"Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone." Fred Rogers
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XXV.
Joe had made approximately fourteen million mistakes in his life and approaching Perrie in the private corridor that housed the Beresfords bedroom was mistake number fourteen million and one. He did not know what had possessed him to seek her out here instead of waiting for a private moment with her during supper that evening, or chancing upon her in the library.
Of course, the library was an unlikely location seeing as Perrie's pastimes often involved plotting his death rather than reading.
But his legs had taken him here while his mind had been in pieces elsewhere, and he had happened upon her staring up at a painting on the wall.
Joe recalled what had been going through his mind when Perrie had walked into the ballroom the night before, dressed up as she was. She had been beautiful, as beautiful as he had ever seen her ... but she hadn't been Perrie.
Perrie stood wearing a white cotton nightgown with a sturdy brown riding coat draped around her shoulders, an ensemble that would have looked utterly ridiculous on anyone else, but on Perrie, Joe seemed to understand it. Her hair was loose and curly, reaching her hips in glorious, untameable dark waves.
Joe called out her name without hesitation, his tongue taking control before his mind could think better of it. She hadn't been looking at him, and he'd needed to see her, to look into her eyes and see what she was thinking. What he had not counted on, however, was frightening her to death.
Perrie jumped so violently that she tripped over her own feet and fell down onto the rug, and it took a few moments for her head to turn around towards him.
Through a curtain of her dark hair, Joe saw her bright blue eyes as wide as they had ever been. Her lips parted as Joe anxiously searched her face for her every thought. He had been so desperately cruel to her, callously so, and Joe felt more terrified by the minute at the thought of Perrie truly hating him.
The fear that he felt at Perrie's thoughts of him began to cripple him. Joe felt it paralysing him limb by limb. He was waiting for her to curse him, to cast him out, to tell him that she wished that he had never been born. Perrie would know that he was exactly like his father and she would never want to see him again. She would never speak to him. She would never fight with him. She would never again let him look upon her.
Perrie had seen Joe's true self, and it had no doubt disgusted her.
With Joe frozen to the spot, it was Perrie who eventually climbed to her feet and approached him, taking very careful steps, as though she thought he was a frightened fawn in the forest.
And then she greeted him. She had called him Mr Parish. Not Joe. Joe's demons momentarily asked if she knew it was him, but Joe couldn't question it. Perrie knew. She was so close to him now that he could see every fleck of violet in her eyes. Just as he was seeing into her, she was seeing all of him. Joe struggled to contain the parts of himself that he didn't want Perrie to see.
Joe knew they he needed to apologise to her, and yet the words that bubbled to his lips were startlingly, "I'm deaf."
Perrie did not recoil from him. She did not admonish him. She did not demand to know the reason for his behaviour the night before. She did not insist upon an immediately apology despite deserving one. A look of tenderness filled Perrie's face, and it made Joe feel all the more wretched and wicked for what he was capable of.
Perrie was perhaps the most infuriating individual that Joe had ever had the displeasure of knowing. But there was a beauty in her that was far greater than her outward appearance.
Joe did not feel worthy standing in her presence. But it was her tenderness that captured him, and it was her tenderness that had brought his greatest failure to the forefront of his mind.
Joe realised then exactly what his mind was doing, as it was entirely separate from his will. Just as he had punished Perrie the night before with his cruelty, he was suddenly testing her tolerance, testing the genuineness of the soft side to her heart.
If she heard of his failure, if she knew it all, then she would know that he was not worth more than a dirty penny, and he would have been right all along to keep her at arm's length.
"You do not have to tell me anything you are not comfortable sharing," Perrie murmured quietly.
She already knows that you are a failure. She doesn't want to hear it confirmed.
Joe's demons echoed in his mind as loudly as a church organ.
"I know I am nosy, and I don't mind my tongue," Perrie continued, "so you must not feel obligated to tell me anything that you do not wish to."
"You do not want to hear it," Joe muttered to himself in realisation.
"No!" protested Perrie. "No, that is not what I said at all. I will hear anything that you explicitly wish to tell me. I know that we ... quarrelled ... last night, but I do not want you feeling obligated to tell me something that you will only regret telling me later ... and I don't want you punishing me for knowing it."
Joe felt the wound in not only himself, but in Perrie's tone. He was so used to her spirit, the rage she fired at him that had only ever amused him. Joe had wounded her, hurt her, and he hated himself for that. He had taken away a part of Perrie that he really lo –
Liked.
