The Duke of Ice

by Lisa Andersen

  She made her way around the periphery of the party, wearing the expression of a woman on an errand. The occasional lord or lady would glance at her, but she was beneath their notice and soon they would glance away. She didn’t care. She wanted to be beneath their notice. She wanted to be beneath everybody’s notice. If she had her way, she would disappear.

  Nobody noticed when she slipped out of the door and walked down the hallway to the library. She breathed a sigh of relief when she was away from the party. It was good to be alone. Life is so much more peaceful when there aren’t dozens of eyes glancing over you, she thought.

  She walked up and down the stacks, occasionally studying a book. She picked one up, read the title, and set it aside. She adored libraries. They had a small one at home, but it was nothing like this. This library must have had at least a thousand books in it. She breathed in the scent of them. It was comforting. Books didn’t judge. Books simply were.

  She was about to sit down with a novel – she thought she could speed the time to the end of the party if she read – when something shifted in the corner. The library was long and narrow, with just enough space for two high, long rows of shelves and a desk and chair in the middle of the room. But what she had not seen, and what she saw now with a gasp, was a chair in the corner, in the darkness, between the shelf and the wall.

  She jumped to her feet. “Excuse me,” she said. “I did not know there was anybody in here.”

  The man looked like a ghost, a black silhouette sitting alone in the dark. Lilla felt a strong, childlike urge to run. But she fought it. This was most likely some lord who had had the same idea as her and wanted some respite from the party. If she fled, she would look ridiculous. But even so, the urge was there.

  “You don’t have to apologize, Lilla.”

  Lilla. She gasped again at the use of her given name. And there was something familiar about the voice. It was like hearing a voice from her dreams, hearing a voice from the depths of memory.

  “Who are you?”

  “You don’t remember me?” The voice sounded tired, like it had expected no less, but still wished that she did.

  “It is difficult to judge the identity of a man when he is shrouded in darkness,” Lilla said. “Show me your face.”

  A possibility rose within her mind. It was a mad possibility. It was an absurd possibility. And it was a possibility which filled her with a warring mixture of emotions. Dread and glee and shock and anger danced together within her breasts. He gripped the edge of the chair until her knuckles turned white. Her mouth was suddenly dry.

  Time seemed to slow as the man climbed to her feet and stepped into the light.

  “Miles!” she gasped, and emotions exploded within her.

  “Lilla,” he muttered, with downcast eyes, like he was ashamed to see her.

  *****

  He should be ashamed, Lilla thought, as anger beat the other emotions back. It was anger unlike anything she had felt before. It was a bone-deep anger. She gripped the edge of the chair so hard now that splinters bit into her palms. It hurt doubly from when she’d clenched her fists earlier, in the party proper, when her nails had bit where the splinters bit now. It seemed mad to her that less than a half-hour ago she’d been that angry by the very existence of a party. Her anger now was so large it dwarfed even the recollection of that.

  “You left me!” she spat, only keeping her voice low so the party didn’t stampede in here to witness her rage. “There was a fire. I got this!” She pointed to the scar on her face. “And you left me. I saw you. Maybe you thought I wouldn’t. Maybe you thought I would still be passed out. But no, Miles, I saw you, running from me. A girl of eighteen summers who’d given you her honor, her life, her everything. And you fled from her.”

  Miles sighed and slumped into the chair opposite that in which she had sat. “Let me explain,” he whispered.

  “Explain!” She felt like slapping him across the face. She had never been this full of rage. It was black and abyss-like, eating her insides. It clouded her vision and if she had held a club, she would have battered him across the face with it. “There is nothing to explain! You left me, ran from me. I had no clue – I still have no clue – where you went. We were to be married.”

  Miles laid his hands upon the table. He looked at her with an expression of patience. That angered her even more. What right did he have to look at her as though she was an unreasonable child? He was the one who had left. He was the one who had destroyed everything.

  Crack!

