Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
By the time the last dance ended, Poppy had become practiced at not looking toward her husband. She failed often enough that she stopped pretending otherwise.
Each time she found him, he was at the edge of the ballroom, tall and dark-haired and severe.
Jasper stood beside him for much of the evening, speaking now and then with an expression Poppy could not read from a distance.
Hector listened with that stillness of his, the kind that made him seem carved from stone.
I ought not to have been disappointed.
That was what she told herself while thanking Leander for the dance, while laughing at Jasper’s outrageous compliments, while watching Julia accept her husband’s hand with the ease of long affection.
Poppy could only blame herself for her husband’s coldness; she had insisted on the shape of her marriage. The separate bedrooms, the sensible expectations and the gratitude instead of wanting. She had been proud of herself once for understanding that safety could be enough.
But the ballroom had unsettled that pride.
A dance was such a small thing. Three minutes, perhaps four. A turn, a touch, and a public courtesy. Yet when Hector had not asked, something in her broke.
“You are tired.” Julia found her by one of the quieter edges of the room, away from the remaining guests.
Her sister’s face held the gentle concern Poppy had known since childhood and resented only when it was deserved.
“I am a little,” Poppy said flatly.
“You are sad.”
Poppy looked down at her gloved hands. “That too, perhaps.”
Julia did not press. She had never needed to. Her patience made confession feel less like surrender and more like setting down a weight.
“I wanted him to ask me to dance,” Poppy finally said.
Julia’s expression softened. “Oh, Poppy.”
“It is foolish, I know.”
“No, it is not at all.”
“It is. There are far graver disappointments in the world than not being asked to dance at a private ball.” She tried to play it off as if this were nothing.
“Grief does not become invalid because it is quiet. But perhaps you should understand why Hector did not ask you. I only meant to say that he is…”
Blind.
Poppy’s eyes stung with tears. “But he can see the shape of me, and that is all that matters.”
Julia exhaled loudly. “I do not understand his blindness, but it cannot be easy, Poppy.”
She felt as though they were young again, and Julia was correcting her bad behavior. Julia touched her arm. “Tell me what is truly troubling you.”
Poppy looked across the room where Hector was speaking to Leander now. He held himself as he always did, controlled and remote, but she had come to know the effort inside that control. Once, that knowledge had made her patient, but tonight, it made her ache.
“I thought I understood what I was agreeing to,” she said. “I was the one who asked for separate bedrooms. I know that. I was frightened, and I thought dignity required distance. Or perhaps I thought if I asked for nothing, I could never be refused.”
“That is a lonely bargain in a marriage.”
Poppy swallowed. “I did not know any better.”
Across the room, Leander said something to Hector, and Hector’s mouth shifted in the faintest suggestion of a smile. It was not the smile he gave to guests. It was smaller, reluctant, and real. Poppy wanted, suddenly and sharply, to be close enough to see it properly.
“What do you truly want, Poppy?” Julia asked.
Poppy watched her sister’s gaze drift toward Leander and soften without effort. They had a love that Poppy had tried not to envy. They had a family built out of daily choosing. And Julia had a husband who reached for her without fear.
“I want what you have,” Poppy confessed, and Julia’s hand tightened gently on her arm.
“I want a family with him. Children with him. A life that feels shared and not arranged across a corridor.”
The words, once spoken, could not be made smaller.
Poppy had cared for the children. She had argued with Hector about them, defended them, worried over them, sat beside their beds when needed.
But this was different. This was not duty dressed as affection.
She wanted a child whose face might carry Hector’s stern brow or his pale eyes, a child who would belong to them both.
She wanted mornings that did not begin with restraint, and she wanted the right to reach for him—
“Does he know?” Julia interrupted her thoughts.
Poppy gave a soft, humorless laugh. “Hector? He would sooner walk into a wall than discuss wanting.”
“Perhaps because he wants you too, and he would not admit it because of your silly rules.”
Poppy looked at her, and Julia remained calm. “I have seen how he listens for you.”
“That is not the same.”
“No. But it is not nothing.”
Poppy pressed her fingers together. “When we made our agreement, he was very clear. No foolish romantic thoughts. He meant that.” She swallowed. “I meant that.”
“But you did not have to agree.” Julia’s tone changed. “Do you still agree with that?”
