Page 29 of Lord of the Darkness

“Just friends?” said Helena shrewdly, mixing some honey into her tea, “or more than friends?”

“Maybe more,” said Ariana with a shiver of something compounded of hope and apprehension.

There was no knowing where they might end up if the relationship continued on its present course. Far from avoiding him, Ariana actually found herself looking forward to spending time with him. There were moments at night when she even hoped that he might put down his correspondence and talk to her more, and occasionally gaze at her with the quiet warmth of a man who loved without needing to say so in words.

“The way he looks at me sometimes,” she said, “I can’t believe I never noticed how handsome he was at first. Or maybe love has made him handsome, I don’t know.”

“I think sometimes a person grows in our estimation the more we get to know them,” said Helena. “The imagination finds them suddenly beautiful.”

Ariana was a little offended by the suggestion that it was only her imagination that made Benedict handsome, but she conceded the point.

“I think any other husband would have given up on me long ago,” she said. “I owe him so much.”

“What is it that you think you owe him?” asked Helena from behind the rim of her teacup.

“Loyalty, I suppose. He’s been unfailingly loyal and persevering, even when he didn’t have to be. He already knew that he would have the estate when Father died - which was what he wanted, or why would he have agreed to Father’s bargain in the first place? We could have easily drifted into being just two strangers who lived in the same house.”

“It must feel strange to find yourself falling in love with your own husband. I suppose that not everyone has the luxury of falling in love before getting married.”

Ariana nodded. It felt like the most wonderful joke, one that the world had played on her. Having been married to a man against her will, she had awoken one morning to discover that she was suddenly glad to have married him. They had both been changed by the experience of marriage. Benedict was quieter, calmer, more devoted and more patient than he had been at the start. And she was less withdrawn, less stubborn, less frightened, less likely to dart out of a room at the noise of approaching footsteps. There were moments when Ariana felt a growing suspicion that she and Benedict might save each other.

“If the marriage is really what you say it is,” said Helena, “then I’m happy for both of you. But Ariana, I want you to be careful.”

“Careful?” she said in a nervous tone. “Why?”

“Because, as I’ve said before, in my letters, everything that you wrote of him in the past suggests that Benedict is a controlling, domineering person who will do anything to get his own way. Men don’t suddenly undergo a transformation in character for no reason. I worry that Benedict’s heart remains the same as it ever was. It’s only his methods that have changed.”

“I’m still not sure I understand what you’re saying.”

Ariana spoke in an aggrieved tone, afraid that she did, in fact, understand exactly what Helena was saying. She felt instinctively defensive whenever Benedict was disparaged.

“I mean that he may have found subtler methods for getting what he wanted from you,” said Helena. “And if that was his aim, then he has succeeded beautifully. He’s garnered your full co-operation.”

“Only because he’s earned it,” said Ariana, now deeply annoyed. “He’s done what he needed to do, if he wanted my love and support - he loved me first.”

“I only say this because I worry about you,” said Helena. “I’ve known you for a long time. I’ve seen how easily you can be overruled by someone with a more dominant will. I know how hard it is for you to argue on your own behalf. I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life being governed by others.”

“If I had married anyone else, I might share those concerns.”

Ariana set her uneaten cake down on the table, no longer hungry. She was not about to admit that she had, actually, shared such concerns, and had only finally been convinced to set them aside by her mother’s words. Helena regarded her cynically.

“Are you certain?”

“Yes. Benedict is so, so much kinder than he used to be. He’s almost like a different person. The way he looks at me sometimes — the way he looked at me by the river…” She was becoming flustered now, not knowing how to defend her own husband to someone who seemed determined to see evil in him. “When he looked at me, I felt both safe and exposed, at the same time. I think that was the first time I truly knew that my heart was beginning to be engaged.”

“But are you sure that his kindness isn’t manipulation?”

“I don’t know.” It was an odd feeling, this feeling of being torn between her husband and her best friend. “I know that there are times when I need his affection, where I feel like I’ll die without it. Sometimes when he has to leave home for a day or two, I feel lost, like I won’t be able to breathe again until he returns. Is that what he wanted me to feel? Again, I don’t know.”

***

Ariana watched as Helena decided to let the subject go, before she drew a permanent wedge between herself and Ariana – she had known Helena so long that she could almost see the thoughts happening before her. They spoke of vastly different things for the next two hours, until it was time for Ariana to go home, and she left feeling mostly happy with the afternoon.

Mostly.

Because Helena’s questions repeated themselves in her mind, making Ariana question everything she had thought she felt.

That questioning rapidly bloomed into full scale doubt and, newly suspicious of her husband, she withdrew into herself again over the next week. When Benedict beamed at her, she looked the other way; when he touched her, she shivered and removed her hand.

It saddened her to do so, and she felt a degree of disloyalty to her mother as well, but she could not be sure – what if it was manipulation, not genuine care? She was miserable, no matter what she did, and she wished, in her darkest moments, that she had never spoken with Helena at all.

***

Benedict, who had hoped that the recent thaw in their marriage, especially after that conversation by the river, might herald a real flowering of shared affection, felt a keen sense of disappointment. It seemed like all the work he had put into their relationship over the last several months had been for nothing.

He had no idea what had gone wrong. He had followed Fitzherbert’s advice to the letter, and it seemed to have worked, briefly. But since shortly after her father’s death, it had all changed. Perhaps it was grief?

Now he could barely get her to look at him. When he came into their parlour at night, she had already gone to her own bed, and when he looked in, she lay motionless and silent as if already asleep. During the day she shut herself away, or worked feverishly on the next part of the redecorations, refusing his assistance, or walked in the winter bare gardens, looking mournful.

Some nights she didn’t even come down for dinner.

It was a source of immense frustration for Benedict, who liked it when things worked the way that they were supposed to and hated it when they didn’t. He had always thought of marriage as a situation where one did the appropriate things, and everything happened as it was supposed to. But in this case, he had done everything he knew to do, and it still, repeatedly, went wrong.

Perhaps he should speak with James again, and see what advice he might have. The more he considered that, the more it seemed the only option. But he would invite James here – he had no wish to again converse in the Harbottles’ winter frosted garden.