Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
She had been trying to find the right moment for a week.
This was, she recognized, an entirely uncharacteristic problem. She was not, as a general rule, a woman who struggled to find words. Words had always been reliably available to her—in excess, her mother would have said, and not as a compliment.
She had, more or less, talked her way down a church aisle in another woman’s dress. She had navigated a distrustful and suspicious duke in a carriage while wearing borrowed silk. She had handled considerably more alarming conversational situations than this one.
And yet.
She was sitting in the library window seat, Ptolemy arranged across her feet like a small, self-satisfied sovereign. The other kittens, because of course they had kept all of them, were napping in various places in the library.
One of the things Imogen had learned about her husband in these last few months was that he seemed to have an inability to say no to her.
And well, the weather was still atrociously and unseasonably cold and wretched outside.
No doubt, the almanacs will someday refer to this as the year with no summer.
She knew it was still likely early, but she also knew that her courses were always on schedule. She had not had one once since arriving at Whitmore Hall.
The door opened.
Tristan came in, Margaret hot on his heels.
It hadn’t taken Mama cat very long to decide that Tristan was hers, and she perched on him whenever he was remotely still.
He was in his riding clothes, which meant he had come directly from the stables.
His hair was slightly disordered from the windgiving him a devil may care look that set her blood ablaze.
Her husband was an exceedingly attractive man.
“You’re staring,” he said.
“I’m appreciating,” she corrected.
He grunted and took a seat in his usual chair. Margaret immediately jumped up and settled herself in his lap. “Bloody cats are everywhere.” His words were cross, but his demeanor belied the truth. He adored their felines as much as she did.
He picked up his book.
She looked down at her lap. “Tristan,” she said.
“Hmm?” he said, not taking his eyes off the pages of his book.
“I have something I need to tell you.” She paused. Ptolemy shifted on her feet and began to purr with. He clearly had no qualms about the current conversation.
When she remained quiet for a few breaths, Tristan looked up. “Are you well?” he asked, concern etched into his features.
“I am—” She stopped. She drew in a breath, then tried again. “We are going to have a child.”
Silence.
It was a short silence, and entirely different in quality from his usual silences. She watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.
“You are certain?”
“As certain as I can be. I have not had my courses since we arrived here.”
He nodded.
Her heart pounded. “Are you displeased?”
He stood, picking up the large calico from his lap and setting her on the chair. He walked to the window seat and cupped her face.
“Never. I could never be disappointed with you. And certainly not because of this.” He pressed his lips to hers, then leaned back, looked at her for a long moment. “Are you well?”
“Quite well. A little tired in the mornings, but nothing—” She stopped at his expression. “Tristan, I am perfectly fine. You are not to become anxious about me. Women have babies every day. And I clearly come from some very fertile stock.”
“I am not anxious,” he said quickly. Though the nerves tightened his voice.
“You are doing the face you do when you are organizing something in your head.”
He appeared to consider denying this, then did not. “Italy,” he said.
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“We were to go to Rome in September.” He said it not accusatorially, but with the particular quality of a man discovering that a plan he had invested considerable effort in required revision. “And then Greece.”
Something moved through her chest, warm and complicated. She set the letter aside. “We will go another time. Rome will still be there.”
“I know Rome will still be there.” He carded his fingers through his hair.
“I had arranged everything. The itinerary, the accommodation, the letters of introduction.” A pause.
“I had found a scholar at the British Museum who had agreed to meet us at the Forum and spend two days walking us through it in detail.” Another pause.
“His name is Professor Alderton and he is apparently the foremost living expert on the Palatine Hill.”
She looked at his back. Something was happening in her throat that made speech temporarily inadvisable.
“You organized a scholar,” she said, when she had recovered the use of her voice. “For me.”
“You wanted to go to Rome.” He said it simply. “One should go to Rome properly.”
She was quiet for a moment. Ptolemy had migrated from her feet to the warm armchair Tristan had vacated, and was now arranging himself next to his mother.
“You do too much,” she said.
He turned from the window. “I beg your pardon?”
“For me.” She met his eyes steadily. “You spoil me. All of the private library visits you’ve arranged, and the riding lessons. Not to mention bringing in all of the cats, which I know you would never have done otherwise.”
He shrugged. “It is still cold outside.”
“Then this trip. I know you have planned it meticulously.” She stopped, because the warmth in her throat was becoming something more difficult to manage. “You do all of it for me.”
