Chapter 25
“The Bennetts’ solicitor,” James said, “had the most comprehensive filing system I have ever seen and absolutely nothing useful inside it.”
Harding, his London solicitor—compact, quick-eyed, with twenty years of practice concentrated into a permanently skeptical expression—looked at him across the desk with the diplomacy of a man declining to say, I told you so.
“The Bennett family’s legal affairs have always been modest,” Harding said. “The late Miss Bennett was not a woman of independent means. Whatever arrangement existed between her and the late Duke was managed through his representatives, not hers.”
“Which means her personal papers—”
“Would not have passed through any legal office I have access to.” Harding folded his hands. “The letters Mortimer presented… Do you have copies, Your Grace?”
“Henderson has them. I’ve read them twice.
” James stood from the chair he had been occupying for the past two hours and went to the window.
Outside, London was grey and purposeful and entirely indifferent to his problems. “They are written in a woman’s hand.
The content is plausible, on the surface.
An intimacy with an unnamed gentleman. Dates that would create sufficient uncertainty about the child’s parentage.
” He turned back. “But there is no name. Not once. The person is referred to vaguely throughout. Which is either discretion or invention, and I cannot determine which from the letters alone.”
“You need a witness,” Harding advised. “Someone who knew Miss Bennett personally and who could speak to her character and her circumstances in the relevant period.”
“Her aunt produced the letters.”
“Her aunt,” he said carefully, “has provided those letters to Lord Mortimer. I would not rely on her as a witness.”
“No.” James turned back to the window. “There is the father. Reverend Thomas Bennett. A vicar, apparently. I had the name from the third office we visited yesterday, a clerk who remembered the family from some years back. He mentioned the father specifically.” He paused.
“He would have known Clara. Known her well, presumably, in the way fathers know their daughters when they have not yet been separated by circumstance.”
Harding was quiet for a moment.
“A reverend would be a credible witness,” he opined.
“If he is willing to speak.”
“If he knows anything worth speaking about.”
“He would know his daughter,” James said. “He would know whether those letters are consistent with the woman she was.” He turned from the window. “I will pay him a visit within the week.”
“Your Grace, if the reverend is unwilling—”
“Then I will persuade him,” James assured him. “Gently. I am capable of being gentle.”
Harding seemed to consider.
“Yes, Your Grace,” he said, with the tact of a man who had made his professional opinion known and was now stepping aside for the personal one.
James arrived back at the townhouse at half past nine.
The evening had been long and largely unproductive.
He was tired from spending too many hours in solicitors’ offices reading documents that led, with persistent creativity, to nothing.
He had eaten something at some point that he could not recall, and what he now wanted, in the precise and uncomplicated way of a tired man, was a glass of his best brandy and the silence of his own house before the morning.
“Your Grace.” His London butler, Fenwick, appeared in the entrance hall with a grave expression. He was older than Briggs and considerably more austere, and had been managing this townhouse through three decades of James’s various phases and had made his peace with them all.
“Good evening, Fenwick.”
“Your Grace.” A fractional pause. “You have a visitor.”
James handed over his coat without looking up. “At this hour?”
“She arrived approximately thirty minutes ago, Your Grace.”
He looked up. Fenwick received the look with perfect composure.
“She,” James repeated.
“Miss Caroline Pembley, Your Grace. She is waiting in the drawing room.” Disapproval dripped from Fenwick’s voice. “She came alone.”
James frowned. “Alone?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Without Lady Pembley.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Without any chaperone.”
“Correct.” Fenwick blinked. “Your Grace.”
James looked up at the ceiling briefly, calculating the dimensions of a situation he had not anticipated and did not particularly want.
“Tea,” he instructed. “In the drawing room.”
“Your Grace.”
He went to the drawing room.
Miss Caroline was standing at the fireplace when he came in, which he suspected was intentional, for the firelight was doing considerable work on her behalf. She was dressed with a care that was not accidental.
She was, as she had always been, very beautiful.
She turned when he entered with rehearsed naturalness. He almost scoffed.
“Jam—forgive me.” A small smile. “Your Grace. I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”
“Miss Caroline.” He stopped in the center of the room. “This is unexpected.”
“I know.” She moved slightly away from the fireplace, a graceful repositioning. “I know it is irregular. I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t think—” She stopped like she was recalibrating. “I heard you were in London. I thought it was an opportunity to speak privately.”
“Your mother is not with you.” He raised an eyebrow.
“No.” She met his eyes directly. “I preferred to come alone. What I want to say is not—it is not something I wished to say in front of my mother.”
Fenwick appeared with the tea tray, set it down with the absolute professional silence of pretending he could not feel the tension in the room, and withdrew.
“I don’t think I should offer you a seat, Miss Caroline,” James said.
She sat anyway. He did not, not immediately. He moved to the side table, poured himself the brandy he had been wanting since four o’clock, and then sat in the chair opposite her with the glass and the tea table between them.
She looked at him.
He waited.
“You know that I have always liked you,” she began.
He said nothing.
“I don’t mean that in the way women usually mean it when they say it to men they are trying to secure an offer from,” she said with honesty.
“I mean that I genuinely like you. I have liked you for three years. I find you interesting, and I find you—I am not afraid of you, which I think is rarer than it should be.” She looked at him steadily.
“I am telling you this so that what I say next is understood in that context.”
“Go on,” James allowed.
She straightened slightly. “I know your marriage is not a love match. I know the circumstances that led to it. Society knows too, though they say it in different ways depending on their position.” She paused.
