Chapter Nineteen
“She won’t open the door.”
Marcus looked up from the chair where he had been attempting to read, or more accurately, attempting to pretend to read while watching Edmund pace the length of the guest chamber like a caged animal.
The house party had been excruciating since the previous night’s disaster, and Edmund had spent every waking moment trying to undo the damage Clarissa had wrought.
Without success.
“Have you tried explaining what actually happened?” Marcus asked.
“Through a locked door. Multiple times. She says she understands perfectly and there is nothing to discuss.” Edmund’s jaw tightened. “She called me ‘Your Grace.’ She has not called me that in weeks.”
“That is not encouraging.”
“It is devastating.” Edmund stopped pacing, his hands clenching at his sides. “I saw her face, Marcus. When she walked in and saw Clarissa touching me. I saw the exact moment she decided what she was looking at, and I saw the moment she decided she had always known it would come.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“Of course it wasn’t.” Edmund’s voice cracked.
“Clarissa cornered me. Positioned herself deliberately. I was trying to extract myself without making a scene when Helena appeared, exactly when Clarissa intended her to appear. It was theatre. Perfectly staged theatre designed to destroy everything we had built.”
“And Helena believed the performance.”
“Helena believes she is unworthy of affection.” Edmund pressed his palms against his eyes.
“She has believed it her entire life. She has spent months waiting for evidence that this matrimony was exactly what she feared, a transaction, an arrangement, a cold exchange of services for security. And Clarissa handed her that evidence on a silver platter.”
Marcus was quiet for a moment.
“Then give her different evidence,” he said finally. “Give her something she cannot explain away.”
“I have tried. I have told her.”
“Words are not enough. Not after this. She has been interpreting your words through the lens of doubt for months. She will continue to do so unless you give her something undeniable.” Marcus leaned forward.
“What do you have, Edmund? What evidence exists that proves, beyond any possibility of misinterpretation, that you are wholeheartedly devoted to her?”
Edmund went still.
The letters.
The unsent letters, locked in his desk at Westmere, each one a confession he had never found the courage to deliver. Months of accumulated feeling, poured onto paper in the darkest hours of the night.
My dear Helena, the first one began. I find myself noticing things about you that I have no right to notice.
“The letters,” he said slowly. “I have been writing her letters. Since our first week of matrimony. I never sent them, I was afraid of making her uncomfortable, but they exist. Everything I feel, everything I have noticed, everything I have been too much of a coward to say aloud.”
“Where are they?”
“At Westmere. In my study.”
Marcus stood. “Then we need to get them. Now. Before she leaves.”
“She would not leave.” Edmund stopped. His blood went cold.
“Wouldn’t she?” Marcus’s expression was grim. “You said yourself she has been waiting for evidence that this matrimony was a transaction. She believes she has found it. What is there to keep her here?”
Edmund thought of Helena’s face from the previous night, composed, polished, and utterly closed.
The perfect mask she deployed when she was protecting herself from pain.
The same mask she had worn when she faced down Mr Gibbs at the musicale, when she handled Clarissa’s barbs at the ball, when she navigated every crisis with grace and determination.
She will not make a scene, he realised with sudden, terrible clarity. She will not rage or weep or demand explanations. She will simply leave, quietly, and efficiently, as though she were never here at all.
“We need to go,” he said. “Now.”
They rode hard for Westmere.
The house party had three more days to run, but Edmund could not spare the time for social niceties. He left Marcus to make their excuses, some emergency with the estate, requiring immediate attention, and pushed his horse to the limit of its endurance.
Please, he thought, the word becoming a rhythm that matched the pounding hooves. Please let me reach her in time. Please let her still be there when I return.
He did not know if she was already gone. Did not know if she had left the house party, left London, left everything they had built together. He only knew that he had to try, had to give her the evidence Marcus had demanded, the proof she could not explain away.
The letters represented everything. Months of affection, committed to paper. If she read them, if she saw what he had never found the courage to say, she has to read them, he thought. She has to understand.
Westmere Park appeared on the horizon as the sun began to set. Edmund’s horse was lathered, exhausted, but he pushed on until he reached the stables. He dismounted before the animal had fully stopped, tossing the reins to a startled groom and running toward the house.
The letters were in his study, locked in the bottom drawer of his desk.
He burst through the door, and stopped.
Helena was there.
She stood beside his desk, a sheaf of papers clutched in her trembling hands. The drawer was open. The letters, all of them, every confession he had written over the past months, were spread across the surface of the desk.
She was crying.
Edmund had never seen Helena cry. In all the weeks of their matrimony, through every crisis and humiliation and moment of fear, she had never let herself weep. She had maintained her composure with an iron will that he had admired even as it broke his heart.
But she was crying now. Tears streamed down her face, unchecked, and uncontrolled.
Her shoulders shook with silent sobs. And in her hands, she held the letter he had written the night of the examination, the one where he had described his catalog of her laughs, his desperate hope that she might one day feel the same.
“Edmund.” Her voice cracked on his name. “You wrote these?”
He crossed the room in three strides. He did not touch her, did not know if she would welcome his touch, but he stood close enough that she could feel his presence.
“Every word,” he said. “Every letter. Since our first week at Westmere.”
“But you never.” She pressed her hand to her mouth, the papers crinkling in her grip. “You never sent them.”
“I was afraid.” The confession came easier than he expected.
“I was afraid of making you uncomfortable. Of adding my feelings to the list of burdens you already carried. I watched you manage everything, your mother’s illness, your sister’s future, the cruelty of the ton, and I could not bear to be one more thing you had to manage. ”
Helena stared at him. Her eyes were red, her cheeks wet, her composure utterly shattered.
