by Ava Devlin
The sound of her voice found him first, drifting out over the eerie stillness of winter air from the interior of the stables. She was murmuring to one of the mounts, too low to make out the words, but it was her voice for certain.
It was unexpected to be affected so by something he had never even considered a fundamental part of Heloise. She did not sing nor did she recite poetry with melodic intonations. She spoke without flourish and always said what she meant.
He had already taken in her vibrant beauty with his eyes, but hearing the timbre of her voice shattered something deep in his chest, something he had been keeping cold and solid to survive the years away from her. He wanted to pause, to linger in it for as long as he could, just to prolong the pleasure of rediscovering Heloise Somers bit by bit after so long away.
He edged around the corner of the stables and caught sight of her within, murmuring into Boudicea's ear as she secured the saddle on her back, rewarding the mare each step of the way from a wealth of sugar cubes concealed in her pale hand. She was wrapped in a cloak of russet brown, a fine thing rimmed in fox fur, with a pattern of leaves stitched through the back in a variety of earthy colors. If her hair had been down, it would have spilled down over the sagging hood in glorious red waves, blending into the autumn colors reflected so artfully in the cloak.
He could not help drifting closer, his boots crunching on the frozen hay beneath his feet, drawing her attention from her task with an elegant twist of her body, bringing that cloak around herself like a sheet of protective armor. Her skin shone alabaster white, those emerald-green eyes flashing against the light of the setting sun.
"Lieutenant Laughlin," she gasped, reaching up to swipe an errant curl of red hair from her forehead. "I did not hear you approach."
"Lieutenant Laughlin?" he echoed with a surprised chuckle. "Surely you know me well enough to sidestep formalities. Don't you, Heloise?"
She appeared to shiver, whether from the gusts of cold air seeping in from the outside or from his words, he could not be sure. Whichever it was, she appeared to recover herself quickly, drawing her arms over her chest to still her body and lifting her head and setting her jaw with a resolve he found all too familiar.
Seeing her like this, poised like a warrior queen, made his heart ache for the years he had missed by her side. With the low sunlight creating shafts of jewel-toned light from the rafters above, even the ribbon in her hair could have been an emerald tiara, pinned painstakingly into place as she rallied her knights for battle. She was spectacular to behold, but her posture was markedly defensive, and as such it gave him pause, the smile of greeting melting slowly off his face.
"Is aught amiss?" he managed to ask, his throat dry, heart suddenly clenched in a web of frost. He found himself taking a step forward, hand outstretched as though to offer some invisible tribute to the woman he loved. "Heloise, are you not pleased to see me?"
She released a tiny sigh, her breath escaping from her lips in a cloud of fog against the cold, and dropped her eyes to the ground, focusing on some mote of meaningless dust on the stable floor. She spoke with an air of disconnect, breathy and impatient. "It isn't that I'm displeased that you've returned safely, Callum. Of course I am glad you're home. It has simply been a very long time since we last saw one another, and very much has happened in that span of time."
"Naturally," he replied, a wariness lighting signal fires in his mind. He spoke with the steady voice he had learned to keep in the line of combat, a voice that betrayed nothing of the way his heart had begun to sink in his chest. "I wish to hear about every moment I missed."
She smiled without joy, reaching up quickly to flick a finger at her eyelashes, and shook her head. "It is far too late for that now."
"Will you not look at me?" he said softly, studying her face as she kept it stubbornly turned to the side. The sudden chill in his bones had nothing to do with the brisk weather. "After all this time, would you not grant me at least that?"
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then set her jaw and turned her face to meet his. "Do you believe I owe you some sort of penance or gratitude?" she breathed, her voice dangerously low. "Do you imagine that I have been patiently holding vigil, having no idea where you'd gone nor why, and allowed myself to keep a candle burning for you with no indication whatsoever that you were doing the same?"
