The Duke of Ice

by Lisa Andersen

  She sighed and rose from the chair. The book she had been reading lay face down on the desk. Her body ached from sitting so long. She stretched her arms and wiggled her legs.

  She turned swiftly when he cleared his throat.

  “Lilly,” he said.

  She flinched. He had been calling her by her lover’s name ever since they were married. She resented it even as she adored it. A potent brew of conflicted emotions bubbled up within her every time he said the name. It brought hundreds of memories, each of them tinged with pain even as they filled her transient pleasure.

  “Miles,” she muttered. “How long have you been watching me?”

  “I just arrived,” he said. A small smile touched his lips. It was the smile he had given her after their first kiss. Everything about him reminded her of the past. That would have been lovely, if it had not also included the fire. “I didn’t expect to see you stretching, however.”

  Lilla blushed. The implication hung in the air. How many times had she stretched with him, but in different, heated circumstances? How many times had her body writhed under him, or atop him? She had given her honor to this man. The thought caused remembered pleasure to move through her for a moment.

  Then the fire, bright, painful, forced away the pleasure.

  “What do you want, my lord?” she said.

  “I want you to walk with me in the gardens, Lilly.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Because we are husband and wife, and we never spend time together.”

  His voice was strong, but there was a note of desperation in it. He was trying to hide it, but it was there. Lilla felt for him, even as she tried to discard the feeling. She wanted to make him happy, she realized. She wanted to make them both happy. But it wasn’t as easy as that.

  She sighed. “I can’t make myself into who I was back then, Miles,” she said, using his Christian name because my lord made him flinch as though she struck her. It was too distant, and he wanted the two of them to be close again. “I wish I could reverse time and make it so we were who we were, but I cannot.”

  “Just walk with me,” he said. “That is all I ask. Please.”

  Lilla sighed again. The atmosphere between them had shifted these past months. Before, it had been one of combat, of war. She had wanted to tear his eyes out every time she saw him. She couldn’t look upon him without seeing his retreating figure, without feeling the sting of abandonment. But that had waned as he had persisted, and had demonstrated to her that he would not leave her again. Even when she avoided him, he sought her out. He was trying. Now the atmosphere was that of a man carrying a heavy burden, trying manfully to pull it up a hill. Lilla was self-aware to know that she was the burden which troubled her husband. He was trying to pull her forward with him, to soothe that which had burnt for the past four years.

  She interlocked her fingers, drummed her forefinger onto the back of the opposite hand. His sky-blue eyes were open and loving. They pulled Lilla in. She sighed a third time. “Okay, I will walk with you. But do not think that I have forgiven you.” The last words came out harshly, with a bite in them.

  Miles nodded slowly. “Will you ever forgive me, do you think?”

  Lilla shrugged. “I honestly cannot say.”

  It was the truth. She could feel the emotions within her with naked brilliancy, but judging whether or not they would still exist at some nebulous time in the future was more difficult. All she knew was the pain and the confused affection and the regret and the timid love that she felt now and had felt for years. It was not an easy thing to make sense of so much turmoil.

  “I will still try,” Miles said. “I will never stop trying to make you love me again.”

  Part of me still does love you, she thought but did not say.

  2

  Lilla wore walking boots and held her dress up around her knees as she and Miles walked through the garden. The plants had withdrawn for the winter, and only a few brave blades of grass poked through the uniform whiteness of the snow. Despite the absence of colorful flowers, despite the leafless branches that stuck out like thin, decrepit arms, despite the white shield of clouds overhead, Lilla thought the scene was quite beautiful. It was more honest, and it seemed to match her heart utterly: barren but with hints of life and color and love.

  “Did you miss me, when I first left?” Miles said.

  Lilla could have lied. She could have told him that the anger was all there was, that she hadn’t thought about him except to curse him. But she didn’t lie. They had been married for four months. Lying now would serve no purpose. She was with this man forever, after all.

  “Yes,” she said. “I missed you. I missed you as I imagine an amputee misses an arm. Oh, I know, it is not very ladylike of me to make such a comparison. But it is truth, and when have I been ladylike, Miles? Our entire romance was predicated upon the assumption that I would shun ladylike values. We did things no married man and woman should do. Yes, Miles, I missed you. I felt as though a part of myself had been taken away. It was a part I could not do without, I thought. But then it scabbed over, hardened, and anger took its place.”

  “And you are still angry,” Miles said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “But not as angry as you was.”

  Lilla considered this for a moment, and then nodded. “But not as angry as I was,” she agreed.

  “And why is that?”

  They had walked to the end of the garden where the grass usually met with the trees that led to Wells, the village on the outskirts of which they lived. Now there was no grass and no trees. There was just a white blanket leading to a crisscrossing maze of skinny brown white-flecked limbs. Miles turned and walked along the edge of the trees, and Lilla followed.

