Seeking Persephone (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Adam was speechless. He was never speechless. He had entered the drawing room in anticipation of dinner only to find his mother sharing a sofa with Persephone.

“Good evening.” Mother smiled that pitying smile she always used. “You look a bit unwell, poor boy.”

“I am fine.” Adam paced away from her. He hadn’t actually expected Mother to come to Northumberland for the ill-conceived wedding ball. He ought to have known better. Balls had never kept her at Northumberland, but they had always brought her back: back from Newcastle, back from Leeds, back from London.

“I was just telling Persephone of the wonderful balls we used to have here at the castle.” Mother’s tone turned wistful and reminiscent. “Even the London papers were full of every detail of the evening; who attended, the decorations, the menu. Falstone balls were positively legendary.”

“And completely pointless,” Adam added under his breath. He knew his father had staged the monumental entertainments solely for Mother. She’d left anyway.

“I am certain our ball will be far less elaborate.” No apology hung in Persephone’s tone, no disappointment, merely a statement of fact. Adam was grateful for that. Somehow he couldn’t bear the thought of her being disappointed by her wedding ball, or anything else for that matter—especially by him. If she asked, he would give her the most extravagant evening she could imagine.

“Oh, but it could be,” Mother said to Persephone. “A few changes to the menu, perhaps a more involved decorating scheme—”

“No,” Persephone interrupted. “My tastes are far more simple, I assure you. Mrs. Smithson and I have discussed the menu and the preparations, and I am quite satisfied.”

“Satisfied and pleased are not the same thing,” Mother pointed out.

Was she displeased, then? Adam looked over at Persephone from the corner of his eye. She did appear a little flustered.

Adam moved to the window. The informal drawing room overlooked the north garden and tower. It was the only area of Falstone permitted to run wild. He’d always liked it, the one part of his home that never felt contrived.

“I am both satisfied and pleased,” Persephone insisted.

Adam wondered if she meant it. She was precisely the sort of person who would accept less than what she wanted in order to please another, in order to have peace and harmony. He didn’t want her settling. He didn’t want her merely contented. Adam wanted her to be happy. He wanted Falstone to be her home. He wanted her to have everything she wished for.

Rubbing his forehead with his hand, Adam let out a long, silent breath. “I sound just like my father,” he said to himself. For the first time in his life, Adam wasn’t at all certain he liked the idea of having inherited one of his father’s traits. Father had spent Adam’s early years catering to Mother, trying to give her everything she wanted. In the end he’d been left lonely, and, Adam realized with some pain, Father had been broken, undone by her defection and his own inability to please his wife.

Now Adam was attempting to do the same thing. He meant to keep Persephone at Falstone through bribes, entertainments, visitors, whatever he thought she wanted. “It will never work,” he told himself. “It didn’t before, it won’t now.”

“You really must let me help with the next entertainment,” Mother was saying when Adam’s ears returned to the ladies’ conversation. “I could recommend a few individuals whom you should consider including.” Her enthusiasm grew with each word. Adam felt himself stiffen with tension. “Friends of mine who are simply delightful.”

Mother’s friends walking the corridors of the very home they’d pulled her from? After all Father had done, after all the time Adam himself had spent praying, begging her to stay, Mother was suddenly so willing to be at Falstone? And she wanted to bring with her the sort of people who had pulled his family apart when Adam was only a child.

“Excuse me,” he said, his voice stern enough to cut through their conversation.

Both ladies looked up at him. It was the perfect opportunity to end all of Mother’s schemes. He could tell her that there would be no other entertainments once the blasted ball was over.

But something in him felt five years old again, running to the front doors because Mother had returned, promising to be a good boy if only she would stay for a while. He would cling to her skirts and beg her to tell him about her excursions and to come to the nursery to read to him. Father would smile at her and greet her with a fond kiss on the cheek and tell Mother how happy he was that she had returned.

Sending her away would feel like letting Father down, which made no sense. Father was no longer there. Neither was that tiny boy, yet Adam could clearly see the pain in his face as his mother had slipped away again.

“Excuse me.” His voice emerged softer than before. He walked back to the door of the drawing room.

“But dinner,” Mother protested.

At least she’d left off the “my poor boy.”

“I am not particularly hungry, Mother.” Anger gripped him, but he could not explain exactly why.

“You are ill, you poor—”

“I am not ill,” he snapped. “I am simply not hungry.”

