Chapter 21
Twenty-One
The Suffolk deeds were not interesting reading on a good evening.
Tonight they were impenetrable. Evander had been looking at the same page for twenty-five minutes.
The fire had burned down without him noticing, and the room had gone lukewarm.
He was still on the same paragraph about the contested boundary on the eastern side of the property – Frederick would need to be told and sign the deed too once he had made his way through it.
Dinner had been an unsettling affair. He couldn't have said exactly how.
The food was fine, and the conversation was the same as always.
Frederick had told a story about chickens outside Edinburgh that was funny enough.
All of it was correct on the surface, as he liked it.
Aurelia had sat through it usually, but the distance from her across the table had felt larger than a sea.
Evander put down the deed and sighed. She had been fine before the walk.
He was nearly certain of that. He ran through the afternoon in his head, and whatever had been between them then was considerably better than what had been at dinner, despite his inelegant and unplanned confession of jealousy.
Something had happened on the hill, he just didn’t know what.
He picked up the candle and went to find her.
The sitting room was quiet. The fire cast tall shadows on the tapestried wall, and Nike was on the rug in front of it with Aurelia's hand moving absently over her silvery-grey head.
He could tell she had been sitting still for a long time.
Titan was in the corner in his usual wicker basket.
The room smelled of the last of the evening's candles, the dogs, and the faint floral trace of whatever Aurelia used in her hair after bathing.
She was in her night things, a yellow shawl around her shoulders, her hair loose. She looked up when he came in, blinking as though her eyes hurt, but not moving from her folded position.
“I thought you were working,” she said, her voice soft and sleepy.
“Near enough.” He came in and sat in the chair across from her. It creaked under his weight. Nike acknowledged him with a look and then went back to sleep. “I couldn’t concentrate. You were quiet at dinner.”
“I didn’t have much to say.”
“Not in that sense, not verbally.”
She looked at the fire when he trailed off. Her hand had stilled on Nike's head. He braced himself. She seemed willing to speak to him, as a small mercy that pitiable evening.
“Maybe it’s a good thing you noticed. I wanted to ask you something,” she said. “And I want you to answer me honestly if possible.”
He set down his candle on the side table and suppressed the sigh rumbling in his chest.
She looked at him. “Is there anything about the house party here, two summers ago, that you haven't told me and would like to?”
He started. Why was she talking about the house party?
How had she even heard about it? It was so far back in his memory, so insignificant in comparison to other things that had happened in the last five years, that he had to search hard for it at first. But yes, the memory was there, buried under other things.
It was a mostly successful party, a mostly insignificant affair. Except for…
Ah, he thought. Except for that. His second thought came out of his mouth before he could stop it. “Why do you care to ask me about it?”
She winced like he had pinched her. “Because someone brought it up.”
“Frederick?”
“Seraphina.”
The sigh escaped through his nose. Suddenly the afternoon made sense. Seraphina had been there on the hill with his wife, when the brothers were under the tree. Seraphina had been standing at the edge with Aurelia, and then everything had changed.
“Why would she…” He stopped, unsure how to proceed without giving away too much.
“I don't know why Seraphina does anything,” Aurelia said with exasperation, moving slightly so she was facing away from him more. “But she spoke about it. And it’s not the first time. Only this time… She said something happened between you then that she did not mention before.”
He looked at the fire as it crackled. In his mind, the house party had been finished and done for two years. It belonged to a chapter that had closed before Aurelia had anything to do with his life.
“Tell me,” Aurelia said. “Tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know why I should.” He knew what she was getting at slowly, what Seraphina must have implied.
He didn’t want to have this conversation.
It was unnecessary, only painful for her.
But she looked at him and waited, and he realised then that he had lost the ability to deny her things even when they cost him.
So he started telling her what she thought she wanted to hear.
The party had been in the late summer. His grandmother had harangued him for months by then, telling him that the engagement had to be formalised.
“You are the Duke now,” she had said time and time again.
