Chapter 27
“Where is she?”
William Harcourt stood in the entrance hall of Blackholm House with his coat unbuttoned, his satchel hanging from one shoulder, and the same tremor in his hands Evander remembered from the study visit three weeks ago.
The young scholar’s eyes were wide and searching, moving from Evander to the staircase to the corridor beyond, and every line of his body strained toward a door he had not yet been shown.
“She is upstairs,” Evander said. “With Mary and the baby.”
William’s face crumpled. He pressed his fist against his mouth and closed his eyes, and for a moment, Evander thought the man might collapse right there in the entrance hall.
He did not.
He drew a breath, opened his eyes, and straightened.
“Take me to her. Please.”
Evander led him upstairs. At the nursery door, he paused. Inside, Charlotte sat in the rocking chair with Tommy asleep against her chest. Mary stood beside the window, and Richard leaned against the far wall. Three people and a baby, waiting.
William stepped through the doorway. Charlotte looked up.
The sound she made was not a word. It was closer to the sound Tommy made when he woke from a nightmare and found arms around him, the desperate, animal relief of someone who had been alone too long and suddenly was not.
Charlotte rose from the chair, Tommy still pressed against her shoulder, and William crossed the room in three strides and wrapped his arms around both of them.
Charlotte buried her face against his neck. William’s hand came up and cradled the back of her head, and his other arm enclosed the baby between their bodies, and the three of them stood in the nursery in a tangle of arms and tears and months of silence, collapsing at once.
“I’m sorry.” William’s voice broke on the first word. “Charlotte. I am so sorry. I looked for you. I came back, and you were gone, and no one knew where you were, and I searched every—”
“Where did you go?” Charlotte pulled back far enough to see his face. Tears ran freely, and her grip on his coat was white-knuckled. “You vanished. I went to your rooms, and the landlady said—”
“The landlady turned me out. I had missed two months’ rent.
I had nothing, Charlotte. No savings. No family in London.
I went back to my father’s village and worked in the fields for three months to earn enough to return.
” William’s voice was ragged. “By the time I came back to London, you were gone. Then I heard that you’d disappeared, and no one knew where you’d gone.
But I also heard that… that you’d had a baby, and you’d left him at the Duke’s house. ”
“You came here.” Charlotte gripped his face between her hands. “Evander told me.”
“I came for the manuscript because it was the only excuse I could invent to get through the door. I thought if I could see the house, see where the baby was, I might find some way to reach you.” William’s eyes moved to Tommy, sleeping undisturbed between their bodies.
“I saw nothing. I heard nothing. And I was too much of a coward to ask.”
“You are not a coward.” Charlotte kissed him. Brief and fierce, her hand still gripping his face, her tears wetting his cheeks. “You are here now. That is what matters.”
William pulled back and looked at Tommy. The baby slept on, oblivious to the upheaval around him, his fist curled against Charlotte’s collar. William touched the child’s head, and his fingers trembled.
“He is so small,” William whispered. “I thought I was prepared. I am not prepared at all.”
Charlotte took his hand and pressed it flat against Tommy’s back. “Feel that? His heartbeat. He’s strong.”
William closed his eyes. His palm rested against the baby’s back, and his breath hitched once, and when he opened his eyes, they were bright and certain, and the trembling had stopped.
He turned to Charlotte and took her hand. “Marry me.”
Charlotte’s breath caught. “I have nothing to offer you except myself. I am a scholar with no fortune, no title, and a father who is a country clergyman. I cannot give you what your family expected. But I will work. I will find a way to provide for you and for our son, and I will spend every day of my life making certain that neither of you ever feels abandoned again.” His voice was quiet and absolute. “Marry me, Charlotte.”
The nursery was silent. Mary’s hand covered her mouth. Richard looked at the floor, his jaw working.
Evander stood in the doorway and watched a man with nothing offer everything he had, and the simplicity of it, the total absence of calculation, landed against Evander’s chest with a force that shamed him.
This was what love looked like when it was not afraid of itself.
Evander stepped forward.
“Mr. Harcourt.” His voice cut through the room, and every face turned to him. “You said you speak French.”
William blinked. “I do, Your Grace. I studied at the Sorbonne for two years before returning to London.”
“And Charlotte.” Evander looked at his sister-in-law. “You speak French as well?”
