Chapter 18
Acold wind blew in over the next few days, as if the weather itself was determined to parallel Aaron’s mood.
Ice crystallized on the cobblestones, and knife-sharp icicles hung from the eaves of the house, making every step outside treacherous.
Matters inside the house were sufficiently uncomfortable, however, that Phoebe found herself considering risking the elements at least once per hour, though good sense ultimately prevailed.
The morning after Clio’s arrival, Phoebe had resolved to revisit the…
unfinished business between herself and her husband.
She wouldn’t say that she was delighted to try to consummate her marriage with her husband immediately following the return of his younger sister, but the house was large enough, and Clio’s room was not close to the Duke and Duchess’ chambers.
But when she found Aaron, he was… polite.
It was deeply strange.
“Good morning,” he said when she entered the breakfast room, glancing only briefly from his freshly ironed newspaper.
Phoebe had been taken aback. She hadn’t expected him to make the first conversational gambit.
“Good morning,” she returned, a touch hesitantly. “I was hoping that we might… talk.”
He gave her a polite half smile, as if she were an acquaintance he’d met on the street.
“I have a number of things to do today. Perhaps another time.”
He tried to raise his newspaper again, but Phoebe cleared her throat meaningfully—then kept doing so when her first attempt failed to garner any reaction from him.
Nobody had ever said that Phoebe was anything less than pigheaded, and eventually, even stubborn Aaron couldn’t ignore her.
“Can I help you?” he asked dryly. “Or should I perhaps send for a physician for whatever you’ve got going on with your throat there?”
Phoebe shot him her most winsome smile.
“I was hoping,” she said again, this time in a saccharine tone, “that we might talk.”
The subtext was clear: I will continue annoying you until you talk to me.
He was stubborn, but he wasn’t stupid.
“Yes, Phoebe?” he asked. A navy man, having spent his life on the water, ought not be able to get a tone that dry, but Aaron was a man of many talents, it seemed.
She kept her chin raised high, even though she felt a blush start to rush over her cheeks.
“I thought we might discuss… the other night,” she said, trying not to quiver under his regard. “When I came home from visiting Hannah, and you were… scared.”
It was the wrong choice of words; she recognized it as soon as it left her lips.
“Is it unreasonable of me to not want to my wife to freeze to death?” he objected, his tone icy enough that it put her at more risk than the snow ever had.
“That’s not what I said,” Phoebe protested. “But you seemed—”
“Must we do this, Phoebe?” he demanded.
“Talk?” she clarified. “Yes, I daresay we do need to do that, at least—”
“No,” he corrected, and she was getting pretty damned tired of these interruptions. “We don’t. We are not friends, Phoebe. You are my wife. We agreed to marriage out of a mutual benefit in regards to our social standing and lineage. That is all.”
Phoebe was pretty certain that he was trying to make her mad. Unfortunately for him, however, she had a deep well of pettiness in her heart, and so, she would do whatever she could to deny him the satisfaction of seeing her squirm.
“So,” she said, touching a finger to her chin like she was really straining the limits of her feeble female mind, “we shall ensure your legacy… silently?”
She blinked aggressively at him, just in case he missed her sarcasm.
“Let me frame it for you in very simple ways,” he said acidly.
“We will produce an heir when it is time for such things, yes. And before you try to send another one of your sardonic little barbs in my direction—no, we shall not do so silently. But there is a vast difference between consummating a marriage and your persistent need to pry into things that are absolutely none of your business.”
He wasn’t raising his voice, but she couldn’t have felt the harshness of his words more if he’d been shouting. She felt as though he was wielding a knife and using it to hold her at bay.
“But—” she objected.
“No,” he said. “No. No arguments. No ‘buts.’ We will leave it here.” She felt as though she was facing down a judge about to make his verdict.
“When the time comes to continue the line, I will let you know.
Until then, we shall deal with one another as polite acquaintances and nothing else. Good day.
And then, before she could protest, he’d folded his newspaper and left the room.
Phoebe had been left blinking after him—blinking back tears at his hardness.
