Chapter Nine
Dear Persephone,
We have been home for two days now and I am nearly dead with boredom!
Athena spends all her time reading fashion magazines and practicing country dances, which she does not perform well, at all.
I do not think she will find a husband dancing like she does.
No gentleman wants to marry someone who dances like a cow.
Persephone smiled for what felt like the first time since arriving in Northumberland.
Poor Artemis, to endure the raptures Persephone could easily imagine Athena, at the very romantic age of eighteen, indulging in at the prospect of a London Season.
Athena ever was the romantic of the family.
Daphne was the shy, practical one, even at eleven.
And Artemis, though only eight, had the reputation for dramatics.
Papa has engaged a governess, but she will not arrive for another week. So I am running around like a heathen (that is what Mrs. Russell says) and terrorizing the neighborhood. It’s lovely. I wish you were here so we could be heathens together.
When can I come explore your towers? You did promise. Do duchesses have to keep promises? I have been wondering about that.
I will have my birthday in London, Daphne says. I think that could be fun, but I am not sure yet. I will invite you. If the duke wants to come, he can too, even if he never did talk to me once while I was at his castle.
Please write to me. Be sure to put the guinea under the seal.
Your sister,
Artemis
“You seem in good spirits this afternoon.”
Persephone looked up at Harry Windover, who had apparently entered the sitting room while she was reading. “I have been reading a letter from my youngest sister, Mr.—” A disapproving look changed the words even as they left her lips. “Harry,” she corrected with a smile.
“She writes with good news, then?”
“She has written a letter filled with crises, actually.” Persephone smiled. “With Artemis—that is my sister’s name—every little thing is a crisis. I was enjoying being reminded of that.”
“You miss your family.” He said it so matter-of-fact, as if there was no question of her feelings.
“And what of you, Harry?” Persephone carefully refolded Artemis’s letter. “Do you miss your family, being here as long as you have been?”
“I think of Adam very much as a brother,” Harry replied, “so being here is like being with my family.”
Persephone studied the gentleman standing near the fireplace, warming his outstretched hands.
“How is it that the two of you have become such close friends?” Persephone would normally have been alarmed at her own audacity but was too perplexed by the man she’d married to hold the question back.
“Does it seem hard to believe because we are so different?”
“And he is so hostile toward you.” Persephone sat on a sofa facing the fire, feeling her brows furrow with her confusion.
“Adam is hostile toward everyone.” Harry shrugged. “It is just the way he is.”
“Does he never show any tenderness of feeling?” Persephone felt her heart sinking lower with every word.
She had been entertaining some hopes that Adam would improve upon closer acquaintance—that, perhaps, he was simply wary of strangers.
An odd character trait, she admitted, for one who’d chosen a stranger to be his bride.
“Tenderness of feeling?” Harry pushed a log further into the fire with the toe of his boot. “Not within the last two decades, I’d say.”
“And before then? Before the last two decades?”
“I met Adam at Harrow,” Harry said. “Twenty years ago. I have no idea what he was like before that.”
“Then you forged a friendship with someone who was . . . was . . .” How did she put it into words? She finally decided on, “Hostile?”
Harry smiled. But a different smile than he usually produced. It was sentimental, fond; not laughing or joking. “Adam saved my skin,” Harry said. “First year at Harrow. I was something of a runt, and the other boys found that grounds for torturing me. Adam set them straight.”
“They weren’t unkind to Adam?” Persephone knew how children could sometimes be.
“They were afraid of him,” Harry answered. “Even then. They still are. Everyone is.”
“He would have only been seven or eight years old.” Persephone tried to imagine a child Artemis’s age already intimidating and hard.
“Seven,” Harry confirmed. “He was a force to be reckoned with even then. The only shell in the history of Harrow, I’d guess, who ran the school.”
“Shell?”
“The youngest year,” Harry explained. He chuckled as if remembering something. “A few of the boys, now grown gentlemen, of course, still whimper when they see him.”
“But to be so frightening when he was only a child.” It was unfathomable. And not a very encouraging sign. Perhaps there wasn’t a gentle side to Adam, after all.
“It wasn’t that, exactly.” Harry strode from the fireplace to sit on the sofa facing Persephone. “He was, still is, remarkably intelligent. And he is authoritative, the kind of man few people question. Even at seven he was very much that way. And he is unafraid.”
“Unafraid? I don’t imagine anyone could be entirely unafraid.”
“I would wager a pony he hasn’t an ounce of fear in his entire body,” Harry said. “And if he does, he squelches it with alarming finality.”
“There is nothing that frightens him? Nothing that intimidates him?”
Harry rose as if to leave. “Not that I’ve seen.”
Persephone digested that as Harry made for the door.
A man without fears, in control in every situation, who had been intimidating, apparently, all his life.
And she, who had always been quiet and happy at home, dreaming of her future cozy family life, was married to him.
What had ever led her to believe that this marriage could be remotely like the one she’d always hoped for?
“Why doesn’t he ever look at me?” she asked the instant the question jumped into her mind. She immediately regretted asking. Persephone felt herself color up.
“What do you mean?” Harry stopped a step from the door.