  “Because I know the anger serves no purpose. We are married. We will die together. I don’t feel angry as much as tired.”

  “Tired of me?” Miles said.

  “Tired of everything.Tired of the necessity of breath.Tired of sleep.Tired of waking.Tired of reading.Tired of sitting.Just tired.”

  Miles gasped. “You cannot mean that.”

  She reconsidered her words. Lately she had been feeling tired, but not to the extent she had just said. She wondered why she was being dramatic, why she was trying to make her emotional state seem frightening her husband. Could it be sympathy? Did she desire his attention, his love, even as she threatened to shun it?

  “Perhaps not,” she said. “Fine, perhaps not. But confused. I don’t know—” She pointed to a rock that bulged out of the snow. “For the longest time, my mind, my emotions, were like that. Stone, still. Not calm, by no means calm, but there was an equilibrium. I had become intimately acquainted with rage, and I had settled into a sort of angry calm. Now—” She spread her hands at the scene around them. “I don’t know how to feel. One minute I am sorrowful, the next I am angry.”

  Suddenly, Miles reached across and touched her scar, near her lip. Lilla was about to pull away, but then something stopped her. An emotion she neither understood nor ignored moved through her. It was as though all the emotions she had felt up until now combined, and forced her to stand still as Miles ran his thumb along her scar.

  “I wish I could take that for you,” he said.

  She closed her eyes and focused on his thumb. It was warm against her skin, warm against the November cold. She released her dress, letting it fall into the snow, and reached up and touched his hand. It was abrupt, this change, this action. It pushed aside all other considerations. She found herself wanting to pause this moment and allow it to stretch on forever. This was a remnant for their old love. This moment reminded her of her youth, when she had been a young, naïve girl with a head full of roses.

  She was only two and twenty, but she felt ancient.

  “Why are you touching me?” she whispered, even as she caressed his hand.

  “Because I have not touched you for a long time,” he said.

  Their voices were hardly louder tha
n the soft breeze which stirred the snow. She gripped his hand, gripped the warmth and the security of it. She had taken such solace in this hand, once upon a time. For the first time since their marriage, she seriously considered that she might take solace from it again.

  “Do you still love me?” she said.

  She hadn’t known that she would ask the question. It came from another part of her, a part she usually kept buried. It came from the part of her which had almost died when he left her. Almost, but not quite. Now that part of her was rising in her consciousness, taking predominance.

  He moved his hand to her cheek and stroked her skin, the way he had stroked her chin after the first time they made love, and they were lying spent and weary and satisfied in a single bed in the backroom of a forgotten inn. “Of course I still love you,” he said. “But that is not the important question. The important question is, do you still love me?”

  She opened her eyes and saw that his face was close to hers. His breath was warm on her face, her nose and her mouth. She moved her hands up his arms to his shoulders. They were firm, like a mountainside. That was, she realized, what she was doing: clinging onto a mountainside, trying to stop the wind from whipping her away again.

  “I never stopped loving you,” she said, and even as she said it, she wondered if it was a mistake; if he could hurt her again.

  But this moment was apart from all that, somehow. This moment existed in its own realm. This was the moment when all the emotion and the pain and the regret would be forgotten. He leaned in and she did not pull away, could not pull away.

  His lips were warm despite the cold. Her heart hammered in her chest. The sweat on her hands was cool. After a moment, she kissed him back.

  3

  The kiss haunted Lilla’s dreams for the next week. She and her husband walked together three more times, and they kissed again, but none of it had the magic that the first time did. It was as though Miles had reached within her and rearranged her feelings, pulling some to the foreground and pushing others into the background, where they were dim and hazy. She found herself remembering with more poignancy their time together, before the fire, before the war, before the scar. She realized that she still loved him. But she did not know if the love was strong enough to overcome the anger and the regret.

  She had just awoken when there was a knock at her door. She answered it and Miles walked in. His expression was serious, without the hint of a smile. Lilla’s first instinct was that he was angry at her. She was surprised by how much the thought hurt her. She didn’t want him to be angry at her, she realized. She thought on what this said about her feelings for him. They were, indeed, shifting, reforming.

  “Is something wrong?” she said, unable to keep the anxiety from her voice.

  “No.” He sighed. “Yes. There is something wrong.”

  “What is it?”

  “Us.”

  The word hung in the air like a knoll. Perhaps he had come to confront her, finally. Perhaps he had come to drag out the secret, hidden emotions and bring them into the steely blue winter sunlight.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Lilla said, forcing her voice to remain calm.

  “I love you, Lilla,” he said. He took her hand. She didn’t fight him. A dim, quiet part of her begged her to pull her hand away, warned her that he would only hurt her once more. But it was much quieter than it had once been. And the image of him running from her no longer possessed the pain it had before the kiss. His fingers were cold.

  “You’ve been outside,” she said.

  He nodded. “I have. All night. I needed to think. And time escaped me.”

