Seeking Persephone

by Sarah M. Eden

  Persephone’s brow furrowed and she spun back around, glancing once more at the paper in her hands. Adam managed not to roll his eyes. She was still using that blasted map.

  Persephone turned her attention back to Harry. “There are no passages leading out of the dungeons.”

  “They are secret,” Harry answered in a low aside. “You won’t find them on a map.”

  Persephone colored up on the spot, her eyes once more shifting nervously in Adam’s direction. “I . . . I . . . I just . . .”

  “You’ve been walking around with your nose pressed to that confounded map for a week,” Adam said. “I certainly hope you have the castle memorized by now.”

  “After a week?” Harry had the effrontery to laugh out loud. “You and I may have the castle memorized, Adam. But we practically grew up here.”

  “I did grow up here.”

  “Truly?” Harry looked confused, but Adam spotted the twinkle of mischief in his eyes. “I was sure you were born grown-up.”

  Before Adam could respond, the front bell rang. Adam reached out and snatched the map from Persephone’s unsuspecting grasp. “You cannot be forever looking at this thing,” he muttered. “Especially when there are other people around.”

  “Because it would be embarrassing?” Persephone asked quietly.

  “Because it would be ridiculous.”

  “Not nearly as ridiculous as my getting lost four or five times a day, as I was before I had the housekeeper make up that ‘confounded map.’” Persephone motioned to the parchment crumpling in Adam’s fist. “And I would appreciate it if you would return it to me.”

  “Do you still rely on it?”

  “No,” she admitted warily.

  Adam stuffed the map into his coat pocket. The bell rang again. Adam turned his gaze down the stairs toward the front door. “Someone had bloody well better answer that door before the entire staff is let go!” he bellowed.

  “Of course, Your Grace,” Barton said quite calmly from the foot of the stairs. “I was merely waiting to inquire whether or not you are ‘at home.’”

  “No,” Adam growled.

  “Very good, Your Grace.” Barton, being a proper butler, turned without blinking an eye to the door and went about his duties. There was a man who understood how things are done. He performed his duties—he took Adam’s threats seriously—as he ought to.

  Harry, as usual, chuckled. “Planning my demise?”

  Adam shot him a venomous look.

  “Would you mind putting off my obviously deserved murder until after I complete my correspondence?” Harry requested mockingly. “I am sadly behind and can think of at least a half dozen people who would be sorely put out if I were to stick my spoon in the wall before writing off a final farewell.”

  “You can write all the letters you wish in your carriage as it pulls away from Falstone,” Adam grumbled, brushing past Harry and Persephone as he continued toward the corridor that led to his book room.

  “I do not have a carriage,” Harry called after him.

  “You can use one of mine,” Adam answered without looking back.

  “You are nothing if not a model of hospitality.” Harry laughed as Adam stepped down the hall.

  “Is he actually making you leave?” Adam heard Persephone ask, her tone one of confusion and concern.

  “No. He’s just cutting a sham.”

  Adam clenched his fists. Why did Harry insist on sounding like an idiot? “Cut the cant, Harry,” Adam bellowed back at him, “and write your blasted letters.”

  To which, of course, Harry laughed.

  Adam didn’t pause but continued toward his book room.

  “Adam?”

  He stopped at the sound of Persephone’s voice. Adam let out a breath of frustration. Couldn’t he have a moment’s peace?

  “Yes, Persephone?” He turned just enough to see her out of the corner of his left eye. He was steps from his book room. Couldn’t this have waited?

  She seemed to hesitate for a moment. “May I please have the map back?”

  The deuced map again. “No lady should require a map for her own house.”

  “Unless that house is the size of a small village,” Persephone answered with something like exasperation.

