Chapter 32
HELENA
She walked quickly, and did not stop until her chamber door was closed behind her.
Then she stood in the middle of the room and did not move.
The coldness in his voice at the end had shaken her more than his anger ever had.
She had braced herself for the anger — had been waiting for it, reading the signs of it the way she had learned to read them, cataloguing each shift in his expression and the set of his shoulders.
But the anger had not come. What had come instead was something quieter and far more final. A man who had decided to stop trying.
She had done that. She had taken something that was trying very hard to grow and she had put her hands around it and held on until it stopped.
She sat down on the edge of the bed.
The worst of it was that she had meant none of it.
Not a single word of it after the first, and she was not even certain she had meant those.
She had wanted him to come back at her. To refuse to let it stand.
To do the thing he always did, push back, make her laugh, find some angle she had not considered.
Instead he had gone very still and very cold, and said very well, and that had been that.
She had wounded him. She knew it with a certainty that sat like a stone in the center of her chest. Not annoyed him, not frustrated him — wounded him.
She had seen it in his face in the moment before he masked it, that brief unguarded second when he had looked at her as though she had said something that could not be taken back.
And the terrible truth, the one she could not look at directly, was that the reason she had kept pushing was not because she did not care.
It was precisely because she did. She had felt it coming for weeks — this slow, creeping, terrifying feeling of needing him, of looking for him in a room before she had even decided to look.
And every time she felt it she had pushed it back down and told herself that an arrangement was an arrangement, that she knew exactly what this was, that she was not going to make that mistake again.
Because she knew what happened when you loved someone who held power over your life.
She had learned it very thoroughly, in the years she had spent finding new ways to make herself smaller, quieter, less likely to draw the kind of attention that ended badly.
She had spent three years inside that lesson. She was not going to take it again.
Even if Gideon was nothing like Huxley. Even if she knew that, fully, in every rational part of her mind. Her heart had not yet caught up to what her mind knew, and until it did, the only safe thing was distance.
A knock at the door.
“Your Grace.” It was Mrs. Storm’s voice. “I beg your pardon. There is a note arrived from the village.”
Helena crossed to the door and opened it. Mrs. Storm stood in the corridor with a folded piece of paper and an expression of mild uncertainty, as though she was not entirely sure whether this was a good moment or a very bad one.
“It is from Mrs. Baker,” she said.
Helena took it and unfolded it.
Your Grace — I write with the very happiest of news.
Your apple pie has carried the day by a considerable margin.
The vote was not even close. I shall be calling it Duchess Helena’s Apple Pie henceforth, if Your Grace does not object.
The Duke’s rhubarb came in last, I am afraid to say, though I thought it best you hear it from me directly rather than from the village at large.
Helena read it twice. Then she laughed — a short, wet, entirely undignified laugh — and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, because she was also, apparently, crying again.
Mrs. Storm looked at her with the a blank expression, which she appreciated.
“Please write back to Mrs. Baker,” Helena said, when she had composed herself, “and tell her it is perfectly all right. I am very glad.” She folded the note and held onto it. “And would you send Mary up to me, please?”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
She waited. She looked at the note in her hand, and then at the window, and then at the note again.
Outside, the grounds of Blackthorne stretched away in the afternoon light — the oak trees along the lane, the glimmer of the lake just visible at the far edge of the grounds, the kitchen garden with its neat rows of late summer plants.
It was a beautiful estate. She had thought so from the moment she arrived.
She had thought, in her more unguarded moments, that it could be home.
She crossed to the wardrobe and pulled out her portmanteau. She set it on the bed and opened it.
By the time Mary appeared in the doorway, she had already folded three dresses into it.
“Your Grace—” Mary stopped. She looked at the portmanteau. She looked at Helena. “What are you doing?”
“I am returning to London,” Helena said. “I need you to write to Clara tonight. Tell her we are coming and ask if we may stay with her. If she cannot accommodate us, we will take rooms at Grillion’s.”
Mary did not move from the doorway.
“I said I need you to write to Clara,” Helena repeated.