“But skipping a meal is not good for you.” Mother used the tone she had employed when he was still in the nursery.

“Adam is perfectly capable of deciding what is good for him,” Persephone said, a gentle scold in her voice.

“Thank you, Persephone.” His tension only grew as he stood in the doorway. “Excuse me, ladies.” He offered an abbreviated but strictly appropriate bow and left the room.

Only two weeks remained until the ball. In the week since Adam had proposed the mad scheme, he had more than once regretted it. But as he’d told Persephone, he was a man of his word. There was no question of calling it off.

Every invitation extended had been accepted—except for the Jonquil family, they being still in deepest mourning over the passing of the earl—so the ball would be precisely the sort of crush London idolized and Adam despised.

He stood in the middle of his book room, having arrived there without even noticing the path his feet had taken. Just as automatically, Adam’s eyes turned to the portrait of his father and himself. What had happened to “Dukes do not depend on people” or “We are better off without her?”

If they had been so much better without Mother around, why had Father tried so hard to keep her there? Adam stared at the portrait as if it would answer. She’d left anyway. And Father had died a frustrated and lonely man, despite Adam’s attempts to be something of a balm. It hadn’t been enough.
He
hadn’t been enough for either of them.

Mother had left him. Then Father had, too. And Persephone, he felt certain, would be next. How often he had told himself that he didn’t care, that he needed no one? He was no longer a child begging for his mother’s affection or his father’s approval. He didn’t need it anymore.

Adam muttered a curse and stormed across the room to the French doors. It was too dark to see Persephone’s garden, so standing there was pointless, and yet he didn’t move away.

What was happening to him? He’d been calm and level-headed and undisturbed by anything for decades. He kept his head in every situation. He dealt with problems swiftly and decisively. And suddenly, Adam was wandering his own home, confused and frustrated. And he, who never bothered with emotions of any kind, was angry, tense, and boiling.

With a sound filled with anguished frustration, Adam pounded his fist against the wall, feeling the pain of flesh connecting with thick, solid stone. Another curse slipped from his lips, not at the pain but at his own inability to keep himself in check.

Adam felt a soft, gentle hand slip over his fist where it still lay against the wall. Persephone.

“You will hurt your hand if you keep doing that.” She tenderly pulled his throbbing hand from its punishing block.

He did not want Persephone saving him from himself. It would simply be one more thing he depended on her for. “Go eat your dinner, Persephone,” Adam muttered, pulling his hand free and returning his gaze to the darkness outside.

“I plan to,” she said. “Right there will be fine.” She spoke the last to someone apparently behind them.

Adam glanced over his shoulder to see a footman, accompanied by an upper maid, setting a heavily laden dinner tray on Adam’s desk. Both appeared anxious and uncertain. Why shouldn’t they? Neither was among the few on the staff permitted in his book room. After a bobbed curtsy and a bow, the servants quit the room with all the speed of a fox during hunting season.

“I told you I wasn’t hungry,” Adam grumbled.

“I know.” Persephone appeared entirely unperturbed. “But I am.”

“Mother—”

“Is taking her meal with Harry,” Persephone cut across him. “And I am eating here.”

“No one eats in this room.” Adam called forth his authoritative duke’s voice.

“You would rather I starve?” He heard not the slightest catch in her voice or quiver of apprehension.

Adam turned to look at her. Persephone stood with her chin raised, voice determined, but eyes betraying a nervousness that cut him to the quick—the same look he’d seen in her eyes these past two weeks when the wolf pack made their presence known. She was trying to be brave again.

Adam’s steward had confirmed that the pack had drawn closer to the castle than usual, something their sheer volume had already made obvious. The two of them had taken turns reassuring Persephone that there was no danger, and she had made a valiant effort to appear reassured. But there had always been that look in the back of her eyes, the one that lingered there now.

“If you truly are on the verge of expiring, by all means, take some nourishment,” Adam answered impatiently as he crossed to the fireplace and deposited himself in his usual chair.

The sounds of a plate and cutlery being set out clanged around the room. She was invading every aspect of his life, changing his rules, his routine. He ought to be growing angrier, more frustrated. Instead he found the noises and the aroma of her dinner and her very presence soothing.

“Blast it,” he muttered.

“It does smell good, doesn’t it? It really is too bad you aren’t hungry.”

Adam turned his head enough to watch her fill her plate with a selection of the courses laid out there. Suddenly Adam, who had, in fact, earlier lost his appetite, was extremely hungry. “Is that a hint, Persephone?”

