Chapter 19
“Ihave decided,” Letitia announced after a while of arguing, “that I will only marry for love.”
“You’ve decided that before,” William reminded her.
“I reaffirm it periodically. It bears repeating.”
“You reaffirmed it in June. And again, after the Langley ball.”
“The Langley ball gave me a great deal to think about.”
“Lord Langley ’s son gave you a great deal to think about,” William corrected. “I think that is rather it.”
“He danced with me twice and then spent twenty minutes discussing his horses,” Letitia said.
“I thought about him very briefly and concluded he was entirely wrong for me, which I consider a success of discernment rather than a failure of anything else.” She reached for the bread.
“The broader position stands. I will marry for love, or I will not marry at all.”
“Good, I support this entirely,” William declared.
Letitia turned to look at him, blinking. “You do?” she asked. “That’s it? Good?”
“Of course, what else would I say?” He reached for his wine. “Why would I argue with you about that?”
“But you were arguing with me.”
“I was questioning your reasoning. That is different from disagreeing with your conclusion. I am in love with my wife. I would not have it any other way, and I would not have either of my sisters settle for less.” He glanced at Cecily beside him with the private look that Isadora had often watched pass between them, the look of someone who had made the best decision of their life and knew it every day.
“I simply think the sentiment benefits from more than periodic reaffirmation.”
Letitia stared at him. “William, that was almost romantic.”
“Do not make it strange,” he muttered.
She blinked. Then she turned to Isadora with the expression of someone who needed a witness. “He agreed with me.”
“He agrees with you more than you think,” Isadora said. “You simply expect him not to, so you stop listening before he finishes.”
“That is—” Letitia paused. “Possibly accurate.” She looked back at William. “All right, you support the position. Good.” She smoothed her napkin with the energy of someone recalibrating. “James, what do you think?”
James looked up from his pheasant with the expression of a man who had been hoping to be excluded from the conversation. “About what?”
“Love,” Letitia said. “Marriage for love. William has declared his position. I have declared mine. You are the only one at this table who has not.”
“I was enjoying the pheasant.”
“The pheasant will not disappear. What do you think?”
James set down his fork with the slight resignation of a man accepting the inevitable. He reached for his wine and looked at the table for a moment, as if deciding how much truth to put into the room.
“I think that love is an excellent reason to begin a marriage and a very unreliable one to sustain it,” he replied.
Letitia frowned. “That is bleak.”
“It is realistic.”
“It is the same thing dressed differently.”
“People fall in love with some frequency,” James said, with the patience of someone making an argument he had made before.
“They fall out of it with equal frequency. What holds a marriage together over twenty years is not the feeling that began it. It is something more like…” He paused.
“Architecture. Structure. Shared purpose.”
“Architecture,” Letitia repeated, in the flat tone she used when something had offended her.
“You find that cynical.”
“I find it deeply depressing, much like every marriage in the ton,” she scoffed. “You are describing a building, not a marriage.”
“Buildings last.”
“So do bad marriages,” Letitia pointed out. “That is precisely the point.”
William, Isadora noticed, was looking at James with a slight frown.
“James,” he said.
James looked at him.
“What holds my marriage together is not architecture. It is Cecily. Specifically. Irreplaceably. The feeling has not gone. It has changed… It is quieter than it was, less…” He seemed to search for the right word.
“Less urgent, perhaps. But it is not less. It is more, if anything. It has more history in it. More weight.” He looked at his wife, and something in his face opened in the way it only did when he looked at her.
“I could not construct a building adequate to what I feel for her. The architecture would collapse.”
The table was very quiet.
Isadora picked up her cup to mask her smile.
Cecily was looking at her husband with an expression that had nothing composed about it, the way she looked at him when she forgot other people were in the room.
That was exactly what Isadora wanted.
Letitia pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling.
“Right,” she said after a moment. “Well, that”—she gestured between William and Cecily with her fork—“is what I mean. That is exactly what I mean. I want someone who says things like that about me after years. How do you account for that?”
“William is fortunate.” James shrugged.
“Or he is right, and you are wrong,” Letitia countered.
“The two are not mutually exclusive.”
“James.” She set down her fork, which meant she was serious. “You cannot sit at a table with William and Cecily and continue to argue that love is insufficient. The evidence is right in front of you.”
“I am not arguing that love is insufficient,” James said. “I am arguing that love alone—”
“Is not enough,” Isadora finished.
Everyone looked at her.
She had not planned to speak, but the conversation had arrived somewhere she found she had something to say about.
“I agree with you on that part,” she continued. “Love alone is not enough. It requires… tending. Attention. The daily choice of the other person even when they have done something to irritate you thoroughly.”
