Chapter 27 #2
Absently, she was aware that they were both saying things that they didn’t quite mean, that they were saying things they might not be able to take back. That part of her was drowned out by the roar of her temper.
“Isn’t that what a Society marriage is?” Hector’s tone was scoffing.
“You can’t have it both ways, Clio. You can’t come in here, begging me to ingratiate myself with a group of people that will never accept me as one of their own, and then in the same breath complain that I’m following their rules for aristocratic marriage.
That is the bargain that your people arranged; you women fluff and primp, and we protect you from worrying about things like work. ”
Clio’s hands balled into fists. Her nails cut into the flesh of her palms. She clenched harder, needing that sharp bite of pain to ground her.
“So that’s it, then,” she said. Her voice sounded as though it was coming from very far away. “I come in and say, ‘Can we attend a ball on Wednesday next?’ and you counter that I have no grounds to make even so simple a request? Because I am just a woman, and therefore without any worth?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.
In the absence of any clarification about which part of her words had been ridiculous, she decided that this was not a protestation of her worth. She decided, instead, to get even madder.
He continued, “Besides, even if I wanted to go to your little soirée, I couldn’t. That’s the day that I am finally meeting with these sodding trustees.”
Clio’s mouth dropped open, but Hector kept going. He seemed to be as wrapped up in his temper as she was, which she felt was entirely justified on her part and entirely unjustified on his. This might have been the temper speaking, but she didn’t care.
“Even if the only thing I did have going on that day was sitting around staring at the bloody wall, I would not attend a London ball if my life depended on it.” His coarse language, which she normally found thrilling, enraged her to her core now.
“The only reason to do so would be to find a wife and I’ve already done that. ”
There was a tiny beat of silence after that, one in which Clio knew he was too angry to say anything kind about her, any small reassurance that he was pleased with the choice of wife he’d made.
But still, she hoped. She held her breath against the force of the hope.
He offered no such reassurance.
The disappointment cut straight to her heart.
She squared her shoulders. She was so tired of fighting.
“Perhaps you think you have followed all the rules they want you to follow,” she said, drawing upon all the centuries of aristocratic hauteur at her fingertips, solely because she knew it would irritate him.
“And perhaps, on paper, you have. But have you ever considered that the spirit of those rules was not, as your idiot brother seems to think, about continuing the line as quickly as possible, but about bringing you into London Society?”
He blinked, but she kept talking before he could answer.
“You are here. You are, even if you hate us, one of us. You have to live by the rules, at least a little, so that you are not exhausting yourself with constant battles.”
Hector’s shoulders squared, and he looked, in that moment, strong enough to fight any battle that could ever come his way. She liked that about him most of the time, but it was disheartening when the battle he seemed determined to fight was her.
“Since when,” he asked, his voice not angry any longer, either, but flat and unyielding, “do you care about their rules? You said you wanted to travel, to see the world. You said that you were different from the rest of them. But maybe you’re not so different after all.”
Maybe I’m not. The words came immediately to mind, but she didn’t let them escape her lips.
But it wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Yes, there were the pretenses and the gossip and the obsession with trivial things. She couldn’t defend those aspects of the ton.
But if you stripped those things away, weren’t the people here just making lives for themselves like anyone else?
Weren’t they just trying to find a place where they belonged?
Weren’t they building homes for themselves, surrounded by the people they cared for—the people who cared for them in return?
It wasn’t about the ball itself. She knew it wasn’t about the ball. She just didn’t know what it was actually about.
She’d ignored the little warning bells in her head for too long, the ones that told her that the thing she insisted that she wanted and the thing she actually wanted were different. And now, she couldn’t quite parse the two.
She couldn’t keep pretending, though. She just … couldn’t.
“I’m going to the ball, with you or without you,” she said. Even she could hear the defeated note in her words. “I will not embarrass you; I will not do anything to tarnish your reputation.”
She laced her fingers together in front of her, squeezing tightly. It was something to hold herself together.
“You’ll get what you want from your arrangement,” she said.
“You will have the wife. You will have the heir whenever you decide the time is right. You will leave and abandon the home you fought for whenever you decide to do so. I understand that this is what will happen. I understand that I cannot do anything to change this.”
Hector seemed caught between concern and anger. Clio felt something else chip off inside her. She couldn’t even please him by giving him what he wanted, then?
“Is this about you thinking that I don’t want you?” he asked, his eyes narrowing. “We settled that, as I should not need to remind you.”
Clio shook her head. She longed for the days when their arguments would have them lunging into a kiss, though perhaps that unsteady foundation was always destined to lead here.
“It’s not that,” she said simply.
He raked a frustrated hand through his hair, sending the long black locks into disarray.
“Then I don’t see what the problem is, Clio,” he seethed. “You don’t understand how fortunate you are—how privileged you are.”
This, at least, shocked a little bit of emotion back into her. She hiccuped a laugh that, if not full of humor, at least it wasn’t a sob.
“Fortunate to be married to you?” she asked bitterly.
His expression darkened, and she could see, in that moment, why people called him a monster. She still wasn’t afraid, not when she knew what lived beneath, but still. She could see it.
“Watch yourself, Clio,” he said. “I am not sensitive to barbs like yours. I couldn’t be, not if I intended to survive a life of being unwanted. Abandoned. Lame. Broken.”
Each word left him with a crack, and Clio staggered beneath the blows of each of those words, words she’d known must have been levied a thousand times against a child who never deserved them.
“But you push me,” he went on, “not because of anything I’ve done, but because you have never once in your life been brave enough to say what you actually want. So.” His gaze pinned her, like a butterfly to a card. “What do you want, Clio?”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. What words could she offer, after all, to describe a feeling that even she didn’t understand?
His mouth twisted bitterly. “As I thought. I was the one thrown away; you are the one who is truly lost.”
The words struck true enough that they made her anger rise again.
“If you are so wise, then,” she countered, “what is it that you want?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I don’t want my brother to take what is mine. I don’t want to be in bloody London. And I don’t want to be surrounded by arrogance.”
He looked smug.
Clio let out another jolt of laughter. It likely was a sob, now, but she ignored it.
“Those are things that you don’t want,” she said. “That is not the same as saying what you desire.”
He looked briefly stunned by this point. Clio didn’t feel a sense of victory, though. She just felt … hopeless.
“We should never have done this,” she said. “We should never have married. It’s broken. It’s all just …”
She shook her head, taking in his beautiful face, twisted with irritation, at this building that could have become a home if only they’d known how to ask for it. How to want it.
“It’s ruined,” she said. “It’s done.”
And then, before she could say anything else that she didn't mean—or worse, something that she did, she left him behind, tears stinging her eyes for all the things she would never have.