Chapter 24
Really, Ariadne was very understanding about a teary Phoebe showing up on her doorstep late in the night.
“I’m sorry,” Phoebe hiccupped. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Ariadne cooed, opening her arms to Phoebe even though she was wearing a dressing gown and had clearly been headed to her bed. “Come here.”
“Who do I have to murder?” David asked with more cheer than the question warranted as he, too, came into the parlor where the nervous footman had deposited Phoebe while he went to retrieve his employers.
“Well, she’s married to my cousin, so perhaps let’s hold off on that,” Ariadne said, offering her husband a small smile. “It does so annoy Xander when the Lightholder offshoots squabble.”
David got a very put-upon look. “Oh, if you insist,” he said. “If my services aren’t needed, I shall absent myself.”
And he did so, but not before pressing a kiss to the top of Ariadne’s head and pouring drinks for both women—Phoebe’s significantly larger than the one that he offered his wife.
“Just to be clear,” Ariadne said when David had left and both women had taken a sip of their drink; Phoebe relished the way the liquor burned her throat, “I will absolutely take your side over Aaron’s.
But killing a duke is a hanging offense, and I’d like my husband’s neck to remain unstretched, so maybe we stop short of murder, eh? ”
Phoebe recognized that this was an effort to cheer her up, and she tried to laugh, but it came out as a sob instead. Ariadne let out a small sound of dismay and wrapped her arms around Phoebe tightly.
“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said again, her words thick and wet. “I just… Oh, God, I never thought I would be like this,” she lamented. “I never wanted to be someone who let a man make me miserable like this. I wasn’t supposed to let myself get into this situation. But—but here I am.”
“Tell me what happened,” Ariadne encouraged.
And so Phoebe did. It took several handkerchiefs and more than a few fingers of whisky, but she muddled her way through the explanation of the fight with Aaron and—after swearing her friend to secrecy—Hannah’s pregnancy.
“I wanted to matter to him,” Phoebe explained, feeling pathetic with the admission. “I wanted him to care about me more than the potential for scandal. Is that stupid?”
“No,” Ariadne said without hesitation. “It isn’t stupid at all.”
“Not even if ours was just a marriage of convenience?” Phoebe pressed. David’s liquor cabinet was well stocked, and her head was feeling fuzzy. It was, she found, far preferable to the gut-wrenching sadness she’d been experiencing earlier.
She would have a headache in the morning, she knew, but that consequence felt too distant to bother her now.
“Not even then,” Ariadne confirmed kindly. “No matter how you’re feeling now, you did a good thing, Phoebe.”
“Publicly fighting with my husband at a Yuletide ball?” Phoebe asked.
“Letting yourself be yourself,” Ariadne clarified patiently. “You were vulnerable and open. And that matters. Your courage matters, no matter how it all ends up.”
“Even if I wasted it?” Phoebe asked bitterly. She’d crossed over into the bitter side of her intoxication, which likely meant that she should stop drinking. She took another long swig instead.
“There’s no such thing as wasting it,” Ariadne said, taking the glass from Phoebe’s hand. “Now, let’s put that away before I have to pry you out of bed in the morning with a lever.”
Phoebe thought she was out of tears, but she felt her eyes prickle again at this gesture of friendship—though that was very likely the whisky talking.
“You don’t mind if I stay the night?” she asked.
“Stay as long as you need,” Ariadne assured her. “You’ll always have a place here with me.”
There was only so long that Aaron could spend sulking around his own house like an itinerant ghost before it started to become pathetically clear that he was, in fact, moping.
But he hadn’t expected Phoebe to stay gone. Yes, he had as good as told her to leave him—at the very least, he hadn’t objected when she indicated that this was her design.
And yet, on the second day, when he still expected to see her around every corner, he had to admit it.
He’d thought she would return.
It was so stupid of him, though. Had he given her any reason to return?
He must be spoiled, he decided in a particularly sharp fit of self-loathing. He was spoiled by Jacob and Clio, who seemed to care for him despite his many overwhelming, obvious flaws.
On day three, he became aware that his best friend and his sister would likely try to make him feel better if he allowed himself to be cornered by them. As he did not deserve to feel better, he had no choice but to avoid them at all costs.
Instead, he went to the rehabilitation home, which he felt certain would make him feel worse, which was what he merited. He would be forced to face all the men he had failed and know that they were suffering because of his own inadequacies as a commander. This fit his mood perfectly.