"I am sorry," Joe breathed, his voice thick and hoarse. "I am sorry that I have treated you in a way that you entirely did not deserve. I ..." Joe had wanted to say that he was too much like his father, exactly like his father, but then he decided that he did not want to ruin an apology with an excuse. "I treated you horribly last night. I overstepped and imposed upon you in a way that was utterly ungentlemanlike, and then I reacted ..."
"Like a cad?" Perrie finished his sentence for him after Joe had trailed off.
Joe nodded feebly. "Yes." He swallowed loudly and felt his heart hammering inside of his throat.
Her tone as she had called him a cad was sharp and quick, and almost in the exact way that Perrie would chastise him when they were exchanging their usual insults.
Joe knew it was foolish to hope, but that spark of the Perrie he was well seasoned in fighting was a comfort.
Perrie pursed her lips, mulling over his words. "I will listen to you if you still want to tell me what happened."
She had not forgiven him explicitly, and Joe was extremely aware of that fact. She had not said the words, nor did she owe them to him, but Joe still felt as though he was teetering on the edge of a blade despite the small ember of hope that lay glowing in the fireplace of their acquaintance.
"Is there somewhere you might feel comfortable sitting with me?" Joe asked quietly. He could count on one hand the number of people he had told this tale. One finger, actually. Of course, others knew, but Joe had not been the one to relay the story. He had only ever spoken to Ed. Very few others knew of his deafness without knowing the cause of it. Joe had kept it that way. He did not want to risk being overhead.
Perrie nodded, before she promptly turned around and headed directly back up the hallway towards her family's bedrooms. Joe presumed she meant him to follow her, and his heart beat erratically at the thought of Perrie taking him to her bedroom. They had been in each other's bedrooms before now, but only to play tricks on the other.
Perrie, of course, had managed to walk in on Joe in a rather embarrassing state of undress, but this would be the first purposeful –
Perrie bypassed her bedroom.
Joe frowned curiously as Perrie continued on down the hallway to the set of double doors at the very end of the long passage. Perrie opened the door on the right-hand side and held it open for Joe. He tentatively crossed the threshold, walking past her into the bedroom and looked around cautiously. It was a bedroom of great luxury and grandeur. Its size was easily comparable to that of an entire cottage, and the furnishings were all antique, and beautifully preserved. Every wall was covered in tapestries and paintings and every surface was decorated with pottery and nick knacks that seemed personal.
"We won't be disturbed in here," Perrie informed Joe as she motioned for him to follow her over to a set of settees before a dormant fireplace.
"Whose bedroom is this?" Joe asked her as he sat down on the settee opposite her.
"Papa's."
Joe's eyes flared. "Your father's? What if he walks in on us in here? What would he think?" he cried. The duke already had every reason to question Joe's character. What was Perrie thinking establishing them in this room?
Perrie smirked, and Joe could not deny that her smile settled him a little, even if it was a mocking grin. "Papa does not sleep in here. He and Mama share her bedroom next door. I know it is very odd for married couples to share a bedroom, but they do. Papa does not like this room. Nobody comes in here, really. My grandfather died in that bed the day after Christmas the year before I was born."
Perrie had shared a rather morbid tale combined with a rather sweet one. Joe's eyes flicked back to the enormous bed that was set against the far wall. It was made with thick, expensive linens and looked like it would have been like a cloud to sleep in. But it was a site of sorrow for this family.
Similarly, she had shared that her parents shared their quarters which, Joe knew, was odd for a couple of their rank. Once upon a time, he had heard, that his own parents forwent their own bedrooms and cohabitated as well. That was, of course, before disaster had struck.
Perrie knitted her hands together and set them in her lap as she looked upon Joe expectantly. Her bright blue eyes were focussed on him, and Joe felt his tongue begin to swell in his mouth as it had done so many times before whenever he was confronted with something that filled him with shame.
"I want you to know that nothing you can say will make me dislike you more than I already do," Perrie offered sweetly.
Perrie telling Joe that she hated him the night before had wounded Joe when he was already in a terribly fragile state. But the way that she had said those words just then was exactly what he had needed to hear. It was Perrie sparring with him, just as they always had.
To Joe, it felt like she was saying, "I will still be here to fight you tomorrow."
