Chapter 19
The gentlemen’s club smelled of tobacco, old leather, and the particular brand of silence that men bought with money they did not earn. Dark wood paneling. Chairs cracked at the seams. A fire that nobody tended, but never went out.
Edward had been in rooms like this across half of Europe, though the ones on the Continent usually had better wine and worse intentions.
He had been in London for four days. Four days of George insisting on one more meeting, one more drink, one more conversation that circled back to the same question: why are you leaving?
Edward had come for a single evening. George had made it last four days.
George Turner was good at making him stay. He had done it for twelve years.
This was the last meeting, Edward had told him that morning. No more. He was going back to Thornhill tonight, and if George had something left to say, he could say it now.
Edward found them in a private room on the second floor. George sat in a wingback chair with a glass of brandy, one ankle crossed over his knee, looking like he had been there for hours and planned to stay for several more.
He had not changed. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Mustache trimmed with the precision of a man who cared more about appearances than most people cared about anything. He was handsome in the way a well-made knife was handsome. One admired it, but one did not forget what it was for.
Peter stood by the window. He was shorter than George.
Broader. Fair hair going grey at the temples, though he was barely thirty-five.
He had a nervous energy that Edward had always found useful in the field and irritating everywhere else.
He checked exits and counted heads the way other men breathed.
He was drumming his fingers on the windowsill when Edward walked in. He stopped when he saw him.
“There he is,” George drawled, not standing. He raised his glass. “The Duke of Welford. I will never tire of saying that.”
“You might attempt to stop saying it. Just to see what happens,” Edward said. He pulled a chair from the corner and sat. Did not grab a drink to keep a clear head.
Old habits.
The room was smaller than the ones he was used to. Two windows. One door. Exit through the corridor and down the servants’ staircase at the back, if it came to that.
It would not come to that. These were his friends. His oldest friends. The only people alive who knew his real name, his history, and the things he had done in rooms much smaller than this one.
He had not seen them in three months. Not since he had left the Crown’s service. Not since the day he had walked into the Queen’s private chambers and laid his pistol on her desk and said, “I’m done.”
She had looked at him for a long time. Then she had nodded. “I expected you sooner,” she had said.
That was all. No ceremony. No farewell. Twelve years of service, and the end of it took less time than ordering a meal.
Since then, he had been at Thornhill, learning to be a duke. Learning to eat breakfast at a table instead of standing by a window. Learning to sleep in a bed instead of a chair. Learning, slowly and with considerable difficulty, to be a person rather than a tool.
Breakfast was the hardest part. Sitting still. Letting food come to him instead of eating whatever was available and moving on.
Valeria had noticed. She noticed everything. She noticed that he stood by exits, that he did not drink, and that he flinched at loud sounds. She noticed, yet she did not comment. And the grace of her silence was the most generous thing anyone had ever given him.
“You look well,” Peter noted. “Rested. Almost civilized.”
“Almost,” Edward agreed.
“Marriage agrees with you already,” George said. “Or is it the prospect of marriage? I hear she is beautiful, the Duchess of Thornhill.” He rolled the title in his mouth like wine. “A widow. Very young. Very rich. Very alone.”
Something shifted in Edward’s chest. A tightening.
George had a talent for finding the softest part of a subject and pressing on it.
Valeria was alone. She had been alone in a house with a dead man’s debts and the memory of three years that nobody outside those walls understood.
The thought of her sitting in that study at night, quill in hand, planning orphanages and schools, with nobody beside her except a maid who washed her secrets with the household linens, made his fists clench under the table.
He had left her. That was the part that gnawed at him.
He had kissed her in the drawing room, touched her on the carpet, heard the sounds she made, felt her fingers in his hair, and yet he had left.
Because George sent a message. Because his old life called and old habits answered, and he was out the door before he could think about what he was leaving behind.
He was always leaving things behind. It was what he was good at. Cities and countries and safe houses and people. One did not form attachments while in service. Attachments were liabilities. Attachments got you killed, or worse, got the people you loved killed.