  “Falstone Castle is laid out logically,” Adam replied shortly. This wasn’t so very difficult. “All of the public rooms are on the ground level. The first floor,” Adam gestured around them, “holds the living areas: dining hall, breakfast room, and so on. The second floor is the family bedchambers. Third floor, the nursery. Fourth and fifth floors and three of the four towers house the guest bedchambers. It is not so confusing that one ought to be required to carry around a map.”

  “Perhaps not after some time,” Persephone persisted.

  “You know the castle well enough to get around on your own,” Adam insisted, still not looking at her full-on. “You will learn the rest far faster if you must find your way using your own observations and memory.”

  “I would feel more confident if I had the map with me should I need it,” Persephone said. “I haven’t been relying on it this past day or so, only checking it occasionally.”

  “Then you do not need it now.”

  “Why are you so insistent about this?” Persephone asked, her tone gaining a hint of urgency. “I don’t understand. It seems such a trivial thing.”

  “Did you use a map in your home in Shropshire?” Adam asked, frustrated at her insistence. He was accustomed to simply being obeyed. Dukes always are.

  “No, of course not.”

  “If one does not know a house, it cannot be one’s home,” Adam said.

  “You wish me to feel at home here?” she asked with obvious doubt.

  Feel at home? Adam instantly bristled at the sentimentality of that phrase. “I only wish for you not to stick out,” he answered sharply. “There are enough reasons why our situation is . . .” He was suddenly struggling with his composure, something he rarely experienced. Adam shifted enough to be looking away from her and found it helped. “. . . ridiculous,” he finally finished the phrase, “without making the flaws so obvious.”

  He heard Persephone take a tight breath and release it shakily. “I have been trying,” she said. “But there is a lot to learn.”

  “Then perhaps you should get on with the learning and leave me be.” Adam found the necessity of talking while looking away from his conversational partner grating.

  “Your Grace?” That was Barton’s well-modulated voice.

  “What?” Adam snapped.

  “Mr. Jones is below. He claims to be in receipt of a letter from you reinstating his employment and wishes to express his most heartfelt thanks.” Barton delivered the message without so much as a change in expression.

  “Tell Mr. Jones that if he wishes to show gratitude, he can do so by taking himself off.”

  “Very good, Your Grace.” Barton executed a dignified bow and took his leave down the corridor, no doubt to deliver, verbatim, Adam’s response.

  Jones would scurry away like a frightened rabbit. Adam had some satisfaction in that knowledge, at least.

  He allowed a glance in the direction of Barton’s retreating back, his thoughts on the confrontation he would be missing. His attention, however, was quickly recalled when he realized Persephone still stood quite near, her gaze riveted on his face.

  He would not be stared at in his own house.

  “Haven’t you some household duty to see to?” He turned his back once more, closing the distance between himself and his book room.

  “Several,” he heard Persephone answer in a tone clearly laced with resignation. “I ought to have seen to them before now. Another of my obvious flaws, I suppose.”

  Though he doubted her reply was meant to be barbed, it stung just the same. He hadn’t intended to imply that she was flawed, only the idea of a marriage between the two of them.

  Persephone’s footsteps sounded, muted by the long, woven rug running the length
of the stone floor. Adam turned his face and watched her go. She held her head high, her posture perfectly straight. But as he watched her retreat, Adam saw Persephone wrap her arms around her waist, and he knew, watching her, it was a gesture of self-comforting.

  He hadn’t meant to hurt her. The realization shocked him. Not so much the hurting without meaning to as the idea that he hadn’t set out to cause her pain. When, he silently asked himself, was the last time he’d met someone whom he hadn’t instantly felt the need to lash out at?

  At what point had he grown weak and vulnerable?

  Emotions had no place in his life. No place, whatsoever.

  That, he reminded himself, could never change.

  Chapter Nine

  Dear Persephone,

  We have been home for two days now and I am nearly dead with boredom! Athena spends all her time reading fashion magazines and practicing country dances, which she does not perform well, at all. I do not think she will find a husband dancing like she does. No gentleman wants to marry someone who dances like a cow.

