Chapter 5
“The figure is incorrect,” James said.
Henderson looked up from the document. “Your Grace?”
“This number.” James turned the page toward him and indicated the line with one finger. “It cannot be correct.”
Henderson looked at it, pushing up his wire-rimmed glasses. Then he looked at James with the expression of a man who had learned, over thirty years of legal practice, to deliver extraordinary information without inflection. “It is correct, Your Grace.”
James looked at it again.
He had been sitting in the study for two hours, working through the will with the focused attention of a man who had decided that if he was going to be responsible for forty-three pages of legal consequence, he was going to understand every line of them.
James looked at the figure once more.
“The Duke made several highly profitable investments over the past eight years. The Ashbourne estate itself is—was—in a bit of disarray, but he was careful with money.” Henderson paused.
“He was also, I suspect, a man who knew the child’s position would be precarious and wished to secure her future regardless of what society made of her birth. ”
“He was extraordinary with money.” James set the page down. “This is—she will never want for anything. Not for a single day of her life.”
“I believe that was precisely the intention.”
James sat back. He looked at the ceiling briefly, then at the wall. He thought about his cousin, a man he had known in the peripheral way of family connected by obligation rather than intimacy, encountered at the necessary occasions, regarded with vague warmth and no great depth.
He had not known any of this. He had not known about Clara Bennett or the years of quiet, careful planning, or the will drawn up fourteen months ago by a man making certain that a child he could not publicly claim would be protected after he was gone.
He should have known and done better.
The thought arrived simply, without self-pity, and stayed.
“Your Grace.” Henderson’s voice brought him back to the present. “There is the matter of the family.”
James looked up.
“Specifically,” Henderson continued, folding his hands over his papers, “certain members who have engaged their own solicitor.”
“Calder,” James said.
A slight pause. “You’ve spoken with him.”
“He came to me last night. Uninvited and after ten o’clock, which tells me something about the urgency his clients are feeling.” James leaned forward, his elbows on the desk. “Who are they, Henderson? I want names.”
Henderson looked down, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. “I am not at liberty to—”
“Henderson.”
“Lord Nathaniel Mortimer,” he said quietly.
“Primarily. The late Duke’s cousin on the paternal side.
He has… He had certain expectations regarding the succession before your claim was established.
The duchy going to you rather than through his branch of the family was already a disappointment.
The inheritance attached to the child compounds it considerably. ”
“Because if Violet is removed from Ashbourne,” James said slowly, “if her connection to the family is successfully challenged—”
“The inheritance would pass back into the estate.” Henderson bobbed his head. “And from there, through the standard line of succession, it would eventually—”
“Reach Mortimer.”
“Or those connected to him, yes.”
James said nothing for a moment. The anger that flared within him was cold and very clean.
“Did he know about Mortimer?” he asked.
“There are notes,” Henderson said after a while, “in the Duke’s personal correspondence—which came to me with the estate deeds—that suggest he was aware Lord Mortimer had expectations regarding the succession.
Whether he anticipated the specific nature of the challenge…
” He paused. “I could not say with certainty.”
“But he knew someone would come.”
“He knew the inheritance would not go unnoticed, yes.”
“They do not even care about the circumstances of her birth,” James thought out loud.
“No, Your Grace.”
“The propriety. The family name. The concerns about what the acknowledgment means for the Ashbournes’ reputation—”
“Are, in my assessment, largely incidental to the financial consideration.” Henderson paused. “I am sorry to be direct.”
“Do not apologize for it. It is the only thing I have patience for this morning.” James stood up. He could not sit still with this. It moved through him in a way that required motion, or it would simply burn where it sat.
He went to the window. Outside, the grounds were green and endless and unbothered.
“She is one year old, Henderson.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“She has just lost both her parents. Her mother, her father, everything familiar to her—gone. In an afternoon.” He pressed one hand flat against the window frame. “And there are men… men who stood at my cousin’s graveside, who are looking at her and seeing a number on a page.”
Henderson was quiet.
“That is what she is to them. A number.”
“I’m afraid that is an accurate summary.”