“A hint?” she asked, far too innocently.

“You are trying to convince me to join you.” Adam suspected she knew that. Was she teasing him? No one teased the Duke of Kielder.

“Join me?” she repeated. “I told you this meal was provided for me. If you want something, you will simply have to send to the kitchens for it yourself.”

Adam eyed the extensive spread of victuals doubtfully. There was more than enough food there for two people. She couldn’t possibly have expected to eat it all on her own.

“You plan to eat an entire chicken?”

“It is not an entire chicken.” She continued filling her plate. “And not such a very large one, at that. In fact, it is a very good thing the kitchen sent along a great deal more to go with it. Otherwise I would be in very real danger of wasting away.”

Adam shook his head and muscled back a laugh. He had the strangest conversations with Persephone. And yet he enjoyed them. Just last night she’d told him rather dryly of her latest difficulty with Atlas. The horse had decided several minutes into her daily ride that he would much rather stand still than move about the paddock. Her retelling had him chuckling despite his determination otherwise.

He’d told her several weeks earlier that her presence in his room helped him sleep. That was becoming less true all the time. When she wasn’t entertaining him with stories from her day, he was watching her sleep or thinking about her or wondering what else he needed to do to make her happy at Falstone.

Obsessions cannot possibly be good for a man, Adam had been telling himself for days.

A plate of food was placed on the end table beside his chair. Adam shifted his gaze from the low burning fire to Persephone, where she stood next to him. How could she possibly be happy at Falstone with him?

But she offered a friendly smile. “You didn’t expect me to eat the entire chicken, did you?”

She
was
teasing him. Even the novelty of that did not break through his pensive mood. Persephone continued to stand there, but Adam kept his gaze diverted from her face. He did not want to see any revulsion now that she stood in such close proximity or, worse yet, pity.

He found himself, quite without intending to, focusing on her hand hanging at her side so near his own. Women always seemed to have such tiny hands. Adam lifted his fingers from the arm of his chair just enough to brush her fingertips with his own.

Persephone stood perfectly still. Adam looked up at her from his position in the chair. There was something almost painful in her expression. He dropped his fingers immediately.

“Thank you for dinner, Persephone.”

“You’re welcome.” With that, she returned to the table.

He was as foolish as his father had been, reaching out to a woman who wanted nothing to do with him. But Adam would not make the same mistakes. He wanted her to stay—that much he couldn’t help—but he swore to himself that he wouldn’t allow himself to care about her.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“It is one o’clock in the morning, Persephone.”

She turned toward the door of the nursery. She truly hadn’t expected Adam to come looking for her. He’d been quiet and distant during their dinner in his book room. She’d hoped to reach out to him, as a friend would. But her attempt to be supportive and comforting hadn’t seemed to work.

Persephone closed her eyes as the memory of his feather-light touch on her fingertips flashed painfully through her mind. If he were fond of her—if theirs were the type of marriage Persephone had always wanted—that touch might have felt affectionate. Instead, it had been excruciating, almost torturous. She’d wanted, in that moment, to hold his hand, but she knew that doing so would only open her up further to feelings that would hurt her in the end.

“I cannot help but think that Linus would not be happy in here.” Persephone kept her warring emotions out of her voice. “I have been trying to determine what I ought to do about it.”

“You would place a midshipman of the Royal Navy in the nursery?” Adam asked.

“He is only a child.” She crossed the room toward the door, running her fingers over a tabletop as she passed.

“A thirteen-year-old is not precisely a child,” Adam said. “Especially after two years in the navy.”

She didn’t want to hear that. In her mind Linus was still her little boy, the affectionate child whom she’d taught to read and write, the brother who had retaught her to play spillikins. She wasn’t ready to accept that he had changed so much. She felt unaccountably nervous at the thought of seeing her little Linus again. How much had he changed?

“I should select a different room for him, then?” Persephone tried to sound less affected than she was.

Adam stepped aside to allow Persephone to pass through the doorway. “There are plenty of rooms in the family wing,” he said.

“Within Harry’s sphere of influence?” Persephone smiled, walking down the corridor.

“Perhaps a room on our end of the wing would be best,” Adam said.

Persephone wondered if he was smiling, even a little. He walked behind her, so she couldn’t say for sure. She pulled her dressing gown more firmly around herself as the chill of the corridor began to penetrate her nightdress. “It is hard to imagine Linus grown up.”