“Lady Seraphina is a good match. Her family expects it. Your family expects it. So do it. Why stall?”
He had come back from his grand tour with the intention of settling into the title, ultimately finding that the estate, the work and the politics, the things he was bred for, made sense to him – and that the rest, the social arrangements his parents had set in motion before they died, made up a skin that didn't fit, that he was being told to wear anyway over his bones.
“Seraphina had been at the house party,” he continued.
“And late one evening, we had been alone. I don’t know how she found me, or why.
I had wine – that was no excuse. But perhaps without it I would not have acted rashly.
” He stared at his hands where they were folded in front of him.
He couldn’t stand to look at Aurelia, feeling like an embarrassed child.
“I had thought, this is what you do, you must try. So I… Yes, I kissed her.”
The memory was distorted and hazy. It was a brief kiss. It was immediately and obviously wrong. They had stepped back from each other. In Seraphina’s face he saw the same disgusted resignation he had been feeling for years – and that made it worse than if she had seemed happy for his touch.
“She looked,” he continued, pinching the skin between his thumb and forefinger, “like she had confirmed something she had already suspected. And I felt like a fool. We never spoke of it again. The engagement continued because… Well, what else would we do after that? Our families, the expectation… there was no clean way out of it. And then Frederick found a nasty way out for both of us, which I suspect suited Seraphina considerably more than she has admitted to anyone, including Frederick at the time.”
Aurelia was quiet for a moment. “She wasn't in love with you.”
“Of course not. Far from it. I told you this already. A moment like that changes nothing. I was not surprised by that discovery, at the time. I was surprised by my own discovery… that I had kissed her and felt nothing, and felt worse about the nothing than I would have felt about a rejection.”
“Why worse?”
“Because a rejection would have meant there was something to reject. The absence of feeling just meant we were two people who had made a mutual error and were both too well-bred to say so aloud. I hated myself for it. A little for kissing her, yes, though that was merely foolish. But primarily for the realisation that I had been going along with the whole arrangement for years without ever asking myself whether I actually wanted any of it.”
Aurelia looked at him. “Did you? Want any of it, ever?”
“The house, of course,” he said. “The estate and the title. Yes, I wanted those for ever. They were my right, second in my heart only to my family. I had always wanted those. But the rest…?” The rest I had simply assumed would become real if I gave it enough time. I was mistaken.”
She was quiet again. Nike shifted under her hand, and she resumed the slow movement without seeming to notice.
Evander watched from below his lashline, too self-conscious to raise his head fully so she would see his face.
Would Aurelia despise him? Would she think he had been a rake?
Beyond kissing Seraphina he had never– he had never thought or intended anything with a woman.
He had only ever tried to do things right, and now he was catastrophically failing even at that, his legal marriage.
“She told me,” Aurelia said, “that it reminded her of the way you looked at me today, just before she and Frederick appeared. That’s why she said it.
At least, that’s why she claimed she said it.
” There was an edge to her voice he hadn’t heard before, right before she paused.
“She said it looked like a kiss had been about to happen between us.”
He nodded. Maybe there had been.
“I'm not angry about what happened two years ago,” Aurelia said.
“I don’t like it. But I understand what it was.
I'm just angry that she said it. And I'm angrier that it worked… that I spent the entire walk back to the house doubting something I should not have to doubt. I don't understand what she wants, and I don’t know what you want either.”
“Neither do I.” He said it honestly, and then said the thing that had been sitting at the back of his mind since his brother’s arrival. “It concerns me, what Frederick has married into.”
“She is not unkind to him.”
“Perhaps not. But Frederick is not a proficient reader of women. He never has been. He feels things very strongly and assumes other people are feeling them equally. It doesn't always occur to him to check whether his instincts are right.”
“I think she loves him,” Aurelia said, though she didn’t sound half as confident as the words suggested, which was not much in the first place. “In her way, I think she does. But the rest of what she does, I don’t understand.”