Chapter 2
Chapter
The morning was too fine for Julianna’s mood. Sunshine spilled through the tall windows of Chester House, burnishing the breakfast table in a warm glow, gilding the silver and porcelain until the entire room gleamed. She ought to have felt charmed. Instead, she felt unsettled.
Fred sat across from her, his newspaper folded at his elbow, his teacup untouched. He looked every inch the Local Adonis he was named: his coat impeccably cut, his blonde curls tumbling down around his blue eyes. They were guarded this morning, though.
Whatever had happened last night, first in the carriage ride to the restaurant where he could hardly seem to breathe and then again, after dinner, had changed him. Made him wary and formal.
He had watched her at Tremaux’s as though she were the only woman in all of England; he had fed her bites of roast beef with a gentleness that melted her bones. And yet each time the air grew too close, each time their hearts and lips might have collided, he had pulled away from her.
She was tired of it. Tired of being drawn near only to be pushed back. Tired of not knowing the truth of him, even after he’d promised to stop lying to her.
“Fred,” she said, laying down her fork with deliberate care. “Will you tell me what it is?”
He looked up and she knew, even before he spoke, that he would deflect. “What is what?”
“What is happening in your mind? No, not your mind.” She shook her head. “Your heart, I think, is what needs explaining. You hold me close one moment and keep me at arm’s length the next. I am not blind nor am I a fool. Something is wrong. Tell me what it is.”
“Jules—” He set down the paper and leaned back in his chair and she knew—she knew—he was concocting a lie.
Damn him. “No more evasions, Fred. I am your wife and yet you hardly touch me.” Her voice shook more than she might have liked, but she pressed on anyway. “If there is something I must know, please tell me what it is.”
For a long moment he only stared at her, the silence stretching thin as the gossamer strands of a spider’s web. Then he exhaled sharply and dragged a hand through his hair. “I can’t,” he said. The words sounded wrenched out of him. “I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I cannot.” His gaze softened then, unbearably tender despite his cool tone. “Jules, can’t you simply…be with me? Like this, without questions?”
She could only stare at him, the bright points of sunlight reflecting back from the silver spoon she held in her hand. “Like this,” she repeated quietly.
“Yes.”
He was asking if she could live in this world of pushing and pulling, drawing her close and then retreating. A marriage lived at arm’s length, as if he could keep her safe by keeping her apart from himself—financially secure and emotionally bereft.
Julianna’s voice was steady when she said, “No.”
His gaze snapped to hers. “No?”
“No,” she repeated, and the word landed harder this time.
“I have been with you, Fred. I have ridden beside you in a carriage, slept under your roof, eaten at your table, held my tongue while you decided what was best for all of us. As though we were chess pieces you might arrange to your liking.” She lifted her chin.
“I will not do it any longer. You promised to tell me the truth and it is obvious now that you have not.”
His face went very still as the color drained from it. “You don’t understand.”
She realized then how much he must have been hoping she would acquiesce, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t agree to a life filled with half-truths, not after Robert. She wouldn’t.
“What I understand is that you want my companionship without my questions. You want a wife you can keep by your side as long as she remains docile and quiet and apart from you.”
“That is not—”
“Then what is it? Tell me. And if you think you are being kind or merciful or some other nonsense by keeping silent, you are not. You are being cowardly.”
He flinched as if she’d slapped him but she held her ground, even while her heart hammered in her chest. Her heart was either a tiny, little coward or a tiny, little tyrant.
She wasn’t sure which, but she knew she wasn’t going to be swayed by it any longer.
Her head was firmly in control of this conversation.
She looked up at her husband, whose jaw was clenched so tightly she was half afraid he might break his teeth. “You have no idea what you’re asking,” he said, finally.
“That is exactly my point. I don’t know. And I won’t unless you tell me.”
“And if I did? If I told you the whole of it?” He laughed bitterly, his eyes bright with something…anger? Fear? She couldn’t read his expression but that was because she didn’t know the context of his question. Which was, again, the point of asking.
“It would not merely change how you look at me, Jules. It would change the very ground beneath our feet.”
“And what does it matter?” she demanded. “Is this ground so good? So stable? I am your wife, whether you touch me or not. Thomas is dying, whether you tell him the truth or not. It’s not clear to me this half-lived state of affairs is worth preserving.”