"You knew exactly where I'd gone and why," he returned, aware that his own impatience was beginning to tint his words. "And you know very damn well why I couldn't write you directly."
"Well, I certainly seem to have known a lot without realizing it!" She shook her head, reaching into her cloak and withdrawing a pair of gloves, which she fumbled with, giving her an excuse to look away from him as she drew them over her hands. Her voice was shaking now, though with anger or the onset of tears, he couldn't be sure. Knowing Heloise, it was likely the former.
"Hel, this is madness," he breathed, taking two quick strides over to her and reaching out to still her hands from their task, sharing the warmth of his own skin with the wind-whipped chill of hers.
She went very still, her eyes still fixed on her hands, which were now held within his, her chest rising and falling in time with the little clouds of warm air that emerged from her lips. "Callum," she whispered, as though it pained her to say his name. "Please, don't."
He studied her from where he stood, the curve of her face that she kept turned away from him, the rigid posture of her body beneath that cloak, and the coolness of her hands within his own.
"Something has happened," he realized, struck nearly dumb with how obvious it should have been to him from the start. "Something monumental."
She did not answer him, instead choosing to remain frozen perfectly still. It was almost as though she feared him, which of course was ridiculous. Heloise Somers feared nothing. Anything capable of frightening her would be truly fearsome indeed.
He dropped her hands, taking a step back, suddenly overwhelmed with horror at the idea that he was having this effect on her. "I left to build a respectable future for myself," he said quietly. "So that when I returned, I would be worthy of you."
"No," she replied, turning those eyes of hers up at him with such a sudden and intense ferocity that he was almost knocked off his balance. "You left for you, not me. I wanted you here. I was ready to marry you when you were naught but a stable hand, and you knew it. You left because the idea of letting my dowry support us wasn't good enough for you."
He opened his mouth to reply, outrage blossoming in his chest at this accusation, which was entirely false, but she turned her back on him before he could speak, gathering Boudicea's reins in her hands and throwing herself onto the horse's back. He was helpless to do anything but watch her kick forward, horse and woman lunging out of his reach as she burst from the doors of the stable, and out onto the expansive white lawn of Somerton, presumably in the direction of her duties and whatever other secrets had unraveled in his absence.
He found himself left behind, standing with an expression of befuddlement, exposed to the first whirls of snowfall as they blew into the stables, with only the strange and unfamiliar as options for his next destination.
He wondered if perhaps it might have been simpler, somehow, if he'd just stayed at war.
7
The truth of the matter, of course, was that Heloise Somers had no particular destination in mind when she'd spurred Boudicea out of the stables and into the endless white expanse of the Somerton grounds.
The wind bit at her face, ripping the hood of her cloak back and ringing in her ears as great bursts of snow exploded upward under her mare's hooves. To her credit, Boudicea seemed unconcerned with the frosty terrain and obeyed her mistress's need for wild abandon as though she could sense its necessity deep within her equine soul.
Perhaps Boudicea was more intelligent than any of them realized. Without much in the way of direction or command from her mistress, she led them to the dower house, slowing to a stop near the small, double-stall sta
ble that she often lounged within when Heloise had taken her from the stables proper. She whinnied, tossing her head with a spray of caked snow flying off the strands of her glossy, brown mane and releasing something akin to a sigh as Heloise melted forward, clinging to her neck, as she pressed one frozen cheek to her horse's warm skin.
"I did not expect him to follow me," Heloise confessed, squeezing her eyes shut as she wrapped her arms around the sturdy, loving neck of her mare. "I did not expect him to wish for everything to resume as it was. Can he not see, as plain as day, that things are not the same at all?"
Boudicea did not answer, for she was only a horse. Still, the steady warmth and patience of her presence in the tension of this moment were more than many a human companion might offer, and when Heloise slid off her saddle, the horse turned to check that her mistress was all in one piece, nudging her affectionately with her broad, very cold nose.
