Of Moths and Butterflies

CHAPTER sixty-two





RCHER RETURNED TO his room to find Imogen no longer where he had left her. He withdrew his watch and checked the time. He had made her wait far too long. Standing before the fire, he removed his coat, necktie and waistcoat and threw them on the chair beside the fire. He was loosening the buttons of his now untucked shirt when he stopped again, his attention suddenly arrested by the unfamiliar sound of rustling. He turned to see Imogen ensconced upon his bed, where she had evidently fallen asleep. Though he was surprised, he said nothing, but turned again toward the fire and, taking up the poker, contemplated the addition of a few more coals.

“Are you cold?” she asked him, sleep heavy in her voice.

“No,” he answered. “Not particularly.”

“Then you’d better come to bed.”

He turned to her curiously, questioningly. In response, she arose from where she had been laying and stood, drawing her shawl quite tightly about her shoulders.

“Are you cold?”

She shook her head.

Evidently her wrappings were not so much to protect her from chill as from something else—him, presumably. And yet she remained. The look she offered him was a strange one, a mixture of humility and uncertainty, but there was warmth there too. He sat down to remove his boots and met her gaze with a look of his own that changed gradually from one of wonder to one that dared her to remain where she was. Still dressed in his shirt and trousers, he laid down atop the covers, and with his arms folded behind his head, he closed his eyes. His anger spent, he was suddenly exhausted, and the effects of the alcohol, which still remained, conspired to put him to sleep. And at the most inconvenient of times. Were she not in his room, where he’d dreamt of having her a hundred thousand times before, he might have drifted off then and there. But no. No, not yet. Still his eyes remained closed until her movement persuaded him to open them again. She had sat down at the foot of his bed.

“It was Wyndham?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said firmly but quietly, as if she were some fragile insect and any louder noise might scare her off.

“What was he doing?”

He paused a moment before replying, uncertain what to say. “Acting the fool,” was the answer he gave at last. “Trying to get my attention, I think. Or yours. You have seen him there before?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. All this time I thought it was you.”

“You did not tell me he had been in the house. Or that you had spoken with him.”

“Oh,” she said.

“That’s it? ‘Oh’?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want an apology, Gina,” he said sitting up. “I want to know why you didn’t mention that you had spoken to Wyndham during my absence.”

“Well, I hardly had the chance, did I?”

“I suppose not,” he said with a great breath and leaning back against the headboard.

“Will you tell me?” she asked him at last. “What you learned from Sir Edmund? And from your trip into Town? Roger told me your intentions. I do wish you’d spoken of them to me before you’d gone.”

“What would have been the point?”

She blinked with this question but did not answer it.

“You would have told me not to go, not to trouble myself, whether or not you wanted it.”

She looked away from him, toward the covered insects, and from them toward the fire.

They were silent for a moment or two.

“And?” she asked at last and quietly. “Is it possible…to divide yourself?”

“If we walk away, we do it with nothing but what we can carry. I don’t know–” he continued and shook his head. “I don’t know if I can ask you to do it. I don’t know if I can give you the kind of life you deserve. I’ve not made the necessary preparations. Nor have I fostered the connections I ought. I have Claire, but…” And he shook his head again. “I should have done more to prepare. If it were not for the thought that–”

“What?”

“Wyndham.”

“You cannot give up all you might have to him?”

“No, Gina. I cannot give up all that you should have to him. All that is rightly yours that I, in my single-minded selfishness, in my negligence, have stolen from you.”

Imogen turned to face him squarely. “Don’t think of that,” she said. “You can’t think of that. I never wanted it, remember.”

“Because I was not man enough, I’ve lost it to my uncle. I might have it again, for you. For us. I might fight for it.”

“No. Don’t think of it. Please.”

No. He had known her answer already. Still, he regretted it. “To see Wyndham get it, though, it’s as much as to say he had married you in my stead, and I cannot–” He stopped and cleared his throat. The thought of it, the very idea… He contemplated the room. So far he had told her nothing, and still she sat there waiting for the answer to her question. He was not yet sure he had the answers to his own. To look at her, just sitting there. And within arm’s reach. Were he to take her now… But if she would not have chosen this—if she would not choose it for herself, was he not then trapping her all over again? How had it come to this? He, once the moth to her flame. She, now his specimen in glass. He looked away, toward that forgotten corner of his room, where sat a not quite forgotten collection. He saw them, uncovered, the Atlas moth propped against the wall and watching him.

