Chapter 21
Barnes arrived at half past nine. This was earlier than his usual hour, which Frederick noticed when Simmons announced him. He was already at his desk. Rachel and Anna were in the morning room. He told Simmons to show Barnes in and went to the morning room door himself.
“Anna,” he said. “Rachel. Barnes is here.”
They came without questions, which said something about the weeks they had all spent learning to move when things needed moving. The four of them arranged themselves in the study with the familiarity of people who had done this before.
Barnes sat across the desk. Frederick behind it. Rachel beside Anna. Barnes did not open his folder. This was the first deviation from his established pattern, and Frederick registered it immediately.
“I have some unexpected news,” Barnes said. He said it in the particular register he used for things that required care in the delivery—not soft; Barnes was never soft, but deliberate. He looked at Anna. “News that changes the situation materially.”
Anna was very still. “Tell me plainly, Mr. Barnes,” she said.
“Lord Birchall was found dead this morning,” Barnes said.
“At a private gaming establishment in St. James’s.
He had been there through the night, by several accounts.
The circumstances, as relayed to me by the attending physician, indicate a sudden cardiac event.
” A pause. “The signs point to a heart attack. There is, as yet, no indication of any other cause.”
The room was quiet.
Anna repeated, “He is dead. Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Barnes said.
“Birchall is dead.”
“Yes, Miss Cartwell.”
She did not say anything else immediately. She was looking at the edge of the desk with the expression of someone trying to locate the correct response and finding that no single one is adequate.
Frederick looked at her. He looked at Rachel, who was looking at Anna with her hand hovering, not quite settled on her arm yet.
“What happens now?” Anna said. Her voice was measured. She was making it measured. He could see the effort of it, and the effort was, for once, not composed but was something rawer underneath. “Practically speaking. What does this mean for the petition?”
Barnes folded his hands. “The petition is no longer necessary. The marriage, as it existed, is concluded by his death. You are not seeking an annulment of a marriage that no longer…” He paused.
“Legally, you are his widow. The marriage was contracted, however its circumstances, and his death resolves it conclusively. You are free.”
A silence.
“Free,” Anna said, as if testing the word’s weight.
“There is also the matter of inheritance,” Barnes continued.
“Birchall’s estate will be handled by his own solicitors, but as his widow, you are entitled to a portion.
I would expect his attorney to make contact within the fortnight.
I would strongly advise,” he looked at Frederick, “that you have representation when that conversation takes place.”
“You’ll contact Barnes immediately on Miss Cartwell’s behalf,” Frederick said. “He will negotiate on her behalf, and I will cover his fee.”
“Your Grace. I cannot allow you—” Anna began.
“It is not a discussion,” Frederick said. He looked at Barnes. “Whatever she is owed by his estate, she will have it in full. Make that plain.”
Barnes nodded. He rose. “I will be in contact when I have more from the Birchall solicitors. In the meantime,” he looked at Anna, and something in his expression, usually so spare, made the smallest concession to warmth, “I am glad to bring you a piece of news that requires no action on your part other than to receive it.” He gave a brief bow. “Good day.”
Frederick walked him out. When he came back to the study, Rachel was on her feet, and Anna was in her arms. He stood in the doorway and watched them.
“It’s over,” Rachel said, into Anna’s hair. Her voice was not its usual composed self. It was the voice of someone who had been frightened for a long time and had just been given permission to stop. “It is over, Anna. He is gone. It is done!”
Anna’s hands had come up to Rachel’s back.
She was holding on. Her face was not visible.
He could see only the line of her shoulders, which were doing something complicated, neither entirely still nor entirely giving way, the specific posture of someone navigating the distance between enormous relief and an emotion that didn’t have a clean name yet.
“He got what he deserved,” Rachel said.
He thought this was probably true, and said nothing.
After a moment, Anna pulled back and looked at Rachel’s face and then looked, briefly, at Frederick, and the look she gave him was something he could not take. Too many things in it at once. He held it for a moment and looked away.