  Persephone smiled for what felt like the first time since arriving in Northumberland. Poor Artemis, to endure the raptures Persephone could easily imagine Athena, at the very romantic age of eighteen, indulging in at the prospect of a London Season. Athena ever was the romantic of the family. Daphne was the shy, practical one, even at eleven. And Artemis, though only eight, had the reputation for dramatics.

  Papa has engaged a governess, but she will not arrive for another week. So I am running around like a heathen (that is what Mrs. Russell says) and terrorizing the neighborhood. It’s lovely. I wish you were here so we could be heathens together.

  When can I come explore your towers? You did promise. Do duchesses have to keep promises? I have been wondering about that.

  I will have my birthday in London, Daphne says. I think that could be fun, but I am not sure yet. I will invite you. If the duke wants to come, he can too, even if he never did talk to me once while I was at his castle.

  Please write to me. Be sure to put the guinea under the seal.

  Your sister,

  Artemis

  “You seem in good spirits this afternoon.”

  Persephone looked up at Harry Windover, who had apparently entered the sitting room while she was reading. “I have been reading a letter from my youngest sister, Mr.—” A disapproving look changed the words even as they left her lips. “Harry,” she corrected with a smile.

  “She writes with good news, then?”

  “She has written a letter filled with crises, actually.” Persephone smiled. “With Artemis—that is my sister’s name—every little thing is a crisis. I was enjoying being reminded of that.”

  “You miss your family.” He said it so matter-of-fact, as if there was no question of her feelings.

  “And what of you, Harry?” Persephone carefully refolded Artemis’s letter. “Do you miss your family, being here as long as you have been?”

  “I think of Adam very much as a brother,” Harry replied, “so being here is like being with my family.”

  Persephone studied the gentleman standing near the fireplace, warming his outstretched hands.

  “How is it that the two of you have become such close friends?” Persephone would normally have been alarmed at her own audacity but was too perplexed by the man she’d married to hold the question back.

  “Does it seem hard to believe because we are so different?”

  “And he is so hostile toward you.” Persephone sat on a sofa facing the fire, feeling her brows furrow with her confusion.

  “Adam is hostile toward everyone.” Harry shrugged. “It is just the way he is.”

  “Does he never show any tenderness of feeling?” Persephone felt her heart sinking lower with every word. She had been entertaining some hopes that Adam would improve upon closer acquaintance—that, perhaps, he was simply wary of strangers. An odd character trait, she admitted, for one who’d chosen a stranger to be his bride.

  “Tenderness of feeling?” Harry pushed a log further into the fire with the toe of his boot. “Not within the last two decades, I’d say.”

  “And before then? Before the last two decades?”

  “I met Adam at Harrow,” Harry said. “Twenty years ago. I have no idea what he was like before that.”

  “Then you forged a friendship with someone who was . . . was . . .” How did she put it into words? She finally decided on, “Hostile?”

  Harry smiled. But a different smile than he usually produced. It was sentimental, fond; not laughing or joking. “Adam saved my skin,” Harry said. “First year at Harrow. I was something of a runt, and the other boys found that grounds for torturing me. Adam set them straight.”

  “They weren’t unkind to Adam?” Persephone knew how children could sometimes be.

  “They were afraid of him,” Harry answered. “Even then. They still are. Everyone is.”

  “He would have only been seven or eight years old.” Persephone tried to imagine a child Artemis’s age already intimidating and hard.

  “Seven,” Harry confirmed. “He was a force to be reckoned with even then. The only shell in the history of Harrow, I’d guess, who ran the school.”

  “Shell?”

  “The youngest year,” Harry explained. He chuckled as if remembering something. “A few of the boys, now grown gentlemen, of course, still whimper when they see him.”

  “But to be so frightening when he was only a child.” It was unfathomable. And not a very encouraging sign. Perhaps there wasn’t a gentle side to Adam, after all.