“You found them,” he said, his voice not quite as steady as he would like it.

“Yes. I found them.” She nodded toward the Blue Morpho, resting now on the table beside his bed.

Lifting it from its place beside him, he examined it. He prized it more for the association it held with her than for anything else.

Leaning forward, Imogen took the butterfly from his hand. She laid it down, the brown side facing up, and he wondered at her purpose. He looked at it, and found that he could not take his eyes from it. It had quite suddenly occurred to him, that, for all the hope he had placed in himself, there had been far more in his heart for her. If she had failed to realise that hope, was it not his fault?

“I’m afraid our way will be difficult, whatever we decide to do,” he said, at last finding the courage to speak.

“Yes.”

“If you tell me you wish to do this thing, that you wish for me to separate myself from my uncle, then I’ll do it. For you, Imogen, I think I would do anything. But it is a risk, and possibly a greater one than I can ask you to make. It must be your decision. Yet there is, at this point, just as much risk in staying, I fear. At the very least we will have to contend with my uncle’s enduring capriciousness and resentment. And we will have to be mindful of Wyndham.”

“He’s Sir Edmund’s son.”

“Yes,” he answered, surprised. “How did you know?”

She didn’t answer right away, but looked a trifle nervous.

“He told you, I suppose.”

“It was the only explanation I could come to, Archer. He’s always about. Sir Edmund doesn’t seem overly fond of him, yet there is an air of intimate familiarity in their relationship. Then, when I found him in Sir Edmund’s room... I don’t know. He said you were not the undisputed heir, and so—”

“Yes, I see,” he said, leaning back once more against the headboard.

“And you?” she asked.

The tremor in her voice stirred that familiar gnawing. He understood her real question, the one she dared not ask outright. He answered her the only way he could think to do.

“I’m to inherit a title,” he said. “More than anything else, Sir Edmund wishes to preserve it. The money, the house, the rest of it, Wyndham may dispute. He believes he has the right. At least he has the power to force Sir Edmund’s hand. The title, though… It is to go to me.” He shook his head to indicate his own disbelief.

“Sir Edmund is your—”

“He was married to my mother.”

“He is your father.”

“He’s not my father!” he said, flinging the words at her. He flung himself from the bed as well, and taking up the butterfly, moved to replace it on the table from whence she had taken it.

“But—”

He rounded on her. “What!”

She did not speak.

“What, Imogen?” he said in a tone only slightly more amiable.

“It doesn’t make sense. If he married her, then why aren’t you—”

“It doesn’t make sense! It never has and it never will! I am his bastard of a nephew and nothing more! He could have claimed me as his son and he didn’t!” And in an uncharacteristic display of violence, he threw the butterfly, which fell and smashed upon the floor just before the fireplace.

Silence reigned in the aftermath of shattered glass and raised voices. He dared to look at her. He had expected to see her teary eyed and frightened. She was pale; this was worse. But she did not appear to be afraid of him. Not now when he was nearly beyond his own control. He turned away and examined himself in the mirror.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said at last. And then, after another long silence: “Tell me what to do.” He turned to look at her, to receive her answer.

It was nothing more than a whisper. “I can’t.”

“Can’t you? This is your life, too, now.”

“But as you said, I would not tell you to break your ties, from your responsibility, from all you stand to inherit, whether I wanted you to do it or not.”

“And do you?”

“To be honest with you, I don’t know.”

“Great day, what a mess this is!” He turned from her again and began to pace the floor before her. “If I could do this all over...”

“You regret?” she asked, and she felt her heart constrict.

“From beginning to end, Gina, I regret the whole bloody thing.”

That was it, then. The end of hope. What use was there fighting for that which he wished had never happened? And how could she tell him her secret now? She couldn’t. She would not give him one more thing to be sorry of.

“Tell me,” he said, facing her squarely but not quite looking at her. “I have used you, I have made demands of you, I captured you, as you said, with no will of your own, trapped you as some hopeless, helpless animal. Because I knew that’s what you were.”

These words stung like accusations, but she knew he had not yet finished.

