Chapter 9
Helena’s drawing room was exactly as Clara remembered it.
Warm and slightly cluttered in the way that only genuinely lived-in rooms ever are with books left open on side tables and one of Lavinia’s small shoes inexplicably on the mantelpiece.
Gideon’s house had the bones of grandeur and the daily reality of a family, and Clara had always loved it for that.
Helena was on her feet before Clara had fully crossed the threshold.
“Come in quickly,” she said and then, to the maid who had shown Clara in, “Thank you, that will be all.” The moment the latch clicked, she crossed the room and took Clara by both hands.
She looked at her for a long moment without speaking—taking inventory, Clara thought, the way Helena always did when she suspected somebody was not entirely all right.
“Sit down,” Helena said. “And tell me everything.”
Clara sat. She took a breath. And then she told her.
She started at the corridor, at the frightened young man with the bundle in his arms, at the Italian accent she had not registered until Julian mentioned it afterward.
She told her about the whispers that had started before she had even understood what she was holding, about the faces turning toward her, about Julian’s arm around her shoulders.
“He asked me if I trusted him, and when I said yes, we stepped outside, and he announced me as his wife to everyone there.”
“But why? Whose child is this?” Helena asked. “Why did you have to pose as his wife? I do not understand.”
Clara took a deep breath and finished telling her the story she’d heard regarding Arabella and her misadventure in Italy. This time, when she was done, she sat back and looked at her friend, who sat there looking as though she had just been told that a woman was to be pope.
“Pray, say something,” Clara said.
“I am trying,” Helena said, “to decide which part to address first because there are a very great number of parts.”
“Start anywhere.”
“Arabella,” Helena said. “You are certain the child is hers.”
“Julian is certain, and he saw her a month ago. The baby has her eyes. And there is no other explanation for why a terrified Italian servant would bring a child to me, specifically, in the middle of a ball and invoke her name.”
Helena absorbed this. “And Arabella herself—nobody knows where she is.”
“Not yet. Julian is already making inquiries. He has men looking.” Clara paused. “He is frightened for her. He does not show it, but he is.”
“No,” Helena said, “he wouldn’t show it.
” She was quiet for a moment. “Julian has spent years keeping the ton at arm’s length.
Gideon says he has been keeping a solitary watch ever since he lost Arabella’s parents, and now, she is gone too.
And things only got worse when Lady Josephine treated him as she did.
He is holding the line where he stands because he knows no other way to survive.
” She said it plainly as a simple observation.
“You sound as though you know him rather well,” Clara said.
“I know Gideon, and Gideon has known Julian since they were young men together. You hear things.” Helena reached for the teapot on the table beside her and poured without being asked, which was also very much like her.
“What I will say is that whatever you may think of his methods, the fact that he stepped forward the way he did is not a small gesture. He put himself directly in the path of the scandal to pull you out of it.”
“I know it is not a small thing,” Clara said. “I have thanked him for it. Though I do wish he had not simply decided we had to act as husband and wife. I wish he had asked me first.”
“If he had presented the idea to you first, would you have agreed?”
She thought about that for a moment. She’d have declared him utterly befogged, but then, upon hearing his reasoning, she still supposed she would have.
“I imagine I would have.”
Helena handed her the cup.
“Well then, there you are. The truth is that people have been talking about you all day. I have heard the servants whispering already. I think, given the circumstances, he did the right thing. You both did. And he is a man you can truly trust.”
Clara drank her tea.
“You are talking about him as though you think I ought to value and trust him.”
“You should, but I think you already know that. He has been a friend after all.”
“I would not call him a friend as such. He was my friend’s cousin. That is all. But he is not a stranger; that is true. You need not try to paint him in bright colors for me.”
“I am telling you the truth about him which happens to reflect well on him. That is not the same thing.” Helena set down her cup.
“Clara. In my opinion, you could not have found a steadier man to stand beside you in this. Whatever his faults, and he has them, Julian is not the sort of man who abandons people for whom he has taken responsibility. You are safe with him. So is the baby. And should the worst happen and Arabella isn’t found, you and the baby would have a good life with him.
Even if she is found, you may yet find a good life with him. A happy one.”
Clara looked at her hands around the cup.
“That is exactly the sort of thing,” she said, “that I knew you were going to say. That I might yet find happiness with him.”
“Is it wrong?”
“No,” Clara said. “But it is not the point.” She set the cup down on the table beside her.
“Helena. Listen to me carefully because I want you to hear what I am actually saying and not what you want to hear.” She looked at her friend directly.
“This is not a romantic match. It is not something I secretly wished for. I did not go to that ball hoping for a husband, and I did not come away with one because fate intervened in my favor. I came away with one because the alternative was ruin, and Julian is nothing if not a practical man who understood that faster than I did.”
