Chapter Seven #2
“It’s not my fault that you can’t either school yourself from your emotional outbursts or simply keep them to yourself,” he said, proud that he sounded very nearly disinterested.
As if she was a science project he was observing from afar.
“Sometimes you can, of course. What that tells me is that you are making a choice. You could choose something else, Esme.” He could see it so clearly.
They could be models of cool propriety and exquisite protocol by day and keep the rest of it purely in the bedroom.
Expressed only and ever that one way. “Everything could change for the better, and for good, if you would only obey.”
She leaned in, and he was struck by how much rounder she was now and how well her dress hid it. He found he hated that it was hidden. It continued to surprise him, how beautifully her pregnancy suited her. As if she was made to bear children.
He didn’t know what it was about that notion—about her ripeness and her round sweetness—that made him feel as if he was breaking his own rules. As if that was an emotional thing he was feeling rather than a simple observation.
“You would hate it if I obeyed,” Esme told him, with a laugh. “You would be bored out of your mind.”
Tadeo could not have said why that infuriated him. “I rather doubt that.”
“You would calcify in real time, Tadeo, and do you want to know how I know that?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Because you were a shell of yourself for seven years. And I was perfectly fine.”
“You were creeping about the manor house like a hysteric in an asylum,” he shot back. “Smearing paint on the walls and befriending your servants. I would argue that you were something very far indeed from fine.”
And the name she called him then—in her cool, crisp, calm way—was so outrageous that he decided she’d lost access to him for a week.
He told himself that his reaction was the only possible one to have. That he was doing the right thing and she was testing boundaries that he needed to uphold.
But he also knew that it was the loneliest week he’d had in a long while.
He was happier than he wished to admit when it ended and she managed to bite her tongue in the face of his pointed provocation after a dinner with some ministers, allowing him to glut himself in her once more.
Afterward, they lay together. Tadeo traced patterns against her belly, murmuring to the child inside.
A habit he chose not to question himself about overmuch.
All he knew was that he no longer thought of the child they were having as a problem, or any of the other things he’d called this pregnancy when he’d first heard of it.
These nights with her, with the baby a very real presence between them and with them, had changed everything for him.
He could not think of the last time he’d thought of this child as anything but that. His child.
Something of a marvel, if he was honest. He didn’t think that strayed too far over the line into maudlin.
“I saw the palace physician again today,” she said. He already knew this. But he had not expected her to share it and he found that his chest felt unexpectedly tight when she did—and of her own volition. Another marvel, perhaps. “Do you want me to tell you what we’re having? A boy or a girl?”
He knew the answer to that too. But he nodded, to let her tell him.
“A boy,” she said softly. Almost shyly, he thought. “And I wondered if one of his names should be Hugo, to honor your father. And the night he was made.”
Tadeo felt too many things slam into him then. They all seemed to crash around inside him, when he would have said he was immune. He would have said that he wasn’t the sort of man who felt anything, because that was the kind of man he wished to be.
But he felt this. He felt all of this. Too much of this to name.
The trick, he decided, was in not showing it. Ever. In keeping it contained. “I’d like that,” he managed to grit out.
Then he kissed her, hot and hard, to forestall any further conversation.
She was six months pregnant now. Time was running out.
Soon, their child would be here and Tadeo found that he both couldn’t wait—and couldn’t imagine what that would be like.
His own memories of childhood were divided between the happier, brighter memories from before his mother died—mostly of her laughter, the games she would play with him, and the way they’d sometimes hidden from his father.
In those memories, he recalled only shadows and glimpses of his father, as if he was more a monster from a nightmare instead of simply part of a game.
His later memories were sadder and quieter, as he’d learned the truth about all those bright memories of Queen Marisol and how truly noble and good his father had always been in the face of her sins.
So there was regret laced through it all too, that he’d been too young and foolish to understand what was happening.
This was not something he shared with anyone. He could still remember—too well—when he’d said something along those lines to Esme in Boston.
They had been wrapped up in each other in his bedroom in the house he’d bought for his studies in the leafy, gaslit, cobblestoned neighborhood that had reminded him of home. I wish I could have seen my mother for who she was while she was alive, he’d said in an unguarded moment.
It chilled his blood to remember himself like that. So open. So vulnerable.
Esme had propped herself up on her elbow and pushed the weight of her hair back from her face. She’d looked at him seriously. Too seriously. You saw your mother as your mother. Maybe that’s a gift.
Tadeo did not like to think about how often those words came back to him. How they’d haunted him across the years. He hated that he’d allowed that moment to happen, but he’d hated even more that he couldn’t let it go.
The next day he found himself in the portrait gallery, studying the formal portrait that hung beside his and Esme’s.
It was of his parents in their wedding finery and Tadeo wasn’t sure why it had never occurred to him that his parents might very well have been as at odds with each other while they’d sat for theirs as he and Esme had been.
That maybe there had never been the happy period he’d liked to think there had been. Maybe that had been a story they told. An act they put on.
He certainly knew how that went.
Tadeo found himself looking at his own wedding portrait. It was so cold, he thought now. They looked like strangers who happened to have found themselves in the same ornate frame, subject to the same brushstrokes with nothing else in common.
Though he would not have described it like that before his father’s funeral had turned everything on its head.
Back before that fateful night, he would have said that he and Esme looked formal, yes.
Perfectly appropriate. She sat in her lovely gown and he stood behind her in the usual pose for a portrait like this.
Two people who looked suitably solemn as they started their life of duty and obligation together, he’d thought.
Now Tadeo thought he looked distant and faintly disapproving. And while Esme looked beautiful, as always, if he was fully honest with himself, she also looked terribly sad.
What he didn’t like was that his parents looked much the same to him now.
Tadeo didn’t think of his mother as sad. Careless, certainly. Reckless and scandalous, but not sad.
Somehow, the fact that he was having a son—within a few months—brought this home to him. He found himself thinking about his parents more than he had in a long while, and in ways that felt different to him. He particularly found himself thinking about that expression on his mother’s face.
Had she truly been sad? And if so, why had his father not done something about it?
That felt disloyal. He hated that he could entertain any notion that did not paint his father in the bright light King Hugo deserved.
“And to what end?” he asked himself during one of his ferocious workouts on a night that Esme had decided to poke at him, thereby ensuring he would sleep alone.
He lifted weights until he thought his muscles would betray him and then he walked back toward his rooms, not pleased when his mind took him back again to his father.
But not about his mother this time.
What was on Tadeo’s mind tonight was his child.
His soon-to-be-born baby. He preferred the nights when Esme followed the rules—that he relaxed once she was there, he acknowledged, because they talked in bed now.
He preferred sleeping with her, yes, for all the expected reasons and more.
But he also liked that he had access to his baby.
He could not conceive of treating his child as anything but the miracle he was. He already liked to feel him kick and roll. The child wasn’t here yet and his antics already made Esme laugh and even Tadeo smile in the cocoon of his bed.
He could not imagine how he would take these feelings within him and turn them off. The truth of the matter was that when it came to his son, Tadeo did not feel neutral or icy at all.
What he could not figure out was why—or, crucially, how—his father ever had.