Chapter 16
As always, the illness tore through Celia quite quickly. She had a very strong system, and so when she awoke late that morning, the fever was almost entirely gone from her body. She took the offered cup of tea from her mother and smiled at the doctor who was fussing about her.
“Cease, Doctor,” she said. “I am perfectly well. I always am. My body is made to endure all. Just about every Briarwood’s is.”
The doctor grinned. “My dear, you’re right, of course. But since I am here, I’ll do my job and earn my keep, if you don’t mind. The Duke of Roseford seems to think you were on death’s door.”
“Balderdash,” she replied swiftly, stunned that Dominic had been so easily frightened.
The doctor laughed. “Well said,” he said. “I wish all my patients had your constitution.”
Priscilla shook her head and said ruefully, “The doctor is right though, Celia. Poor Dominic called for us as if you were about to die upon the spot.”
“Oh no. Really?” Celia asked, “Where is he now?”
Priscilla arched a brow. “If I had my guess, he’s in some church somewhere praying for your immortal soul.”
Celia blinked. “Well, we best tell him that I’m perfectly all right and that he better grow accustomed to this.”
Priscilla gave her a short stare before she blew out a worried breath. “I’m not entirely certain that will happen, my dear. He seems…”
“What do I seem?” Dominic asked from the door.
“Dominic,” Celia called, reaching her hand out to him. “Do come in.”
He stared at her for a long moment. His eyes widened. “You’re well.”
“Of course I’m well,” she said. “Did you think I was dying?”
He stared at her, silent, his face gaunt.
“Oh dear,” she gasped, her stomach tightening and not from illness. “You did think I was dying.”
A muscle in his jaw tightened.
Her mother suddenly stood and crossed to the doctor, who was packing up his bag, all but whistling. He was so carefree. “Doctor, I think that I owe you a good breakfast. Will you come downstairs and we can discuss the latest remedies around children’s coughs?”
“I would like that very much indeed,” the doctor said merrily and the two headed out together.
Celia stared at the man she had come to love and felt a wave of apprehension. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I feared I would see yours,” he whispered.
“Oh, Dominic, I was never that ill,” she said.
“You were,” he said brokenly.
“No, Dominic, I was not. I was ill. I had a fever, but that is quite usual when you do the kind of work that I do. Emilia and I often experience this. Physicians are like this too. Physicians are always being exposed to things, but they don’t really get very ill.”
Her words were not having the effect she hoped. If anything, he grew grimmer and so she tried, with a dose of forced cheer, “It’s quite rare for physicians to die of illness, you know?”
But he did not look amused. He looked terribly worried, as if he had been to hell and back. Dominic strode to her and sat upon the bed.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t think you should keep doing what you’re doing.”
She cocked her head to the side, certain she had misheard, though her ears had not given her any trouble. “I beg your pardon?”
He licked his lips and took her hand in his. “Perhaps it’s not such a very good idea that you teach in the East End. Your health is very important, and if you’re going to become my duchess and have children, we mustn’t…”
His words died off as he began to stroke her hand, almost frantic in his worry.
But despite his worry, his words chilled her.
“You didn’t just say that, did you?” she whispered.
He met her gaze. “I did. Yes.”
“You don’t mean it, do you?”
He swallowed.
“Oh, dear God, you do mean it,” she gasped. Thoughts began to riot through her, and she did not even know how to respond. But at last she said, “Do you remember when you took me up to your room in the East End and you told me why you had to live there?”
He said nothing.
“I’ll remind you,” she said, her hand shaking in his grasp, not from illness, but from her own foolishness.
“You told me that you needed to live there so you could stay close to the people that you wanted to help. How will I help those children? How will I teach them Shakespeare if I do not go to the school?”
“And may I remind you that you came and told me that if I wished to help people, I could no longer live there.” His jaw tightened, but his gaze was a war of emotions. “And I listened to you. I left.”
Fear clawed at her then. Dear God, he was going to try to make her give up her work, and he had done as she asked. So how could she deny him now?
But she would have to.
“Celia, I love you,” he said, his voice raw with emotion.
“And I love you,” she whispered, tears stinging her eyes.
He sucked in a shuddering breath. “I did not mean to love you the way that I do.”
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“I told you that I could not be like my father, that I could not care so intensely about things. I told you that literally from the first moment we met.”
She tensed, a dark feeling circling in her stomach. “So you did.”
“My father died because he could not separate his cause from his disappointment. It broke my mother. It broke me. It broke him. And I cannot repeat that. Do you understand?”
“Isn’t it too late?” she said. “If you care so very much for me?”
“It is my failing,” he lamented.
“Failing?” she whispered. “How can you say it’s a failing?”
He looked away, the muscles in his jaw straining.
“Because it will get in the way of what I’m trying to do,” he ground out, “and it could destroy me like it destroyed him. Don’t you understand that the only way to survive this life is through a healthy detachment, Celia?