Poppy did not answer her at once.
The music had ceased, and guests were beginning to gather themselves for departure, voices lowered by the lateness of the hour, and the ballroom seemed quieter now and emptied of expectation.
Hector stood near the door, courteous to each person who approached.
No one would look at him and think him uncertain.
No one would know how carefully he measured every step.
Perhaps that was what hurt most. Not that she had sacrificed herself by marrying him. She no longer believed that, if she ever truly had. Living beside the man she wanted while he remained convinced that wanting him back would be a misfortune was taking a toll on her.
“Perhaps I am a fool,” she said more to herself.
Julia leaned closer and kissed her cheek. “Then you are in distinguished company. Most happy marriages require at least two.”
Poppy laughed despite herself, but the sound trembled.
The farewells took time.
The Duke of Berkshire approached them and bowed over her hand again. “Sterling deserves such a charming duchess beneath his roof.”
Poppy opened her mouth to retort, but Hector appeared suddenly and closely.
“Sterling deserves many things, Berkshire. Your commentary is not among them.”
Jasper only grinned. “A jealous husband to the last.”
Poppy felt heat rise to her face. Hector’s head turned slightly toward her, as if he had heard the change in her breathing.
When Julia and Leander departed with a sleeping Thomas in tow, she felt her heart ache with loss.
Hector promptly went to his chambers, and Poppy walked around the ballroom one last time, imagining a different night altogether where she was wrapped up in her husband’s arms, swaying happily to the sound of soft music.
Later, in her bedchamber, sleep refused Poppy.
The house settled into darkness around her, all its daytime movement folded away.
She lay still for a long while, looking toward the shadowed outline of the door, conscious of the corridor beyond it and, farther still, the rooms that contained Hector’s life but not hers.
Poppy rose.
She did not call for a maid, nor did she light a candle.
She moved through the house by memory, guided by the faint remaining warmth of the evening and the ache she had no wish to name.
The ballroom drew her back not because it had wounded her, but because it had given her something beautiful at first. For one evening, the house had felt alive with music and laughter, and she had imagined what it might be to stand beside Hector not as an arrangement, but as a wife.
The room was dark when she reached it.
The candles had been extinguished or allowed to gutter low elsewhere. Only the broadest shapes remained: the pale suggestion of windows, the darker mass of furnishings along the edges, the open floor where the dancing had been. Without music, the room seemed to be holding its breath.
She froze when she saw Hector standing near the center of the ballroom.
For a moment, Poppy did not move. In darkness, he seemed less like the Duke of Sterling and more like a man who had come too late to a place where he had wanted to be brave.
His cane touched the floor at his side, and his head was slightly bowed.
I should leave.
Whatever private reckoning had brought him here, it was not hers to interrupt.
She stepped back as quietly as possible.
“Poppy,” his low voice echoed in the empty ballroom.
She closed her eyes briefly. “I am sorry; I did not mean to disturb you.”
“You did not.”
“I did not think that you would notice me.”
“In my own ballroom?”
“It is dark.”
“Yes.”
“And your eyesight—”
“Is of little use at the best of times,” he said, not unkindly. “And even less now.”
Poppy walked farther into the room. “Then how did you know it was me?”
He turned toward her. The darkness hid his eyes, but she knew their color even without seeing them. “I know your scent.”
His answer sent a shiver up her spine. “My scent?”
“Yes, it is unmistakable and distinct from the rest. It smells like flowers. The little white ones in the hedges of my garden. I do not know what they are called, but they make me think of you. And you make me think of them.”
Poppy tried to laugh, but the sound caught in her throat. “I—do not know what to say. I was alarmed at first that you noticed me by my scent.”
“It should not be alarming. I meant only that I would know you anywhere.” He stopped as if he had to think before saying the next line. “Even in a crowded room.”
Poppy’s pulse quickened, and her fingers curled against her skirt. All evening, she had thought of herself as unseen by him. Yet he had known her in a way that did not require his sight at all. The feeling both unsettled and steadied her at once.
Neither of them spoke for a moment as they took this in.
Until at last Hector said, “I regretted not dancing with you, Poppy.”
The confession was so quiet and gentle that it surprised her even more.
“Why didn’t you dance?” she whispered, and her voice cracked with emotion.