By the time Hel had removed Boudicea's kit, given her a quick brushing, and filled her trough, the cold had seeped deep into her bones. For the second time that day, she reflected on the foolishness of wearing a dress commissioned for the early autumn to a winter wedding.
The dower house was dark, with most of the staff in the manor proper for the New Year celebrations. Still, there was a fire lit in the drawing room, so at least one of the staff had the same misanthropic disposition that Heloise herself possessed, else the poor sod had simply drawn the short straw on the odds that Lady Heloise would be adopting the position of recluse in the wake of a double holiday.
Everything she was wearing felt wet, somehow. Strangely, the driest thing of all was the cloak, which she supposed was likely due to the merit of its material rather than some preternatural phenomenon by which water passed straight through one cloth and into the one beneath. She left her boots by the drawing room fire, hanging her cloak there as well, and made haste up the stairs to her room to change into something a little more sensible for a time of year when the world seemingly lost its pulse.
The ancient Greeks, which her teachers at Mrs. Arlington's had been so very fond of, believed that it was a mother's love for her child that caused the turning of the seasons. Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, mourned to see her only child wed to Hades, and thus, banished to the underworld. When Persephone was with her husband, Demeter grew so listless and despondent that she failed to rally the warmth from the sun and the green from the earth. Everything grew as dark and cold and bleak as Demeter herself, until finally the gods agreed that Persephone could come to live with her mother for half the year, just so that the crops might grow and the sun might give warmth once again.
At the time, she had thought Demeter histrionic and controlling. After all, her own mother had moved back to America when Heloise was still in knee socks and hair ribbons, and neither of them had ceased to thrive, had they? Why couldn't Demeter simply write amusing letters to her daughter and have them sent via courier over the River Styx for half the year? Yes, it all seemed rather dramatic and unnecessary, and a young Heloise had much preferred the goddesses of wrath and fury, who raged against pain rather than found themselves crushed by it. Hera, she recalled, had been a particularly engaging figure.
She chuckled to herself, drawing a heavy green gown from her wardrobe that would serve both to protect her from the elements in a more significant way and to not require her to restyle her hair for the New Year festivities this evening.
Callie was still scarce bigger than a babe in arms, and far, far off from one day being taken away in marriage by some man who might very well live as far away as Hades itself. Still, every year, when autumn began to settle, and the world turned colder by the day, Heloise would think, for just a moment, that Persephone must have departed back to her marital bed, and left her weeping mother behind in a field of ripe summer flowers that would soon turn gold and brittle, crumbling to dust under an eventuality of snowflakes.
Since becoming a mother herself, she had found far more compassion for poor, mourning Demeter, who simply did not have the will to continue while her baby was deep underground, reigning over the dead.
In the days of her pregnancy, her own tumult of emotions might very well have turned the world cold and white, had she been given domain over such things. She had fled from Bath-Spa in the night, leaving most of her things behind at Mrs. Arlington's School for Young Ladies in an effort to reach Yorkshire as fast as possible. She had sent out three identical missives, explaining her situation, to all of her living family members.
It had been an unseasonably cold year, with the frost still clinging to the burgeoning blades of grass well past Easter. The necessity of bundling up under layers of fabric had been a blessing, hiding her condition for as long as she possibly could, until she knew beyond a doubt that she must go into hiding.
She arrived home ahead of both of her brothers, unsure if either one would come. She knew Callum was in London with Gideon, unable to receive any sort of letter without raising the eyebrows of his master. Even if he had been alone, she could not write to him about something this sensitive, which might be intercepted and read.
Oh, how she had dreamed of what she would say when he finally returned home, of how she could throw herself in his arms and cry into his strong, broad chest. She had plotted and planned meticulously, dredging up ways she might get him alone before having to face her family, negotiating the imaginary matter of their hasty marriage and what might follow.
Of course, nothing had played out the way she'd expected.