  The back of the chair snapped in Lilla’s hands. She looked down in shock as the wood of the back clattered to the wooden seat. After a moment, she realized she was holding broken pieces of wood. She dropped them to the seat with the rest of the chair. “You see how angry you make me,” she said. “Do you see?”

  “Lilly.”

  The old lover’s name.A nickname just for him.

  “Don’t call me that!”

  He sighed. And then the patience fled from his face. He slowly rose to his feet and leaned forward, placing his fists upon the table. He looked as though he might pounce across at her. Her heart crashed madly in her chest. Tears welled in her eyes. Only the horror she would feel at crying before him gave her the strength to beat them back.

  “He hasn’t told you, has he?” Miles growled. His stance told her he was not angry with her, as she had assumed. He looked down at the ground. His anger seemed to turn inward.

  “Who hasn’t told me what?” she said, still angry but curious now, too.

  “Your brother,” he said. “He was supposed to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” Lilla demanded, her voice quivering.

  Miles looked into her eyes. He still had the same sky-blue eyes and the same muscular build. He still had the same strong jaw and the same short, curly brown hair. His face was still kind and strong at the same time. And for a moment Lilla was transported to four years ago, when she would have died for this man. She stamped the feeling away. It was a dangerous feeling. It had scarred her. She could not allow it to scar her again.

  “I have asked your brother to allow us to marry,” Miles said. “And he said yes. He said he would talk to you.”

  Lilla said nothing. She just turned and paced from the room. Events were moving too quickly. Her heart barely had time to feel one way when something else happened to make it feel another. Anger at Miles and anger at Isaac played tug-of-war in her chest. The injustice of it– of all women who are playthings of men – swept over her violently. She hardly cared when innumerable eyes turned upon her when she re-entered the party. She was too angry for that.

  “Isaac!” she called. The patrons flinched. She hated them all the more for that; they would judge her because she had raised her voice. They were all so cold and devoid of emotion that a raised voice was like a landmine to their stunted sensibilities.

  Isaac turned at the sound of his voice. His cheeks bloomed red. Lilla felt a small, malicious glee at that. Good, she thought. Let him feel one tenth of the shock I am feeling right now.

  “We need to talk.” Her voice was lower now.

  Isaac approached and the party resumed its pointless babble. There was nothing in the world more important to these people than the appearance of civility, even when a real drama was happening in the next room, even when hearts were being broken and old wounds were bleeding.

  Isaac grabbed her elbow. “Is he in the library?” he said.

  “He is,” Lilla said through gritted teeth. “I don’t like playing chess, brother. You know that about me. By I like far less being used as a chess piece. I want answers.”

  “And you’ll get them,” Isaac said. His tone of voice was that of a wrongly accused man. He coughed into his handkerchief, a wracking cough which caused his whole body to spasm. “Please, sister, just come to the library with me.”

  She couldn’t say no. He looked too pathetic. And he was, after all, her brother. Despite her rage, she loved him. She resented him a little
in that moment, too. She knew he wasn’t doing it on purpose, but his illness made it much more difficult to be angry with him.

  “Fine,” she hissed.

  Without waiting to see if he would follow, she turned and walked from the room.

  *****

  “I will be dead soon, sister,” Isaac said. “I will be dead and there will be nothing for you. Nothing.”

  Isaac had walked into the library, looked at the ruined chair, bent down and brushed away the debris, and then sat upon it. Miles sat opposite, where he had sat when Lilla left. Lilla couldn’t sit. She was too full of energy, too full of pain and shock and a hundred other emotions which she couldn’t identify. She paced up and down, from shelf to shelf, gripping her hands together.

  “You know as well as I do that Father left us with very little,” Isaac went on. “What you perhaps do not know is that my physician bills have almost completely exhausted the rest of our income. We are on the brink of destitution, Lilla. When I die, you will be left with nothing. You will be alone and lost.”

  “Why would you even want this, Miles?” Lilla snapped. “You ran away from me, if you do not remember. You fled through the crowd like you were fleeing a leper.”

