Chapter 1
Chapter
The house was too quiet. Julianna noticed it the moment she stepped back over the threshold.
Sedgewick Manor had never exactly been a cheerful place—but now, with Thomas gone, it felt somehow even more emptied out and tomb-like to her.
No Mrs. Sykes quietly tending her brother, nor the physician’s tread on the stairs.
Most of all there was no coughing. No terrible, tearing sound to always be listening for.
She stood in the great hall with her gloves still on and her cloak still buttoned at her throat, listening to the absence of her brother. It veritably roared in her ears.
“Would you like some tea, my lady?” Gilbert asked.
She turned her head. He was standing at his usual discreet distance, hands folded in front of him, his expression grave but composed in the way it always was. Julianna had begun to suspect he’d been hired for that facial expression alone.
“No. Thank you.”
“As you wish. I will send word down to the kitchen.”
She turned then. “Is it already made?”
“The chef has begun preparations. She assumed with Mr. Farrow’s leaving you may wish a repast.”
Everyone, she thought, probably knew Thomas had a bed in Torquay before she did. Even the chef. “Actually—” she heard herself say. “Tea would be nice.”
“Very good, my lady. Where will you take it?”
She looked around. There were a few more habitable rooms now in Sedgewick Manor, but every one of them felt redolent with either Thomas or Fred and, for the moment, she did not want to be steeped in memories of either man. She just wanted, needed, space.
“The morning room,” she said finally. “And would you ask Cook to prepare something plain for supper? Nothing too elaborate.”
“Of course, my lady.”
She went to her own chamber, shut the door, and sat on the edge of the bed without removing either her bonnet or her gloves. Thomas was gone. The thought lodged like a stone in her chest.
And worse still, while she felt guilty that Thomas had gone to a sanatorium, she also felt relief. She had, in fact, felt relief first. Relief that she might be spared the burden of his care and the storm of his temper for even a short while. The realization made her feel slightly sick.
She unfastened her gloves finger by finger and laid them beside her on the coverlet. Her hands looked oddly bare without them. She pressed them into her lap and stared at the linens until the pattern began to blur. And then she put her head into her hands and she cried.
A knock sounded at the door. “My lady? Your tea is in the morning room.”
That was one of the maids, but Julianna didn’t even know her name.
She ought to. As mistress of the house she truly ought to, but she only knew Gilbert and Clara the chef, and Mrs. Sykes, who had now gone away with Thomas.
She wondered if Fred knew everyone’s name, here in Sedgewick Manor and in all the other houses that belonged to him too.
“I’ll be right down,” she said, drying her eyes.
By the time she made it downstairs and poured her tea, it had gone lukewarm.
She drank it anyway. Outside, the afternoon sank slowly toward evening.
The pale spring light reflected off the last heaps of snow, taking on a silver tinge through the windows.
Shadows lengthened across the carpet. She didn’t know how long she sat there, alone, and watched the light turn.
“Jules?”
Fred. She’d know his voice anywhere whether she wanted to or not. She looked up to find him standing on the threshold of the morning room, half in and half out, as if he wasn’t certain he was welcome there.
“What is it?” she asked.
His eyes flicked to the by now very cold tea, then back to her face. “It is nearly seven.”
“Oh.”
“And we are to have supper.” He paused. “Unless you’d rather not.”
She almost said she was not hungry. Which was true.
But she’d said it too often of late, and she knew it would be an insult after she’d asked for dinner to be prepared.
And she could almost hear Thomas’s teasing voice in her head: Eat, Julie-bug.
Eat every hand pie and pudding you can. Take him to the poorhouse with your appetite.
“I’ll be there momentarily.”
Fred nodded once and said, “Take your time.” But he did not move. He just stood there, watching her. And she let him.
When she finally entered the dining room, she found that Gilbert had set the table not in the cavernous formal chamber, but in the smaller room overlooking the side lawn. The fire was lit and lamps glowed softly on the sideboard. The table had been laid for two.
Only two. Julianna stopped short in the doorway. They’d always set the third place, even though Thomas had not dined with them once since they’d arrived at the Manor. He was gone now, so of course they hadn’t set his place. But the lack of it still hit her like an unwelcome shock.
Fred was already there, standing by the fire with one hand braced on the mantel. He turned when she entered, his gaze traveling over her for the briefest of moments before dropping politely away.