“Has someone irritated you thoroughly?” James asked.
“The point,” she said with great composure, “is that I think you and William are describing the same thing. William is simply describing it from inside, which sounds like Cecily. You describe it in the abstract because the abstract is manageable. You can have opinions about the abstract. You can be intelligent about it, and measured, and appropriately skeptical.” She held his gaze.
“Particular is more difficult because it requires you to be in it rather than above it.”
“I am not above it,” James protested. “I am simply—”
“Observing it from a slight distance,” she said. “Yes, I know.”
The table had gone rather quiet. Letitia’s eyes darted between James and Isadora with sharp focus as she chewed on her food.
“The particular,” James said carefully, “is messier than the abstract.”
“Yes,” Isadora agreed. “It is.”
“People in particular love to make particular mistakes. They misread each other. They expect things that were never promised and are disappointed when they fail to materialize. They…” He paused. “The particular is where it goes wrong.”
“The particular is also where it goes right,” she argued. “You seem to have noticed only the one direction.”
“I have seen more of the one direction.”
“Then you have been looking in the wrong places.” She said it without heat, even though she could feel the color rise in her face. “Or you have been looking for things to confirm what you already believe, which is not the same as looking.”
“I look,” he insisted. “I observe things accurately.”
“You observe things safely,” she corrected. “From a position that allows you to say it is exactly as you expected rather than being surprised.” She paused. “Letitia wants someone who surprises her. I think that requires being surprising. Which requires—”
“Being wrong,” James cut in.
“Being open,” she countered. “Which feels like the same thing if you are very committed to being right.”
James looked at her over the rim of his cup. “You think I am closed off.”
“I think you are careful,” Isadora said. “I think you have been careful for so long that it has become invisible to you. You call it observation. You call it realism.” She looked at him steadily. “I think it is armor, James. Very well-made armor. But armor nonetheless.”
His expression shifted in a way that she had not anticipated. Still, he did not argue.
“And you are not careful at all?” he asked, more quietly than before.
“I am very careful,” she replied. “In different directions.”
“Which directions?”
She looked at him for a moment.
“The ones that matter,” she said. “Which is the difference between us, I think.”
The fire popped, and Isadora blinked, suddenly remembering that there were other people in the room. She looked around the table; it was too quiet.
William was looking at her with questions in his eyes, and she looked away quickly. Cecily’s hand had found his on the table.
For once, Letitia was not looking for something to say.
James regarded Isadora carefully. “Right.”
He reached for his wine. She reached for hers.
The candles burned steadily.
“Well, I should like to know,” Letitia spoke up, very gently, which was its own kind of remarkable, “what the directions are. The ones that matter.”
Isadora looked at her sister.
“I know I’m interfering,” Letitia added quickly. “But I think—” She stopped. Made the visible decision to stop there. “No, never mind.” She set her napkin on the table. “I am suddenly exhausted.”
“You were not exhausted three minutes ago,” William remarked.
“Exhaustion is sudden,” Letitia said serenely.
“It comes conveniently,” William drawled.
“Are you not tired, Cecily? Brother?”
“Yes, we are.” Cecily smiled.
“No, I am not remotely tired.”
“Yes, we are, darling.” Cecily’s smile widened.
William looked at her. She raised her eyebrows in a way that meant, Yes, we are leaving.
He stood. “Right.”
Letitia was already pushing back her chair with the decisive energy of someone setting a plan into motion. She bent and kissed Isadora’s cheek, then whispered in her ear, “Do not argue yourself out of it.” She straightened before Isadora could answer.
Cecily embraced her on the way out. “Good night,” she said.
William paused behind her. He did not look at James, but he fixed her with a brief, direct look that said several things and said none of them aloud. “Good night.”
She gave him a small nod.
He left, and the door closed behind him.
When it was finally just the two of them, Isadora looked at her dessert. She did not look at James. She did not need to. She could feel him looking at her.
The dining room settled into its new quiet—two place settings, lower candles, the house entirely still around them. She looked at the space where her family had been.
“A perfectly ordinary dinner conversation,” James said.
She looked at him. “Entirely.”
“So, armor, huh?”
“Yes.” She nodded.
“You believe that.”
“I have believed it for some time.”
He turned his wine glass once, slowly.
“And yours,” he said. “Your armor. The careful directions. What are they protecting?”
She looked at him across the table.
“The same things as yours,” she said quietly. “Probably.”
The silence between them had a different quality to it now—not the dinner-table silence, but the kind that meant something had been acknowledged without being named.
“More wine?” he offered.
“Yes,” she murmured.
He poured.
Neither of them moved to leave.