Chapter 7
D inner at Huxley House had become a smaller event, which was quite the irony because it had never been big since Adam had come back from the war. The dining room itself had not changed, and the routine around it didn’t feel any different than it had been for a long time.
However, the atmosphere had shifted completely, and Adam felt it the moment he took his seat.
It no longer felt as it had when he had returned, when the people around him had been struggling to get themselves upright.
Now, it seemed like the servants were preparing for a new kind of trouble and just waiting for him to acknowledge it.
And Harriet was the clearest sign of this.
She had scarcely touched her soup before asking, “Will Emily wear white?”
Adam looked up from his plate. “I imagine so.”
“I think ivory is prettier,” Harriet said.
“White can look too cold. Mrs. Fenwick says lace is very costly, though, so perhaps there will be less lace than I first hoped. Do you think there will be orange blossoms? Mama liked orange blossoms. Or perhaps roses. Does Emily like roses? She looks like she does.”
She did not stop for breath. She spoke as if the wedding were a wonderful pageant arranged for her private pleasure, and perhaps in part it was. To Harriet, weddings belonged to the same category as birthdays, dolls, and stories with a happily ever after.
Adam cut into his meat and listened intently, even though that wasn’t a difficult task. Harriet was practically screaming the house down as she spoke.
“I would like to stand near her,” she continued. “And I hope there is cake. There must be cake at weddings. Then, when the babies come, they may have cake too.”
Adam paused eating to look at her for a minute. Then, his eyes shifted to Theodore, who sat at the corner of the table and continued to eat, though more slowly than before and with less focus.
Harriet, oblivious to the tension, went on happily. “I think one of them ought to be a girl. Then, we should have another lady in the nursery.”
Adam set down his knife and fork. “Harriet.”
She blinked at him, bright and innocent. “Yes?”
“Eat your dinner.”
She obeyed at once, though with the air of a child who was very certain that she had said only sensible things.
Across the table, Theodore had gone unusually still.
That, more than Harriet’s chatter, drew Adam’s attention. He had learned enough about the boy over the past months to know that his silence often meant more than words.
Theodore had never been as easy to read as his sister. While Harriet’s feelings arrived in the room and announced themselves, Theodore’s were usually more laid back.
Adam drank a little wine and watched him.
The boy noticed, of course. He met Adam’s gaze for a brief second, then looked down again.
“What is it?” Adam asked.
Theodore’s hand tightened around his fork before relaxing. For a few moments, it seemed he would say nothing. Harriet looked up from her peas, sensing his seriousness, even if she could not yet properly put it into words.
At last, Theodore looked back up. “When you marry her, what will happen here?”
Adam felt the room shrink around him. Harriet, on the other hand, frowned faintly, as if she had not expected any difficulty in the matter. Adam waited.
Theodore took a deep breath. “I mean, after . When there are children and everything belongs to them instead.”
Harriet straightened. “Not everything belongs to them. Some of it is mine.”
Theodore ignored her. His eyes remained on Adam’s face, steady now in the way they only became when something truly mattered.
“Will Harriet and I still be—” He broke off, jaw tightening with the effort of saying it plainly. “Will we still be here?”
Adam answered before he could think too long about it, “Of course, you will.”
Theodore blinked.
Adam heard the roughness in his own voice and did nothing to smooth it. Some things ought not to sound rehearsed.
“I do not need an heir or a princess. I have both.” He looked from Theodore to Harriet as he said it, because he meant it fiercely. “This is just to help Lady Emily.”
Harriet’s face lit up at once. “I am the princess!”
“You are many things,” Adam said. “One of them, apparently, is impossible.”
Harriet gave a laugh that seemed to say she would accept what he had just said as a compliment.
Theodore did not smile. Yet some of the tension left his shoulders. That should have settled the matter, but for some reason, it did not settle Adam.
If the marriage’s sole purpose was to rescue Emily, why had Harriet’s talk of her in this house pressed under his skin like a hand? Why had Theodore’s fear felt like something he didn’t know how to prepare for? Why did Emily’s name alter the air around the table, when she was not even present?
Harriet reached for the sweeter half of what he had said and held it fast. “Can I tell Mrs. Fenwick that you called me a princess?” she asked.
“No.”
“I shall tell her anyway.”