"Little Imp," he muttered, to which Perrie grinned. But it was all the courage he needed to take a breath and speak. "My ... my father may have a title, but we were not a wealthy family. My mother's family established a trust for the child she expected, but twins were, of course, unexpected." The money that his mother had brought to the marriage, the money that was not set aside for her eldest child, had all been gambled away, before his mother's death, and after. His mother's family had washed their hands of their wayward son-in-law, and their grandsons. That's what his father had claimed. "My father took out a large loan to purchase me a commission in the Royal Navy," Joe revealed softly.
Perrie's brows rose. "The navy?" she repeated. "Is that where you went after you left school?"
"Of sorts." Joe nodded. "I was not perhaps the most disciplined seaman, and I didn't always pay attention to my superiors. But I never went to sea. I never got the chance." Joe could feel his humiliation and shame encroaching upon him as he looked into Perrie's trusting, curious eyes. He knew they would change when she heard what he had to say. He knew that she would see him for what he was. And the knowledge that she would see him this way hurt him more than his father ever could. "The other officer cadets and I were in training when it happened. We were engaged in a battle exercise ... but we were foolish ... we loaded several of the cannons without permission ... and one accidentally exploded." Joe couldn't continue to look her in the eye. "It was fun. I found the experience of the navy fun. I felt freedom for the first time in my life. Comradery. I was entirely idiotic, and I fell victim to my own arrogance. I didn't listen, and my punishment would be an inability to ever hear again.
"The cannon exploded, and I was too close. I don't remember it. I don't remember anything from that day at all. My entire account of it comes from others. I was in the infirmary unconscious for a week. They didn't know if I would live or die with that sort of head injury. My family were sent for. Ed came." Joe's father did not. "I eventually awoke, and my recovery revealed my hearing loss. It was presumed that it would return, but as you see before you, it did not. A surgeon confirmed that the blast had caused my eardrum to burst, and the damage was quite catastrophic, and completely irreversible. My diagnosis was deafness, and I was dismissed from the navy as unfit for service."
Joe dared not look up, but he heard nothing from the opposite settee as he revealed the cause of his deafness. Perrie was now the second person to hear this from him, and Joe found himself feeling completely terrified.
"My father is now in debt because of my failure to complete my training. All he has to show for his investment is a crippled son." A crippled son he would have preferred to have lost in that explosion.
"Crippled?" Perrie gasped in an exasperated tone.
Her sudden cry brought Joe's eyes back to her instinctually. Perrie wore an expression of disbelief on her face as she gripped the settee cushions either side of her.
"Joe, you are alive. You lived. Can you not see the miracle in that?"
Had Perrie heard anything at all? Had she not just listened to Joe regale that he had deafened himself because of his own stupidity? Had she not just heard that his father was now in debt after taking out a loan to try and make something of his second son?
"Perrie, this is not a heart-warming tale," Joe bit back. "I deafened myself and have about ruined my family. My father barely tolerated me before, now he ..."
Perrie huffed and rose from her seat, before she marched around the small tea table in between the settees and plopped herself down beside Joe. Before Joe could turn his body, recognising that Perrie had sat down to his left, Perrie realised her own mistake. She rose again, and she scurried around so that she was seated to his right.
"Now, I don't want this to fall on deaf ears," she began.
Joe groaned and closed his eyes. "Was that your idea of a joke?"
"I am very witty," Perrie confirmed. Joe could hear that she was smiling.
Joe stole a glance at her, and Perrie was staring at him rather intently, her smile unsettling. Was she in denial? Had she misunderstood the story? Had he left something out accidentally? "This is my shame, Perrie," he stated plainly. "I have to live with this."
Perrie shook her head. "What you described to me sounded like a dreadful accident. Your behaviour was not malicious. You were young. You still are young. And what happened was tragic and accidental. Whatever foolishness you and the other officers got up to, not one of you deserved to suffer for it, and I am so sorry that this happened to you. I think I am rather qualified to determine your guilt and what you ought to be punished for. But you must grant yourself some grace. You deserve compassion, Joe, not admonishment."
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Surprise!!! I wanted to see what happened next, too!!
I love these two with my whole heart ... which is why I'm very sorry for what's coming. I am so very sorry. Please forgive me ... I have my cup ready for your tears. I'm very thirsty hehehehe
Already, I've got to take my makeup off and get to sleep. Work tomorrow. I don't usually write on a school night, so my kiddos are going to be getting one tired teacher haha
Vote and comment xxx