her cousins.
Helen looked liable to expire from delight.
“Here’s what really happened,” Hector said. “I was minding my own business in the toy shop when this princess came in and started harassing me for daring to be in her regal presence.”
He gave Clio a censorious look, but there was good humor dancing in his eyes.
“Darling,” she said in an exaggeratedly aristocratic purr. “How many times must I tell you? I’m not quite a princess. Just a duke’s daughter. And now—” She fluffed her hair, “—a duchess, of course.”
He ignored this.
“Then she goes outside and doesn’t you know that her self-importance is too heavy for the horses and topples the carriage right over,” he continued, sketching a large shape around her head, apparently to illustrate the enormity of her self-regard.
“She starts shrieking so loudly that half the street goes deaf, and when I courageously rescue her, she’s so grateful that she can’t stop clinging to me like I’m the last man on earth.
” He shook his head. “Intemperate, it was. Very scandalous.”
Clio could feel that the smile on her face was—well, intemperate was a good word for it, actually. She was revealing too much. She couldn’t bring herself to regret it, not when Hector was smiling back at her in that same way.
Xander cleared his throat, breaking the spell.
“That’s all well and good,” he said. “But I do believe Helen’s request was for the real story.”
Helen rolled her eyes fondly at her husband, the gesture of a woman who knew herself to be loved without reservation. Clio pushed down a pang of jealousy.
“That was the real story,” she said, and the words rang true to Clio, even if they clearly baffled poor Xander. Helen turned to the two of them, a maternal sort of smile on her face.
“The two of you are very lucky,” she said.
Clio’s heart stuttered in her chest. Nobody had spoken to them that way; everyone had acted rather as though she and Hector were two idiots who had gotten what was coming to them.
Some people acted as though Clio was lucky, but only insofar as they seemed to feel that Hector should have abandoned her to her shame.
But Helen clearly intended something different.
“You had a rocky start,” she allowed. She didn’t even seem to notice that she inched closer to her husband as she said it. “But that can lead to something marvelous; take it from me. And it is clear that the two of you are well suited.”
Hector shifted at her side, and Clio worried that this clear parallel between them and the Lightholders—a famous love match—would be pushing things too far.
“No,” she said, “it’s not—”
He interrupted her.
“Clio was my only choice,” he said firmly, looking at her family without the slightest flinch. “For me, she was the only choice.”
Clio felt her cheeks flame.
Helen smiled like the cat who had got the canary.
“Well,” she said smugly. “Isn’t that just the nicest thing I’ve heard in ages?”
“This is your fault,” Clio said as they stood side by side that evening.
“My fault?” Hector protested. She wasn’t looking at him, but somehow she could perfectly picture the look on his face—the one he got when he was pretending to be more irritated than he was. “How on earth do you come to that conclusion?”
She propped her hands on her hips and stared at the bed in front of them.
“You encouraged my cousin,” she said. “And Helen Lightholder is not a woman to encourage lightly.”
Given their present circumstances, Hector felt he could hardly argue this point.
He liked Helen, he had decided that day, in a way that went beyond the pleasant familiarity of listening to her accent. She didn’t put on airs, and, as she informed them clearly, she kept rather lax social rules when at home with family.
“The children dine with us,” she said. “Their governess joins us, too.”
Clio, who was friends with the children’s minder, perked up visibly at this.
“I have to play Grand Lady Godwin sometimes,” Helen continued, “but it doesn’t come naturally to me, so I don’t do it when I don’t have to.
Besides,” she added, with a sly sidelong look at her husband, “now that all the younger siblings are gone off, married and in their own homes, someone has to keep Xander’s feet on the ground. ”
“Your commitment to your duty is admirable, my dear,” the duke had said dryly, his smile obscured by the curve of his wine glass.
That was all well and good. Hector had a natural distrust of fussiness in all its forms.
Or perhaps not all its forms, as Helen had proven to him.
“The maid will show you up to your room,” Helen had said at the end of the meal, in between taking a bite of her own pudding and stopping her daughter from trying to put a grape in her nose.
Beside him, Clio’s spoon had stilled.
“Did you say room?” Clio asked faintly.
“Oh, yes!” Helen replied, placing the nose-grape out of her daughter’s reach. “My apologies. There is only one suitable for visitors.”
She did not look apologetic in the least.
“Helen,” Clio said with an exaggerated patience that Hector recognized. He found he liked it when it wasn’t being directed at him. “This house has sixteen bedrooms. You cannot mean to tell me that only one is available.”
“Oh, these old houses,” Helen said vaguely, then failed to follow up with anything resembling an excuse.
Hector had heard cautionary tales about the matchmakers of the ton, but he’d figured himself safe from such machinations, even before he was married.
What Society mother wanted her precious little darling married off to a scarred blacksmith, even if he were a duke?
He’d assumed himself doubly safe once he’d married Clio.
He’d failed to account, it seemed, for Helen Lightholder.
Hector had dared a glance at Xander, but found the man wearing the expression of someone who was very firmly staying out of it.
Since even Hector’s lax sense of propriety balked at outright calling his hostess a liar to her face, they were now here.
In one bedchamber.
With one bed.
It was almost laughable, except for the part where Clio was as skittish as a spring colt. Good God, what did she think he was going to do? Attack her?
He found that the idea of her being frightened of him sat in his stomach like a lead weight.