Charming Artemis by Sarah M. Eden

Chapter Twelve

“Do you really have to go?” Artemis stood in the guest chamber Persephone and Adam had used the past few days, watching her sister gather the last of her things. “Everything has been so much better with you here.”

“That is because we are a distraction.” Persephone gave her an empathetic but slightly scolding look. “You can avoid reality for only so long before it catches up to you.”

“Reality sat heavy enough in this house before your arrival, I assure you.” Artemis dropped onto the bed, frustration weighing her down.

Persephone set aside her reticule and sat beside her.

“We can hardly have a conversation without arguing,” Artemis said. “Charlie has made perfectly clear that he resents me. I am certain I have not hidden my disappointment at our current arrangement. We are both stuck in this house, married no matter our objections, and facing a miserable future.”

“And is a miserable future what you want?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what are you doing to change that?” In true Persephone fashion, she had offered a reprimand, advice, and empathy all at once.

“What can be done?” Artemis answered quietly.

“I suspect you think our siblings rather sailed toward their happy futures, but that is not remotely the case.” Persephone took Artemis’s hand in hers. “I always dreamed of life in a cozy cottage with an affectionate husband who married me because he loved me tenderly and entirely. Then I married the most terrifying man I’d ever met, who lived in an enormous, drafty castle and married me in an act of revenge against a cousin.”

It was, without question, the bleakest explanation of the earliest days of Persephone’s marriage Artemis had ever heard her give.

“I had to decide if my happiness, our happiness, was worth fighting for.” Persephone squeezed Artemis’s hand. “Harry fell in love with Athena almost the moment he met her, but she was looking for love everywhere but with him, and everything about their situation testified to the reality that his chances of earning her affection were small indeed. He had to decide if that whisper of a chance was worth fighting for.”

Artemis had been so young during Athena and Harry’s courtship that she remembered very little of it.

“Daphne adored James from the beginning, but his family’s machinations and the impossible situation it put him in created a painful and personal barrier between them. She had to decide if the future they might have was worth fighting for.”

“I am sensing a pattern,” Artemis said.

“Good, because I’m not finished.” Persephone gave her a look she knew so well from her childhood. It was equal parts older sister and mother figure. “Linus found his perfect match in Arabella, but he had a very real rival for her affection, one she seemed to get on with very well. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say the odds were not in his favor and walk away. He had to decide if a life with her—”

“Was worth fighting for,” Artemis finished for her.

“I am not going to discount the difficulty of the situation you find yourself in, Artemis. But absolutely nothing will change if you do not try. This will not get better on accident.”

“If he doesn’t think it ‘worth fighting for,’ it won’t get better no matter what I do.”

“Shall I explain all the ways that is not true? I believe I shall.” Persephone put an arm around Artemis’s shoulders. “Even if you are the only one working to find a degree of happiness, you will be benefited by it. Secondly, I don’t believe you are the only one willing to try to make this a success.”

“You have not been here,” Artemis said. “He either treats me with disdain or indifference.”

Persephone snorted. “I watched him during our game out on the back lawn. When he ‘caught’ you, there was no indifference there. Confusion, yes. But nothing remotely resembling indifference.”

A bit of heat touched Artemis’s cheeks. That moment had been unexpected. “I think he liked touching my hair.”

Persephone smiled at her. “Your arm, your hair. Setting his hand on your back. Standing close to you.”

“It was rather nice,” she said. “But it doesn’t fix everything.”

Persephone squeezed her shoulders. “I didn’t say it would. You have a very long road to travel, but that moment gave me hope. And watching him with the children convinced me Adam was right about him.”

“What do you mean?”

Persephone stood. “For reasons he has not divulged even to me, Adam has a tremendous amount of faith in the goodness of Charlie Jonquil. One thing I have learned in the nearly thirteen years I’ve been married to Adam is that he is generally a good judge of character.”

“Being kind to children is not the same as being a good husband,” Artemis countered.

“No, but it says a lot about a man’s heart.”

There was no arguing with that. It was her Papa’s kindness to her as a child that still lived on as hope in her own heart. It was how she knew he was a good and loving gentleman. It was how she knew that if she could only find him again, he would be as tender and loving as he’d been then.