“Never mind,” Persephone whispered, knowing her face was flaming brighter than ever.
“No. There’s no ‘never mind’ here.” Harry walked back toward her. “He never looks at you?”
Persephone shook her head. “And he moves away if I sit near him. I thought, that morning at breakfast, it was only because I sat on his right side. Considering his . . . um . . .” She was getting flustered.
“Face,” Harry finished for her. “Adam’s mother makes a lot of fuss over Adam’s scars. More than she needs to. At Harrow, when one of the other boys would sit on his right at meals or something and started staring, Adam didn’t move. He made the boy who was staring move. And they always did.”
“Then it wasn’t because of the scars?” Persephone’s heart plummeted. If his reason hadn’t been the scars, then it had to have been her.
“I couldn’t say.” Harry looked genuinely perplexed.
“Oh.” Her prospects were growing dimmer.
“He really doesn’t look at you?” Harry asked.
Persephone shook her head. Adam hadn’t once taken more than a very passing glance in her direction. He turned away almost instantly when she came into the room.
“That is strange,” Harry said. “He usually faces problems head-on.”
“I am a problem, then?” Persephone asked in a small voice.
Harry smiled at that. “Poor choice of words on my part.”
Persephone managed the smallest of answering smiles.
“It may just be that Adam is unused to the idea of a wife,” Harry offered. “He tends to get more, I don’t know, prickly when he has a lot on his mind.”
“So I should give this some more time?” Persephone felt a bit of her natural optimism returning.
“Definitely. Look at me. If I’d given up on Adam for being grumpy, we wouldn’t be friends.”
“How long did it take for him to not be prickly with you?” Her determination was building once more.
“He still is. But after a while he quit landing me facers every few days. I figured that was something.”
“Landing you facers?” Persephone had never heard that particular phrase before.
“It’s cant. Slang. Means punching a person in the face.”
“Good heavens,” Persephone muttered.
“Adam hates it when I use cant.” Harry smiled mischievously.
“But you do, anyway?”
“That’s why I do. Every time I’m in Town I try to pick up a new phrase. Drives him mad.”
“Doesn’t that worry you? Suppose he actually follows through with one of his threats?”
“He won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Adam would never admit it,” Harry said, “but he knows I refuse to be bullied, and I think he respects that. He keeps trying. But I think he hopes it’ll never work.”
“So he doesn’t like people who are intimidated by him?” Persephone rose to her feet. She needed to think about this new information.
“Doesn’t respect them,” Harry corrected.
“I guess that is a little different.”
“It is a great deal different to Adam,” Harry said. “Adam likes his mother.”
“But he doesn’t respect her?”
Harry shook his head rather adamantly. “Mother Harriet—I have called her that since I was a boy—has made something of a hobby out of pitying Adam.”
“And he doesn’t like that?”
“Frustrates the—” Harry cleared his throat and looked a little embarrassed. “Frustrates him.”
Persephone paced the room, her brain spinning with the insights Harry offered her.
“If Adam does not like people to be afraid of him, why does he go to such lengths to accomplish it?” A few of the stories she’d heard from the staff regarding Adam’s rather colorful past came springing to mind: duels, brawls, grown men reduced to tears, women swooning.
“I have a few theories,” Harry said. “But Adam would, literally, kill me if I posed any of them to you.”
Persephone turned to look at Harry, expecting to see the joking facade he usually presented. He looked far too serious for her peace of mind.
He shrugged. “‘Kill’ may be a little strong. Still, Adam’s motivations are not a topic I am willing to discuss.”
“But I am trying so hard to understand him.”
“Most people do not even try.” Harry’s smile was full of sympathy. “Give it some time. I have a feeling you will come up with a few theories of your own.”
He bowed then walked to the door. He stopped a step from the threshold and turned to look back at her. “He really never looks at you?” he asked.
Persephone shook her head.
“Something about you has ruffled him.” Harry narrowed his eyes a little. “And nothing ruffles Adam.”
“Is that good or bad?” Persephone asked, suddenly concerned.
“I don’t know yet.” He gave her one last searching look before inclining his head and stepping out.
“Ruffled him?” Not exactly the reaction most women would wish for from their husband. “But,” she told herself, “it means he, at least, is not indifferent.”
Perhaps that was something she could build on. Persephone quickly reviewed all Harry had told her about Adam.
“Do not be intimidated. Do not pity,” Persephone whispered. It wasn’t much as far as advice went, but it was something. She thumped Artemis’s letter against her open palm as she circled the sitting room.
Adam had said something the morning before, in the corridor outside his book room, about not wanting her to stick out at Falstone Castle, about not advertising her flaws. Appearances seemed to be important to him as well.
Persephone could learn to conduct herself like a duchess.
She had been practicing and could improve.
She’d also been spending a little extra time at her dressing table each morning, allowing her maid the opportunity to experiment with her toilette.
Adam hadn’t said anything, specifically, about her appearance. But it certainly couldn’t hurt.
“Do not be intimidated,” Persephone repeated to herself.
She still wasn’t sure why he seemed to avoid her, why he, apparently, couldn’t bear to look at her. But those things could be dealt with later. Persephone had a goal.
If nothing else, Adam would respect her.