“How long has it been since you last saw him?” Adam followed her down the stairs to the family wing.

“Fifteen months.” She did not even have to think or calculate. She knew precisely how long she’d gone without seeing her brothers.

“You’ve missed him.”

“I have missed all of them,” she replied.

A sudden lump formed in her throat. Good heavens, she missed her family. She had once been a central part of all their lives, but now she no longer felt part of anything.

“Mr. Pointer has volunteered to bring Linus back from Newcastle,” Adam said as they stepped inside her sitting room. “He will be there on personal business on that day, as it is.”

Persephone turned swiftly toward him. “I wanted to meet the
Triumphant
myself.”

“There is a ball to plan, Persephone,” Adam argued. He stepped past her.

“Mrs. Smithson can certainly do without me for a day or so,” Persephone insisted. “And your mother would be more than happy to take over while I am gone.”

Watching Adam cross the room into her bedchamber, Persephone could see him tense. “You will not be going. So there is no need for either of them to take charge of the preparations.”

She followed him in. “But he is my brother.”

“And he will be arriving with Mr. Pointer.”

“A stranger.” Persephone did not like it at all.

“After more than two years in the navy, I doubt Linus will be reduced to childish tears by a sixty-year-old vicar.” He employed that dry, sarcastic tone that always seemed to cut at her.

“Now you are making fun of me,” she muttered, crossing away from Adam to sit on her window seat.

Disappointment and frustration surged within her. She’d had her heart set on going to Newcastle and not just to retrieve Linus. Persephone had never been to Newcastle and was curious to see the town.

“You really wish to leave, then?” Tension sat thick in Adam’s voice.

“I do, yes.” She watched his reflection in the window.

His face hardened in the next moment, something flashing in his eyes that made her instantly nervous. “Go, then,” he snapped. Suddenly he was the Adam she’d met on her wedding day: distant, intimidating, unfriendly. “Go wherever you bloody well want to. I don’t care.”

The connecting door slammed behind him, rattling the windows and Persephone’s nerves.

What had just happened? The Adam she’d been so afraid of losing her heart to had disappeared in an instant. She’d gone from feeling content, if not happy, to feeling very much alone.

* * *

Perhaps Harry had been right. He had flatly refused to accompany Adam on his morning ride. “In all this fog?” Harry had asked incredulously. “A man’s likely to run directly into a tree and not even realize it.”

But Adam had needed to get out, to escape the castle. Mostly, he admitted with frustration, to avoid Persephone.

She wanted to leave Falstone—she’d said so the night before. A brief journey, to be sure, but that was how it always began. A day away here and there, then a week, then a month. Eventually she simply wouldn’t come back.

He told himself he didn’t care, which was, of course, a blatant lie. He’d told
her
he didn’t care, which meant he’d lied to Persephone—something he’d promised never to do.

It was no wonder she was ready to “jump ship,” as Harry would have said.

He could learn to live without Persephone. Father had gone on without Mother. He’d been miserable, but he’d gone on. And Adam had long ago reached the point where he no longer needed anyone. Only since Persephone’s arrival had that begun to change. Well, he’d changed once; he would simply change back.

The Duke of Kielder was an island, beholden to no one, dependent on no one. He simply had to convince himself of that.

The air swiftly grew almost too cold to breathe. The fog turned thicker with each passing moment. It was time to return to Falstone. Adam turned Zeus toward home.

“I can be indifferent,” he told himself. He had been for twenty years. It wouldn’t be impossible. Then Persephone could make whatever journeys and trips she chose, and he would do what he’d done in Mother’s absence all those years ago. He would ride the estate, manage his finances.

It would be fine.

“Fiends, it’s getting cold,” Adam muttered.

As if to prove his assertion, Zeus shuddered. Beneath his hooves a frozen layer of snow crackled and broke. Yes, maybe Harry had been right.

Somewhere in the distance a howl sounded, only slightly muffled by the thickening fog. It was an eerie sound, almost like a warning.

“Go on, Zeus.” But the horse didn’t appear to be listening.

Smaller footsteps, like a fox or dog, broke the silence. Zeus skittered nervously. The sounds, the feelings of the moment were horrifyingly familiar, though Adam knew he’d never before taken a ride through fog so thick.

A chorus of growls echoed around him.

It was the pack. Hayworth had said they were hunting nearer the castle than usual. Adam’s hand went automatically to the pistol in his greatcoat pocket. He had no plans to use it, but if worse came to worst, he would be prepared.