She had changed into a plain evening dress of dark blue wool. Nothing about it was notable except that it was clean and dry, and different from what she’d worn to see Thomas off.
“Gilbert thought this room might be less—” He glanced around, searching for the word.
“Bleak?”
He gave a faint huff of laughter, making his dimples show. “Yes. That.”
She took her seat and a footman served the first course in silence: a clear broth with little pearls of barley and soft carrots. It was sensible food. Simple, like she’d requested. Her stomach turned at the sight of it. But she lifted her spoon anyway.
Fred waited for her to begin although she knew he must be starving. He always was. “Eat,” she finally said to him. “No need to wait on me.”
“Are you alright, Jules?”
She looked up at him, found the intensity of his stare to be too much and returned her eyes to her soup. “I don’t know how to answer that.” And then, “Really, Fred. Eat. You look as if you haven’t had a bite all day.”
“That is an unfortunately common expression of mine. Always has been, even though it’s rarely been true.”
Despite herself she found her mouth quirking up into a smile. “I do recall something like that. It was why Mother always invited you to stay for dinner. She was afraid you were starving to death over here, no matter how much Tom or I tried to convince her otherwise.”
“I’m glad you failed, then. I lived for those invitations.”
The smile he showed her was soft and she felt that strange urge again to fit her finger into his dimple. To press in slightly on that small space that seemed just the right size for it.
“You were always welcome there. You were…family.”
They finished that course in silence. Or, Fred did while she fiddled with her spoon. A fish course followed—something delicate with parsley and lemon—but Julianna had little sense of eating it.
She was aware of the fire, though. And of Fred’s hands and his face and the shape of his shoulders in the lamplight. She still wasn’t certain what to feel about her awareness of these things, of all the parts of him.
Or of the fact that no one was coughing upstairs and no nurse would interrupt them. Of how vast the manor house felt around the two of them. She set down her fork. “He’s really gone.”
“He is.”
“Do you think he…wanted me to make him stay?” She didn’t know exactly what she was asking as she stumbled over the words but Fred seemed to grasp her meaning well enough.
“No. I don’t think he did. He wouldn’t have gone if he didn’t think it was a good idea.”
“How can you know?”
He turned his wineglass stem slowly between his fingers.
“Because he loves you, Jules. And because, for all his dramatics and manipulations these last weeks, I don’t think he’s ever been ill-intentioned.
Just short-sighted and feeling the kind of self-pity any of us would feel. Will feel, when our time comes.”
Julianna watched his fingers move. They were competent fingers, those. Ones that could hem and chop and cradle. “I don’t know that I’d call his behavior dramatic exactly.”
Fred’s eyebrow came out to make its point before his lips said a word. “Wouldn’t you? We may as well be living in a penny-novel for all his sturm and drang.”
“He was just trying to protect me.” And then she found herself saying words she hadn’t intended to say. “There was a man before. And it did not end well.”
“Were you in love with him, this man?” he asked and she heard another question underneath: are you still?
She answered truthfully. “No. I was just lonely. My aunt had died and Thomas was still at war and I…needed companionship. I picked Robert Rothchild, undeniably the wrong man.”
He did not ask what happened, but she told him anyway. “We could only afford one visit to the physician when Thomas came home, already showing signs of illness,” she said. “And on the way back we saw Robert coming out of a tavern.” She paused. “With his wife.”
Fred went very still while she went on. “I remember thinking there must be some mistake. That perhaps she was a sister or cousin. Something sensible.” Julianna laughed softly. “But then he looked directly at me and pretended not to know who I was.”
“Christ, Jules.”
“I stood in the middle of the road with my mouth hanging open like a fool. Tom kept asking what was wrong, and I kept saying ‘nothing’ until I burst into tears and told him everything.”
Fred reached for her hand and she appreciated that gesture, how it helped her to continue with this stupid, awful story.
“The worst part,” she said, “was that Robert soon realized Thomas knew. And once he saw how angry my brother was, he decided there was money to be made from the situation. He threatened to tell everyone he’d had his way with me if Tom didn’t spend most of his Army back pay to buy the cad’s silence.
Money we desperately needed, gone in a flash because I had been foolhardy enough to believe a liar.
And that was that. My only romance, built entirely on a lie. ”