Chapter 31
“Iowe you an apology.”
Richard looked up from his coffee. They sat in Evander’s study, the door closed, the morning light falling across the desk between them.
Richard had shaved for the first time since his return, and the face beneath the stubble looked younger than Evander expected. Closer to the boy who had played chess on the rug in this very house fourteen years ago.
“For what?” Richard asked.
“For not believing you.” Evander set his own cup down. “When you told us what happened with Charlotte, I did not say it, but part of me doubted you. Part of me still expected the worst because expecting the worst from you has been easier than trusting you for a very long time.”
Richard’s jaw tightened, but he did not look away. “You had reason.”
“I had a habit. There is a difference.” Evander leaned back in his chair.
“You were reckless, Richard. The gambling. The debts. The boxing ring. I spent years cleaning up after you, and I let that become the entire story. The irresponsible younger brother. The one who needed managing.” He paused.
“But what you did for Charlotte was not reckless. It was brave, and I failed to see it.”
Richard stared at his coffee. A muscle worked in his cheek, and his grip on the cup tightened. “I should have told you. From the beginning. Instead of running, instead of hiding, I should have walked into this study and told you everything and trusted you to help.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I was ashamed.” Richard set the cup down.
“Not of Charlotte. Of myself. Of the mess I had made of my life before any of this happened. The debts, the fights, the nights I stumbled home and could not look at you because I knew you were comparing me to Father, and I was terrified you were right.”
The words landed in the quiet study. Evander looked at his brother and saw, with painful clarity, the cost of the story he had built. The irresponsible brother. The one who needed managing. He had told that story so many times, to himself and to others, that Richard had started to believe it.
“I was wrong,” Evander said. “About you. About what you were capable of.”
Richard’s eyes shone. He pressed his lips together and nodded, once, and the nod held the weight of twenty years of trying to earn something he should never have had to earn.
“Marry her,” Evander said.
Richard blinked. “What?”
“Lucrezia. Marry her. I can see what she is to you, and I can see what you are when you speak about her. If that is what you want, I will arrange for you to live in Europe. Italy, if she prefers. I have connections in Rome and Florence, and your linguistic abilities would serve you well in either city.”
Richard stared at him. “Evander, you do not have to—”
“I have spent my life telling you what to do and how to do it. This is the one time I am telling you to do what makes you happy.” Evander met his brother’s gaze. “You deserve that, Richard. You have earned it.”
Richard stood. He crossed the desk and pulled Evander out of his chair and embraced him.
It was graceless and sudden, the kind of embrace brothers gave when words had run out, and the body had to finish what the words could not.
Evander stood rigid for a moment, the instinct to resist physical contact warring with something older and deeper, and then his arms came up, and he hugged his brother back.
They stood like that in the morning light, two men raised in a house where affection had been rationed, and damage had been constant, and the embrace was awkward and brief and the most honest thing that had passed between them in years.
Richard pulled back. His eyes were wet. “Thank you.”
“Go and write to Lucrezia. Tell her to start looking at apartments in Florence.”
Richard laughed, rough and unsteady, and left the study.
Evander sat back down and stared at the desk and pressed his hand flat against the surface and felt, beneath the relief, the sharp awareness that he had just told his brother to pursue love while he himself sat in a locked study, avoiding his wife.
“Smile.”
Mary’s mouth curved on command. Evander offered his arm, and she took it, and together they climbed the steps of the Heathcote townhouse for an afternoon garden tea that neither of them wanted to attend and neither of them could refuse.
Lady Heathcote had sent the invitation three weeks ago, before Charlotte’s return, before Richard, before the pleasure house and the carriage and the bedroom and every unresolved catastrophe that now hung between Evander and his wife.
Declining would have invited speculation. Attending required performance.
They performed.
The garden was immaculate, the guests select, the refreshments arranged on linen-draped tables beneath a striped canopy.
Perhaps thirty people occupied the lawn, clustered in groups of three and four, their conversations carried on in the modulated tones of a class trained to discuss scandal without appearing to enjoy it.
Evander and Mary circulated. She kept her hand on his arm and her smile in place, and they moved from group to group with the seamless coordination of a couple who had learned to read each other’s cues.
When Lord Parker asked about the duchy, Evander answered while Mary turned to Lady Parker and complimented her roses.
When Lady Atherton inquired about the household, Mary deflected while Evander scanned the garden for threats.
They did not look at each other. They did not need to.
The choreography had its own intelligence, practiced over weeks of avoidance, and it translated into public fluency.
To the guests, the Duke and Duchess of Blackholm appeared composed, united, comfortable.
