Chapter 13
“Lord and Lady Eversleigh,” Briggs announced, “and Miss Eversleigh.”
Isadora had approximately three seconds to arrange her expression before the drawing room doors opened, which was sufficient since she had been arranging her expressions on short notice since she was old enough to understand why it was necessary.
She was standing near the fireplace when they came in, with James beside her.
Lord Eversleigh was a large, tall man of sixty with the ruddy complexion of someone who spent more time outdoors than indoors.
Lady Eversleigh was precisely what her husband was not.
She was small, sharp-eyed, impeccably dressed, and taking in the room with the comprehensive speed of a woman who had been collecting gossip at dinner parties for years.
Miss Eversleigh was perhaps five-and-twenty, pleasant-faced, and looking around with the open curiosity of someone who had heard a great deal about the Ashbourne estate and was comparing the reality to the account.
Isadora suspected that they had all heard a great deal about the estate recently.
“Your Grace.” Lord Eversleigh’s hook James’s hand with the warmth of genuine acquaintance, then turned to Isadora. “And Lady—Your Grace,” he recovered smoothly. “Forgive us; we are still adjusting.”
“As are we,” Isadora said pleasantly.
Beside her, she felt rather than saw James’s reaction—a slight shift that might have been amusement if it had been allowed to develop.
“Congratulations are long overdue,” Lady Eversleigh said, taking Isadora’s hands in her own. “We were so pleased to hear it. Ashbourne has needed a duchess for some time.” She glanced at James. “And you, Your Grace, have needed someone to prevent you from spending every evening in that study.”
“You wound me, My Lady,” James said dryly.
“I don’t. You are constitutionally incapable of being wounded by accuracy.” She released Isadora’s hands and looked between them with the satisfied expression of a woman whose opinion had been confirmed. “You look well together. That’s all I’ll say.”
She said it as though it were simply a fact she was reporting, which was somehow more effective than if she had made a fuss over it.
The Pembrokes arrived shortly after. Isadora and James greeted them warmly, offering Mrs. Pembroke a smile and a gentle embrace before turning to Mr. Pembroke, who bowed politely.
Mr. Pembroke was a quiet, thoughtful man who managed the nearest estate with the understated competence of someone who preferred doing things to discussing them, and Mrs. Pembroke had kind eyes and the comfortable manner of a woman entirely at peace with her life and genuinely interested in other people’s lives.
Then Colonel Hartley, who was sixty and widowed and had the distinguished bearing of a man who had done important things in his youth and was now content to have done them.
The Colonel’s nephews joined to form a party intimate enough for real conversation but small enough that Isadora had nowhere to hide.
Not that I am hiding. I am simply… adjusting.
James pulled out her chair for her.
It was not remarkable. It was the right thing to do, and he did it with the ease of long habit, one hand on the back of the chair and a slight inclination of his head as she sat.
She had expected it. But she had not expected his hand to rest briefly on the back of her chair after she sat. His fingers curled over the carved wood before he moved to take his seat.
It’s nothing. It’s just furniture.
She unfolded her napkin.
“The east field at Pembroke,” Mr. Pembroke was saying to James as he settled into his chair and arranged his napkin, “has yielded more crops since the drainage work in August. I was right about the approach. You might see the same result on your south paddock.”
“That’s exactly what Henderson tells me,” James said. He reached for his wine glass and then, with the unhurried movement of someone doing two things at once, glanced at Isadora. “Have you everything you need?”
She looked at him, unable to stop the warmth spreading through her.
He is checking. He is actually checking.
“Yes,” she replied. “Thank you.”
He returned to Mr. Pembroke as though the brief interruption was the most natural thing in the world.
Because to him, it is. He is playing the part.
She looked down at her soup.
She was playing the part, too. They were both playing their parts, and they were, she had to admit, playing them well with the ease of people who knew each other well enough to move through a room without collision, who did not need to coordinate because they had arrived at a sort of unconscious fluency over the past several days that she had not entirely noticed developing until this evening, watching it from the outside as it were, seeing how it appeared to other people.
Apparently, it was entirely convincing.