“But I told myself I was doing the right thing. I convinced myself that if I would not comply, Sir Edmund might try it upon another.”

“Another?”

“He had threatened as much. I could not bear the idea.”

She waited for the explanation. At last it came.

“Wyndham was as willing as I, after all.”

“Wyndham?” she demanded. “I would never have accepted him. No one could ever have made me. How can you think it?” She paused then, but he had no answer. “How can you think it for a moment?”

“But he was not my only incentive, was he? Barrett did not deserve you. I was determined to keep you from him. And yet you trust him, love him as perhaps you have loved no other. He understood you like I can never hope to do. I was wrong on that point. Perhaps he might have become the reformed rake. The Galahad you so desire.”

“I never said that. You know I never said that.”

“No. No, those were Claire’s words. But she was right. I’ve failed. I’ve failed her. I’ve failed you. Will you tell me,” he said, “had I done the gentlemanly thing, the honourable thing and refused the arrangement, had I not pressed you, would you have married Barrett?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do not say no.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“It’s just as you said. He loved me—”

“Loves you still, my dear.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps I would have married him. And I’m sure I would have been safe and comfortable with him, for a time. But eventually my heart would long for something more than he has ever been able to excite in me.”

Archer stopped and looked at her, not quite comprehending. Not yet.

“But…perhaps…I did not know then…what I know now.”

“Imogen,” he whispered. “What are you saying?”

“I cannot know what I would have done with knowledge I did not have.”

“And do you have that knowledge now?”

The courage to answer came slowly. Too slowly, for he did not wait to hear it.

“What reason, truly, had you to refuse him?”

“You know that already.”

“I want to hear it. Do you believe it still, now you know what it is you’ve gotten yourself into?”

“I do not want to be someone’s object, something collected and displayed. You know that. I have never wanted to be valued for what I bring with me, how I might serve, what I might provide, but for who I am, all of me. You know that too. It was why I agreed, because I thought you didn’t know about the money. And because I thought, if you were indeed ignorant of it, that it was me you wanted. Me alone. But I was wrong.”

“You were not wrong!” He blew a breath and turned away. Then examining, for a moment, the shattered glass, he turned to her again. “You want someone to love you for who you are? What you are, in spite of all?”

“Yes.” It was nearly a whisper. She knew what he was asking. She was not prepared for what came next.

“But are you truly capable of that, Imogen? I wonder. Because you do not seem it to me.”

She was stunned by this, the worst, and perhaps the most accurate of all his accusations.

“You have never given me that opportunity. I have wanted it and sought it and hungered for it! But you have never bared your soul to me! I don’t know what else I can do. Will you never be persuaded?”

“You are shouting at me,” she said, but he was beyond hearing.

“How do I know, after all, that you can accept the secrets I have yet to reveal? I might fight and clamour and it may come to nothing! And if you cannot trust me after all I may do, then what point is there? In the end we’ll only learn to despise each other as my uncle despises my mother. Is that what you want?”

“Of course not!”

“Well then, what do you want!”

“Stop shouting, at me,” she said, raising her own voice to meet his. “Why are you shouting? I’m trying, can’t you see that?”

And he did stop. He closed his mouth. He closed his eyes. And he turned away.

“I’m sorry,” she began, desperate to fill the silence. “I—”

“No,” he said. “I had no right to say what I did. It’s the drink, I suppose. Or I’m a greater blackguard than I realised. What’s happened, I allowed to happen. It is low of me, disgraceful, to blame you. You have every right to hold yourself from me. You do it rightly.”

“Do I?”

Slowly, he turned to look at her. “You do.”

“And am I doing it now? You’ve been raving like a madman, and here I am still. If I think so little of you, would I be here now? I have my own room, after all. And a key to lock the door. But I am here. I choose to be here. With you.”

His lips parted to speak, but the only sound that came from them was that of his breathing.

In the silence, and in need of some occupation, she knelt down before the fire and began gathering up the broken glass.

“Don’t,” he said.

But she did not heed him. She simply kept working. If she stopped, if she allowed herself to think, to speak, even to look at him, the tears would come. At least this way, with her head bent and turned from him, he could not see her struggle.

“Will you please leave it?” he tried again. “Mrs. Hartup, or one of her girls—”

His hand was on her arm, but she pulled it away. Then winced and dropped the glass. He saw the blood as it gathered in her hand, then dripped to the floor.

