Chapter 13 #2
The question echoed one they had asked Hermia so often that it had likely begun to irk her. Isabella now understood why her sister’s eyes would always seek something else to look at: a way to stall, a way to avoid being noticed, a prettier lie she had to tell to protect her sister.
“I shall be happy when I am at the ballet,” she said instead of answering truthfully.
She was content, but her heart had begun to ache for more from her marriage, and she did not know how to voice such a thing. She and Oscar continued to make progress with one another, but she was beginning to yearn.
“The ballet makes me happy, and I believe I may make a plan to go soon.”
“Isabella, that is not a truthful answer,” Sibyl said.
“You needn’t worry about my happiness,” she replied, flicking her gaze to the lake where fireflies danced in patterns that rippled over the surface. “Worry about your own, and that will make me happy. That is where my true contentment lies, Sibyl.”
“That is also not a truthful answer.”
“Yet it is the only one I shall give,” Isabella teased. “Please, honestly, do not worry about me. I do not do things that do not bring me happiness.”
“You and I both know that is not true.”
“It is true enough.”
“Let us see what has enthralled our youngest sister so,” Isabella replied, squeezing Sibyl’s hand and pulling her up to stand.
Sibyl only pursed her lips, and Isabella knew she was going to let this go today, but she’d come back to it.
Isabella hoped that she’d have a better answer when the time came.
At the Varcroft, a gentleman’s club in the heart of London, Oscar dropped into his seat opposite Edmund, who had, as usual, come early and ordered their first round of drinks.
“You arrived early to mock me, I suspect,” he said, tone dark, almost a growl. “I am punctual. Remember that.”
He snapped the lid of his pocket watch with deliberate force, as if to punctuate the warning.
“Or maybe I just enjoy seeing people breathe easy before your towering, brooding presence crushes it,” Edmund retorted.
“No,” Oscar let out a low, sharp huff. “You were always early to every class in Cambridge, leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed. As if the teacher arriving on time was inconvenient to you.”
“Better early than known for tardiness.” Edmund flashed a smile. “Besides, it unnerves people to think they are running late, even if they are right on time. Does it unnerve you?”
“You do a lot of things to unnerve me, Harcross.”
Edmund cocked his head to the side. “And your wife, does anything about her unnerve you, Rochdale?”
A growl escaped his throat. “No.”
“She is changing you, my friend,” he drawled, voice lilting.
Oscar glared at him, reaching for his drink. “Do not be ludicrous.”
“Factual is not ludicrous,” Edmund insisted, eyes sparkling. “Before her, you’d have grunted a single, noncommittal word and been done. Now? We actually debate. You tolerate more, my friend… and, dare I say, you’re growing softer.”
“There is nothing soft about me,” Oscar was quick to say, his hand clenching his glass. “Do not conjure such notions merely because idleness drives you to spy upon my marriage.”
“Oh, I cannot deny that may be exactly what I wish to do, but it is not fueled by idleness. This excites me. Rather, it makes me happy to think you might be married to a woman who’s smoothing out your rough edges. They have grown ever so sharp since Cambridge.”
“Perhaps there were reasons for those sharp edges,” Oscar muttered drily.
“Indeed, but you are no longer there,” his friend reminded him.
“Perhaps now, now that you are safe and you are settled, you can afford yourself a little softness. You are not in the war anymore, Oscar. You bear the scars of it, yes, but that is the past. Now you have a wife who might need your softness more than your weaponized temper.”
Oscar narrowed his eyes at Edmund over his glass. “I agreed to meet you to discuss business, not to be lectured.”
“Perhaps I merely miss how attentively you listened to me, even while pretending not to. Much like you once attended university lectures, scribbling away at every word. Has your wife glimpsed your studies yet? I imagine she is quite taken with the sheer number of useless papers you hoard.”
At the mention of Isabella in his study, Oscar’s thoughts returned—although they had never truly left—to the night he had pleasured her.
He swore that when he slept, his nightmares were being replaced by the taste of her on his tongue, by the skin that had pressed to his, soft and scented and intoxicating. In the days since that evening, he had woken with a hard ache between his legs, craving his wife again.
“Oscar… is it really so hard to believe she might be affecting you?” Edmund questioned when Oscar offered no confirmation or denial. “Is it so difficult to think that you might want to be affected? You think she is everything good, and she is, but why can’t you believe you can be, too?”
He paused, not sure how to answer it. Edmund knew plenty about him, but he didn’t always know how Oscar thought that he poisoned the good things he touched. That he himself felt riddled with so much darkness and beastly crimes that he was not worthy of ever thinking he could be good.
“As long as it is not reversed,” he muttered. “And that my darkness is not affecting her.”
“You do not have to live in darkness,” Edmund reminded him, sounding so like Isabella for a second that Oscar was prickling. “But the fact that you are grateful she is not affected by you already proves my point, I believe.”
Before he could say anything, Edmund went on. “Although if you are so worried about your influence, then why are you not changing?”
Oscar let himself lapse into silence, looking away from his friend coolly.
Because it is not so easy to change.
When he once hoped that he could remain in the light, he was only dragged deeper into darker shadows. He learned to stop hoping quickly after that.
One ray of sunshine coming into my life cannot suddenly bloom with such warmth everywhere.
Except he said nothing of the sort. Instead, he only drank deeply and finally answered, “Because I am content.”
“In yourself, or in your marriage?”
“Myself.”
“But not your marriage?”
“Edmund,” he hissed in warning. “Do not push.”
“We are friends.” He flashed Oscar a smirk. “There is no such thing as pushing. Do tell me your thoughts about your marriage. It was something you wanted so wholeheartedly once, and now you have it.”
“Do not hold me to the foolish whims of a student when I was too young to know anything,” Oscar muttered.
“Oscar, you have had dreams before,” Edmund laughed softly.
“What is so terrible about letting yourself continue having them? I have seen the two of you at all events. You have a wife who smiles at your side when you do not notice. You have a wife who looks at you as though you are you, more than the reputation that snakes after you throughout the ton. Does that not mean something greater than this… this mask you feel you must put on to survive? What are you surviving anymore?”
A war with myself, he thought. A war my wife should not have to witness. Not when that war consists of screams and nightmares that do not fade so easily.
In the end, he only stared down at his empty glass and said, “I do not know anymore.”