“Your Grace,” Lady Eversleigh addressed her from across the table with the directness of a woman who considered preambles a waste of everyone’s time. “I hear you have taken a particular interest in the nursery.”
“I have.” Isadora nodded.
“The child is well?”
“She is.” She paused. “She is… She has had some difficulty settling, but she is improving. She is a very… determined little girl.”
Lady Eversleigh smiled, a genuine smile rather than a polite one. “They always are at that age. My own children were absolute tyrants until they were three. After three, they become merely difficult.” She glanced toward James. “She is fortunate to have you both.”
“We are fortunate to have her,” Isadora said.
She said it without thinking and then felt the slight weight of having said something she meant in a room full of people she barely knew, which was more than she had intended to offer.
She reached for her wine in a bid to distract herself.
James was looking at her. There was not a question in his eyes, but something else. Then it was gone, and he returned to Mr. Pembroke and whatever he was saying about the country roads. Still, she had sensed the pause, the attention in those three seconds.
You are reading things into looks, she told herself firmly. Stop it.
The thing about James at a dinner table, Isadora was discovering, was that he was entirely impossible to look away from.
She had known he was charming. She had years of evidence for this and had thought herself adequately prepared. What she had not accounted for was the effect of his charm in a room this size, small enough that she could see it at work in the way he moved between people.
“The road matter,” Colonel Hartley was saying, “is not going to resolve itself before winter, Your Grace. I said as much to the parish council in August, and they received it the way they receive most things I say in August—which is to say they nodded and did nothing.”
“They nod beautifully, though,” James drawled. “Years of practice.”
Lord Eversleigh laughed. “He’s right, Hartley. The nodding is excellent.”
“The road, however, remains a problem.”
“It does.” James set down his glass with the easy authority of a man changing register without losing the room. “I’ve spoken to Henderson about our section. We’ll address it before the ground freezes. However, the parish section is…” He paused. “A more delicate matter.”
“Delicate,” Colonel Hartley scoffed.
“They are proud of their process,” James said gravely, his hand moving to the back of her chair. “One must respect the process.”
“One must want to throw the process into the nearest ditch.”
“Also that,” James agreed. “Both things can be true.”
Laughter rippled through the table. Isadora watched James’s face light up with mirth before looking down at her soup.
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Pembroke leaned forward slightly. “I was hoping to ask about the walled section at the back of the kitchen garden. I do not know if you’ve had a chance to look at it yet, but the previous—”
“The herb section,” Isadora cut in. “Yes, I’ve seen it. It needs attention, but the bones are good.”
“The previous housekeeper planted lavender along the south wall,” Mrs. Pembroke said warmly. “A most extraordinary amount of it. The whole kitchen smelled of it in August.”
“I’d like to restore it,” Isadora said, then stopped, slightly surprised by the certainty in her voice. “I mean, I think it would be worth restoring.”
“You should,” Mrs. Pembroke encouraged. “Ashbourne smells of old paper at present, which is… well…”
“My fault, I expect,” James piped up from Isadora’s left. “I have been in the study more than is probably advisable.”
“He has,” Isadora confirmed pleasantly. “The study is his natural habitat. We are working on broadening it.”
She had said it without thinking, and she felt the small collective pleasure of the table.
Lady Eversleigh was looking at her with undisguised satisfaction.
James went slightly still beside her. Only slightly. Only for a moment. Then he returned to Lord Eversleigh and resumed their conversation.
“The lavender,” she said to Mrs. Pembroke, a fraction too quickly. “Tell me about the south wall.”
Halfway through the second course, she realized James had moved her chair closer to his.
She was not sure when it had happened, but she was closer to him than she had been at the start of the meal.
Not so much. A few inches, perhaps. Except that his right hand was resting on the table beside his wine glass, and the arm of her chair was close enough to his that his proximity was… difficult to ignore.
He was speaking with Colonel Hartley about something, following the thread enough to appear present. His left hand moved to her chair and pulled it closer as he spoke, and then returned to rest on the table.
He had not looked at her. Apparently, he was not aware of having done it at all.
She looked down at her plate, feeling too warm.
The fire… Briggs built it too high.
The fire was at the other end of the room.
