“Speak to His Lordship?” The ghost of a smile played on his lips.
“On the matter of your retirement. I…” At his growing smile, her words trailed off.
“I do not wish to retire, my lady.”
She cocked her head. “You do not?” Surely, all people not only deserved, but wanted, some rest at the end of their years.
Wallace gave his head a vigorous shake. “I do not.” He leaned close and then dropped his voice to a hushed whisper. “Oh, His Lordship has fought me on any number of scores about the very matter.”
“He has?” Shock filled her tone.
“He has,” he concurred. “But I ultimately always prevail with His Lordship.” Phoebe eyed him with incredulity. No one prevailed where Edmund was concerned. With his ruthlessness and steely resolve, he was indomitable in all matters.
She continued to study Wallace a long moment. Yes, no one emerged triumphant over Edmund—except, it would seem this ancient servant. Intrigue stirred in her breast and she felt like she had been handed a thousand jagged pieces of a puzzle and tried to put it to rights. “Why do you wish to remain at your post?” She could not call the question back, nor did she wish to. The old man’s smile slipped. Sadness wreathed his wrinkled cheeks. “I vowed I’d not abandon my post until His Lordship was happy.”
Those words struck at her heart; an unexpected, painful jab. But twelve words, and yet they conveyed so very much. They recalled the parts of his past he’d shared yesterday. “Surely,” she wet her lips. It was the height of impropriety to speak on personal matters with a servant; to speak of one’s husband, madness. “Surely, he’s been happy at some point these years.” Yet, this man also had known Edmund from the moment he’d been born. She tried to imagine Edmund as he’d been once—innocent, trusting, and dependent upon others for his care and love. Who had first failed him to make him this empty shell of a person?
“Oh, he was once very happy.” Wallace said nothing more on it, dangling that morsel so she was forced to either remember what was expected of a proper lady or feed the questions on her lips. He sketched a bow and a moment of panic besieged her, a fear that he would leave and so would end her only opportunity to ask the one person with answers about the stranger she’d married, but then he said, “Will you allow me the honor of showing you about the townhouse, my lady?”
“I would appreciate that, Wallace,” she said suddenly glad her husband had not seen to that polite detail. She hurried after the butler as he turned on his heel. They continued down the hall. The older man walked with slow, shuffling footsteps with the soles of his shoes dragging quietly on the floor. Together, Phoebe and Wallace moved through the corridors with Wallace pointing out a Blue Parlor, a Pink Parlor, and a Green Parlor.
It would seem in this new, grand, spacious labyrinth she called home, there was no shortage of parlors. She troubled her lower lip and searched for a polite way, or at the very least, less obvious way, to inquire about her husband and coming up empty, she settled for blunt directness. “What was he like as a child?”
Wallace slowed a moment. She stole a sideways peek at him. The fond gleam in his eyes was better suited to a proud parent. Then, he resumed his pace. “He was quite mischievous, my lady. Always ready with a smile but a handful to his nursemaids and tutors.”
Phoebe drew forth an image of Edmund as a small boy—a boy with a thick crop of chestnut, slightly curled hair and a wide grin. Her heart pulled painfully at the image.
The butler motioned to another room. “His Lordship’s office.”
She paused beside the closed door and stared at the wood panel.
“He is not in his office at this moment.”
No, she knew as much. He’d fled her the way one might have fled the burning city of Rome. They continued on, when a portrait in an elaborate gold frame caught her notice. She paused, and Wallace momentarily forgotten, wandered over to the canvas upon which a boy, mayhap no more than ten or eleven glared back at her. He stood beside a leather button sofa with his hand curled on the arm. The virulence in his brown-eyed stare beckoned her forward. She inched closer and then came to a stop. A chill went through her. She’d never before thought a mere child could invoke fear and upon a painting, no less. Yet, there was something menacing about the boy. A dark strand of hair tumbled over his brow and the hardness of his lips marked this too-old-for-his-years child as her husband. “When did he become so…so…?” Cold, unfeeling, ruthless.
