Owen was shaking slightly, and Arthur pulled back, terrified. Had he distressed Owen into tears again, somehow?
But Owen was laughing. Not heartily, perhaps, but chuckling enough that his red-rimmed eyes had lit with something like their usual sparkle.
“Well?” he demanded, a little aggrieved. He still held Owen in his arms, he had kissed him with all the passion at his disposal, and he was quite in the act of begging him to be Arthur’s husband. And Owen had the temerity to laugh?
“I’m sorry,” Owen said, sounding not sorry at all. “Don’t be angry with me. It’s only that — you, Arthur Drake, attempting to persuade me to marry you. It’s absurd.”
Arthur’s heart lifted, both at the unexpectedly wonderful sound of his given name on Owen’s lips, and at the implication of his words. “Does that mean your answer is yes?”
Owen bit his lip, his eyes going distant. Clearly one kiss hadn’t entirely removed his reservations; tempting, then, to repeat the experiment. But no. Arthur shouldn’t have taken even that much when Owen was in too much turmoil to be quite in control of himself, and he would not take more. With great reluctance, he let his arms fall from around Owen’s back.
That seemed to bring Owen back from wherever he had gone. “What kind of marriage do you have in mind?” he asked quietly.
They still stood very close; he could see the way Owen’s damp eyelashes clung together, and feel the warmth of his breath as he spoke. A smattering of delicious freckles stood out along Owen’s cheekbones, highlighting the delicacy of his skin. Arthur could hardly be expected to say anything sensible when he had such distractions before him, could he?
“The normal sort,” he said, feeling rather foolish. “A — a marriage like any other, I suppose.”
“I meant, if this is only a marriage in name.” Owen stopped abruptly and fixed his gaze on a point somewhere beyond Arthur’s shoulder.
“Ah,” he said, understanding dawning. “No. This is not a marriage in name only. I intend to honor my vows to you, and I don’t particularly want to live in celibacy for the rest of my life. I can’t imagine that you would either.” Arthur realized he had been speaking as if their marriage were a decided thing, and chose not to correct himself.
If possible, Owen’s blush deepened, spreading to his ears and down his neck, disappearing tantalizingly below his loosely knotted cravat. “No,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t ask that of you.”
That was not at all what Arthur wanted to hear. “I won’t force myself on you,” he said, keeping his voice even, disappointment carefully hidden. “If you can’t bear the idea of having me as a husband, with all that entails, tell me so. And I’ll accept it, as a gentleman should.”
Owen reached up and brushed his fingers down Arthur’s cheek and along the line of his jaw. Arthur’s heart lurched, and then thudded back into life, at a much greater pace. That soft touch affected him more, even, than the kiss had done, since it was Owen choosing to make contact. Choosing him, perhaps.
“If you’re serious. If you truly mean it, mean to — to rescue me from this mess. I don’t think I could bear it if you changed your mind.”
Arthur turned his head a fraction and pressed the chastest of kisses to Owen’s fingertips. Owen jerked his hand away as if burned, but then curled his fingers into his palm, almost as if he were holding the kiss for safekeeping.
“Rescuing you, as you put it, is no hardship,” Arthur said gently. “Perhaps it’s not what your heart desires, but this is to our mutual advantage. I should have been reluctant to marry a woman in any case, since that’s not where my preferences lie.”
Owen looked at Arthur long and hard, seeming to measure him and his intentions; finally, he nodded and squared his shoulders. “Then I accept your proposal, sir.”
The enormity of what he had done only hit Arthur then, as the words left Owen’s lips. He had proposed marriage to his brother’s fiancé; he had been accepted. He would be married, presumably in — what was it? Only twelve days, good gods. He opened his mouth, to say what, exactly, he wasn’t quite sure: to express his pleasure, he must do that.
But Owen startled before Arthur could even touch him, and he slipped away, bumping against the edge of the settee and barely righting himself in his haste.