  “It wasn’t that, exactly.” Harry strode from the fireplace to sit on the sofa facing Persephone. “He was, still is, remarkably intelligent. And he is authoritative, the kind of man few people question. Even at seven he was very much that way. And he is unafraid.”

  “Unafraid? I don’t imagine anyone could be entirely unafraid.”

  “I would wager a pony he hasn’t an ounce of fear in his entire body,” Harry said. “And if he does, he squelches it with alarming finality.”

  “There is nothing that frightens him? Nothing that intimidates him?”

  Harry rose as if to leave. “Not that I’ve seen.”

  Persephone digested that as Harry made for the door. A man without fears, in control in every situation, who had been intimidating, apparently, all his life. And she, who had always been quiet and happy at home, dreaming of her future cozy family life, was married to him. What had ever led her to believe that this marriage could be remotely like the one she’d always hoped for?

  “Why doesn’t he ever look at me?” she asked the instant the question jumped into her mind. She immediately regretted asking. Persephone felt herself color up.

  “What do you mean?” Harry stopped a step from the door.

  “Never mind,” Persephone whispered, knowing her face was flaming brighter than ever.

  “No. There’s no ‘never mind’ here.” Harry walked back toward her. “He never looks at you?”

  Persephone shook her head. “And he moves away if I sit near him. I thought, that morning at breakfast, it was only because I sat on his right side. Considering his . . . um . . .” She was getting flustered.

  “Face,” Harry finished for her. “Adam’s mother makes a lot of fuss over Adam’s scars. More than she needs to. At Harrow, when one of the other boys would sit on his right at meals or something and started staring, Adam didn’t move. He made the boy who was staring move. And they always did.”

  “Then it wasn’t because of the scars?” Persephone’s heart plummeted. If his reason hadn’t been the scars, then it had to have been her.

  “I couldn’t say.” Harry looked genuinely perplexed.

  “Oh.” Her prospects were growing dimmer.

  “He really doesn’t look at you?” Harry asked.

  Persephone shook her head. Adam hadn’t once taken more than a very passing glance in her direction. He turned away almost instantly when she came into the
room.

  “That is strange,” Harry said. “He usually faces problems head-on.”

  “I am a problem, then?” Persephone asked in a small voice.

  Harry smiled at that. “Poor choice of words on my part.”

  Persephone managed the smallest of answering smiles.

  “It may just be that Adam is unused to the idea of a wife,” Harry offered. “He tends to get more, I don’t know, prickly when he has a lot on his mind.”

  “So I should give this some more time?” Persephone felt a bit of her natural optimism returning.

  “Definitely. Look at me. If I’d given up on Adam for being grumpy, we wouldn’t be friends.”

  “How long did it take for him to not be prickly with you?” Her determination was building once more.

  “He still is. But after a while he quit landing me facers every few days. I figured that was something.”

  “Landing you facers?” Persephone had never heard that particular phrase before.

  “It’s cant. Slang. Means punching a person in the face.”

  “Good heavens,” Persephone muttered.

  “Adam hates it when I use cant.” Harry smiled mischievously.

  “But you do, anyway?”

  “That’s why I do. Every time I’m in Town I try to pick up a new phrase. Drives him mad.”

  “Doesn’t that worry you? Suppose he actually follows through with one of his threats?”

  “He won’t.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Adam would never admit it,” Harry said, “but he knows I refuse to be bullied, and I think he respects that. He keeps trying. But I think he hopes it’ll never work.”

  “So he doesn’t like people who are intimidated by him?” Persephone rose to her feet. She needed to think about this new information.

  “Doesn’t respect them,” Harry corrected.

  “I guess that is a little different.”

  “It is a great deal different to Adam,” Harry said. “Adam likes his mother.”

  “But he doesn’t respect her?”

  Harry shook his head rather adamantly. “Mother Harriet—I have called her that since I was a boy—has made something of a hobby out of pitying Adam.”