Page 59 of Duchess Needed
“We usually are,” he shrugged eventually.
Edward sat up carefully, reached for the tea, and found that he had, somewhere in the past few minutes, already made his decision. Perhaps he had made it even before he arrived here.
It did not matter when. What mattered was that he was going home.
He was unsure of what he would say when he got there. He did not know how to explain himself, or undo the silence of the past week, or find a way through the impossible thing lodged in the center of his chest. But he could not remain here, hiding from a woman who had done nothing but try her best in a situation that had never been designed to be fair to her.
After a few minutes, he set down the empty cup, his mind still full of noise but his heart strangely heavy and calm.
“Please give Jane my deepest apologies for the imposition,” he requested blankly.
“She found the whole thing tremendously interesting,” Thomas replied, entirely without sympathy. “She will be disappointed you are leaving. But even more so if you do not act like the good man she believes you to be.”
Edward nodded, then he stood up and went to find his coat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Phoebe had realized over the course of a very long week, that the problem with hope was that it was terribly difficult to get rid of once it had taken root.
And it was not as though she had made no attempt to eradicate it. She had tried. She had been quite deliberate about it. She had reminded herself, on numerous separate occasions and in several different rooms of the estate, exactly what her marriage was and what it had never been designed to be. She had recalled the specific terms of the arrangement founded by mutual needs and fueled by the shared desire to keep a careful and civilized distance from anything that might complicate matters between them. She had told herself repeatedly that it had no way of working out for her.
The hope had remained. Obstinate. Irrational. Entirely her own fault for allowing it sprout in the first place.
And now, a nearly week after Edward had last been in this house, it was withering.
It did not vanish suddenly though. She did not experience it as a sudden collapse, which she suspected she would have found easier to manage. It was slower than that – like a fire that has not been tended eventually losing most of its heat, until all that was left were dying embers. Each morning, she woke and it was slightly dimmer than it had been, and she went through the day and it was slightly less so again, and she went to bed and lay in the dark of her room wondering why her heart yearned to blow on them to reignite the flames.
She had received word from the housekeeper that he was attending to business matters in the city and would return when he was able to do so. Her first gripe was due to the fact that the word had not been given to her but to her housekeeper.
The second was that it felt as though she had been left to go about her days with a desperate need for his closeness and a heart that was losing its ability to remain calm in his absence. She had done what she could to keep herself busy, but it was hardly ever enough.
The week passed. The estate affairs continued on and Phoebe carried on her dull activities. She ate her meals, attended to her correspondence and visited the garden in the afternoons. She played the piano one evening for longer than she usually allowed herself, until her fingers ached pleasantly and the house had gone dark around her, and she told herself that was simply something she had wanted to do and not at all a means of filling a silence she had not anticipated missing.
By the end of the week, the hollowness in her chest had developed a persistence that she found increasingly difficult to attribute to anything other than what it was.
She woke feeling strangely off kilter. Not ill precisely, but not well either – as though some essential thing had shifted slightly out place and her body was not sure how to cope with it. She dressed without particular enthusiasm and went down to a breakfast that she ate without tasting, half her attention on the window.
Maude appeared at her elbow, silently lingering as she often did these days.
“You've barely touched the plate, Your Grace.”
“I am not very hungry this morning.”
“Shall I bring some tea instead? Something lighter, perhaps?”
“I am perfectly fine with this,” Phoebe shook her head, aware that she was not entirely convincing considering she had only eaten three bites of toast and had shifted her attention from her plate to the window.
Maude did not say anything further, but she remained close by, and Phoebe had not the energy to send her away.
She went to the garden eventually, as she had developed the habit of doing when it felt as though she was being overwhelmedby her thoughts. The lavender along the south wall was coming in beautifully – she had been watching it for weeks since the gardener had told her of his intentions – and the climbing rose near the garden gate was beginning to do something genuinely promising along the lower lattice. She stood and admired the leaves and blossoming buds for a moment before she walked further down.
It helped quite a bit, the breeze against her skin and the warmth of the sun. It felt as though if she really tried, then all her problems would melt away in the silence –
The sound of hooves on the concrete of the driveway cut out the peace she had been wallowing in and she went still, her heart beating rapidly.
Then she the servants chattering busily, and recognized the usual pattern of the duke’s arrival at home and her heart soared as she turned and ran out to the front of the house, praying that she was not wrong.
She was not. He really was there. He seemed slightly windblown from the ride, his coat not somewhat askew as he spoke to the stable hands before he dismounted from his horse. Then looked at her and she stared back, neither of them said anything for a moment.