“Serious?” Wallace supplied from just over her shoulder.
She nodded, transfixed by her husband forever memorialized as an angry child. Serious would suffice. When silence met her inquiry, she shot a glance back.
Lines of sadness wreathed Wallace’s face. “He was seven.”
Phoebe swiftly returned her attention to the canvas. She raised tentative fingertips to the grim child. Seven. Her heart sputtered. Oh, God. “Seven,” she repeated. That was the piece he’d not shared yesterday. He’d been just a babe. Her throat worked spasmodically. “Did he…ever know happiness after?” At least with his Margaret. For as much as she hated the other woman for having what Phoebe herself wanted, she would be grateful if, even for just a short time, he’d smiled again.
“That is a question best reserved for the marquess, my lady.”
As she stood there, the ten-year-old Edmund continued to bore his angry, hardened stare into her soul. She swallowed hard and once more managed words. “Wallace, thank you so very much for showing me about.” Phoebe forced her focus to the older servant and managed a smile. “May we continue our tour at a later time?”
“Of course, my lady,” he said. With a bow, he turned and shuffled down the hall.
Phoebe stared at Wallace’s slow-moving frame as he retreated. This ancient servant was just one more piece in the puzzle that was her husband; a piece that did not fit within the jagged frame of his life. Who was this man she married? Monster or just a complex man who hid the good parts of himself from the world? She gave her head a rueful shake. Or perhaps that was nothing more than the fanciful ponderings of a woman so desperately wanting to see more. She turned to make her way abovestairs and then froze. Unbidden, her gaze traveled back to Edmund’s office door. With hesitant steps, Phoebe wandered to the door and froze. She worried her lower lip and then cast another glance down the opposite end of the corridor. It wasn’t really wrong entering his empty office. This was now her home and surely she was permitted the luxury of moving freely within any and every room. Before her courage deserted her, she pressed the handle and stepped inside.
Silence rang in the grand space and she quietly closed the door behind her with a soft click. She scanned the empty room. The mahogany Chippendale furniture and broad, immaculate desk in their deep, cherry hue perfectly suited Edmund’s dark personality. Phoebe took a cautious step forward and then another. Crimson velvet curtains hung closed, as though her husband barred the passersby below even a glimpse into his world. She skimmed her fingers along the leather button sofa and the cool of the fabric chilled in an otherwise warm space. She came to a stop at the foot of his desk and rested her palm along the surface.
The room for all its costly pieces of furniture was otherwise devoid of life and cheer. Dark, cold, sterile. Phoebe moved around the desk and claimed her husband’s tall, leather, winged back chair. She shifted in the seat testing the folds of his chair and then laid her palms on the smooth surface. In a distracted manner, she rubbed them back and forth along the cool wood.
“So this is where you see to your business, Edmund Deering,” she said into the quiet of the room.
The familiar silence of the room echoed as her only response. Phoebe ran her gaze about the office again. For a man who evoked terror in the hearts of most gentlemen, there was something rather ordinary about this space that he made his. She made to rise and then stilled. With the tip of her finger she played with the gold latch on the long desk drawer. It really wasn’t her place to snoop through her husband’s affairs.
Phoebe looked to the closed door and then back to the drawer. But then, neither had he given her much choice in the matter of their marriage. Surely one as ruthless and relentless as her husband would not object to such behavior in his own wife? Guilt niggling at the back corner of her mind, she thrust aside those misgivings and pulled out the drawer.
She stared disappointedly down into the meager contents. Though she didn’t know what she’d truly expected to find, there had been the sliver of hope that there would be some piece of his business that gave a glimpse into who he was and what he did. Not unlike the book and the breakfast and now the childhood painting. But for a small, black leather ledger and a handful of pens and a sheaf of parchments, there was nothing personal or at all distinctively Edmund’s.
Absently she pulled out the book and fanned the pages, admiring his neat, meticulous scrawl. There was a boldness and power to even the ink markings he left upon his pages. She flipped through the small ledger and then blinked slowly as the words inked upon those pages registered. The leather seat groaned in protest as Phoebe sat forward in the chair. With trembling fingers, she brought the book close to her face and buried her nose in its loathsome pages as she rapidly scanned the words in her husband’s hand.