James turned away from the window. “How long before they can make a formal challenge? How would you assess the strength of their case?”
“That depends on several factors, like the stability of the household and the strength of the guardianship as it appears to outside parties.” Henderson folded his hands.
“A settled household and a guardian whose fitness cannot reasonably be questioned would make a challenge very difficult to sustain.”
He hesitated, and James moved close to him.
“Their case is currently limited.” Henderson looked at his notes and turned a page. “The Duke’s acknowledgment is explicit. The will is sound. Your guardianship is legally established.” He looked up. “However…”
“There it is.”
“… a challenge does not need to be legally strong to be damaging, Your Grace. It needs only to be persistent and public.” Henderson folded his hands.
“If Lord Mortimer’s solicitors begin filing questions about the circumstances of the child’s birth, about the validity of the acknowledgment, about your own fitness as guardian, the process itself will become the problem.
The gossip, the uncertainty, the appearance of a household in dispute.
” He paused. “Courts move slowly, but gossip moves very fast.”
“And an unmarried guardian with a reputation for recklessness makes it considerably easier,” James scoffed.
Henderson blinked rapidly. “I do not say this to alarm you, Your Grace. I say it so that you understand what is at stake.”
James looked at the will again. At Violet’s name. At the extraordinary figure beside it that his cousin had spent years accumulating for a daughter he would not watch grow up.
She will not grow up unwanted. She will not spend a single day of her life feeling like an inconvenience. Not while I am breathing.
The certainty of it surprised him.
He had spent most of his adult life being very careful about what he allowed himself to feel with that kind of absoluteness. It was, generally speaking, safer.
Violet had apparently not received that particular memo.
He sat back down.
“There is one solution,” Henderson said carefully.
“I know what it is.”
“A duchess would—”
“I know.” James picked up his pen, set it down. “I asked someone last night.”
Henderson’s eyebrows rose. “That is fantastic, Your Grace. That solves—”
“She refused.”
A pause. “I see. May I ask on what grounds?”
“I told her how practical the arrangement would be. I was honest about what I could offer.” James looked at him. “She is a woman who reads in window seats and believes in love with the kind of certainty that does not require evidence. I told her I could not offer it.”
Henderson was quiet for a moment. He looked at his papers, then looked at James.
“Your Grace,” he began. “In thirty years of legal practice, I have sat across from a great many intelligent people who have made a great many avoidable errors.” He paused.
“The error they make most consistently is believing that stating the full extent of their limitations before establishing a single point of value constitutes honesty.” Another pause.
“It does not. It constitutes a poor opening position.”
“I was being honest,” James argued.
“You were telling her one truth,” Henderson said, with gentle precision. “The truth of what you cannot offer. Which is a very different thing from the whole of it. And she said no immediately, you said?”
“Before I finished the sentence.”
Henderson pressed his lips together. “Quite.”
“You think I was wrong.”
“I think,” Henderson said carefully, “that honesty, while admirable, benefits from sequencing.” He folded his papers with the precise movements of a man retreating to safer ground. “But that is outside my area of expertise, Your Grace. I concern myself with the legal situation.”
“The legal situation requires a duchess.”
“It does.”
James sat with that.
He thought about Violet asleep against Isadora’s shoulder in the dimly lit nursery. About the three hours of uninterrupted sleep that had followed. About the exhausted relief in the nurse’s expression the next morning.
He thought about Isadora saying no with the composed certainty of a woman who had made a decision and would not be swayed from it, and walking out of the nursery without looking back.
He thought about the remaining option.
He did not like it. But Violet’s name was on page nineteen of a forty-three-page will, and Lord Mortimer’s solicitor had visited twice already, and James had made himself a promise that he intended to keep.
He picked up his pen, returning to the estate papers with focused calm. He had made his decision.
“Is your report on the north tenancy included in this stack or the other one?”
Henderson blinked. “The other one, Your Grace.”
“Bring it this afternoon.” James looked at the papers before him. “And Henderson.”
“Your Grace?”
“Thank you. That will be all.”
Henderson inclined his head, gathered his things, and left without another word.