  She couldn’t stop pacing. She felt like a woman about to run a race. She wished she could tear this cumbersome, heavy dress asunder and walk freely. The library was so small, the walls so close, the dress so constricting. All of it combined made her feel as though she was in a cage.

  “I love you, Lilla.”

  He said it matter-of-factly, like it was obvious and she shouldn’t even have needed to ask the question. But it wasn’t obvious, not to her. The only thing that was obvious to her was that he had run away.

  “Please,” Isaac said. “Let him explain.”

  He coughed again, leaning forward, his throat sounding like razorblades were being pulled out of him.

  “There is nothing to explain—”

  “Please!” Isaac wheezed. “Just—please.”

  Lilla sighed and walked around to the side of the table. With an effort, she forced her fists to unclench. The manic energy was still in her body, but she forced her limbs to be still. Her lip trembled and she thought she might shout or cry. Only Isaac’s pitiful appearance stopped her. Her dying brother had asked something of her. What sort of woman would I be if I denied that?

  “Fine,” she said. “Fine. Explain.”

  There was a pause in which the three of them regarded each other, three actors in this private drama, only yards away from an elite party. Then Miles’ forehead creased. She had to resist the old urge to smooth the crease with her thumb, as she had done when they were lovers. Images flitted through her mind: her hands in his hair; his naked body standing at the window, the muscles in his legs and back taut and tense; his lips upon her gloveless hand. She forced the images away. She could not feel tenderness for this man. She would not. She knew where that led.

  “I went to war, Lilly—Lilla.”

  Lilly. Every time he said it she felt a stab of recollection. It was like smelling a flower one associated with a particular poignant childhood memory. Every time one smelt the flower, one invariably conjured up the memory. Lilly was her flower, and Miles was her memory. But she did not want it.Liar, a voice whispered. She pushed the voice and the memory away. She was angry, she told herself. That was all.

  “I was planning on going over to fight Napoleon in the last month of our courtship. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you. I was so in love and we were so young and everything was happening so fast. No, please, let me finish.”

  Lilla’s fingers tapped the desk. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and then nodded. “Go on, then,” she said.

  He interlocked his fingers. It was an old gesture, one she recognized intimately. He was as full of emotion as her, that gesture told her. “I kept hearing stories about the war,” he said. “Horrible stories of men being slaughtered. You know how it was back then. Boys younger than I was then were going over there and being slaughtered. I desperately needed to go. I felt it in my soul. But I could not leave you. I was torn, and soon, I knew, I would be ripped apart by my indecision. And then that fire came. Do you remember? Of course you do. Yes, of course you do. It was like a sign from god.

  “I went up the stairs and saved the boy. And then I returned to the room we had shared. When I got there you were bleeding from the mouth, and you were unconscious. I threw you over my shoulder and carried you from the inn. I left you with some women to tend you. And I fled. Yes, I fled. I fled because I knew if I waited for you to wake up, I would never join the war. The day after the fire, I left for France. I returned two weeks ago.”

  Lilla didn’t want to believe this story. She wanted to push it aside, to name it as lies. She wanted to tell herself that it was a vicious trick. Hating him would have been easier then. Justifying her anger would have been easier. Tolerating this rage was difficult when Miles looked at her with such open, honest eyes, when his reasoning was something with which she could empathize. She did believe it, though. Everything he said was something the Miles she had known four years ago would have done. Isaac’s somber face and his slight nod when she looked to him confirmed it. He was telling the truth.

  “You could have written to me,” she said. “You say you could not tell me, that it would have caused you to stay. Fine. I have my problems with that but fine. But what stopped you from writing me after?”

  “War,” Miles said. “Just war.Blood and pain and death.I was in no state to write to anybody. I was consumed with day-to-day survival.”

  The pain of memory in his voice called out to something deep within Lilla. She felt the old urge to wrap her arms around him when he was sad, to make everything better with the warmth of her body, to lift his spirits with a well-placed kiss. All of these old urges rose within her. The mad energy within her quieted, and she no longer the need to drum her fingers upon the desk.