He had learned that lesson early and well, and he had carried it for twelve years like a stone in his chest. And now, a woman with auburn hair and brave eyes was trying to teach him that the lesson was wrong.
He was not sure he could unlearn it. But he was starting to want to.
“She is not alone,” he corrected. “She has family. And she will have me.”
“How romantic.” George’s smile did not reach his eyes. It never did.
Edward had known him for twelve years, and he had never once seen George smile with anything other than his mouth. His eyes stayed flat. Watchful. Calculating the cost of every word before he spent it.
“And the auction? Did you win, or did you simply terrify everyone else into leaving?”
“Both,” Edward replied.
George made a sound that was not quite a laugh. He set his glass down, tilted his head, and studied Edward with the thorough attention of a man examining a painting for forgeries.
It was a look Edward had seen a hundred times. In safe houses. In embassy drawing rooms. At card tables, where the stakes were not money but information.
George looked at everyone like that. As if they were hiding something he had the right to know.
Peter laughed. “That sounds about right. Remember Vienna? The card game at the ambassador’s residence? You sat down, and three men folded before you were dealt in.”
“They were wise men,” Edward said.
“They were terrified men,” George countered. He swirled his brandy. “Which begs the question of whether your bride chose you or simply ran out of alternatives.”
The words landed with precision.
George always knew where to place a blade. It was what made him exceptional at his work and exhausting as a companion.
Edward let the silence stretch out. Over twelve years of partnership, he had learned that responding to George’s provocations only encouraged them.
“She chose me,” he said, and left it there.
She had. Standing on a staircase in a green dress, she had looked at a room full of men and chosen him. Because he put bread on her plate and turned his back when she needed to breathe. Understanding was rarer than courage, beauty, or money.
George studied him. His flat eyes trailed over Edward’s face with the same careful attention he gave to a target. Reading. Cataloging. Filing away details for later use.
“So,” Peter spoke up, breaking the silence with the uncomfortable cheerfulness of a man who could feel the temperature dropping. “Tell us about her. What is she like?”
“Brave,” Edward answered. “Stubborn. She designed a maze in her garden and then got stuck in it during a storm. She plays riddles and cheats at relay races, and she has the servants of a dead man so loyal to her that they baked shortbread to celebrate the night he died.”
“You sound like a man in love,” George remarked.
“I sound like a man who knows what he has found.”
“And what have you found, exactly?” George leaned forward. The firelight caught the edge of his jaw. “A woman to warm your bed? A title to match your own? A pretty face to stand beside you at Court while you pretend to be something you are not?”
“Careful,” Edward warned. His voice did not change. It did not need to.
George held up both hands, the gesture of a man surrendering. Except that George never surrendered. He retreated. He regrouped. He came at you from a different angle. The raised hands were not a concession. They were a pivot.
“I mean no offense, old friend. I am merely concerned.” His voice softened.
Warm now. Sympathetic. The voice he used when he wanted something.
“You have spent twelve years in service. Twelve years of cellars and alleys and the kind of work that does not wash off. And now you want to play house with a woman who has no idea what you are.”
“She knows exactly what I am.”
“Does she? Does she know about Prague? About Lisbon? About the things we did in rooms like this one, in cities whose names she cannot pronounce?”
Edward’s jaw tightened.
Peter looked down at the floor.
“Those were missions,” Edward pointed out. “Not confessions.”
“They were all missions. But that is not the point.” George put his glass down. “The point is that you are not the kind of man who retires, Edward. You are a weapon. Weapons do not sit on shelves. They rust.”
“Then let me rust.”
The fire crackled in the grate. A log collapsed. Sparks rose and died. In the silence, Edward could hear the noise below them, the clink of glasses and the murmur of men who had never done anything more dangerous than lose money at cards.
He had protected those men. He had protected their families, their homes, and their comfortable, oblivious lives, and he had never once resented them for it.
The resentment was new. It had arrived the day he walked into Valeria’s entrance hall and realized that the life those men took for granted, the meals and the laughter and the warmth of a woman’s hand, was the life he had given up without ever knowing what it cost.