Lord Exeter. Weakness Faro and French mistresses. Debt one thousand pounds.
Nausea turned in her belly.
Lord Donaldson. Weakness diddling his servants. Whist. Debt country cottage in Devonshire.
She quickly worked her gaze over the names of men and women indebted to Edmund in some way.
Miss Honoria Fairfax?
Bile climbed up her throat.
Miss Phoebe Barrett—weakness? Her friends and family.
Oh, God.
For everything she knew about her husband’s fierce pursuit of power, and his ease in taking what he wanted, and when he wanted it…seeing that ruthlessness enumerated on these pages by him, the way he might record a mundane shopping list, spoke to a depth of his hard-heartedness. Gooseflesh dotted her arms and the book slid from her fingers. It tumbled unceremoniously to the desk with a loud thump. She sat frozen, staring at the book open on its spine with her name glaring mockingly up at her. These words, they were not the words belonging to a man who carried breakfast trays and books of Wales. Rather, these black marks upon the page belonged to that sneering, snarling child who’d jeered her for daring to look at his painted likeness.
“Have you found anything of interest in my office?” a harsh voice drawled.
For a moment, she stared numbly at the page not understanding why the damning leather book should be speaking, in her husband’s tone no less. The office door closed with a soft click, bringing her head up.
Edmund stood at the entrance of the room, a hard, undecipherable look stamped on the harsh features of his face. Her husband stalked over like a sleek, lethal panther, moving around the desk and stopping beside her.
He reached for her and she flinched. His ever-narrowing eyes took in that subtle movement and then with a growl, he swiped the book from the desk, snapped it closed, and set it back on the desk. He laid his hands on the arms of her chair, blocking escape. A vein pulsed at his right temple and her heart thumped, reminded once more that Edmund, the Marquess of Rutland, was nothing more than a stranger. “Did you think I would hurt you, Phoebe?” he jeered.
Even with her heart aching and a void of emptiness in her chest, Phoebe managed to tip her head up. “You still have not realized that you don’t need to use your hands to inflict hurt upon,” me, “a person. You manage that just as effectively with your words.”
They remained locked in a silent battle of wills; he seething and simmering like an angered dragon prepared to snarl flames, she proud and defiant, refusing to be cowed by him.
Shockingly, Edmund conceded defeat. He shoved himself to standing and took several steps back, allowing her to rise. Unable to bear the heated emotion in his eyes, Phoebe looked away, peering down at the book. She ran her fingers over the surface of that vile book. “Do you know, Edmund, I am a fool.” He stiffened, but otherwise made no attempt to refute or confirm her claim. Acrimony had a bitter taste like acid on her tongue. As she fanned the pages, her skin pricked with awareness of his studious attention to her movements. “I heard everything outside of my father’s office. Your intentions for me, your plans for Margaret, your…” Pain choked off those words and she cleared her throat. “Your ruthlessness in wedding even my sister should I not relent.” Phoebe raised her eyes to his. His mouth tightened. White lines formed at the corners of his lips. “What does it say about me and the extent of my weakness and folly that I continue to believe in you?” In us. Phoebe released the book once more and dusted her hands together. “All my life I was determined to not be my mother. I would wed an honorable gentleman who’d respect me. He would be kind and he would be faithful.” The dreams of that fictional gentleman flashed to her mind’s eye. “I would dream of who he would be but he never had a face.” She drew in a broken breath and looked into her husband’s eyes. “For a while that man’s face belonged to you. No more, Edmund. You are not that man.”
Over the years, many vile epithets and black obscenities had been leveled at him that they’d ceased to matter. They hit him and rolled off his impenetrable back without leaving so much as a hint of a mark. Standing there with Phoebe’s discovery between them, her words ravaged him more than Stanhope’s blade or any of those other ugly charges to be heaped upon his worthless shoulders before.