“Your wife married you for the child’s sake.
You married her for the household’s sake.
It is… but a practical arrangement, not a real marriage. ”
She shifted in her seat when James remained silent.
“I know what I am offering,” she continued, the color slightly higher in her face now, her composure more effortful.
“I know that it is not… that what I am saying is not conventional, but I would rather say it plainly than spend another season pretending I don’t feel it.
” She met his gaze. “If you want, if there is any part of what might have existed between us that you still—” She broke off.
“I am not asking for what she has. I am not asking for the name or the house or any of it. I am simply saying that if you wanted an… an arrangement, something private, I would not—”
“Caroline,” he interrupted quietly.
He looked at her across the tea table—at the careful composure she was maintaining at considerable cost, at the courage it had taken to come here and say all of this, at the genuine feeling underneath the strategy of it.
He had known Caroline Pembley for three years, and he had never disliked her. He did not dislike her now.
Which was precisely why he was going to be honest with her.
“I’m going to say something,” he said, “and I want you to hear it without the version that your pride will try to construct afterward. Can you do that?”
She looked at him steadily. “Yes.”
“Whatever might have existed between us three years ago, or six months ago, is over,” he declared.
“Not because of my marriage. Not because of circumstances or timing or any external reason you could point to. But because…” He paused, looked at his glass, then looked back at her.
“Because I am not available to you in any configuration. Not as a husband, not as an arrangement, not as anything that exists in private and not in public.”
He let that sink in.
“I will not take a mistress. I will not have a secret. I will not lead another life away from Ashbourne without her knowing.” He set the glass down. “That is not who I am now. I am not certain it is who I was before, but I am entirely certain it is not who I am now.”
Miss Caroline looked at him. Something moved through her expression. Not tears—she was not going to cry; he could see the decision being made in real time—but something that was not the rehearsed version she had arrived with. Something more honest.
“She is lucky,” she murmured.
“I am the one who is lucky,” James said. “Though I have been somewhat slow to fully understand that.”
Miss Caroline looked at the fire, then at the tea that neither of them had touched, then at her hands in her lap with the expression of a woman collecting herself.
“I thought—” She broke off.
“What did you think?”
“I thought that practical marriages stayed practical,” she said. “I thought that… that whatever the initial arrangement was, it would remain the arrangement, and that there would be…” She looked up. “Space for something else. Something on the side of it.”
“There is not,” James replied.
“I can see that.” She fixed him with a slightly rueful look. “You know, you look different, Your Grace,” she said. “Different than you did in London in the spring.”
“Do I?”
She nodded. “You look… settled, which I would not have predicted.” A pause. “Marriage has changed you more than anyone expected.”
“More than I expected,” he emphasized.
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she stood, with the grace that was simply part of how she moved, and retrieved her cloak from the chair where she had draped it with the decisive movements of someone concluding a chapter they had opened.
“I hope she knows,” she said at the door. “What she has… I hope she knows.”
He did not answer.
She bowed and left.
Fenwick appeared from wherever he had been and saw her out with seamless discretion.
The front door closed, and the townhouse went quiet.
James remained in the chair. He did not reach for the brandy. He did not move to the window or the fire or any of the places a man moved when he needed to think. He simply sat, looking at the fire, and thought.
He thought about Miss Caroline saying that practical marriages stayed practical.
He thought about himself agreeing with that six months ago. Two months ago. In a nursery at midnight, if he was being honest, saying it would not be romantic, nothing more than practical, with the full conviction of a man protecting himself and calling it honesty.
He was not available because he was occupied.
Not by the marriage as an arrangement. Not by the household or the child or the practical requirements of a situation that had required a practical solution.
But by Isadora. Specifically, irreplaceably, in the way William had said at the dinner table, in the way that made all the abstract arguments about love and architecture and the unreliability of feeling fall apart into something considerably simpler.
Miss Caroline had said marriage had changed him, and she was right, but it was not marriage that had changed him. It was Isadora.
Isadora, who had walked into a house that wasn’t hers and made it hers without announcing it.
Who had named carved animals and stayed up all night with a frightened baby and reorganized the shelves and argued with him about warmth and duty and the difference between protection and armor with the direct, undeflected honesty of someone who said things because they were true rather than because they were comfortable.
Who had told him their marriage was not real in a corridor at midnight in the voice of a woman protecting herself.
Who had kissed him back on the terrace as though she had been deciding to do so for a very long time.
I am no longer uncertain. I have feelings for my wife.
That made his heart race.
He rubbed his jaw and stood. He went to the writing desk in the corner of the room—it was smaller than the one at Ashbourne—sat down, and pulled a sheet of paper toward him.
He picked up the quill. Held it. Put it down.
There were things he needed to say to his wife that could not be said in a letter. That required the specific, unreproducible medium of the same room, the same air, her face where he could see it properly.
He picked the quill back up.
Isadora, he wrote. The reverend is in Alderton. I leave tomorrow morning. I will be home before the week’s end.
He paused.
I have something to tell you, but it will have to wait.
He paused again for a long moment, looking at the paper. Then he added, before he could decide against it:
I should not have forgotten to say goodbye.
He folded the letter before he could revise it, sealed it, and prayed for the boldness to send it. He sat for another moment in the quiet drawing room of his London townhouse, where he had lived the better part of his adult life as a marquess and which had always felt, until recently, enough.
Now, it felt very far from Ashbourne.
He couldn’t wait to go back home.
He went to bed and slept better than he had in three days.