In the end, though, the visit did make him feel worse… just not in the way he’d expected.
“Admiral!” called an Irishman with an arm in a sling whom Aaron vaguely recognized. Ball, perhaps. Something like that. “Er, that is, Your Grace. Have you brought your wife with you today?”
Aaron felt the puzzled frown cross his brow, though the emotion felt far more distant than the expression. He’d spent enough time shoving back his emotions these past few days that something as shallow as confusion failed to penetrate his defenses.
The Irishman looked nervous when Aaron didn’t immediately respond. “She’s the best fourth for cards we’ve had in ages,” he added by way of explanation, shifting his weight from side to side. “I thought mayhap she would be interested in another hand if she came along with you again today.”
“No,” Aaron said, his voice sounding distant to his own ears. “I… She isn’t here this time.”
“Ah, right,” the fellow said. His discomfort was palpable. “Right. Well, Lieutenant Grand—ack, he’s titled too: the Earl of something—he’s here. He’s usually good for a hand.”
“Dowling?” Aaron asked, blinking in surprise. Jacob was here?
“Erm, yes, that’s it, I do believe,” the man said. “He’s right through there if you’re looking for him.” He gestured with his good arm, clearly hoping to be well rid of the very high-ranking gentleman who was acting so incredibly strangely.
Aaron felt certain that he should say something else, but decided that the lapse in propriety was more than fair recompense for the man getting what he wanted in terms of Aaron’s absence.
He drifted off in the direction that the former soldier had indicated and found Jacob, sitting in a sitting room with a man in a wheeled chair, both of them laughing uproariously at some story.
“And then she—” Jacob was saying as he made a rather indelicate gesture with the arm with the stump. “And so, I’m more than happy to—oh, Warson. Good day. What are you doing here?”
Aaron watched as the other soldier’s mirth faded with his appearance, the laughter disappearing into a polite, proper gesture, and he thought with a real sense of loss about how much simpler his life had been before he had inherited his family’s title.
He would have said life had been better back then, but recently, he was wondering if that wasn’t entirely true.
He didn’t have to look far to wonder what—or, rather, who—inspired this change of heart.
He tried to instill some cheer into his voice even though a greater part of him assumed that it would be pointless to try to hide his true feelings from his closest friend.
“I might better ask what you’re doing here, Jacob,” he said, hearing the falseness of his good humor even to his own ears.
As Aaron had expected, Jacob frowned then murmured an apology to the other soldier, who waved off his words with a friendly ease that Aaron had never experienced with the men who lived in this facility.
Then, his friend crossed to Aaron’s side and grasped him by the arm to drag him over to a long corridor that connected two parts of the building.
One side of the corridor was still structured like a medieval arcade, though Aaron had had glass put into the arches, rather than leaving them open to the elements.
It was a lovely place to stand—or sit, as was the only option for many of the men. Aaron sank into one of the well-used chairs placed strategically along the arcade and was reminded, for the thousandth time, of the horrors of war and how far they reached beyond the battlefield.
Jacob didn’t rush him. For a while, they just sat. A few errant snowflakes drifted past the window from time to time, but they all melted the instant they touched the muddy ground.
Aaron wondered if his marriage would be like that—drifting, beautiful, and all too brief. Then, he scolded himself. What a wretchedly poetic thought.
“Warson,” Jacob said eventually, his voice gentle and probing, “what is it?”
“I shouldn’t have come here,” Aaron said in lieu of answering. “It’s… It isn’t right that I should come here to flaunt how I walked away from battle unscathed while so many others did not.”
An uncharacteristic silence from his friend made Aaron turn in Jacob’s direction. His friend’s brows were high on his forehead in a picture of incredulity.
“What?” Aaron asked, a note of defensiveness in his tone.
Jacob shook his head like he was shaking off a stupor. “Nothing. It’s just… that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.”
“I… beg your pardon?” Aaron asked, stupefied into politeness.
Jacob gestured back toward the main room with his injured arm, and Aaron imagined that his friend was more comfortable with the lost limb here, where people didn’t gawk and stare.
“Those men,” he said, “see you, and they hope.”
Jacob said this in a voice that suggested that this was meant to make Aaron feel better, but Aaron felt as though his friend couldn’t have twisted the knife better if he had tried.