“You wrote.” She looked down at the letter in her hands, reading aloud in a voice that trembled. “I count her laughs. I keep count of every single one, and it is never enough. She thinks I am being strategic. She cannot fathom that I hold her in my highest affection.”
Edmund’s throat tightened. He had written that in the darkness, never expecting her to read it. Hearing the words in her voice, broken, wondering, was almost more than he could bear.
“I am desperately, hopelessly, irrevocably attached to you,” he said.
The words came out raw, unpolished, utterly without strategy.
“I have held you in my highest esteem since the library. Since you made me laugh for the first time in years. Since you reorganised the morning room and made this house feel like a home. Since you dropped to your knees in Hyde Park to comfort a stranger’s child and I realised that everything I thought I knew about myself was wrong. ”
Helena was shaking her head, but he could not stop now. The words poured out of him like water through a broken dam.
“You think you are not worthy of affection. You think you are too sharp, too difficult, too much. But Helena.” He reached for her then, his hands cupping her face, tilting it up so she had to meet his eyes.
“You are the most remarkable woman I have ever known. And I have spent months trying to prove it to you in every way except the one that mattered.”
“Why?” The word was barely a whisper. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Because you would not have believed me.” His thumbs traced the tracks of her tears.
“You had already decided what this matrimony was. You had already convinced yourself that I could never truly want you. If I had confessed, you would have found a way to explain it away, strategy for the legal challenge, performance for Reginald, anything except the truth.”
Helena closed her eyes. More tears slipped down her cheeks.
“I was going to leave,” she whispered. “I came back here to pack my things. I was going to take my carpet bag and disappear before you could, before I had to face.”
“I know.”
“I found the letters by accident. I was looking for paper to leave you a note, and the drawer was unlocked, and…” Her voice broke. “Edmund, these letters…”
“Are the truth.” He leaned his forehead against hers. “Every word. Every observation. Every desperate, pathetic confession of a man who was too afraid to say what he felt.”
They stood there for a long moment, breathing the same air, their faces close enough that he could feel the warmth of her tears against his skin.
“I heard you,” Helena said finally.
Edmund pulled back slightly. “What?”
“At Viscount Carrington’s party. Weeks ago.
I was in the corridor, and I heard you, defending me to that man.
Saying that I was your only choice.” She laughed, a broken, watery sound.
“I have known for weeks that you cherished me. I heard you say it. And I still could not bring myself to believe it.”
“Helena.”
“Because I have never been cherished.” The words came out fierce now, raw with a pain she had carried for years.
“Not like this. Not by someone who was not obligated by blood or duty. I have been useful. I have been necessary. I have been the one who fixes everything and manages everyone and holds the world together through sheer force of will. But I have never been.” She stopped.
Swallowed. “I have never been chosen. Not just for what I could do, but for who I am.”
Edmund’s heart cracked open.
“Then let me choose you now.” His voice was rough. “Openly. Clearly. Without letters or gestures or any other damned strategy. Helena Ridley, Duchess of Westmere, I choose you. I will choose you every day for the rest of my life. And I will keep choosing you until you finally believe it.”
Helena’s breath caught.
“Say it again,” she whispered.
“I choose you.”
“Again.”
“I choose you.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I choose you.” Her temple. “I choose you.” Her cheek, salt-wet with tears. “I choose you, Helena. Always. Only. Forever.”
She made a sound, half laugh, half sob, and then her arms were around him, her face buried against his chest, her body shaking with the force of feelings she had held back for too long.
Edmund held her.
He held her while she cried, properly, finally, the tears she had refused to shed for years.
He held her while the last of her walls crumbled, while the armour she had worn since childhood fell away piece by piece.
He held her and murmured her name and promised her, over and over, that she was deeply cherished.
That she was wanted. That she would never have to carry anything alone again.
When her tears finally subsided, she pulled back slightly. Her face was blotched, her eyes swollen, her composure utterly destroyed.
She had never been more beautiful.
“The letters,” she said, her voice rough. “May I keep them?”
“They were always yours.” Edmund brushed a strand of hair from her face. “Everything I am is yours, Helena. It has been since the moment you raised that eyebrow at me across a crowded room.”
She laughed, a real laugh, full and warm and utterly unguarded.
He had been counting her laughs for months. This one, he knew, would be the one he remembered forever.
Later, much later, they sat together on the settee in his study.
Helena was tucked against his side, the letters spread across her lap. She was reading them one by one, pausing occasionally to ask questions or make observations or simply look at him with an expression that made his chest ache.
“You noticed that I hum,” she said, holding up one of the earlier letters. “In the second week of our matrimony. You noticed, and you never said anything.”
“I did not know what melody it was. I still don’t.”
“It was a song my father used to sing. I did not realise I was doing it.” She traced the words with her fingertip. “You noticed things about me that I did not notice about myself.”
“I noticed everything.” Edmund’s arm tightened around her. “I could not help it. You were, are, the most fascinating person I have ever met.”
Helena was quiet for a moment.
“I noticed things too,” she said finally.
“About you. I told myself I was being practical, learning about my husband, and understanding my situation. But I was deceiving myself.” She looked up at him.
“I was losing my heart to you, Edmund. From the very beginning. I was just too afraid to admit it.”
“And now?”
She set aside the letters and turned to face him fully.
Her eyes were still red, her face still blotched, but there was something in her expression that Edmund had never seen before.
Something open. Something unguarded. Something that looked like hope.
“Now I am still afraid. But I am more afraid of losing you than I am of being hurt.”
Edmund cupped her face in his hands.
“You will never lose me,” he said quietly. “Whatever comes, Reginald, Clarissa, the entire ton if necessary, I will be here. Beside you. Choosing you. Every single day.”
Helena’s eyes filled again.
But this time, when the tears fell, she was smiling.