Charlie was in the front entry thirty minutes later as Adam and Persephone made their way from the house. Artemis pondered her sister’s words as Charlie offered his farewell to the children. Oliver seemed pleased at the promise Charlie made to come visit him at the castle. Hestia tenderly touched Charlie’s cheek as he kissed her goodbye.

It says a lot about a man’s heart.

Adam shook Charlie’s hand. He gave Artemis a very quick one-armed hug. He had always been more withdrawn and less affectionate than most people. She had learned over the years to stop interpreting that as disapproval. She had needed more affection, more shows of approval and love, but she’d stopped disliking his detached nature.

Persephone was quite his opposite in that respect. She pulled Artemis into a full embrace, squeezing her close and tight.

“Please don’t leave.” Artemis hated that she couldn’t hold back the emotional plea. “Please stay.”

Still embracing her, Persephone said, “You are equal to this. Have faith. Fight for it.”

“I need you here.” She’d begged Papa with those exact words more than once.

Persephone pulled back. She brushed a tear from Artemis’s cheek with the thumb of her gloved hand. Her expression held reassurance, but it didn’t assuage Artemis’s worries.

Artemis stood on the front step, watching her sister leave. Heavens, she was a little girl again. Watching her brothers leave for sea. Watching Persephone leave for her new life at Falstone Castle. Watching her Papa leave Heathbrook without taking her with him.

Persephone might have thought Artemis equal to the challenge, but she wasn’t.

She wasn’t at all.

* * *

The two days since her family’s departure had been as lonely as Artemis had feared. She and Rose had spent long hours working to create the gown they’d designed on paper. The undertaking had not proven as satisfying as usual.

“I’ll work on this,” Rose said on the second afternoon. “Your mind’s wandering too much.”

“My mind can wander while my fingers are working.”

But Rose shook her head. “Spend the afternoon perusing the pattern books. That’ll bring you a bit of relaxation and perhaps a few new ideas.”

She would have argued, but the prospect was the most tempting activity she’d been presented within two days. So she set her feet in the direction of the bookroom.

It, however, was not empty. Charlie, clad in untucked shirtsleeves and trousers with frayed cuffs above his bare feet, paced in front of the large table upon which a pile of books and parchment were spread. He was flipping through a text, brow pulled low in concentration.

The sight took her back to her family home, to year upon lonely year of her life there. Father had often looked similarly disheveled and distracted when he’d been deep in his academic studies. He’d paced in just that way. He’d scattered his books and papers about.

She had stood in Father’s doorway, watching, wondering if he would notice her there, if he would say something. Anything. When she was little, she’d cried. With maturity had come the realization that her tears were wasted on him not because he didn’t still break her heart but because he didn’t care.

“Is something the matter?” Charlie’s voice pulled her from her memories, but only just.

She couldn’t entirely bring her mind to the present. It remained heavy, and her heart hurt. “My father used to pace about when he was riddling out a puzzling concept.”

“He was an academic as well, I’ve been told,” Charlie said.

She nodded. Her mind’s eye repeatedly transformed this much larger and brighter space into the dim and crowded bookroom to which her father had so often retreated. This was not that place, and Charlie was not her father, yet she couldn’t force her feet to take her fully into the room. She hovered in the doorway as she had for years in her family home.

“I used to stand on the threshold and watch him.” She wasn’t whispering, but neither could she force her voice to emerge at full volume. “Sometimes I talked to him.”

“About his studies?”

She shook her head. How easily she could see her father, watch him pacing, feel the agony of his indifference. “I would ask him to look at me, to talk to me. He never did.”

“Many men become consumed by their studies,” Charlie said.

Artemis forced the air to empty from her lungs. “I mean he never did. Not once in my entire life.”

“Criminy.” Shock filled the whispered exclamation.

She dragged herself inside not because she was ready to but because she wanted to believe she was stronger than the weight of these memories. “He never looked at me or spoke to me. He didn’t talk about me to my siblings or the neighbors or the vicar. The closest he came was after Persephone moved to Falstone Castle and I would write to her. My father would tell Athena what he felt ought to be written to Persephone, but he never acknowledged that the letters were being sent by me. He never said my name. I wasn’t even included in his will. Even in death, he ignored me.”

“Good heavens, Artemis.”

