Chapter 7 #2
“Travel,” she said. “He wrote that I should travel abroad. That it would suit me. That I had…” A faint warmth moved across her expression, unguarded for just a moment.
“He said I had too much curiosity for the life the county could offer and that I ought to see the world before the world became smaller.” She paused.
“But that I must do so as a married woman. He was quite firm on that point. Travel abroad, but only with the protection of a husband.”
Tristan was quiet for a moment.
“And so,” he said.
“And so,” she agreed, with perfect composure, “when Eliza came to me the night before the wedding, weeping and desperate and in need of a solution, I found that I had somewhat more incentive than pure selflessness might suggest.”
“You needed a husband,” he said.
“I needed a husband. I also genuinely could not bear the thought of Eliza being made miserable.” She lifted her chin slightly. “It was not a calculation. But it was not entirely not a calculation either. I thought you ought to know that, since you appear to prefer plain speaking.”
He regarded her for a long moment.
“I do,” he said. “Prefer it.”
“I know.” A brief, wry curve of her mouth. “You made that apparent in the carriage.”
“I was—” He paused. “Perhaps not at my most diplomatic.”
“You accused me of being a paid conspirator. Among other things.”
“Yes. That was the least diplomatic part.” He inclined his head, a fractional acknowledgment. “I withdraw it.”
She received this with a small nod, as though storing it away.
“Travel abroad,” he said then, thinking aloud, more to himself than to her. His mind had already shifted into its more familiar mode—the problem presented, the variables assessed, the map of consequence laid out and examined. “Where?”
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your father’s instruction. He said travel abroad. Did he specify where?”
“He—no.” She appeared faintly startled by the turn. “He did not. He said simply that I should go, and that I would know where when the time came. He was something of a romantic, my father. In his way.”
“Mm.” Tristan turned the problem over. Italy, he thought.
Or possibly the Rhine. He had obligations that would make a prolonged absence in summer complicated, but autumn was another matter, and by autumn the more impertinent speculation would have quieted considerably.
“We will have to plan it properly. There is the question of timing—the estate will require my attention through the summer at minimum, and there are certain parliamentary matters I cannot simply—”
“Tristan.”
He stopped.
Imogen was looking at him with an expression he could not immediately classify. Not exasperation, though it bordered on it. Not amusement either, though that was there too. Something more layered than either.
“You are planning our honeymoon,” she said, “as though it is a military campaign.”
“I am ensuring it is done properly.”
“It could also be done—” She appeared to consider. “—with some acknowledgment that I have opinions about where I should like to go.”
He fought a grin. “Where would you like to go?” he said.
She looked at him. He looked back. Outside, another carriage departed, and the room was now down to perhaps fifteen souls, most of them in the process of finding hats and gloves.
“Italy,” she said. “Rome, specifically. And then—if it is not too much—” She hesitated. “Greece.”
He absorbed this. “Greece is not nothing. The roads are—”
“I know what the roads are. I have read extensively about the roads.” She held his gaze with perfect steadiness. “I would still like to go. See the Collisuim, the Parthenon.”
He regarded her for one more moment. Then, with the same air of a man closing a ledger—though a rather different ledger than the one in the carriage—he nodded.
“Greece,” he said. “After Rome. Autumn, I think, is the better season for it in any case.” He reached for the final inch of his wine.
“We will spend the summer at Whitmore—my estate in Wiltshire. It will give the more inventive members of the ton adequate time to construct and then exhaust their theories about this morning, and it will give us—” He paused, and looked at her directly, with the same frank, unhurried attention he had employed to such unsettling effect earlier. “—adequate time to become acquainted.”
The faintest color.
“Adequate time,” she repeated. “That is one way to describe a summer.”
“I am a practical man,” he said. “I find adequacy aspirational, in a first marriage.”
She made a small sound—not quite a laugh, not quite the suppression of one—and looked away toward the dwindling room. “Are you already planning my demise then?”
“Not specifically,” he said.
“Whitmore,” she said, after a moment, turning the word over as if testing the sound of it.
“You will like it,” he said, with the particular confidence of a man who knew his house. “The library is excellent.”
She turned back to him.
And this time, the smile was entirely real—unperformed, unguarded, quick and warm and gone almost before he had fully registered it, like a phrase of music heard through an open window.
“Well,” she said, quietly. “That is something.”
He found, with some surprise, that he agreed.