Chapter 10
They left at nine o’clock. Julian had timed it deliberately—late enough that the streets were still busy, early enough that the worst of the theater crowd had not yet spilled out onto the roads.
One more carriage pulling away would attract no particular attention. This was, he reflected, probably the only logistical detail of the past forty-eight hours that had gone according to any kind of plan.
Richmond had seen to the packing without asking any questions which Julian appreciated more than he could say.
The man had been with the family since Julian was a babe and had developed, over those years, a preternatural ability to pack a trunk, maintain an expression of complete neutrality, and make hot tea that appeared at precisely the right moment. He was worth his weight in gold.
Mrs. Holt followed in the second carriage with everything required for the baby, as well as her own baby and its belongings.
Julian had given instructions that she was to be made comfortable at whatever inn they stopped at and that her needs were to be seen to before anyone else’s.
She had looked at him over David’s head and said, “Very good, Your Grace” in a confident tone.
Competent people rarely needed to be told what to do. They simply did it.
Clara had insisted on keeping David in the first carriage. Julian had not argued. He had learned that there were things one argued with Clara about and things one did not, and the whereabouts of the baby fell firmly in the second category.
So, there he was. Sitting across from a woman he was about to marry in a carriage headed for Southampton, with a baby between them that belonged to neither of them at an hour when any sensible person would be in bed. This was his life now.
He looked at the ceiling and thought about that for a moment while trying to find a way to adjust his legs, so they would be stretched out to maximum capacity. Though he did not have much luck in that venture owing to the tight quarters.
David slept with contentment. Julian looked at him and felt the familiar ache in his chest, that same feeling he’d had when Arabella had presented the little one, albeit briefly.
Arabella.
He had tried, on and off throughout the day, not to think about her.
He had failed comprehensively every time.
Where was she? Was she warm? Was she frightened?
He knew she was frightened, but there was a difference between knowing a thing and sitting with it in a dark carriage at night with nowhere useful to put it.
He had failed her. That was the plain truth of it, and he might as well look at it directly. She had come to his door a month ago. He’d promised his aid, and he would have delivered it, but Arabella being who she was had done as she pleased.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“How long to Southampton?” Clara asked.
He looked at her. She was watching him from the opposite seat with an expression that told him she had been watching him for some time and had decided to say something before he disappeared entirely into his own head.
“If the roads hold, we should make reasonable time. We will stop at an inn to sleep and continue in the morning.”
“I am not tired,” she said.
“Of course not,” he said. “But we must think of David, Mrs. Holt, and her daughter. Besides, highway robbers are a real concern at night. We shall stop in an hour or so to rest.”
She nodded in agreement and turned back to the window.
He watched her for a moment without meaning to.
She had changed from the silver-blue gown into something more suitable for traveling, dark and practical, and her hair had been put up in the kind of arrangement that was designed to survive a long carriage journey rather than impress anyone.
She looked, he thought, considerably more like herself than she had at the ball. Less armored.
An hour passed. The roads grew rougher as they moved further from London, and the carriage began to pitch and roll. Julian braced himself against the side with the ease of long practice and watched Clara do the same, one hand on the strap and one hand on David’s blanket.
Then the road dropped, and the carriage lurched hard to the left, and David woke up.
He did not wake gradually. He went from sleeping to screaming in the time it took Julian to register the lurch with a volume that was frankly impressive for someone who weighed approximately as much as a large loaf of bread.
Clara gathered him up immediately. She tried rocking.
She tried the low voice. She tried adjusting the blanket which David treated as a personal insult and screamed louder.
He ought to help her, see if he could soothe him. After all, he had about as much experience. Julian had a brief internal debate, lost it, and held out his arms.
“Allow me to hold him a moment,” Julian said.
She handed the baby over with all the enthusiasm of convict heading to her execution.
David continued screaming at full volume directly into Julian’s ear which was clarifying in various ways.
Julian settled the baby against his chest and began the slow shifting of weight from side to side the way that that Mrs. Webb, their governess, had demonstrated when Arabella was still a baby and his uncle had brought her for a visit.
David’s screaming reduced to crying. Then to hiccupping protests. Then, at last, glorious silence.
“You have done this before,” Clara said.
“Arabella,” he said. “When she was an infant. Her governess showed me. I was only a child then, but I have not forgotten.”
They were quiet for a moment. David’s eyes were open and fixed on Julian’s face. Did he recognize the family resemblance to his mother? Probably not. It would be quite ridiculous to think so. Yet, the way he stared at him had something alarming to it.
“I should have seen it sooner,” Julian said. He had not planned to say it. It came out anyway. “That something was wrong with Arabella. The letters were not right. I noticed and told myself I was imagining things.”
“She would have made it easy to believe,” Clara said. “She could convince you the ceiling was fine while it was coming down around her ears.”
“I know that.” He shifted his weight. “It is not an excuse.”
“No. But if she had wanted you to know, she would have told you. She sent the baby to me because she did not want you involved—not because she did not trust you but because she knew what you would do.” A pause. “She was right about that as it turns out.”
Julian looked at her across the dark carriage. She met his gaze steadily without any pretense, and he thought that this was perhaps the most honest conversation he’d had with another person in several years.
If my parents could see me now, what would they think? They’d think me insane, I am sure.
“She used to sit outside my study door and wait for me when my father first passed, and I took over the estate,” he said.
“Every morning for about a year. I used to trip over her.” He looked down at David, who had fallen asleep again, heavy and warm against his chest. “She was ten, and I was nineteen. Her parents had died some years before, and my father had just passed. My mother was still living, but we both knew she did not have long. She…”
“The lungs. I remember.”
He nodded, remembering the awful diagnosis of consumption that would snatch his mother away in months just before the anniversary of his father’s death.
“I remember taking her to the kitchen and giving her marzipan and biscuits.”
“Once or twice, you took me down there, too. That’s when she’d talk the most, dipping her biscuits into milk.”
“Incessantly,” he confirmed.
“She still does,” Clara said.
“Yes. Although not the last time I saw her.”
The carriage rolled on. David slept. Clara leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. Julian sat with the baby’s weight against his chest. He looked out at the dark countryside moving past and felt something he did not immediately have a name for.
He looked down at David.
David, for his part, appeared entirely unconcerned. “Sensible,” Julian told him quietly. “At least one of us should be.”
He looked back out of the window. Clara was asleep.
He looked at the ceiling instead. Clara understood him at a level almost nobody else could. She knew what he felt about Arabella, that fear and exasperation woven into one.