Clio shot her cousin a reproachful look. “Your breakfast roomdoeshave windows,” she pointed out.
Helen pinched her.
“Ouch!” Clio protested.
“Don’t be obstinate,” Helen returned, unrepentant. “I am an old married lady?—"
“You’re not old, and marriage hasn’t stopped you from being a complete hellion,” Clio muttered.
“—who must get all of her exciting gossip from young things like you,” Helen concluded. “So. That man of yours. You seem very happy together. One might even say blissful.”
Clio supposed that she could have lied. She could have pretended that everything was just fine. She could have extolled Hector’s virtues—that part wouldn’t even be a lie, she supposed—like a woman in the throes of newlywed bliss.
But she found that she just … couldn’t.
“It’s temporary,” she said with a sigh. “We have moments of … connection?—"
“Is that what you’re calling it?”
“—but mostly, we argue all the time,” Clio concluded.
Helen paused, assessing her. “Argue about what?”
Clio threw up her hands. “Everything! He thinks aristocrats are all stuck-up prigs, and he hasn’t any patience for manners at all, and he thinks I’m ridiculous for having them. And he is such aman, and he thinks that he can fix everything just by marrying me, which is really so terribly audacious that I—why are you laughing?”
Indeed, Helen was practically clutching her sides.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped, not sounding sorry at all. “It’s just that he soundspreciselylike your cousin.”
“I assume you mean your husband,” Clio retorted, not sure if her affront at being so ruthlessly mocked was genuine or put upon, “because I have scores of cousins.”
Helen laughed harder. “Nowyousound like him,” she said. “You pedantic, proper Lightholders.”
“Well, which is it?” Clio asked, properly incensed now. “Are we too proper, or is Xander likemyimproper husband?”
Helen was wiping actual tears of mirth from her eyes.
“Sorry,” she said,stillnot sounding like she meant it. “I guess I ought to have said that the pair of you sound like the pair of us. I mean, I adore Xander, but he really does think that he can fix everything with ducal authority. And he does tend to wear propriety like a stiff suit. And I suppose that I also came to London thinking that all aristocrats were absurd prigs,” she added, with the tone of someone making a great concession to fairness.
Clio saw where her cousin was going with this point.
“It isn’t the same,” she said.
“No?” Helen’s one syllable drew to mind all the similarities—not only the ones she’d already mentioned, but the scandal that had prompted her and Xander’s marriage, and the time it took them to find their footing.
But that was missing one important detail.
“He’s leaving,” Clio said quietly, then rephrased it the way that felt true—was true, she supposed, when they got down to it. “He’s leaving me.”
Helen’s eyes grew flinty and angry, and Clio was reminded that Helen was really as fierce and protective as any of the other members of the extended Lightholder clan, just that she showed it differently.
“He’s throwing you over?” she demanded. “Then why did he come here?”
Clio was already shaking her head. “Not … not publicly abandoning me,” she allowed. “He is considerate of my reputation. And he needs his own security, since his awful brother is trying to steal the dukedom from underneath him, and marriage is one of the conditions of inheritance.” She rubbed at the back of her neck while Helen waited patiently. It was all just somuch. It was all socomplicated.
“But he plans to go back to the North,” she said. “That’s his home. I don’t know exactly when—we’ll wait for gossip to die down, he said, and there’s the mess with the inheritance. But he will go. And he’ll leave me behind.”
Helen thought about this for a moment. In the distance, Cordy had found some mud and was gleefully destroying her shoes in it. Her mother didn’t seem bothered by this lack of ladylike behavior, and despite her own worries, this made Clio smile. She hoped that little Cordelia never stopped feeling so free and happy as she did just then.