“Our governess was Parisian,” Charlotte said, confusion creasing her brow. “Mary and I both speak it fluently.”
“Good.” Evander clasped his hands behind his back.
“Then here is what I propose: I have contacts at the Université de Paris through my family’s academic endowments.
I will write to them this week and secure a research position for Mr. Harcourt.
The salary will be modest but respectable, and I will supplement it with a quarterly allowance drawn from the Blackholm estate.
Enough for a comfortable home, a nursemaid for Tommy, and the kind of life that allows a scholar to do his work without starving. ”
William stared at him. Charlotte’s grip on William’s hand tightened.
“France is close enough to visit,” Evander continued. “Mary can see Tommy as often as she wishes. You will be beyond the reach of the ton’s gossip, and Tommy can grow up without the shadow of this scandal following him.” He looked at William. “You will never lack for anything. I give you my word.”
William opened his mouth and closed it. He looked at Charlotte, then at Evander, and his eyes filled.
“Your Grace, I cannot accept—”
“You can. And you will. That child deserves parents who are present and a household that is stable, and I am in a position to ensure both.” Evander’s voice softened. “Consider it a wedding gift.”
Charlotte crossed the room and seized Evander’s hand. She pressed it between both of hers, her face blotched and radiant. “Thank you. I do not have words. Thank you, Your Grace.”
Evander extracted his hand with the careful discomfort of a man unaccustomed to being thanked. “Write to your father. He will need to be told, and it is better coming from you than from anyone else.”
Charlotte turned back to William. She took his hand and placed it on Tommy’s back, so that the baby lay between them, held by both.
“Yes,” she said. “I will marry you.”
William kissed her forehead. Charlotte closed her eyes.
Evander looked at Mary. She stood by the window, with tears streaming down her face, her arms wrapped around herself, and the expression she wore was the most complicated thing Evander had ever seen on a human face.
Joy. Grief. Love for her sister. Loss of the baby she had raised. Pride in what Evander had just done.
And beneath all of it, something private and painful that was meant only for him.
He inclined his head toward the door. Mary nodded. They slipped out of the nursery, leaving the new family alone.
The corridor was quiet. Mary wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and leaned against the wall beside the nursery door. Inside, Charlotte’s laughter carried through the wood, soft and watery, and William’s murmured voice answered it.
“That was the most generous thing I have ever witnessed,” Mary said. Her voice was unsteady. “France. The university. All of it. You did not have to do any of that.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
Evander did not answer immediately.
Because the boy deserves a father. Because Charlotte deserves a life that is not defined by shame. Because the look on William Harcourt’s face when he offered everything he had was braver than anything I’ve ever done, and the least I could offer in return is the means to make it work.
Because love, despite everything Evander believed about it, had just walked into a nursery and put a family back together, and he could not stand in its way.
“Because it was right,” he ended up saying.
Mary wiped her eyes one more time. She straightened against the wall and looked at him, and the composure she reassembled was thin at the edges but holding.
“I will come to your room tonight.” Her voice was quiet and steady. “For your offer. Since Charlotte and William will want to leave for France as soon as arrangements are made, I imagine you will want to… proceed without delay.”
The words hit Evander in the center of his chest.
He wanted to say no.
He wanted to tell her that she would not be alone.
That he was not leaving. That the offer he had made in her bedroom, the cold, measured proposal of a child without love, had been the act of a man so terrified of his own heart that he would rather give Mary a baby than admit he wanted to give her himself.
He wanted to tell her that watching William Harcourt kneel in a nursery with nothing but his own hands and his own courage and offer a woman everything had cracked something open inside Evander that he did not know how to close.
That the man with nothing had been braver in thirty seconds than the Duke of Blackholm had been in thirty-one years.
The words rose to the back of his throat and stopped there, pressed against a wall he had spent fourteen years building, and the wall held, because it had always held, because holding was what walls did.
“Tonight, then,” he said.
Mary nodded. She walked toward her room, and her footsteps faded down the corridor.
Evander stood alone outside the nursery where a family he had helped build was learning to hold each other, and the silence around him was not the silence of peace.
It was the silence of a man who had just chosen to be lonely rather than risk ruining everything.
And for the first time in his life, the choice felt like the wrong one.