“I know.”
That coaxed the faintest huff from Theodore. It wasn’t exactly laughter, but it was close enough to ease the room. Harriet beamed as if she had mended some great injury with her presence alone and returned to eating.
When the meal ended, Adam left the table sooner than usual, but he was grateful that Harriet hardly noticed. She was telling Theodore something about what a princess would wear—he couldn’t exactly remember—but he knew Theodore noticed.
He was also grateful that the boy said nothing.
Adam stepped out of the room and went to his study. He poured himself a drink and left it untouched on the desk. The room gave him no relief. Theodore’s question had followed him here. So had Harriet’s confidence. So had his own words, repeated now with increasing uselessness.
“This is just to help Lady Emily.”
He said it again in his mind and believed it less.
He crossed to the window, stood there for a moment, then turned away in irritation.
The walls of the house had begun to feel too aware of what awaited in a week’s time.
Servants would already be speaking of linens, flowers, guest lists, and rooms. Mrs. Fenwick would be calculating the movement of the future Duchess and thinking of teaching her how to run the household.
Adam grabbed the drink, swallowed it in one go, and set the glass aside.
Still no relief.
He’d had moments like this back in the army. Moments of utter restlessness, with nothing to do and no one to speak to who would understand him. And there was only one solution he had during that time. Something told him it would work this time around.
He exhaled, fastened his waistcoat, and stepped out of his study.
Within minutes, he was out of the house. The cold night air hit his face, providing the barest modicum of relief. He headed to the stables and mounted a horse, before starting through the London streets.
The horse’s hooves struck the road in a steady rhythm as lamps burned in windows. Other carriages easily rolled past now and then, but he continued to ride leisurely.
Theodore’s face came back to him first, then Harriet’s.Then, despite every effort, Emily’s.
Emily in the garden.
Emily wrapped in his coat by the pond.
Emily refusing him, with her chin lifted and hurt flashing under her anger.
Emily, who was apparently becoming the axis around which servants, children, scandal, and his own cursed thoughts had begun to turn.
By the time he reached his club, he was no calmer than when he had left. He was simply elsewhere, and that would have to do for now. He handed over the reins, climbed the steps, and went inside.
The club received him with the very thing he had come for—quiet masculine order, the low murmur of contained conversation, and the smell of tobacco and spirits. No one here looked at him as though a wedding had already built itself around his life.
For one brief moment, relief touched him.
Then he spotted the figure in the back corner.
A young man sat too stiffly in a chair near the wall, hat pulled low, coat cut badly across the shoulders, one hand wrapped around a glass he did not seem to be drinking from. There was something wrong in the stillness.
Adam slowed down.
The figure turned just enough to avoid being seen more directly, and that alone confirmed it. No man bred to these rooms ever tried that hard to vanish.
Adam’s gaze sharpened. He took in the miserable fit of the coat, the jawline beneath the brim, the mouth set in a shape he knew far too well by now.
Wait a minute.Is that ? —
A wave of disbelief hit first, then recognition followed at once.
Good God.
He crossed the room without haste and stopped beside the chair. “Stand up.”
The figure cleared their throat. “Pardon me, Your Grace, I do not?—”
“I know it is you, Lady Emily. Stand. Up.”
The disguised figure went rigid, then slowly looked up. Emily stared at him from under the brim of a terrible hat.
The first thing Adam felt was astonishment. The second was anger sharpened by fear. She looked absurd and tired enough beneath the disguise to make the absurdity sit badly.
He leaned closer and kept his voice low. “What on earth do you think you are doing?”
She lifted her chin at once. Even dressed like a boy on the run, she managed to look just as defiant as she always was.
“Thinking.”
“In my club?”
“In a chair, yes.”
“Does your brother know you are here?”
She looked at him, her eyes defiant. “Do you really want an answer to that?”
He could have shaken her. Instead, he exhaled and swallowed as hard as he could. “Is this why you refused me? To do childish things like this?”
Her eyes flashed. “I suppose it is only childish when it is not a man doing it?”
“A man in such a coat would be thrown out for poor judgment.”
“That is not the part you object to.”
“No.” He bent nearer. “The part I object to is finding my betrothed disguised like a badly dressed schoolboy in a room full of men who would devour the story if they noticed you.”