I can care for you. I can be married to you.
You can be my wife. We can work together.
You can bear my children. But this? This way that you live with full devotion to the things you do, the way your entire family lives? It is a mistake,” he said.
“My family is a mistake,” she whispered. “The Briarwoods are a mistake? We have taken you in and helped you, and without us, your cause would be dust. So what do you have to say for that?”
He tensed. “Very devoted people pay very heavy prices,” he said.
“And you are willing to let us pay that price for you, but you will not pay it in turn?”
“I can’t change who your family is,” he said, “but perhaps you…”
She shrank back on the bed and pulled her hand back. “You cannot change me either, Dominic. Because I don’t want to change.”
“Please,” he whispered, “please try. Please be mine. Always be mine, and then I will not have to…”
“Dominic,” she somehow managed, even as her throat tightened. He wasn’t listening. So she said slowly, as if somehow repetition could help him understand, “I don’t want to change. And if you truly loved me, you would not want me to leave the school.”
She waited. Oh dear heaven, she waited for what seemed like an interminable period as he stared down at where their hands had once been joined.
He lifted his gaze to hers, his stare a wasteland.
“I cannot feel like this. The terror that I felt in the middle of the night was paralyzing,” he said.
“And if I am paralyzed, I cannot fight. Fear freezes people,” he said.
“Love freezes people. My father felt such love and such devotion for his cause. Do you know what it was like watching him every day, knowing that I was never enough, that I could not be enough for him? That I wasn’t enough to keep him alive?
He couldn’t will himself to live for me? ”
She looked at him then and said quite softly, “Yes. Yes, I do.”
He balked. “What do you mean?”
A tear slipped down her cheek as it hit her and she bit out, “I will never be enough for you, Dominic. I will never fill the hole inside you, the pain within you, the thing you’re trying to escape.
You think you can protect yourself. You think you can shore yourself up.
You think that if you are just distant, you will be different than your father, but it is too late, and I will not make the same mistake that you did. ”
He stared at her. “And what mistake is that?” he asked.
Even though it felt as if she was tearing herself in two, she replied, “I cannot harden my heart, Dominic. I cannot separate myself from the children in that school. I cannot protect myself from their suffering as you wish to protect yourself from the world’s suffering.
You have told yourself a lie that if you can somehow remain on the other side of it, you will be more effective.
But it is my love for those children that makes me effective.
It is my love for humanity that makes me good and true and strong and driven.
So if you are asking me to choose between who I am and who you wish that I was, I can already tell you the answer. ”
He started to shake his head. “That is not at all what I’m trying to say.”
“Yes, it is,” she gritted. “Please, Dominic, I love you. I did not mean to fall in love with you. I don’t know why you were brought into my life, except that I am apparently supposed to learn that love is a source of pain as well as a source of pleasure.
Please don’t let me down,” she whispered.
“All my life, I have chosen to remain a spinster because I did not want this to happen.”
“Perhaps what we don’t want to happen is inevitable,” he said. “Perhaps we cannot escape it.”
But then his face hardened. “I have to try. I have to try to escape the fate of my father. It was despicable the way he died, alone in his own misery. I won’t do that again.
Every day is already hard enough, Celia,” he whispered.
“Every day where I have to go and try to convince people who would rather keep people in chains is hell, and I cannot have the risk of misery with you. You are such a source of joy to me, and I cannot worry that that is going to be taken away.”
“You are pushing it away,” she rushed. “You are casting it away. I beg of you not to do it.”
“It is you who’s doing it,” he countered, his voice dire.
“That’s not true,” she said.
“Yes, it is. It is,” he insisted. “We could be happy. You could be happy.”
“I already am happy, Dominic!” she cried out, feeling as if she was speaking to a wall.
“I think that’s the thing you don’t understand.
I have always been happy. It is you who is not.
It is you, no matter how much you wish you could convince the world with your brashness and the way you enter a room and the way people look at you and admire you.
You are the one who is at a loss. And I thought that by bringing you into my family, we could teach you.
But that was extremely arrogant of me, wasn’t it? ”
He said nothing, which was just as damning a reply as a storm of words.
“Please,” she begged again. “Please choose us. Please do not choose the darkness that is in your heart and in your soul that’s trying to keep you alone.”
He stood slowly, almost dragging himself away, as though it was the greatest effort of his life. “You are asking a great deal of me,” he said. “You are asking me to care for you, to care more than I ever intended, to devote myself and risk losing it all.”
“To care more than you ever intended,” she echoed.
“I think that says it all, Dominic, because I already love you more than I ever intended, more than I ever thought I could. But until you feel the same and do not regret it, then we cannot do this. We cannot, because you will always resent me. You will always resent the love you have for me because you are so afraid that it will be taken away.”