Chapter 6
“You look,” James noted, dropping into the chair opposite with the unhurried ease of a man who had never once felt he was interrupting anything, “exactly like a man who has just done something irreversible and is being very dignified about it.”
William looked at him. “You’re late.”
“Twelve minutes. Practically punctual for me.” James signalled the waiter with the fluency of long habit and settled back, taking in the untouched whisky glass on the table between them with a mild, knowing look.
The Marlborough Club at half past two in the afternoon had the particular atmosphere of a place that took idleness very seriously.
The whisky was excellent. The conversation, conducted in the low, unhurried tones of men who had nowhere pressing to be, shifted between horses and politics and the kind of gossip that everyone pretended to be above and no one actually was.
William had chosen the corner table. He did this automatically, without thinking about it—back to the wall, clear line to the door, full view of the room.
An old habit, formed young and never entirely abandoned.
His father had taught him that, in one of the rare moments he had bothered to teach him anything useful.
Always know your exits, William. Always know who is in the room before you decide who you are in it.
He had ordered whisky and was not drinking it.
“Well…?” James prompted.
“Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You have a face, James. It’s saying quite enough.”
“The whole of London is talking about you,” he said pleasantly. “I thought you should know, in case you’d somehow missed it.”
“I hadn’t missed it.”
“Lord Pembury’s wife mentioned it at the Hartleys’ dinner. Lady Ashford brought it up at cards last night. My own mother sent me a letter this morning.” He paused. “A letter, William. She wrote me an actual letter about your morning walk.”
“How efficient of her.”
“She included a clipping from the Gazette.” James accepted the glass the waiter brought and looked at William over the rim.
“The duke who was found on the shore with a lady. I have to say, of all the scandals you’ve generated in the course of our friendship, this is the one that has given people the most pleasure.
There is something about the image of you horizontal on a beach at dawn that the ton finds deeply, deeply satisfying. ”
William said nothing. He turned the whisky glass once on the table, looking at it.
James watched him. The amusement in his expression dimmed slightly. “You’re quiet.”
“I’m always quiet.”
“You’re never quiet. You’re occasionally strategic, and you sometimes pass for thoughtful, but you are not quiet.” He set down his glass. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”
“I’m getting married on Thursday,” William revealed. “I find I’m not particularly in the mood for the comedy version of this conversation.”
The levity left James’s expression entirely.
What replaced it was something older and more genuine—the look of a man who had known William since they were boys with neighboring estates and lied to each other’s fathers about where they’d been, and who had watched him closely enough over the years to know when the performance had stopped.
“You never wanted to marry.” Not an accusation. Simply a fact, stated plainly.
“I know.”
“You’ve said so. Repeatedly. In this room, in other rooms, in a memorable speech at Ashby’s Christmas party that I believe converted at least two previously optimistic bachelors to your way of thinking.”
“I remember.”
“And yet…?”
“And yet.” William picked up his glass. Set it back down.
“The scandal exists because she helped me. If anyone is to blame for what happened to her reputation, it is me. Not the shore, not the women who saw us, not the papers. But me.” He paused.
“I will not sit in this club and drink whisky while she pays for that alone.”
James was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Then don’t make jokes about it.”
“The jokes weren’t about her,” James said mildly. “They were about you.”
“They are currently indistinguishable.” William looked at him squarely. “She is going to be my wife by Thursday. Whatever she is, she will be mine to protect by the end of the week, and I would appreciate it if the people in my immediate vicinity treated her accordingly. Starting with you.”
Something moved through James’s expression, something that was partly respect and partly something more complicated that William chose not to examine.
“Of course.” He nodded.
The waiter passed. The fire in the grate flickered. At the table across the room, a man said something that made his companion laugh with too much enthusiasm, and the sound bounced briefly off the panelled walls.
“Do you remember any of it?” James asked quietly. “What happened on the shore?”
William was quiet for a moment.
This was the part he had been turning over for two days, in the gaps between arrangements and solicitors and the logistical machinery of obtaining a special license in under a week.
He had gone over it carefully, methodically, the way he went over estate accounts when something didn’t balance—starting from the last clear point and working forward.
The letter. He remembered the letter, delivered by a footman at the party, the handwriting plain and unadorned on good-quality paper, the words short and deliberate.
It concerns your sisters. He remembered folding it.
Leaving the party. Walking toward the eastern shore in the dark, the sea audible before it was visible.
After that, it became imprecise.
“I remember the blow,” he murmured. “The impact, and then nothing. I didn’t hear them approach.
I didn’t see anything before it happened.
It was too fast.” He kept his voice flat, clinical, because that was the only way to talk about it without the anger taking over.
“I came to on the shore with the tide coming in and a woman kneeling beside me whom I’d never seen before. ”
“And you have no sense of who it was.”
“None.” The word was quiet and absolute and contained. Underneath its quietness was the full weight of what he was not currently saying—that he intended to find out, and that when he did, he intended to be very thorough about the consequences.