“Yes,” he said, with the mild inflection of a man confirming an obvious fact.
“I know why,” she said. “I told you, on our wedding day, that I had never been first. That I was the sixth daughter, and there was never enough left over by the time anyone got to me. And you heard it, and you—” She stopped.
Pressed her lips together. “You have been remedying it. Methodically. The way you do everything.”
He was watching her. With that way of his where he made her feel seen with a thoroughness that was simultaneously the most comfortable and most unnerving sensation she had experienced.
“It is too much,” she said quietly. “I am not fragile, Tristan. You don’t have to—”
“Imogen.”
She stopped.
He cupped her cheek. “You think,” he said, “that I do these things for you.”
“Don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “And no.” He sat beside her on the window seat. He locked his eyes on hers. “I do them because they make you—” He paused. “I do them because I get to watch your face when something pleases you. And I find that I am quite incapable of giving that up.”
She stared at him.
“I had not,” he said, “before you—known that I was capable of this. Of any of this,” he said.
“I have always lived an orderly life that never brought with it many surprises or alterations. Until you.” He paused again.
“I thought I was a man of moderate feeling. I had arranged my life on that basis. I had selected a wife on that basis.” His eyes did not move from hers.
“And then you came down that aisle and spoke vows with me, and I have not been moderate since.”
She could not speak. She was not certain she was breathing.
“What I feel,” he said, “is not moderate. It is not—” He stopped, and she could see him searching, which he did not often do—he was not usually a man who searched for words, he simply had them, precisely the right ones, always.
“It is not manageable, Imogen. It is not the kind of thing I can organize, structure, or keep in its proper column. It is—” He inhaled deeply.
“It is very large. It is the largest thing I have ever known in all of my thirty-two years. And the scholar at the British Museum, and the kittens, and bringing you tea every morning—” His voice was even, but only just. “I do not do those things only for you. I do them because they are the only available currency for something that has no other way of being expressed. Because what I feel for you is too—” He stopped.
“I have to do things with it, Imogen. Or it has nowhere to go.”
She looked at him. And smiled. Because she knew all about that big feeling he was describing. “You love me,” she said.
Something moved through his face. The last of the careful, residual structure he had been maintaining came down. He breathed a sigh of relief.
“Yes,” he said. “I rather think I do. Though I would prefer,” he added, “if you did not inform Flynn. He will be insufferably pleased with himself.”
She laughed. And then, because it seemed the only possible response to a man who had just taken himself entirely apart in a library window seat, she put her hands on either side of his face and kissed him.
He kissed her back without reservation, with his hands in her hair.
When she lifted her head, his eyes were open, watching her.
“I have been trying,” she said, “to find the correct moment to tell you something for rather longer than a week. Something other than our baby.”
He waited.
“I love you,” she said. “I suspect I have been falling in love with you since our wedding day.” She kept her hands at his face, her thumbs against his jaw.
“I love you and all your meticulous plans. I love that you spoil me. I love that you whisper to the kittens when you think no one is watching.” She searched his face.
“I love that you are not moderate. I love that you couldn’t be even when you tried. ”
He was looking at her with the expression she had never found a word for. She found one now.
Home. That was what it was. That was what he looked like, and what he felt like, and what Whitmore had become. Somehow, against all available planning, she ended up exactly where she was meant to be.
“Rome will wait,” she said. “We will go in the spring. The baby will be three months old and sturdy enough to travel, and we will write to Professor Alderton and postpone, and we will still see the Palatine Hill.”
“Yes,” he said. “We will.”
“And Greece after.”
“And Greece after.”
She leaned her forehead against his. “You are going to be a remarkable father, Tristan. You are entirely too organized not to be.”
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a breath but something in between.
“And you,” he said, “are going to be an extraordinary mother. You are entirely too stubborn not to be.”
She lifted her head and looked at him.
“I take that as a compliment,” she said.
“It was intended as one,” he said. “Everything I say to you is.”
Imogen Somerset, née Harrington, sixth of eight daughters, improbable Duchess of Winfield, settled her head against her husband’s shoulder and listened to him breathe, and found—as she found every morning, and every evening, and every quiet moment in between—that this was sufficient.
That it was, in point of fact, everything.
She had not planned for him.
But then, the best things rarely arrived according to plan.