“I know that,” Helena said.
“We agreed,” Clara said. “Both of us. Clearly. The marriage is what it is—a protection for the baby and a means of finding Arabella. Once she is safe and the danger is gone, we will find a way to end it. He told me so himself and I was grateful that he did because it means there are no misunderstandings between us.”
“And what did you feel,” Helena asked, “when he told you that?”
“Relief,” Clara said. She said it quickly though truthfully, there had been something mixed in with that relief. She just didn’t know what to name that yet.
Helena said nothing.
“I felt relief,” Clara repeated, more firmly, “because I have been through what it means to trust a man far more than he deserves to be trusted, and I have no intention of doing it again.” She looked at the fireplace.
“Benjamin was not a cruel man. He was weak, and weak men are in some ways more dangerous than cruel ones because you do not see the damage coming until it is already done. I saw everything coming with Benjamin, and I trusted him anyway because I was in love with him and love made me make a cake of myself.” She spoke the word cleanly, the matter thoroughly settled and put away.
“I am not making a cake of myself again.”
“Being hurt does not make you stupid,” Helena said. “It makes you hurt.”
“It makes you educated,” Clara argued, “on the subject of what you are and are not capable of surviving.” She turned back from the fireplace.
“I know what Julian is. I am not blind to it. He is intelligent, and he is honorable, and he has been—yes, unexpectedly kind in ways I did not anticipate. He thinks ahead. He is steady. He kept me from falling apart in front of my parents this morning when I had quite forgotten about my grandfather James and how I had sworn to name my firstborn son after him, and I have not forgotten that.” She paused.
“But none of that changes what the arrangement is. Kindness is not love. Honor is not love. A man can be all of those things and still look at you one day and decide that something else suits him better, and you will not have seen it coming because you were too busy being grateful for the kindness.”
Helena was quiet for a moment.
“That is not what happened with Benjamin,” she said. “Benjamin did not look at you and decide something else suited him better. His family decided for him, and he was not strong enough to refuse them. That is a different thing.”
“The result,” Clara said, “was the same.”
Helena did not argue that point.
Outside the window, a carriage passed in the street below.
Clara listened to it go and thought about Julian waiting for her at Lynden House, sitting at some desk or another, writing letters and making arrangements.
She thought about the way he had taken her hand outside her parents’ house, not urgently or with any particular intent, just quietly, as though it had not required very much thought at all.
She pushed the thought away.
“I need you to be my friend in this,” she said to Helena, “and not my matchmaker. I need you to understand that I am telling you the truth when I say that I cannot afford to let this become something it is not. Not because Julian is not worth trusting but because I am not certain I can trust myself to trust someone again and come out the other side of it whole. And I need to come out of this whole. I have a baby to protect, a friend to find, and a marriage to eventually and quietly dissolve. I cannot do any of that if I am in the middle of falling in love with my own husband.”
Helena looked at her for a long moment.
“You said falling in love,” she said. “Not falling into the mistake of caring for him. Falling in love.”
Clara opened her mouth. Then she closed it.
“That,” she said, “is not what I meant.”
“I know it isn’t,” Helena said and picked up her tea again. “More tea?”
Clara looked at her. Helena looked back, her face the picture of serenity.
“You are insufferable,” Clara said.
“I have been told that I am rather formidable,” Helena agreed. She poured. “How is the baby?”
Clara accepted the redirect because it was the sensible thing to do and because the alternative was to sit with what she had just said until she understood what she had meant by it, and she was not ready to do that.
“He is well,” she said. “He is very well, actually. He barely cried in the night.” She paused. “Julian had someone stationed outside my door the whole night in case he woke.”
Helena said nothing, but the corner of her mouth moved.
“Do not,” Clara said.
“I am not doing anything,” Helena said.
“You are looking at me as though your mouth cannot wait to speak and say something you know I do not want to hear. Not everyone ends up falling madly in love with their husband through an arrangement just because you did and the Langleys did.”
“I am drinking my tea; that is all I am doing. And it is true. Many are rather miserable after making those matches.”
Clara looked at the ceiling briefly. Then she looked back at her friend, and despite everything, despite the whole impossible weight of the past twenty-four hours, she felt the tight coil of tension beneath her ribs finally begin to give way.
“I have missed you,” she said.
Helena reached across and took her hand. “I have missed you too.” She held it for a moment. “And Clara, whatever this is, and whatever it becomes or does not become, I am here. That has not changed.”
Clara squeezed her hand and said nothing because there was nothing adequate to say.
Outside, the afternoon light was already beginning to thin. Julian would be waiting. There was a carriage to pack and a journey to begin. Southampton did not yet know what was about to be asked of him.
Clara set down her cup, straightened her back, and stood.