His eyes darkened. “Don’t.”
“Why?” she pressed, stepping out from behind the safe barrier of the table and closing the distance between them. “Because if I name this growing sentiment between us aloud, it becomes real? Because if we speak plainly, you lose your excuse to stay away from me?”
“You aren’t making any sense.”
“Of course I’m not! I don’t know what the hell is happening, Fred.
Of course I only have vague metaphors and loose suggestions at my disposal.
What else could I possibly have? I am not a mind reader nor do I wish to be.
” She dropped her voice low. “I am asking you, husband, please, to tell me the truth of what is in your heart if not in your head.”
His jaw worked and he closed his eyes slowly. And then he said very quietly, “I can’t.”
Julianna stilled. “Why not?”
Fred’s gaze flicked to the door and then back, before he put his head in his hands. When he spoke again, his voice was muffled through the layers of his own flesh and bones. “I said I can’t.”
Julianna felt something inside her go cold as she realized that he truly was not going to let her in. She had told him everything and he was not going to reciprocate. “So you intend to live like this forever?”
“No,” he said far too quickly. “Of course not.”
“When, then, will it be safe enough to tell me your secrets? When Thomas is in the ground? When the gossip has found some other corpse to pick clean? When you have made yourself back into Chester and I’ve lost my Fred entirely?”
She cut herself off, her cheeks flaming at what she’d said. My Fred. But she did not retreat from her own words. She couldn’t very well demand honesty from him and then hide from it herself.
His eyes flashed at her as he growled out a warning, “Jules. We have been happy here these last days. Can you not leave it be and enjoy it?”
“No. You do not get to quiet me. Not in my own marriage.”
For one short moment, she thought he might come to her. Might rise from that table and envelop her in his arms and whisper “Jules” in an entirely different tone in her ear. Might let her into his heart and mind, might tell her whatever truth he’d so obviously been holding back from her.
Instead, when he drew himself up, jaw clenched in that aristocratic way that made him look carved from stone, even with the damnable dimples, he said, “You are correct. I am not able to give you what you want.”
Her throat tightened and she felt the tears threatening to come. “And what do you think I want?”
“Too much.”
His tone was breathtakingly glacial. He was no longer her Fred at all but the cold, snide, Earl of Chester. The sudden swerve nearly made her dizzy.
“Yes, Fred, I do. I want it all.”
“You don’t get to have it. None of us do.”
He looked away first and she realized they were now standing across the room from each other. Like duelers squaring off at dawn. She hadn’t noticed when they’d moved. Nor the practiced scratch of a servant’s knock upon the door.
“Enter,” Fred said and Gilbert appeared.
He cleared his throat quietly and flicked his eyes from Fred to Julianna and then back again. “My lord, you have a caller.”
“Send them away.”
“Certainly. I will let Inspector Hughes know this is not an appropriate calling hour.”
“Why is an inspector here?” Julianna asked sharply.
“It is nothing.”
“Then you won’t mind if I meet with him. Gilbert, show the Inspector in.”
“Julianna—”
“No, Fred. If you won’t tell me what is happening, I’ll learn it for myself.”
Fred followed his wife into the front parlor where Gilbert had left the Inspector. He couldn’t very well let Julianna meet the man alone. She may ask him to investigate any number of things, starting and ending with himself.
“It’s good of you to come so soon,” Fred said in greeting and held out his hand.
Inspector Hughes was of middling height and solid through the shoulders.
He was lean though, built more for endurance than raw strength.
A distance horse, not a sprinter. His coat sat cleanly on him for the most part.
It wouldn’t take much, Fred thought, to make the cut as precise as it ought to be to suit him.
His hair was a dark brown with the early markings of gray threading through his sideburns.
There was little to distinguish him at first glance—no striking feature to hold the eye. And Fred realized it was a look cultivated to blend into the crowd, one that likely made the Inspector very, very good at his job.
Inspector Hughes raised an eyebrow before he took Fred’s hand. “Most Earls don’t shake hands with their enquiry men.”
Fred didn’t bother to reply to that. He might be an Earl now but that hadn’t always been the case.
And that conversation with Jules had made him realize how much he disliked who he was when he was Chester.
He just didn’t always know how not to be the Earl, how to not be the coward his wife had accused him of being.