Clio felt her cheeks redden. “You don’t need to dance,” she protested. “Society balls are about more than just the dancing?—”
He interrupted again. “Nor do I need to brush elbows with a bunch of gossiping matrons, Clio! You might not have noticed, as you have been flitting about untroubled, but I have been working endlessly to prepare for a meeting with the trustees so we don’t need to live with my brother constantly underfoot.”
This was so patently unfair that she took a step backward.
“Do not act as though I have abandoned you to it,” she returned. “Whenever I have tried to speak with you, you’ve practically banished me.”
“It’smyconcern,” he sniped back. He was on his feet now, his hands clutching the edge of the desk tightly enough that his knuckles were going white. “You?—"
Clio felt a surge of satisfaction that, finally, it was her turn to interrupt. “You don’t trust me,” she said sharply. “You don’t want a partner; you just want a pretty little bauble to hang on your arm—but only when it is convenient foryou.”
Absently, she was aware that they were both saying things that they didn’t quite mean, that they were saying things they might not be able to take back. That part of her was drowned out by the roar of her temper.
“Isn’t that what a Society marriage is?” Hector’s tone was scoffing. “You can’t have it both ways, Clio. You can’t come in here, begging me to ingratiate myself with a group of people that will never accept me as one of their own, and then in the same breath complain that I’m following their rules for aristocratic marriage. That is the bargain thatyourpeople arranged; you women fluff and primp, and we protect you from worrying about things like work.”
Clio’s hands balled into fists. Her nails cut into the flesh of her palms. She clenched harder, needing that sharp bite of pain to ground her.
“So that’s it, then,” she said. Her voice sounded as though it was coming from very far away. “I come in and say, ‘Can we attend a ball on Wednesday next?’ and you counter that I have nogrounds to make even so simple a request? Because I am just a woman, and therefore without any worth?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.
In the absence of any clarification about which part of her words had been ridiculous, she decided that this wasnota protestation of her worth. She decided, instead, to get even madder.
He continued, “Besides, even if I wanted to go to your little soirée, I couldn’t. That’s the day that I am finally meeting with these sodding trustees.”
Clio’s mouth dropped open, but Hector kept going. He seemed to be as wrapped up in his temper as she was, which she felt was entirely justified on her part and entirely unjustified on his. This might have been the temper speaking, but she didn’t care.
“Even if the only thing Ididhave going on that day was sitting around staring at the bloody wall, I would not attend a London ball if my life depended on it.” His coarse language, which she normally found thrilling, enraged her to her core now. “The only reason to do so would be to find a wife and I’ve already done that.”
There was a tiny beat of silence after that, one in which Clioknewhe was too angry to say anything kind about her, any small reassurance that he was pleased with the choice of wife he’d made.
But still, she hoped. She held her breath against the force of the hope.
He offered no such reassurance.
The disappointment cut straight to her heart.
She squared her shoulders. She was so tired of fighting.
“Perhaps you think you have followed all the rules they want you to follow,” she said, drawing upon all the centuries of aristocratic hauteur at her fingertips, solely because she knew it would irritate him. “And perhaps, on paper, you have. But have you ever considered that the spirit of those rules was not, as your idiot brother seems to think, about continuing the line as quickly as possible, but about bringing you into London Society?”
He blinked, but she kept talking before he could answer.
“You are here. You are, even if you hate us, one of us. You have to live by the rules, at least a little, so that you are not exhausting yourself with constant battles.”
Hector’s shoulders squared, and he looked, in that moment, strong enough to fight any battle that could ever come his way. She liked that about him most of the time, but it was disheartening when the battle he seemed determined to fight washer.
“Since when,” he asked, his voice not angry any longer, either, but flat and unyielding, “doyoucare about their rules? You said you wanted to travel, to see the world. You said that you were different from the rest of them. But maybe you’re not so different after all.”
Maybe I’m not. The words came immediately to mind, but she didn’t let them escape her lips.
But it wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Yes, there were the pretenses and the gossip and the obsession with trivial things. She couldn’t defend those aspects of theton.
But if you stripped those things away, weren’t the people here just making lives for themselves like anyone else? Weren’t they just trying to find a place where they belonged? Weren’t they building homes for themselves, surrounded by the people they cared for—the people who cared for them in return?
It wasn’t about the ball itself. She knew it wasn’t about the ball. She just didn’t know what it was actually about.
She’d ignored the little warning bells in her head for too long, the ones that told her that the thing she insisted that she wanted and the thing she actually wanted were different. And now, she couldn’t quite parse the two.