“What’s the matter?” Arthur asked. The question answered itself instantly; that bustle in the hall had to be Mrs. Honeyfield returning home. She had been out, thankfully, when he arrived — could it be only an hour before? Familiar as he was with the sounds of the house, Owen had been quicker than he to notice her arrival.
“Please — I don’t mean to be discourteous, but you must go,” Owen whispered. He had the desperate, hunted look of a mouse about to confront a tabby. “Before she comes in. Please.”
Mrs. Honeyfield’s voice was audible, now, a few words of her discourse to the housemaid on the success of her trip to the market carrying clearly. Still, Arthur hesitated. “Are you certain you don’t want me to remain? If it would distress you to tell her, I can—”
“No!” Owen flapped his hands, herding Arthur towards the side door. “Forgive me. Thank you. But please go, and call tomorrow? In the morning. Or any time that suits you.”
Perhaps it was cowardly, but Arthur had no great desire to stand before the Honeyfields and attempt the impossible task of explaining his brother’s behavior. He allowed himself to be shooed out the door, and he was on the other side of it listening to the latch click before he even had the opportunity to wish Owen goodbye.
Bemused and wondering what on earth he had done, he went swiftly through the garden and away before he could be seen.
He was halfway home, and nowhere near ordering his thoughts, when it struck him that Owen hadn’t contradicted his assertion that marrying Arthur wasn’t what he desired. The thoughts that followed that realization occupied him for long hours afterward.
Chapter Eight
The day of the wedding began with a furious downpour. Owen donned his new suit in the grim half-dark, with rivers of wind-blown water lashing against the window and rattling in the tree just outside. The coat, cut long and loose in an echo of the robes worn by Mirreith’s priestesses, was perhaps the finest garment he’d ever owned, made of silk in a rich deep blue with hints of green, like the deep ocean, or like Owen’s eyes. Owen had liked the fact that it would catch the hue of Tom’s, too. Drake’s eyes were dark brown, almost black.
He shook his head, hoping to clear it, and only succeeding in making his slight headache a degree worse. The folds of his cream silk cravat wouldn’t sit right; perhaps the damp in the air was at fault, or perhaps Owen’s clumsy hands. Every glimpse he caught of his face in the mirror as he tried fruitlessly to adjust it made him wince. Pale cheeks, shadowed eyes, and bloodless lips: not the joyous countenance one might expect from a young bridegroom preparing for a life of happiness with the one he loved.
Drake was not the one he loved. That was the simple truth, and it seemed his face was determined to show it to the world.
Not that he could truly claim to love Tom, either. Owen had no pretensions to the sort of high-minded idealism shown by storybook knights, nor even to showing the single-minded, bullheaded, blind passion espoused by men like the hero of Withering Sights. He couldn’t really love where he could no longer like his beloved, and Tom, despite his fair face and fair words, had proven himself to be quite horridly unlikeable.
On the other hand, Owen was still very much in love with someone who hadn’t really existed, and also deep in mourning for the loss of the beautiful future he had expected. Twelve days was not nearly enough to change that.
And Arthur Drake had not done much to try to change it, either. He had been distant: polite, but hardly warm. He visited Owen and his parents, bore Mrs. Honeyfield’s diatribes against his brother and guarded, vaguely hostile attitude towards himself without complaint, and did what Owen had expected Tom would have done from the beginning, which was draw up the marriage
settlements with Mr. Honeyfield, rather than a solicitor a hundred miles away. But there was no romance, nor even an attempt at friendship.
If he’d had any other choice, Owen might have backed out of the engagement, despite how soon the wedding was supposed to be. But if he walked away from Drake in order to have a chance at marrying for love, he was fairly certain the damage done to his reputation would destroy that chance in any case. In the end, apathy won. It was easier to simply go along with the preparations, though he felt more hollow with the passing of each day. He was almost surprised his mirror showed him any reflection at all; his body, he thought, should have faded away to nothing, to match the nothingness of his spirit.
A brisk knock on the door startled Owen out of his contemplation of his rumpled cravat.
