Page 60 of The Duke and His Jilted Bride

Evander was standing beside Aurelia, but not with her, in the way Seraphina and Frederick were standing spiritually entwined. She could feel the warmth of him. He said something to Frederick about taking a boat out on a nice day. She heard his voice without taking in the words.

She thought: he has never even alluded to it, not in any of the conversations they had managed to have in the last weeks. So maybe it was nothing. Maybe Seraphina had constructed a moment from memory that was wrong, or she was just lying to be cruel. Maybe the pause was exactly what she intended, just a moment to take in a breath of air, and there was nothing real behind it – and Aurelia was doing the work of single-handedly driving herself mad.

Then she looked at Evander's profile and her heart dropped. He was looking at the view. His jaw was set, a mark of impatience in him, of the desire to leave. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. She looked back at him, and she thought she could not ask him about it there, not with them standing three feet away. The skin on the high point of her cheeks prickled feverishly. She thought momentarily about throwing herself off the cliff and seeing what would happen.

Instead, she turned back to the horizon. The light was shifting over the fields, the long afternoon shadows beginning to carve their way over the earth, the sky turning a pale gold and lavender as the clouds moved. It was a beautiful view. She had thought so the first time she found the end of this wall, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and she thought so now despite everything else.

But there was still that coalition of words – just before – sitting in her chest like a stone she wanted to mine out with her bare hands.

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.”