Chapter 17
Something was amiss. Phoebe could feel it in the air.
As Phoebe climbed out of the bed and quickly dressed, she missed Oliver’s warm, hard, protective body next to hers. Where had he gone? She felt cold now. A chill laced through her.
It felt ominous.
Now, he could have simply gotten up to go and do what needed to be done, but her own feelings, her own infallible instincts, warned her that was not the case.
No, she had a wave of something else as she pushed her feet into her slippers, picked up a shawl, pulled it over her shoulders, and headed out of the chamber. She headed down the long hall and along the stairs, her eyes swinging side to side, looking for any sign of her handsome duke.
With each step along the elaborately woven carpet, she tried to convince herself that the rising concern in her was completely unreasonable. But in her entire life, her emotions had never been unreasonable. The warnings inside of her had never been untoward.
No, like her mother, she had an affinity for people and their feelings in a way that most people did not. So the further she searched, the more her concern arose.
When she spotted him standing in the corridor looking into the long hall, she let out a breath of relief. There he was standing tall, beautiful, and strong.
But then she noticed it.
There was a slight rigidity to his frame. He was watching something or someone, his hands curled into fists, and then he sucked in a long, sharp breath and began to shake his head.
Oliver took a step back, and then what she saw pierced her heart and froze her breath.
It was unmistakable because there in the dark hallway, lit only by the glow coming from the room and the sconces along the walls, she saw tears.
Tears slipped down the Duke of Crestfield’s face, her Oliver’s face, and his breath was coming in ragged gasps. He turned and strode away from her. Away from whatever he’d just seen.
He did not even know she was there. He could not sense her presence, but she ached with incredible longing to run to him, to care for him, to ease his wound.
And suddenly, for the first time in her entire life, she was enraged with herself and with her family.
The Briarwoods were so determined to help people that perhaps they had helped him into the abyss, and the very possibility that her family and herself might be the reason for his pain now?
It sucked all the air out of her lungs, and she could not even part her lips to cry. She followed him, her feet battering at the floor. She did not hesitate as he raced out into the dark night.
There were no stars. The moon was hidden behind the clouds and soft, white snow fell, only adding to the crystal layers that had accumulated over the last days.
It coated the trees that lined the forest in white blankets. The landscape shone a cold blue in the night.
She looked for him, looking left to right, but he was nowhere in sight. Then she heard the crunch of footsteps in the snow. She chased after him, not caring that she only had a shawl, not caring that she was in slippers.
At last she cried out, “Stop, Oliver, stop.”
He did not, as if he could not hear her. He kept trudging, and she cried out one more time.
At the intensity of her call, he did stop, his shoulders tense. He didn’t look back but stared out into the distance.
“What is it?” she called. “Let me help you.”
The silence that followed was frightening, and in the falling snow, that silence only grew.
“I don’t think you should marry me,” he said at last, his voice oddly calm, save for the strain of agony under it.
“What?” she gasped.
“I don’t think you should marry me,” he repeated again, his voice growing harder. “It’s a terrible idea. Of course, I will not perform a breach of promise. If you insist upon it, we shall wed, but I am going to let you down, Phoebe. I am not the man for you. Your brother is right.”
“No, he’s not,” she shot back without hesitation. “And you will never let me down. You are too good, too strong, too—”
“Phoebe,” he cut in, “I was already thinking today about how to keep you away from your family at Christmas.”
“I don’t believe you,” she replied, her own voice harsh now as her throat tightened.
He turned to her slowly, his face gaunt in the snow.
“It is true. I was thinking about how I would take you to Austria for Christmas, so that we could travel, or that somehow we would always be away from this place on Christmas Day, so that I would not have to feel like this.”
“What is it that you are feeling?” she asked, unable to bear the idea that he truly had been thinking about separating her from her family on such an important day.
She was willing to give him all the other days of the year.
Was he not willing to give her just this one?
Was the pain so very bad? And if it was, could she truly ask him to give in to her?
“I am not the man you clearly think I am,” he replied.
“I am selfish. I am hard. I am not someone who thrills at Christmas carols or holly. I do not care about the red berries. I don’t care about ivy or Christmas trees or orange garlands or laced cranberries or cut-out snowflakes.
I don’t like Christmas plays. I hate dancing. I hate it all.”
“No, you don’t,” she countered, her voice ragged with emotion, for he was stealing their happiness away word by word.
He flinched.
“You are lying now,” she insisted, unwilling to give up on him, on them. “You lie well, Your Grace, but you cannot lie to me. You don’t hate any of it. You don’t even dislike it. It causes you pain, and that is an intense difference, and I want to know why.”