“What have you done?” he gently asked and attempted, once more, to raise her.

She did not object this time. He drew her to her former place, at the foot of his bed, and took her hand in his to examine it. The cut was not very deep, and no remnants of the glass remained. He crossed to the wash stand and quickly wetted a rag, which he brought back to her. He uncurled her fingers and placed it there, and remembered a time, not so very long ago, when he had done something similar. How altered she was now. No longer a servant to tend him, but his wife, for whom he would do anything. He knew it now, like he’d never known it before. Gently he cleaned the wound.

“I said it would be difficult, our decision.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Whatever we decide to do.”

“Yes.”

“We. Together.”

She raised her chin to meet his gaze, and he found he must look away, and so returned his attention to her hand. He exchanged the wet rag for a dry handkerchief and pressed it tightly to her wound.

“I said I cannot ask you to endure much more hardship, but I don’t see an easy way.”

“No.”

“Tomorrow needn’t be so terrible. Not like tonight.”

“No,” she said again.

That lilt of hope in her voice gave him courage, but his gaze remained on the hand he held. “Shall we say, then, that if tomorrow goes well, that if we make our place as Sir Edmund expects us to do, if it is a brilliant success, we stay and take our chances?”

“Very well.”

“And if it is not. If he behaves as he did tonight, if you are shamed or humiliated in any way, by him, by the guests—by me.”

“You?”

“One never knows. I may decide to throw the china.”

She laughed. And the sound comforted him.

“If tomorrow is a disaster, then we leave, and we place our future in the hands of fate.”

“Yes.”

“It is agreed, then?”

“Yes.”

“Together we’ll do this, one way or the other.”

“Yes. Together.”

With her hands still in his, he at last dared to look up at her. She was watching him intently. There was no look of shame there now, no fear, no regret. Hope, perhaps…and something else that made him ache. He lifted a hand to touch the curl that lay against her face, then her face itself, her cheek, her jaw. Slowly, he bent to kiss her. His lips brushed hers and lingered. He kissed her again, more intently…just as gently. He felt her soften and relax as he wrapped one arm protectively around her. But should he really be doing this? To have his wife in his arms… In his bed! How to say no? It could not be done. And yet… And yet was she truly his? He had not told her, after all, of the complications inherent in the erroneous signing of a name in a marriage registry. He had sworn never again to entrap her into something she had not willingly chosen. But had they not just chosen? Yes. Yes, he believed they had.

He kissed her still as he raised his hand to trace the lines of her neck and then her collarbone, to raise it again that he might entwine his fingers in her hair. Then brushing gently, tenderly, his thumb against her face, he found there were tears there. He looked to find that she was crying.

She was not ready. And truth be told, neither was he. Tomorrow, perhaps, when they had seen the day through and knew what they were facing. When the truth was revealed and they had made their confessions. Until she knew what she was choosing—and had made her choice. Perhaps then.

“It’s all right,” he said and wiped her tears away. “Truly.” He stood to raise her, to see her to her room.

“I’d rather stay,” she said. “I’d much rather stay. If you don’t mind.”

“No.” It was not quite a whisper, but it was certainly more breath than voice. “No. I don’t mind.”

“You must be tired.”

“Exhausted.” And he was, too. Having spent his emotion, he was now nearly dead on his feet.

“Sleep,” she said. It was a tender, tentative suggestion.

“Your hand?”

“It’s fine. Now.”

He sat down again, and then, drawing a blanket up, he did lay down, though she remained seated at the end of his bed.

“Do you mean to sit up?”

“No,” she answered him. “Not long.”

But there she remained until he had very nearly fallen asleep. And when the lights had been extinguished, and more coals had been placed on the fire, when he heard the sound of her shoes fall upon the floor, and saw, in the dim light of the fire, her hair let down, only then did she lay herself beside him. She kissed his forehead. He kissed the hand he now held in his. She closed her eyes and with her free hand, she blindly reached to him, to his chest, where the buttons of his shirt lay, and with her index finger, she hooked it within the placket, holding to him, however tentatively. His breath caught for a mere instant, and though he wanted more, far more, this, for the moment, was enough. It was all he dared ask. Perhaps more than he deserved.





She began gathering up the broken glass.