“I’ll have Mrs. Hale bring tea,” he said.
She did not sleep well, which was strange. She had expected to sleep very well. The weight had lifted. The thing that had been sitting at the base of every day for months. The petition, the waiting, Barnes’s letters, Birchall’s name recurring in every conversation… it was simply gone.
She was free. She was a widow, with a widow’s legal standing and whatever provisions Birchall’s estate extended to her, and the annulment was no longer needed, and the deposition was moot, and she would never have to walk into a room where the door might open and let him in.
She lay in the dark and felt all of this, and found that beneath it was something else entirely.
You are going to have to leave.
She had known this. Of course she had known this.
The arrangement had been predicated on resolution, and resolution had come, and now she would go.
She would go to wherever she was going—the country manor, Barnes had indicated, came with the inheritance, which was more than she had any right to expect, a substantial gift from a man who had not meant it as one.
She would be independent. She would have a house of her own and an allowance and no one directing her movements. She would be free, just as she had been asking to be free since that damned wedding day.
She thought about breakfast tables. The sound of a door in the east wing.
The study light on, late into the evening.
Percy on the third step, then the second, then beside her.
A cold garden and a man who had said she went home, people go home with the certainty of someone who rearranged the world into sense when he decided it ought to be.
She thought about a corridor and two arms coming around her without hesitation. She turned over in the bed and put her face against the pillow and did not sleep. It was past midnight when she heard the scratching at the door.
She lay still for a moment, not certain she had heard it. It came again, brief, deliberate, the specific quality of something small with opinions. She sat up, found her robe in the dark by memory, and went to the door.
Percy looked up at her.
“Come in, then,” she said.
He came in.
He crossed the room at his usual unhurried pace and jumped onto the foot of the bed, turned once, and settled. She sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at him. He looked back. She picked him up, put her face against the top of his head, and breathed.
“You are a very good cat,” she said, which was not a sentence she had ever expected to utter but was what she meant.
Percy purred. A sound in the corridor. A footstep, unhurried. She looked up. Frederick had stopped in the doorway.
He was in shirtsleeves, no coat, no cravat, the shirt open at the collar. Anna could tell he also had not been sleeping and had not yet decided what to do about it. He looked at Percy in her arms. He looked at her face.
“There he is,” he said quietly. “I came to find him.”
“He came to find me,” she said.
He stood in the doorway, and she sat on the edge of the bed with Percy warm against her chest, and neither of them moved.
The room was dark except for the small lamp she had lit on the nightstand, and in the lamp’s light his face was unguarded as it was sometimes late at night, when the controlled surface was tired.
“How are you?” he said.
“I am not certain,” she said. Which was the truth, and she was tired of anything else. “I thought I would feel differently.”
“How did you think you would feel?”
“Simply glad.” She looked at Percy, at the slow movement of his breathing. “And I am glad. I am.” She pressed her hand gently along the cat’s back. “But it is strange. It is like waiting for a storm for so long, that when it passes you don’t know what to do with the quiet.”
He came into the room, but not far. He sat in the chair by the window, which put him across the room from her. She registered this, the deliberateness of the distance, and the fact that he had sat rather than going.
“Now that it’s all over, I’ll go.” She looked at him. “As we agreed.”
He said nothing.
“Barnes says the country property is in Wiltshire. Small, apparently. Two miles from the nearest village.” She turned Percy’s ear gently between her fingers, which he permitted. “I have been trying to decide whether Wiltshire is good.”
“It’s decent land,” he said. “Good air.”
“You sound like an estate report.”
Something shifted in his face. “I know.” He looked at his hands, which were resting on his knees. “I am trying to… be useful.”
“You have been useful,” she said. “For weeks. You have been, absolutely. But, oh, Frederick, you have—” She stopped.
The lamp was warm, the room was quiet, and Percy was like a steady warm weight against her chest. She was tired; that was the problem. She was tired, and the storm had passed, and she was sitting in the quiet of it with this man across the room who would not look at her quite directly.