She was starting to understand Aaron in some small way. She knew enough to know that it wasn’t cruelty that motivated his actions, but some kind of… self-protection, maybe. It was like armor.
But punching against armor would still hurt her.
She pressed her hands against her closed eyelids until she no longer felt the threatening prickle of tears. She would find the chink in his armor. She would.
She would just give him a few minutes to cool off. She would talk to him again the next time she saw him.
Except…
She didn’t see him for the remainder of the day.
He had come to dinner, as their agreement dictated, but there was none of the ease that had appeared between him and Clio the night before.
Instead, he treated her like a near-stranger, too.
He spoke perhaps ten words the entire meal, and the moment that he finished eating, he excused himself and left.
Clio sighed at his retreating back.
“You can’t blame him,” she said quietly without meeting Phoebe’s eyes, at least not at first.
“I could, actually,” Phoebe said mildly. “But I won’t. At least not yet. I just… wish I understood.”
Clio toyed with her spoon for a moment, dragging it through the remnants of the trifle on her plate.
“I would have preferred it for him to be the one to tell you,” she said. “I thought… When I heard that he had gotten married, I wondered if maybe he had…”
“That he’d fallen in love, and it had changed him?
” Phoebe supplied, trying not to sound bitter.
It wasn’t that she wanted Aaron to love her—or that she would ever consider that such a thing was possible—but it would have been nice if he considered their marriage enough reason to at least speak to her.
“I’m sorry,” she told Clio. “It’s—it isn’t like that between us.”
Clio hummed, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.
“The thing to understand about Aaron,” she said, putting her spoon down in a resolved sort of way, “is that he was just the second son.”
Phoebe felt an outraged sound come out of her at this description, one that she made entirely without thought.
For some reason, this made Clio smile.
“That’s how my parents felt,” she clarified.
“As my stories last night no doubt revealed, I doted on Aaron when I was a child. I adored him. But my parents—and Peter…” She sighed.
“They wanted Aaron to be prepared to step into Peter’s shoes, which obviously was eventually needed, but they also didn’t want to…
bother with him unless that need arose. Which, of course, nobody wanted—not even Aaron. ”
Clio was being circumspect, but Phoebe could read through the lines. After all, hadn’t she spent her own childhood in much of the same situation? Her father had wanted her around when Hannah needed someone to fill the shoes of a mother, but otherwise, he wanted her to remain entirely out of sight.
“I see,” she said. “Let me guess. They wanted him to follow orders without question, bring honor to the family, and never put up a fuss about anything?”
Clio gave her a sympathetic look, one that was full of understanding but not pity.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s precisely it. And then… he went to war.”
The two women sat in silence, mulling over all the implications of this.
Phoebe knew that she could never understand her husband’s experience in the Navy.
She didn’t need to understand war to understand the look in Aaron’s eye that he got sometimes—the far-off look of someone who was being dragged back into their worst moments.
Phoebe had seen that look in the mirror when she thought about her mother, but Aaron’s version was… more.
“Is he different now than when he first returned?” she asked.
She didn’t know if the pain of battle faded similarly to the way that the pain of grief did—never fading away but becoming muted until it was just part of the background of everyday life.
Always there but only noticeable when one took a moment to stop and think about it.
But Clio didn’t seem to know any better than Phoebe did, at least judging by her unhappy shrug.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He sent me away.”
There was a cavernous sadness beneath this simple statement, too, and Phoebe felt an ache in her chest about how lonely they all had been.
She, trying to make up for the loss of her mother so that Hannah didn’t have to hurt as she did.
Aaron, constantly being told he was second best—unwanted until the worst happened, and he was needed.
And Clio, sent away so she wouldn’t see her brother’s scars, only to bear the invisible scars of rejection.
“I’m sorry,” she said, knowing it was far from enough.
“Me too,” Clio said, reaching down to play with her spoon some more.
Phoebe realized something, watching Clio fidget and try to hide all the ways she’d been hurt: she knew how to be a sister.
She had no idea how to be a wife, but she had spent her whole life working to be the best sister she could be.
She knew how to reach Hannah when Hannah was being stubborn and irritating.
She knew when to give her space and when to give a very necessary nudge.