She reached for her wine and focused her full attention on Mrs. Pembroke and the question of the herb garden, which was an excellent topic that required no proximity to James and stirred no warmth whatsoever.
“I must say.” Lord Ashfield’s voice carried the comfortable authority of a man accustomed to being listened to, and the table gave him its attention. “Ashbourne feels different this evening.”
“How so?” James asked.
“Better,” Lady Eversleigh answered, before her husband could open his mouth. “It feels better, Reginald. Say what you mean.”
Lord Eversleigh accepted the correction with the equanimity of a long marriage. “Better,” he agreed. “For a while, it felt… I do not mean any disrespect to your predecessor, but it felt like a house waiting for something for years.” He raised his glass. “It has stopped waiting.”
“Hear, hear,” Colonel Hartley cheered.
Lady Eversleigh was looking at James and Isadora with the expression of a woman whose earlier assessment had been confirmed and who was pleased about it.
“You suit each other,” she said. “I said it when I arrived, and I shall say it again now since I have had enough wine to be entirely honest and I am past the age of being indirect about things that are simply true.”
There was a small pause.
Isadora looked at James out of the corner of her eye, expecting him to correct her, but he did not.
He did not say it was a practical arrangement or that the circumstances were somewhat unconventional or any of the various accurate statements that were available to him.
He simply received the comment with the equanimity of a man who found nothing in it to dispute, raised his glass slightly to Lady Ashfield, and said, “You are very kind.”
Isadora felt his fingers brush the back of her hand where it rested on the table, but it lasted no longer than a breath.
She plastered a smile on her face despite the feelings warring inside her and looked at her wine glass, not daring to examine what was happening.
* * *
The guests left by nine, and the house fell back into its usual quiet.
Isadora stood near the fireplace, listening to the last carriage trundle down the drive. James was at the side table, pouring himself a small measure of brandy.
She pulled off one glove, then the other.
“That went well,” she remarked.
“Yes.”
She watched him set the decanter down. He had been very good this evening. That was the thing she kept returning to.
She did not quite know what to do with it.
“Lady Eversleigh will tell everyone in the county that we suit each other,” she said.
“Undoubtedly.”
“James.” She waited until he turned to her. “You were wonderful this evening.”
Something shifted in his expression. He looked at her with the slight wariness of a man who had been paid a compliment and was trying to determine what was inside it.
“It was necessary.”
“Of course.” She tilted her head, watching the firelight caress his face. “I only mean—” She paused, searching for the right word, or possibly the wrong one. “You were very charming. Very attentive.” She met his gaze evenly. “Very doting, in fact.”
“Appearances require—”
“You even moved my chair,” she said over him.
He said nothing to that.
“I am only noting,” she said in the tone she used when she was noting nothing at all, “that you were very convincing. As a husband.”
“I know what I was doing.”
“I know you do.” She let it sit for a moment. “I think you are more convincing than you realize.”
She watched him receive the comment and then watched him pull back from it. The composure returning, the slight straightening, the careful reassembly of everything she had just watched come briefly undone.
He set his glass down.
“You should rest,” he said. “It has been a long evening.”
“It has,” she agreed. She did not move toward the door.
“Good night, Isadora.”
“Good night, James.”
* * *
James was halfway down the east corridor when he stopped walking.
He stood there in the dark, with his hand pressed against the wall, and looked down at the floor. He thought about what Isadora had said, what she had delivered with the infuriating composure of a woman who had looked straight at him and seen something he had not given her permission to see.
He pushed off the wall and resumed walking.
He made it to the study door but did not go in.
He stood outside it and thought about dinner.
He hadn’t been able to keep his hands or his eyes off her.
He had even moved her chair without thinking, one hand on the armrest, pulling it slightly closer.
He had not been aware of doing it until she told him.
That is a problem.
Not because it was wrong. Not because it was inappropriate or dishonest or outside the bounds of what the evening had required. But because it had happened without conscious thought, without his approval.
He thought about their walk and how he did not want to remove his hand from her waist. He thought about the fact that he was standing outside his study at half past nine because every inch of him ached to go back to her.
You are a problem.
He opened the door, walked in, sat down, and looked at the papers on his desk.
“Damn,” he muttered.
He sat there for a long time.