For standing here, staring at Phoebe with the delicate planes of her cherished face etched in grief and acceptance, whatever she might have felt for him that wasn’t loathing had clearly died with the discovery of that book.
He dug deep, searching the dismissive response that would send her fleeing, but he did not want her to go, for when she left, after this, Phoebe would be gone in ways that he could never, ever again find her. Edmund stared blankly down at the book; a book he’d not etched a single mark in after the moment he’d put Phoebe’s name down.
With a sound of disgust, Phoebe made to step around him. He shot a hand out, staying her movement. She glanced down at his hold upon her person with such potent disgust, he released her suddenly. “I have not written another name in that book since yours.” Since you.
She eyed him as though he’d escaped from Bedlam. “Am I supposed to find honor in that? Reassurance?” She scoffed. “So you have not written another name in it since mine. There will be others after me. Mayhap not today or tomorrow, but you will find others. People’s weaknesses you use to build up an artificial strength.” Her words slashed through him, powerful with their accuracy. “But you are not strong,” she said, cutting his legs out from under him. She jerked her chin toward the door. “You are that angry, scared child in the painting—”
“I do not know any other way!” he shouted, his voice thundered from the ceiling and echoed around them.
Phoebe placed her palms on the edge of the desk and leaned toward him, shrinking the space. “Then try. What happened to you as a child was horrid,” she said, her tone gentler, bearing more hints of the warmth usually lining her every word. “It truly was. Your parents, like my father, were rotten, horrid, dishonorable people. But that happened to you, just as it happened to me, and you need to move on from it.”
Move on from it. There was something seductive in those four words. Move on… He’d spent the course of his life with manacles holding him to the past. As she’d said, a child hurt and wounded nursing those hurts in a bid to never be hurt again. He wanted to be more. And yes, he wanted to be more for her because that is what she, at the very least, deserved, but for him.
Silence stretched on eternally between them and then Phoebe pushed away from the desk. With resigned steps, she walked away from him.
“I want to change,” he called out, staying her as she reached the door. “I want to be more.” For you.
Phoebe wheeled slowly back, her face curiously expressionless. “Unfortunate
ly, Edmund I’m not entirely sure you can.”
Long after Phoebe had gone, Edmund stood fixed to the spot. He stared at the wood panel, clenching and unclenching his fists into painful balls at his side. Then, moving behind his desk, he sat down. With slow, methodical movements he flipped open the familiar book and then pulled open his desk drawer. Dipping his pen into the crystal inkwell he etched one more name onto the pages and stared blankly down at the name marked there.
Chapter 22
Later that day, Phoebe stared up at the façade of a familiar stucco townhouse. Her skin pricked with the gazes trained on her by rabidly curious passersby. She rapped once on the front door. In light of this latest betrayal by Edmund, surely she should feel some great torrent of emotions. Except, she didn’t think she could shed another tear for her husband, the Marquess of Rutland. She raised her hand to knock again, when the door was suddenly opened.
Surprise wreathed the old butler, Manfred’s face, reminding her of another loyal, devoted butler. “Miss Barrett,” he greeted with a smile and then remembered himself as she stepped through the doorway. “My Ladyship,” he amended.
Phoebe shrugged out of her cloak and handed it off to the waiting servant. “I daresay a dear family friend who knew me when I was putting rose water in my father’s cologne is permitted calling me by my Christian name, still.”
“Did you now?” A twinkle lit his old eyes. “I do not recall you as anything but perfectly behaved.”
She managed her first laugh that morning and then looked about.
“Her Ladyship is in the Pink Parlor,” he said correctly interpreting the reason for her visit. He motioned with his hand. “If you’ll allow me to—”
“That won’t be necessary,” she said with a murmur of thanks. “I’ve been gone but two days,” which felt like twenty years. “I still remember my way about,” she assured him.
Manfred grinned and inclined his head. “As you wish, my lady… Miss Phoebe,” he said when she gave him a pointed look.
A Heart of a Duke Collection: Volume 1-A Regency Bundle Page 164