At his quiet answer, the door opened to admit his mother, pink-cheeked and flustered, wrapped in a dressing gown over her petticoats. She never put on her good gowns until the last moment, since she claimed that every time she did so earlier, some household crisis involving flour, or feathers, or buckets of water would always arise.
“My dear, you’re not even dressed!” she said, with no apparent consciousness of the irony.
Owen turned and waved a hand at his cravat. “I’m a little stuck, as you see. I don’t know why it won’t just — do what it ought to do.” Horribly, he found himself on the verge of tears. The sight of his mother, bustling into his room to harry him into dressing for the last time, was too much. His trunk was packed and stood in the corner of the chamber he’d called his own since he was moved from the little trundle bed in his parents’ room; his last morning in his own house with his mother would be spent fighting a stupid piece of fabric, bathed in gray gloom and with the sound of hammering rain over it all. The room looked as empty and forlorn as Owen felt.
“Come now,” she said. “We’ll put it to rights.” Her tone said she meant more than just his cravat, and Owen turned his head away to hide his expression. She stroked a hand down his cheek, gave him a gentle pat, and set to work on his cravat. “There. See? All sorted out.”
Owen turned back to the mirror. His face was still the same disaster as before, with the addition of a bit of redness in his eyes, but from the neck down he was the picture of a well-turned-out gentleman on his way to be married. His mother’s face hovered in the mirror too, just over his shoulder, the sadness in her eyes belied by the smile she always saved just for him.
“Do you think—” Owen stopped, the words I ought to marry him caught on the tip of his tongue. He couldn’t ask her that. Not when she and his father had both expressed their reservations at some length, only to be met by Owen’s stubborn insistence that he knew what he was about.
Their rage at Tom knew no bounds. Owen’s father had waxed quite eloquent on that front. To Owen’s shock, his mother had contributed even more in the line of invective, using several words he had not imagined his mother would know.
But when they had worn themselves down, perhaps realizing their abuse of Tom gave Owen more pain than comfort, they had focused their energies on dissuading him from marrying Tom’s replacement. Arthur Drake could not be trusted; he was surely cut from the same cloth as his brother. He would change his mind after the wedding and ask Mirreith’s priestesses for a divorce, which he could easily obtain; the gods offered and retracted blessings as they chose, but they rarely prevented their worshippers from making their own decisions, for good or ill. Then everyone would think the worst of Owen, and his life really would be ruined. Drake would use Owen until he tired of him — and Owen wished he could forget hearing those words in his father’s voice, good goddess — and then take a mistress, or expose him to the mockery of his friends, or treat him cruelly, or worse. The argument had raged for days, and Owen knew they had only given up, rather than giving in.
They had only done that because Owen had finally been pushed beyond his ability to bear. Generally preferring a lack of conflict over having his own way, he rarely put his foot down about anything; this time, he had told them in no uncertain terms that he would leave their house at once and lodge at an inn in Trewebury until the wedding if they mentioned the subject again, and that he would instruct the priestesses to bar them from the ceremony.
No. He could not show his doubts now.
The silence had gone on too long. Owen swallowed the lump in his throat and blurted out, “Do you think the rain will stop?”
His mother wrapped her arms around his waist and gave him a squeeze. “The sun always comes out eventually, my love. Now come downstairs and have a bite to eat and let your father have a look at you.”
Owen tried to smile at her in the mirror. It wasn’t his very best effort. Tomorrow at this time he would be at Alton Hall, having breakfast with Drake — breakfast taken after a night spent — oh goddess, he couldn’t think about that. He couldn’t. Instead, he would try to savor the bittersweetness of his last morning at home, even if his stomach churned and his every nerve felt like it had been rubbed with sandpaper.
“Let’s go down, then,” he said, and turned to face the rest of the day.
Arthur waited for Owen on the windswept cliff-top, gazing out over miles of sparkling sea studded with choppy white waves. It had still been raining when he left home, riding in the carriage in deference to his polished boots. He also thought it might be more gallant to have some shelter from the weather to offer to his new husband once the ceremony ended. It was more traditional to walk to the goddess’s shrine, but Arthur hoped she would make allowances, under the circumstances.