Another deep breath failed to release her tension. “Persephone said it was because his mind was broken. But he was brilliant. His papers on mythology were met with academic acclaim. I heard him undertake thoughtful conversations. His mind worked, at least in some capacity, but it—or he—refused to admit that I existed.”

She had seldom talked about this, not ever with anyone but Persephone. And her beloved, long-lost Papa. Heavens, how she needed him. For years, she’d needed him to come back for her.

“Did Persephone have any idea why your father was so . . . confused?”

A gentle way of explaining it. She appreciated that.

Artemis leaned her back against the wall beside the door. “My mother died giving birth to me. Acknowledging that I was real and alive and present would have required him to acknowledge that she was dead. Persephone believes his mind couldn’t endure it.”

Charlie moved closer to her. “I suspect that explanation doesn’t truly make it better.”

She swallowed down a lump of emotion. “My mother traded her life for mine. I’ve spent the past twenty years wondering if the exchange was worth it.”

He took her hand. “I don’t think these things can be measured that way.”

Artemis dropped her gaze. “But of the two of us, maybe she was the one who ought to have lived. Maybe her life was the more valuable one.”

He leaned against the wall beside her, near enough that his presence added a bit of warmth to the chilly, rainy day. He rubbed her hand between his. “Your father’s treatment of you certainly didn’t help, did it?”

“He has been gone for nearly five years, but I still debate the answer.” She leaned her head against his shoulder, finding needed comfort in his nearness and his hand holding hers. “He may have been right, Charlie. It might have been better if I’d died instead of her.” A tear rolled hot down her cheek. “He would have still had his beloved wife. My family wouldn’t have been thrust into destitution. You would certainly be happier.”

“But terribly bored.”

The unexpected jest pulled a fleeting smile to her lips. “I think sometimes you miss feeling bored.”

“At times, perhaps.”

“Which explains your love of mathematics.”

He laughed. One thing she could say for her unchosen husband: he was quick to lighten difficult moments. “What I am wrestling with at the moment is far from boring.”

“What is it?” she asked.

He pushed away from the wall, keeping her hand in his as they walked back to his table. “I have been studying François Budan’s theorem on the real roots of polynomials. He adjusted Pascal’s triangle and incorporated Descartes’s Rule of Signs.” He looked over at her.

“My apologies,” she said, making certain her tone of mental numbness was clearly jesting. “I didn’t hear all of that. I was too bored to keep listening.”

Charlie had a nice laugh. That had made their time here at Brier Hill better than it might otherwise have been, though he’d not laughed as often as she suspected he usually did.

“If not for Cambridge’s ridiculous rules,” he said, “you could be spending every day listening to discussions with others who are equally intrigued by equally boring things.”

She assumed a look of abject disappointment. “I have been robbed.”

His laugh emerged in an odd sort of snort, bringing her own laugh to the surface. She’d been crying mere moments earlier, and now she was laughing. The change was unexpected but welcome.

“What did you actually come in for?” he asked. “I suspect it wasn’t in the hope of discussing theoretical mathematics.”

“I wanted to peruse a book of old fashion plates.” Embarrassment surged as a blush over her face. “I’m certain you find that a very shallow and simple pursuit.” She ought not be ashamed of her interest, yet he had just told her of his in terms she could not begin to understand.

“Clearly”—he motioned at his ramshackle appearance—“I know nothing of fashion. That you are an undisputed expert is impressive, Artie. Truly.”

She hadn’t always liked when he called her Artie. Lately, though, it felt like a nickname borne of affection. Other than Princess, she’d not experienced that. “Will you find me bothersome if I stay in here while you ponder the mysteries of the mathematical universe?”

“Not at all.”

She retrieved one of her plate books and settled comfortably on the sofa, her feet tucked up beside her. Charlie took up his book again and resumed his pacing and pondering.

He’d shown her greater kindness than her father ever had, despite having every reason to deeply resent her. She’d told herself that was the reason she’d not attempted to forge a connection with him: because he clearly disliked her. But she had to admit, in that moment, that her fear ran far deeper.

She had spent her life plagued by an unanswerable question: was hers the life that ought to have been preserved twenty years earlier? She knew the answer her father would have given. What if Charlie’s answer were the same?