No one could see that the arm Mary held was rigid beneath her glove, or that Evander’s jaw ached from the effort of keeping his expression neutral while her lavender scent drifted up from her hair.
Viscountess Thornton found them near the rose arch.
She was a thin, sharp-faced woman with a reputation for knowing things before they happened and saying them after they did. She approached with a teacup balanced on her saucer and an expression of studied sympathy that Evander recognized immediately as a prelude to an attack.
“Your Grace. What a pleasure.” She curtsied to Mary, then turned to Evander with the precision of a woman selecting her angle. “We have been so concerned for your family. Such a difficult season. And now I hear whispers that Lady Charlotte has been seen in London. Is it true she has returned?”
Mary’s hand tightened on Evander’s arm. The pressure was slight, controlled, a signal between partners. I can handle this. Evander placed his hand over hers. I know. But let me.
“Lady Charlotte is well,” Evander said. His voice carried the pleasant authority of a man discussing the weather while making it clear the forecast was none of your concern.
“She has been visiting family. She will be traveling abroad shortly with her fiancé, a scholar of some distinction. We are very happy for her.”
“Her fiancé.” Lady Thornton’s eyebrows climbed. “How unexpected. And the rumors about a child—”
“Lady Thornton.” Evander tilted his head.
The smile remained. The temperature dropped.
“I wonder if you have had a chance to admire Lady Heathcote’s new hedge roses.
I am told they were imported from France at considerable expense.
Perhaps you might inspect them before the afternoon grows too warm. ”
The dismissal was wrapped in silk, but the steel beneath it was unmistakable. Lady Thornton’s teacup rattled against her saucer. She curtsied, murmured something about roses, and retreated across the lawn at a pace that suggested she understood the conversation was over.
Mary exhaled. Her grip on Evander’s arm loosened.
“Hedge roses,” she said.
“It was the first thing I saw.”
“You sent her to inspect shrubbery.”
“I sent her away. The method was secondary.”
The corner of Mary’s mouth twitched. Not a full smile.
The ghost of one, passing through on its way to somewhere else.
Evander caught it and felt the impact in his chest, because even now, even in the middle of the worst silence of their marriage, her almost-smile could reach him across the distance they had built.
They continued their circuit of the garden.
Lady Heathcote served cake. Lord Parker told an interminable story about a horse.
Mary accepted a glass of lemonade and held it without drinking, and Evander stood beside her and watched the condensation run down the glass and thought about her fingers and hated himself for thinking about her fingers at a garden tea.
Isabella appeared from behind the rose arch, her gold dress bright against the greenery. She kissed Mary’s cheek and squeezed her hand with the easy intimacy of a friendship that required no translation.
“You look tired,” Isabella said to Mary, keeping her voice low. “Both of you.”
“We are fine.”
“You are performing. There is a difference.” Isabella glanced at Evander, and the look she gave him was not hostile, but it carried a weight of assessment that reminded him uncomfortably of Quentin.
She turned back to Mary. “Come to the refreshment table with me. I need to tell you about Lord Pruitt’s latest humiliation. ”
Mary released Evander’s arm. The absence of her hand registered as a physical loss, and Evander watched the two women walk across the lawn, their heads bent together, and he stood alone beside the rose arch and felt the full absurdity of his position.
A duke at a garden party, surrounded by people who envied his title and his fortune and his beautiful wife, and all he could think about was the fact that she had let go of his arm and the place where her hand had been was cold.
Mary laughed at something Isabella said. The sound carried across the garden, and Evander’s chest constricted because he had not made her laugh in days, and the absence of that sound in his own house was louder than any silence.
The afternoon wore on, sunlit and civilized, and Evander played the duke and ached.
In the carriage home, Mary sat on the opposite seat and looked out the window. The silence between them was vast and familiar, and Evander watched her profile in the passing light and searched for something to say that was not the thing he needed to say.
He found nothing.
“Thank you,” Mary said without turning from the window. “For Lady Thornton. For all of it.”
“You do not need to thank me for protecting my family.”
“I am thanking you anyway.”
She did not look at him for the rest of the ride. Evander did not look away from her. The carriage rocked through the Mayfair streets, and the silence held, and the distance between the opposite seats might as well have been the English Channel.
When they arrived at Blackholm House, Mary took the stairs without pausing.
Her door closed. Evander stood in the entrance hall and listened to the latch click, and the sound was small and final, and he turned and walked to his study and closed his own door, and the house held them both in their separate rooms, and the walls stood, and the evening settled, and nothing was resolved.