In any case, he would be walking the last half-mile, up the hill from where the road passed nearest to the stone altar that overlooked the ocean at the very top. The grass on the hill would be slippery, but at least it would limit the mud he’d accumulate.
Just as the carriage pulled to a stop, the rain stopped too; one moment it drummed down on the carriage roof, and the next, there was silence. The creak of the carriage springs sounded loud in the stillness as Arthur stepped out into the first shaft of sunlight and drew in a deep, cleansing breath, the salt of the ocean mingling with the freshness of the rain.
He climbed the hill alone, leaving his servants behind with the coach, and with every step the clouds drifted away. There were the goddess’s priestesses, in their odd flaring robes, waiting by the altar and the oddly shaped standing stones that guarded it; and there was the dazzling sea, with gulls wheeling above and just a few dusky rainclouds still scattering.
The priestesses greeted him with a quiet murmur, he bowed, and then there was nothing to do but stand there and hope that Owen didn’t change his mind.
That still seemed a real possibility. Arthur knew the elder Honeyfields were skeptical at best regarding this hasty marriage, and he could hardly blame them. After one Drake’s callous betrayal of their beloved only son, how could they be expected to trust another? They had bent their efforts toward persuading Owen at least to wait. Arthur had, with great difficulty, refrained from trying to counteract their influence. Owen had to make up his own mind, in the end, and interfering in his relationship with his parents would be the act of an overbearing cad.
That one remark of his that Owen had never contradicted nagged at him, though; it was like a pebble in his boot, a tiny thing that nevertheless gave him no peace. Perhaps it’s not what your heart desires. Arthur had no claim on Owen’s heart. He hadn’t asked for it, and he knew he would likely never possess it. It shouldn’t matter. Arthur had never thought to marry for love.
A slight rustling of robes alerted him to movement among the priestesses. Arthur turned, and there, coming over the rise, was Owen. He hadn’t realized quite how much his tension had built, wondering if his bridegroom would come, until it rushed out of him and left him almost dizzy with relief.
Owen’s hair shone in the sun like spun gold, and with his lithe figure swathed all in blue and cream he looked like one of the goddess’s tempting sea spirits, sent to lure men to their fat
es beneath the waves. Arthur stepped forward, smiling; that smile died away when he drew near enough to see Owen’s pallor, and the smudges of purple beneath his eyes.
Longing swept over him, sudden and fierce. Longing to take Owen in his arms and kiss away his unhappiness; longing to be the one Owen would want to do so. He had spent only a little time with his betrothed in the twelve days of their engagement, but every moment of it had increased his desire — and more than that, his genuine liking for the man he would marry. Owen had an essential sweetness about him that drew Arthur almost despite himself. He had no such quality, and had always thought a gentle soul must necessarily be a weak one. The way Owen had borne up under the shock of Tom’s abandonment, thought through and then accepted Arthur’s offer, and steadfastly resisted his parents’ persuasion had shown Arthur that this was not at all the case, and that a sweet-tempered, obliging nature did not imply any lack of a spine.
Owen came closer, flanked on either side by his parents, who were dressed in their wedding best but wearing expressions better suited to a wake. Arthur went forward to meet them before the altar. He keenly felt the absence of any family of his own. His mother couldn’t leave Arthur’s younger sister, who was about to be brought to bed with her first child any day now; Arthur missed her, but her absence wasn’t the bone-deep ache that Tom’s was. Tom would have been by his side, making inappropriate jokes under his breath and glad-handing the in-laws, if Arthur had married under any other circumstances.
It struck Arthur that he was not the only one bitterly regretting Tom’s absence. The sting of that was enough to overwhelm his uncharacteristic lapse into tenderness.
They met before the goddess’s great granite altar slab, where the priestesses had laid out a stone chalice of wine, a gull feather weighted down with a piece of driftwood, and the ribbon with which his and Owen’s wrists would be bound.
The Replacement Husband Page 5