“Why do I have to tell you?” he demanded, a muscle tightening in his jaw “What gives you the right to know my memories, to know my history, to know what—?”
“Makes you the way you are?” she cut in.
She began to shake in the cold, but she was not just freezing.
She was also in an inferno of anger. Not anger at him, but anger at whatever had shaped him.
“Because I love you,” she explained. “Because you are to be mine. I want to be there for you. I want to be strong for you, and I want to help guide you through whatever—”
“And if I don’t want you to guide me through this?” he interjected, his face a war of emotion. “You see, Laertes made a tremendous error when he asked me to come here for Christmas.”
“What?” she whispered.
He looked away. “I think Laertes thinks that I want to like Christmas again, that I want to be healed, that I want to be with others on a day like today, but I don’t,” he ground out.
“Why?” she demanded.
A torrent seemed to rise in him then and he ground out, “Because on a day like Christmas, when joy should be all around, it can be yanked away by the person who’s supposed to love you.
Phoebe, I don’t even know if I believe in love like you do, because the truth of it is, the people who love you the most are the ones who devastate you.
So maybe you shouldn’t marry me, because in the end, no matter how much I love you, I’m going to be just like my father.
Perhaps I will devastate you. Perhaps I will devastate our children.
I will wreck them and ruin them, just like my father wrecked and ruined my hopes and dreams and the thing that I thought that would please him the most.”
Tears began to slip down her cheeks. She’d wanted to hear it. She’d wanted to know, and here he was telling her.
“Go on,” she urged, unwilling to flinch in the face of his pain.
He sucked in a broken breath, then laughed, a horrified sound. “You want to know the truth? Your young cousin was dancing tonight by the firelight, and I was going to stop him.”
“I don’t understand.” She frowned, confused. “Why?”
“He was frolicking about in a costume, dancing. I came to realize he is a student of Monsieur Georges and is eager to perform, but when I first saw him, I did not know that he was practicing for some performance. I thought he was just dancing about, and I was ready to go in to tell him to stop, to protect him, to make certain that no one else saw him, that no one chastised him, and certainly not his father. But that’s when I realized that his father, Nestor, was cheering him on. ”
Oliver’s voice dropped so low and reverberated with such pain that it was but a ghost on the winter wind beginning to whip in.
“You see, I learned a long time ago that fathers do not always cheer on their sons and that fathers sometimes rip them apart. You ask why I don’t dance? Why I don’t like to dance.
It’s because when I was a boy, I put on a costume made of my mother’s things, and I decided that it would be great to dance like the dancers I saw in the town square at Christmas.
I was free and I was pure and I was love.
All the things that you Briarwoods admire.
All the things that you insist on someone being when they’re a member of your family. ”
Oliver was shaking now as the words poured out of him, words that had been buried for years.
“My father found me. And the look on his face? It is seared into my brain and into my bones, and I will never forget the way I disappointed him that day, the way I caused him dismay. His son dressed in his mother’s things. Dancing.”
Oliver’s brow furrowed and he gritted, “So I’m sorry if I cannot believe in the collective delusion of the Briarwoods, that love and goodness and being oneself always wins out, because I was myself, Phoebe, and it nearly broke me.
So please don’t ask me to be myself anymore.
I’m the Duke of Crestfield, and that has to be enough. ”
“Or what?” she challenged, even as her heart broke for him.
“You’re going to be a very unhappy woman.”
And he then strode to her, picked her up into his arms, carried her back inside, deposited her in the foyer, and then turned from her to stride back out into the snow.
“Come back!” she called, realizing that even in his pain, he had protected her. That he was good and loving and unable to put her at risk, even when he was breaking. “You are going to catch your death,” she cried out.
He said nothing. And he did not come back.
It was Christmas Eve, snow was falling, the moon was pouring down over them, peering through the clouds, leaving the landscape cold and icy, and it was the most alone she’d ever felt in her life.
But it hit her then. If she felt alone, how must he feel?
How lonely could he be? How she wished she could go to his father’s crypt, dig him up, and shout at him.
Because a man who was dead still held sway over his son.
A good man, it seemed, in so many ways, but a man who had crushed his child’s spirit so intensely that it might never know love again.
Phoebe didn’t know if she could ever forgive the former Duke of Crestfield, which was saying something because Phoebe tried to forgive everyone. She stood shaking, her heart bleeding, and she couldn’t understand how this had happened.
The Briarwoods always won out, she had thought.
The Briarwoods had always found a way to love and to feel happiness and joy, especially on Christmas. But at long last, their good luck had run out. At long last, they had meddled too far. At long last, they had been wrong. Maybe love did not solve everything.