Alex had been the first one home, to her utter astonishment, and had set about the business of making sure her secret was safe with an efficacy that probably would have concerned her, under different circumstances. Gone was her blithe, frivolous brother who was never where he was supposed to be and certainly never behaved appropriately. In his place was someone who acted confidently and with speed. He dismissed many of the staff members for the remainder of the season, sent for a tailor in Leeds, as not to alert anyone in the neighboring area of her condition, and provided company entirely without judgement or admonishment. In fact, he had only ever addressed the pregnancy when asking if she was all right or to tease her as her body grew.
It was the first time Alex had seemed to her a man grown, all while she still felt the child thrust into an adult's world.
Gideon, of course, toppled her plans right over once he'd finally shown up. He had arrived home in the dead of night with some stranger driving the coach, married to another stranger, and had left Callum behind in London with Sheldon Bywater. The next she heard of the father of her child had been by chance, standing next to Mrs. Laughlin as she read a letter explaining his departure for the war.
Heloise had stood helpless on the lawn, heavy with child, and unable to react to the horrific news she was hearing for fear of giving away her baby's paternity. She had felt the blood drain from her face while Mrs. Laughlin read the letter, sobbing madly and proclaiming that her son would be slaughtered on the battlefield for certain. That moment and her near collapse was what had given her secret away to Rose.
It was the one time in her life she'd come close to fainting dead away. Even when she'd given birth to Callie, amidst blinding pain, she had not felt as helpless as she had that night on the green, as all of her remaining hopes had been dashed to dust in the cool night air.
Had she given up on the dream of Callum then? No, likely not. She must have held on to a glimmer of hope that he'd return to her, at least until after she'd named her child after him. Caroline, she'd decided, so that she might be called Callie for short. Some part of that decision had come from the fear that he might never return from the war at all. After all, many men did not, especially those who were not fortunate enough to be amongst the gentry and given safer orders.
She sighed, glancing at her bed, so lush and inviting here in the middle of the day. If she must needs return to the manor to ring in the new year, it would be the last time this winter. Just one party and afterwards she would be free of
her obligations to be in the manor proper and near Callum Laughlin.
She could survive that much.
Just one night. She could manage it.
She crawled into her bed and tucked her feet under the dry, heavy material of her skirt. She was asleep before she could decide upon what dreams she might like to have.
The New Year at Somerton had become quite the festivity in the years since Gideon had wed.
Gone were the somber nights where the staff was set free to find their revelry in the township while the Somers siblings were content to have a solitary glass of port and a vague conversation about their plans for the coming year, often retiring to bed well before the toll of midnight.
Rose d'Aubrey Somers had turned Somerton into a palace of cheer and well-wishers, bringing with her all of the traditional New Year celebrations she'd grown up with back in Devonshire. While most years they observed the traditional course of picking a king and queen of the new year from amongst the staff and gentry alike, this year it was unanimously decided that the bride and groom deserved the honor.
Alex and Gloriana, still in their wedding finery, had been placed at the head of the massive banquet table that was usually kept in the ballroom for storage, while the entirety of House Somers, including all of the staff from the dower house, gathered around to share in food and festivity until the clock struck midnight. For this one time of year, there was no social rank and order, and all were equal and welcome.
There was an irony in tonight being the night that Callum chose to return home. Their difference in status had ever been the wedge driven between them, hadn't it? Even as children, called in for dinner from their play, and shunted suddenly and with firm hands in opposite directions for the evening.
Callie and Reggie had not protested at being put to bed early, for they were still adrift on the high of Christmas day, and were placated with one final present to say goodbye to a year well-lived. It seemed that the universe still smiled upon Heloise in the matter of keeping Callie away from her father until she'd figured out how she was going to address the situation. She rather suspected that this docility at being put to bed on New Year's Eve was in its final year or two, at least insofar as Reggie went. Her own daughter, to everyone's utter shock, was an obedient, shy little girl who always did as she was told.