James leaned forward slightly, lowering his voice without being asked to. “But you were lured there. The note–”
“Was specific,” William cut in. “The right title, the right shore, the right hour. Whoever wrote it knew I was in Brighton, knew my habits well enough to know that mentioning my sisters was the one thing that would guarantee I came.” He paused.
“That is not a random opportunist, James. That is someone who has been watching. Someone who knows me, or knows enough about me to use what matters to me against me.” He let that sit for a moment.
“Someone wanted me on that beach. I don’t know yet what they intended, but I know it wasn’t finished when they left me there.
Whatever they wanted, I interrupted it by inconveniently surviving and marrying the woman who found me. ”
James stared at him. “You think it’s connected to your business?”
“I think it’s connected to something. I intend to find out what.
” William’s voice had not risen, had not changed, but James had known him long enough to hear what was underneath it—the cold anger of a man who was not impulsive and was therefore very difficult to stop once he set his mind to something.
“They used my sisters, James. They put their names in that note to get me onto that beach alone in the dark. Whatever else I do or don’t find out, that I will not forgive. ”
James held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded once.
Silence settled between them. Then James asked in a tone so deliberately different, “Is she beautiful?’
William looked at him.
James’s expression was entirely innocent, which meant nothing at all. “I’m asking as a friend. As someone who cares about your welfare and has a natural interest in the woman who is about to become the Duchess of Blackmoor.” He settled back in his chair. “Is she beautiful?”
William was quiet for a moment. He thought of the drawing room two days ago. The morning light from the window, and Lady Cecily’s particular stillness when she was thinking. “She seems proper,” he allowed. “Reserved. Careful with what she says.”
James’s left eyebrow rose approximately a quarter of an inch. “That is not what I asked.”
“It’s what I’m telling you.”
“William. Is she beautiful? Yes or no.”
William picked up his whisky glass. Set it back down.
“She has blue eyes,” he said, after a moment.
“Light brown hair. She is–” He stopped and chose the next word carefully, as though precision mattered here in a way he wasn’t entirely comfortable acknowledging.
“She is not the sort of face you notice from across a room. She is the sort of face you look at and then find yourself looking at again, and then again after that, and the third time you can’t quite explain why you keep doing it. ”
James stared at him. “That,” he said slowly, “is the most honest answer you have ever given to any question I have asked you in fifteen years of friendship.”
“You wanted details.”
“I wanted a yes or a no.” James’s expression had shifted into something that was not quite a smile, but he was clearly enjoying himself. “And instead you gave me a soliloquy about her face, which is—William, that is not the response of a man who finds a woman merely acceptable.”
“I did not say ‘merely acceptable’.”
“No,” James agreed. “You very much did not.” He picked up his glass. “Perhaps you don’t mind this quite so much as you thought you would.”
“Don’t,” William warned.
“I’m only observing–”
“James.” His tone was level and final. “Don’t.”
James fell quiet, but there was something in his expression—settled and knowing, the expression of a man who had filed a piece of information carefully and had every intention of returning to it—that William did not entirely trust.
He looked away. At the fire. At the unremarkable width of a very well-appointed room.
“It is not a real marriage,” he added, after a moment.
Quietly, clearly, as though the clarity of it mattered.
As though saying it plainly enough might resolve the slight unsteadiness that had been living somewhere behind his sternum for forty-eight hours.
“We have agreed on the terms. She will be my Duchess in name and in public, and for however long the situation requires it. After that, we will both live as we choose.” He paused.
“I will keep my distance. I will treat it as a duty and nothing more, because that is what it is, and because the alternative–” He stopped.
James waited.
William looked back at the fire. He thought of his parents.
Of the house at Blackmoor as it had been when he was young—large and full of noise that was never the comfortable kind, the particular acoustics of a home where two people who had once loved each other had turned into something unrecognizable and were making sure everyone within earshot knew it.
He thought of his sisters—Isadora at four, sitting on the stairs with her small hands pressed over her ears, and Letitia, too young to understand why she was crying but crying regardless because the house itself was crying.
He thought of the morning his parents’ carriage had not come back, and the afternoon he had stood in the solicitor’s office at nineteen years old and understood, with the cold clarity of a new duke, that he was the only thing standing between his sisters and whatever the world intended for them.
He had made his peace with what that meant. No entanglements. No softness for his own benefit. Nothing that could become the thing his parents’ marriage had become—the jealousy, the cruelty, the love gone rancid and taking everything around it down with it.
He had been very comfortable with that understanding.
“The alternative,” he said finally, “is not something I intend to allow.”
James looked at him for a long moment. And then, with the wisdom of a man who knew exactly when to press and when to let something lie, he picked up his glass and said nothing further.
The fire settled in the grate.
Outside, London continued in its usual self-important fashion, entirely indifferent to the fact that the Duke of Blackmoor was sitting in a leather chair in the Marlborough Club, telling himself, with great conviction and considerable effort, that Thursday was just a date and a marriage was just a word and Lady Cecily’s blue eyes were absolutely, definitively, not something he intended to think about again.
He almost convinced himself.