If not now, when?
“I am going to miss… this house,” she said.
It was not quite what she meant, but it was a true thing. He looked up.
“I am going to miss this place.” She stopped. “I am going to miss Rachel. And Percy.”
“I’m certain Rachel and Percy will miss you too,” he replied.
She held his gaze. “And… I will miss you, as well.”
The silence that followed was the kind that asked something of both people in it. The Duke stood and crossed the room, and she had thought he was going to stop. She prayed he would stop. But then, he was at the doorway again, at the edge of things, where he always was…
Then she blinked, and realized he came to where she was sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked up at him, and stopped breathing as she took in his warm, amber eyes, his sandy brown hair.
He reached out and took Percy, very gently, from her arms. Percy made a sound of mild protest and then subsided. Frederick set him at the foot of the bed, where Percy sat and regarded them with the focused attention of a small grey witness.
“Don’t do that,” he murmured. His throat moved as he swallowed.
“Don’t ask me things when you know I am hanging on by a thread.
You ask as if I’ve had a single proper thought since you arrived,” he rasped, staring down at her.
“I sit across from you night after night, trying to be useful, trying to be a gentleman… while every line of you makes my control strain to the point of snapping.”
She stopped breathing, her skin prickling with sudden heat.
“Will I miss you, Anna?” he asked, his voice rougher than before as he glanced down at her lips.
“I… I miss you constantly, Anna. Even when you’re standing right before me.
I stand across from you day after day, suffocating on it, this endless, aching need to touch you.
To drag you into my arms and taste you until I can't think straight. It’s consuming me, Anna.
I haven't had a single quiet breath since you got here, because all I want, all I’ve craved until I’m nearly out of my mind, is this. ”
And then Frederick’s hand came back, and it settled against her jaw, and he tilted her face up.
He kissed her.
It was not tentative, but hot and seeking. It was all the things she didn’t allow herself to dream of. His mouth was warm, soft, yet certain.
Her hands came up to his chest and gripped the front of his shirt. She kissed him back with everything that had been accumulating since a morning when she had stood in his entrance hall in a wedding dress with mud on the hem and decided she trusted him because she had no other option.
Now, she knew that she had been right.
He slipped his tongue inside of her mouth, and she moaned, eager for him.
His hand slid from her jaw to the back of her head, and the other came to her waist, and she was pulled closer, and she went. She went entirely. Her hands moved up to his broad shoulders, and he made a sound low in his throat that she felt more than heard.
“You are delectable,” he growled.
He kissed her again, different now, deeper, the careful surface of him comprehensively gone. What was under it was warm, present and utterly Frederick, more Frederick than she had known was there, and she took a leg to wrap him close when—
He stopped.
He did not stop gradually. He pulled back with the same decisiveness that had brought him across the room, and he put two feet of space between them in a single movement.
The Duke was back, and he stood with his hands at his sides and his breathing not quite steady. She looked at him, her eyes searching for a reason.
“I—” He stopped. He looked at the window, not at her. “I am sorry,” he said. His voice was low and very even and cost him something to make it so. “You… you have had a difficult day, and you are leaving, and I am not…” He stopped again. “It is not fair to you.”
Anna sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him. She understood what he was doing. She even, in the part of her that thought clearly and had always thought clearly, understood why.
He was being, in his way, careful of her.
He was doing the thing he always did, protecting her from any version of the situation that could go wrong.
“Goodnight, Frederick,” she said, too tired to fight it, too overwhelmed to think straight.
He looked at her for one moment. The thing she had seen in his face before he pulled back was still there, not quite gone, not yet.
And then, he was in the corridor, and the door was pulled gently closed.
She sat in the quiet, and Percy walked up the bed and settled beside her hip. She put her hand on his back and began to stroke.
Percy purred steadily, and she sat in the lamplight for a very long time.