“I heard you.” Mary’s voice was very careful. “Your Grace. Helena. Please think about what you are doing.”
“I have thought about it.”
“You have thought about it for approximately twenty minutes in the immediate aftermath of a quarrel.”
“There will be no argument, Mary.” She took another dress from the wardrobe and folded it with more precision than was strictly necessary. “I have made my decision. We are going. I need you to start packing Lavinia’s things and to write to Clara. That is all.”
“That is all,” Mary repeated, quietly, as though the words tasted strange. She came into the room and sat down on the chair by the window without being invited to, which under any other circumstances Helena might have remarked upon. “And His Grace? What does he get? You simply vanish?”
“He gets what he asked for. A cold coexistence. Distance.” Helena set the dress in the portmanteau. “I am giving him exactly what he said he wanted.”
“Did you not say that he told you he would give it to you if you wanted it? And you told him you did?”
She looked away, aware that her mind had turned the conversation on its head already.
“Perhaps. But I meant what I said.” She stopped.
Pressed her hands flat on the folded fabric and stared at them.
“I have made a mess of this, Mary. I have made a complete and thorough mess of it and I do not know how to unmake it. Every time I try I make it worse.” She took a slow breath.
“The kindest thing I can do for him is remove myself from the situation. He deserves better than what I am able to give him.”
Mary looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked out of the window.
“Lavinia,” she said.
“Lavinia comes with me. She is my daughter.”
“I meant have you considered what this does to her? She has been happy here. Happier than I have ever seen her. She follows him around the gardens. She says his name a dozen times a day.” A pause. “She loves him and he adores her.”
Helena said nothing.
“And you love him,” Mary said. “I know you do. And you know you do. And you are running away because you are frightened, and I think you know that too.”
“I must think of my daughter,” Helena said. “That is all I am doing. Thinking of my daughter.”
Mary looked at her steadily. Then she stood, smoothed her skirts, and nodded once. “I will write to Lady Clara. And I will pack Lavinia’s things.”
“Thank you.”
“Do not thank me,” Mary said quietly. “I do not agree with you. I am simply not going to argue anymore.”
She left.
Helena stood alone in the room with the open portmanteau and the afternoon light moving across the floor. After a moment she went to the small writing desk in the corner, pulled open the drawer, and took out a sheet of paper.
She sat with the pen in her hand for a long time. She looked at the note from Mrs. Baker, still folded on the desk beside her. Your apple pie has carried the day. She thought about his face when she had said the rhubarb would lose. The particular way he smiled when he was trying not to.
She pressed her lips together and began to write.
She did not write for long. Whatever the note said, it did not take many words. When she finished she folded it, wrote his name on the outside, and set it on the desk where it would be found.
Then she went back to the portmanteau and kept packing.
Gideon sat at the breakfast table the following day, cracking his egg when his eyes fell to the two table settings that stood unused as yet.
She hadn’t come down for dinner again the night before, the second in a row. This morning, he had not waited for his breakfast, instead he’d consumed his porridge while it was still warm, and finished his tea before waiting.
He’d perused the London papers - a couple of days later now - and the local paper.
When the clock struck ten, he rose and made his way out of the room, indicating that breakfast could be removed to one of the footmen.
He walked outside, the morning sun already warming his face, and stopped at the little enclosure that had been created by the house for Ruby, the little pig. Gideon had ordered two of the adult pigs moved here from the stable, where they were usually housed, so they could keep Ruby company.
The three pigs were currently busy finishing their breakfast and he watched for a while as they oinked happily, before rushing toward a puddle created by last night’s rain.
Ruby rolled on her back, legs in the air and enjoyed the mud while the two adults tended to their own tasks, which involved sitting in a patch of sunshine.
The minder, who had been assigned to the pigs’ welfare, rounded the corner and Gideon waved him over.
“Martin, has Her Grace been here to see the pigs yet?”
The man bit his lip and worked his jaw.
“She has, before she departed, Your Grace.”
“Departed? Has she gone into town?”