  But she couldn’t forgive him. The realization rose as though from a mist, and then struck her. She understood him, she empathized with him, but she couldn’t forgive him. Perhaps it was selfish, but the pain she had felt was too stark in her memory. It was knife-sharp, and cut her every time she thought about it.

  “I cannot marry you,” she said.

  “Lilla, think what you say,” Isaac said. “We are poor. Yes, we are. I am not asking you to love him again. But you know him. And he knows you. He loved you, even if you don’t—” The cough cut him short. His body shivered and blood and mucus sprayed the handkerchief. He inspected the dirty piece of cloth with dreadful eyes. “I will be dead soon,” he muttered. “The physicians have told me as much. I cannot force you, Lilla. But please, make the right choice.”

  “We are both scarred, Lilla,” Miles said.

  “I do not see a scar,” Lilla replied, pointing at his face. For a moment her hand was inches from him. To reach out, to touch his cheek, to run her thumb along his lower lip as she had done countless times before, in what seemed like a different life . . . But no. The pain of desertion was stronger within her than the happiness of reunion.

  “I have my fair share,” he said. “On my back and my belly. But that is not what I meant. I am scarred in here.” He touched the place on his jacket under which his heart beat. She had rested her head on that chest and listened to that heartbeat before. She had fallen asleep to that heartbeat.

  “Let me think on it,” Lilla said. “Give me that, at least.”

  “Of course.”

  The three of them rose. “Write to me, as soon as you have made your decision,” Miles said. His gait had changed from before the war. He carried himself like a soldier now. She had not noticed before because he had been sitting and then standing still, but he walked with the measured steps of an officer. He stopped at the door and turned. “Lilly, please say yes. I can win your love again. I know I can.”

  Lilla didn’t say anything. He waited for her to speak, his eyebrows raised, but she only looked down at th
e floor. With a sigh he left. Lilla slumped into the chair he had been sitting in. It was still warm from his body, and for a moment she felt close to him. The closeness filled her with warmth even as it filled her with shard-like memories: memories that sliced.

  “He is your best chance,” Isaac said.

  “My best chance of what, brother?” Lilla asked, unable to keep the exhaustion from her voice. For four years she had been like a windmill, trundling along but feeling nothing. Now the emotion had exploded with her, and it exhausted her.

  “Your best chance of making it,” Isaac answered.

  Part Two – The Marriage

  1

  Four months later.

  Lady Lilla Sawley sat at the window of the library and watched as November snow blanketed the garden. Her mind was in the past today, in the crypts of pain and love and fear that haunted her dreams. She remembered Isaac, only three months ago, ill but alive. And then the cough had taken him. He had moved into The Sawley estate with Lilla and Miles. A maidservant had told them. Lilla had received the news with odd numbness. She loved her brother, but she had expected it. Everybody had expected it. At the funeral, she hadn’t wept. Only when in her bedroom, with the doors bolted, had she given herself to tears.

  The wedding had been quick and formal. The vicar had muttered his words, and then they were leaving, man and wife. Lilla had wanted to flee the church as soon as she entered it, but common sense had prevailed. Miles, at least, was not a brute. He would not hurt her. He would see that she was cared for. He was also the man that had broken her heart and deserted her all those years ago. That was the trade she made.

  She and her husband were not close. As the months waned, Lilla found it more and more difficult to start anew, to wipe clean the memory of his retreating body, eager to desert her, desperate to get away from her. When she studied herself in the looking glass, it was difficult to feel anything but anger and betrayal when she regarded the crescent-shaped scar. Life had tossed her up, battered her, thrown her about. And she had landed as the wife or Lord Miles Sawley, her old lover. Sometimes, she would wake in the early morning, and for a breath of a moment she would not believe it. And then she would remember, and the anger would surface. It would have been simple if anger was all she felt. But there was something else under the anger, cushioning it. It was not happiness. It was more subtle, less warm, but still there. It was the potential for happiness.