A series of long, bone-chilling howls had Zeus dancing beneath him. “Steady, boy.” Adam urged him on.

He heard other hooves nearby, perhaps approaching. The fog made sounds bounce unnaturally and made seeing further than a few yards almost impossible. He kept his hand at his pocket, waiting, anticipating.

“Yer Grace!” a voice bellowed, as if calling out in search of someone.

Had someone come looking for him?

“Yer Grace?” the same person repeated.

“John Handly?” Adam thought he recognized the voice. The hoofbeats grew louder.

The howling grew more chaotic. Zeus seemed ready to bolt. In the next instant, Adam spotted John. One look at his face told Adam something was wrong.

“Have you found her?” was the first thing out of John’s mouth.

“Her?”

“Then you haven’t . . . ?” John looked more frantic.

“I don’t know what you are talking about.” Adam held Zeus steady but barely. The pack sounded closer.

“Her Grace,” John breathed out quickly. “We was riding to Pointer’s, and Atlas bolted. No reason to, just bolted. She ain’t that good a rider yet, and I’m afeared she might’ve been unseated.”

“Persephone?” Adam could manage no other words.

“And with the pack soundin’ so close and angry—”

“Persephone!” Adam shouted, his panicked call dancing in the thick emptiness around him.

“She ain’t been answering, and I’m afeared something must’ve happened.”

“Don’t say that,” Adam snapped. “Persephone!”

The howls had dissolved into aggressive barking. Adam had a horrible feeling, one he refused to even put into words. “I think we need to find the pack.”

“I’ve been thinking that myself.” John sounded as worried as Adam felt.

He wanted to bolt, to charge, but the fog made it impossible. He could only guess which direction the barks and howls came from. The fog rendered his senses unreliable. Then he heard a sound that chilled his very blood: a horse, obviously in pain.

It was his dream come to life.

“I heared it, too, Yer Grace.” John must have seen Adam tense. “We’re getting closer.”

Adam’s heart pounded. The growling and snarling and the sounds of paws on crisp snow were now echoing at them from all sides. They were surrounded.

“Persephone!” Adam called out.

The pack answered with a fearsome chorus of howls.

“There, Yer Grace!”

Adam snapped his head around, first toward John to see which direction he pointed then in the direction of his finger.

Atlas, bloodied and breathing hard, stood not far from them. Persephone was not in the saddle.

Adam looked frantically around, inching closer, not wanting to push the pack into an attack. As he approached, Atlas snapped at him. Zeus shied back but continued his approach at Adam’s command. Atlas assumed an aggressive stance, something Adam had never seen him do—his docile nature was one of the reasons Adam had approved of him as a mount for Persephone.

In a flash of fur, a wolf darted across Zeus’s path. Atlas immediately switched his aggression to the snarling newcomer. A second wolf came from behind, and Atlas kicked out at it. The horse shifted, and Adam understood the reason for the horse’s behavior.

Kneeling on the ground just behind Atlas was Persephone. She held a large tree limb in her hand the way a warrior of old might have hefted a club. She swung it at a shadow that instantly became a wolf. Adam drew Zeus up just as the wolf lunged.

He reacted automatically. His pistol smoked before he even registered that he’d drawn it. The wolf lay unmoving at Persephone’s feet. The rest of the pack seemed momentarily startled into a retreat.

“Hand her up, John,” Adam instructed swiftly, John having dismounted already.

John helped Persephone to her feet. Adam saw in an instant that she was injured. Limping and sagging, she barely managed the few steps to Zeus. John helped Adam pull her into the saddle in front of him.

“Take Atlas’s reins,” Adam said.

John nodded.

“Be quick about it. The pack won’t stay spooked for long.”

John remounted and led Atlas away as fast as the fog and the horse’s injuries would allow. Adam turned Zeus about and pulled Persephone close to him.

“John?” Adam asked as they passed him.

“Yes, Yer Grace?”

“If the pack gets aggressive again, you leave Atlas behind and get to safety. Understood?”

John nodded, but Adam couldn’t say with any certainty if the man would actually abandon a horse to save his own skin. He returned the nod and urged Zeus to a faster pace.

“Persephone?” he asked as he negotiated the trees and fog.

She didn’t answer.

“Persephone?” he repeated more urgently. “Are you well?”

“No,” came the sob, tiny and quiet and filled with fear.

Adam tightened his hold on her. Behind him another howl sounded.