  She led him to the bed and pushed his chest so he sat down. He slumped onto the mattress. Lilla sat next to him. Their legs touched and Lilla felt a thrill she had not felt in years. It was the thrill of lust, the thrill that brought dishonorable, scandalous feelings into her mind, the thrill that made her think of sweat and sex.

  “I need to explain myself,” he said.

  She waited silently. She would not interrupt him now. He had the appearance of a man preparing a speech. He would not have looked out of place standing before a lectern. He had prepared these words, Lilla intimated. She did not judge him for that. Sometimes, she knew, it was easier to prepare what one said, so one did not color it with sudden impulses. A long time passed. Birds began to tweet out of the windows. A pale imitation of sunlight filled the room. Lilla thought about speaking, but the silence was sacred, somehow. She guessed that Miles needed these quiet moments to compose himself.

  Finally, he spoke.

  “I am a coward. That is the truth, Lilla. I ran away to the war because I wanted to serve my country. But do you want to know something? This is something I have never told anybody else. Almost as soon as I was over there, I wanted to come back. There was no glory, no service. There was just mud and blood and depression. There was nothing noble about it at all. The only thing that kept me sane was the memory of our time together. It was the only thing that pulled me through the darkness.

  “And then I came back, and I wanted us to resume our love. But I realized, too late, that that was impossible. And by then you were already angry with me, already hated me.”

  Lilla made to interrupt, to tell him that she did not hate him, but he raised his hand.

  “Let me finish, please.”

  She nodded.

  “No you are my wife, and I can see in your eyes that you are torn. You are torn as I was once torn. I was torn between the war and my love for you; you are torn between the past and your love for me. You think that I am still the man I was. Or you suspect it. I need to tell you, for certain, that I am no longer that man. The man who would leave a loving, beautiful, intelligent woman for some muddy field in France died out there. If I had the chance, I would reverse all of that. I swear on God that I would. I know we cannot go back to what we were, but I wish – I need – us to try and start anew.”

  Lilla knew – intellectually – that these could be naught more than pretty words, that this could be calculated deception. But it wasn’t about what she knew; it was about what she felt. And what she felt was an almost overwhelming urge to throw her arms around him. As he’d spoken, she’d laid her hand on his knee. She hadn’t even realized that she’d done it. His words had touched the old Lilla, the unscarred Lilla. And though she agreed that they could not go back, that she could not be unscarred, she discovered that she did want to start again.

  The hurt which had sustained her for four years was now in the way. It was obstructing her happiness. She delved deep inside of her and tried to let it go. It fought viciously. Torment wracked her. She squeezed Miles’ knee and took a long, deep breath, willing the resentment and the anger to go away, to fly into somebody else’s life. I don’t need you anymore, she thought.

  To her shock, when she opened her eyes it was like opening them after a long sleep. A weight fell from her. For the first time in ages, she felt light and free. She reached up and touched her husband’s face, and then moved her hand down and touched his shoulders. “We can start again, if that is what you desire,” she said. “But know this, hear this. You will never hurt me like that again. If you hurt me again, I want to know why. I don’t want to be left in the dark, alone, wondering what happened for four years. Hurting a woman is one thing; deserting her is quite another.”

  “I will not hurt you again,” he said.

  There was a note of promise in his voice, and Lilla nodded. She believed him. It shocked her. But she could not deny it. Somewhere between kissing him that day in the gardens and this conversation, love had overcome her other emotions. It had beat back resentment, fought off anger, melted pain. Now there was a warm glow in her belly.

  She turned her head, looked up into his sky-blue eyes, and parted her lips. “This is the part where you kiss me,” she said.

  He did.

  *****

  Two and a half years later.

  If there was a single thing whi
ch could cement a new love, it was a child. Harold had been conceived the day she and Miles had found each other again. The night seemed like a blur now. He had come into her bedroom in the morning, and he had made his speech, and then they had kissed and lay in each other’s arms. And then he’d moved his hands down her body, awaking the old lust, the old places of pleasure. Their two bodies had become one in the cold November half-light.

  Lilla sat in the drawing room with Harold on her knee. He was perhaps the cutest baby in existence. She knew that all mothers thought that, and yet she could not shake the conviction that her baby truly was. He looked exactly like his father, right down to the curly brown hair and the square jaw. He would be a handsome man, Lilla thought.

  Miles walked into the room and knelt beside them both. “Hello, little man,” he said. Then he lifted his son above his head and smiled widely as Harold giggled like a little madman. The warmth in Lilla’s belly which, two years ago, had replaced the anger and everything else, bloomed even warmer when she watched her husband and son. She could never watch the two of them without feeling warm, without being filled with irrepressible love.

  The nurse collected Harold, and then Miles offered her his hand. “Let’s walk the gardens,” he said.

  “If you wish,” Lilla replied, taking his hand.