Chapter 25
William was shown in by a footman and found James in the drawing room, in the middle of what appeared to be a one-sided argument with a letter.
“–and the absolute nerve,” James was saying to no one, the letter held at arm’s length as though it had offended him personally, “of a woman who sends four notes in a single morning and signs each one with a different initial, as though I will not recognize the handwriting, as though I have not been recognizing this particular handwriting since–” He looked up. “William.”
“James.”
“This,” James said, holding up the letter, “is Lady Cavendish’s third daughter, who has apparently decided that subtlety is for people with less conviction.
Four notes, William. The first was an invitation to a concert.
The second was a clarification of the concert’s date.
The third was a concern that perhaps the first two had not arrived.
The fourth was–” He looked at the letter. “A poem. She has written me a poem.”
“Is it good?”
“It reads terribly.” James tossed it on the table.
“Sit down. Do you want brandy? It is half past eleven, and I have already decided it is a brandy morning.” He was already moving toward the decanter, not waiting for an answer, which was standard.
“She compared my eyes to a winter sky, which is not a compliment regardless of how earnestly it was meant because I loathe winter, and she rhymed heart with art twice, which I think the rules expressly prohibit–”
He stopped and turned.
He looked at William properly for the first time since he’d entered the room.
“You’re not laughing,” he noted.
“No.”
“I have just told you that a woman wrote me a poem about a winter sky, and you are standing in my drawing room looking like that, not laughing.” He set down the decanter.
“I know I am special, but I did not think I was quite this special. People generally reserve that particular expression for funerals and solicitors.” He crossed the room and handed William a glass. “Sit down.”
William sat.
James sat across from him, stretched out his legs, and waited.
It was one of the things William had always valued about him.
James could be silent when silence was required.
He was rarely required to be, because he was constitutionally designed for rooms that needed noise.
But when the situation called for it, he had a patience that surprised people who didn’t know him well.
“I’ve complicated things.” William couldn’t help sighing.
“Define complicated.”
“With Cecily.”
James said nothing. He simply waited. William had expected a response from him.
“The ball was–” He stopped. Turned the glass in his hands.
“She walked into the ballroom, and three months of London gossip simply… evaporated. Not because she did anything different. She was entirely herself, and the room didn’t know what to do with that, and then it decided to be charmed.
By the time supper came, Lady Ashford had sought her out to apologize. ”
He looked at the fire; all he could see was the shimmery image of Cecily.
“She was extraordinary. She danced well. She argued about everything. She told me at one point, with complete composure, that she had been doing well since she arrived, and I had gone into defense mode. She said it like she was reporting the weather.”
“And you…?”
“Found it completely maddening,” William said. “Yes.”
James smiled and took a sip of brandy, saying nothing.
“She told me something during the waltz,” William continued.
“Why she walked alone to the shore in Brighton. It was because of her suitors—six, apparently—and her sister pressing her and her feeling cornered by it all and needing somewhere she could stand without owing anyone an answer.” He paused.
“She said she would rather have been alone for the rest of her life than marry a man who felt nothing for her.”
“That sounds exactly like her,” James remarked.
“Yes.” A pause. “It does.”
William knew he was simply rambling and avoiding the very thing he should be saying. He couldn’t stop another audible exhale.
James looked at him over the rim of his glass. “William, did something else happen after the ball?”
William looked at the fire. “We went into the garden.”
James was very still.
“Away from the terrace. A quiet corner, the two of us.” William said it without embellishment. “And I… kissed her.”
The room was quiet.
“Right,” James uttered.
“She kissed me back, in case you were wondering.”
“I was.” He set down his glass and gave William a bored look. “And this morning you came to my house looking like that?”
“I could hardly sleep a wink. I could not–” William paused. “I sat in my study for three hours and read the same document approximately nine times and took in nothing, and then I sent you a note because I needed to say it out loud to someone who was not going to repeat it.”
“You kissed your wife at a ball and spent the next morning in your study,” James said flatly. “Most men would consider that a solved problem.”
“Most men,” William retorted, “did not watch their parents destroy everything they had built and everyone who lived inside it.”
James said nothing for a moment. He looked at William with the level attention of someone who had known a person since they were twelve years old and had been holding this piece of information for most of that time, waiting for the moment to use it.
“Do you remember,” William asked, “the summer we were twelve, and you came to Blackmoor for a fortnight?”
James nodded. “Yes.”
“You asked me once why I slept in the east wing, when my rooms were in the west wing. I told you it was quieter.”
“I remember.”
“It was not quieter.” William looked at the fire. “The east wing was farther from my parents’ rooms. When they argued that the east wing was the only place in the house where you couldn’t hear it clearly. Where it became just… noise. Far enough away to be almost unreal.”
He looked at the window. Rain was starting to patter against the glass pane.
“My father was a man who felt everything immediately and examined none of it.” He did not say it as a question.
He was thinking out loud, which he rarely did—which was in itself information, and James was well aware of that.
“Whatever he wanted in a given moment, he pursued without considering the cost until the cost had already been paid. By everyone else.”
“He loved my mother.” He said it flatly, the way he said things he had thought about for so long, they had become bare fact.
“Completely. Exclusively. By all accounts, she was the only person who had ever genuinely held his attention, and he hers.
They married within a year. Everyone who attended the wedding said they had never seen two people more certain of each other.
“By the time I was eight, the house was a thing you learned to listen to before you moved through it. You learned which silence was safe and which was the kind that preceded noise. You learned which doors to close and which staircases to avoid.” He looked at the fire.
“Isadora used to read with her fingers in her ears. She told me once she thought it was simply what reading required. She was six, James. Six.”
“I know,” James said, very quietly.
William shook his head. “They loved each other, James. That is what I cannot—they had not started with indifference. They had started with everything. And it became what it became gradually enough that by the end, neither of them could have told you where the line was.”
“And you have spent ten years making sure you never crossed it,” James said.
“You’ve seen me. I have spent ten years making sure I never found it.”
“William, you–”
“They had argued that morning,” William spoke over him.
“Badly. I know because I heard it through three walls and the east wing. They eventually went out that afternoon.” He looked at the fire.
“They did not speak before they left. The last thing that passed between them was an argument that I still know the shape of because it sounded like every argument before it. I was in my rooms, thinking that by dinner it would be done, they would have cooled, and then–” He swallowed thickly.
“And then they didn’t,” James murmured.
“I stood in the solicitor’s office at nineteen, and I understood two things simultaneously.
The first was that my sisters were entirely mine to protect from that point forward.
The second was that I had watched what love looked like when it soured, and I had decided, standing in that office, that I would not build it.
Would not begin something that could become so toxic.
Would not let anyone close enough be damaged by it or do the damage themselves.
“And then a woman knelt in wet sand at five in the morning and took my pulse without flinching. She looked at me with the most honest eyes I have ever seen, and I have been significantly less certain about most things since.”
William couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face.
“And now I have kissed her in a garden, and all I could think about was my father leaving in a carriage and my mother leaving an hour later, and neither of them speaking before they went. I thought about Isadora and Letty, and I thought…”
James waited.
“I thought I could not be the person who built that. I could not be the person who started something and let it become that. I will not do it to her, and I will not do it to my sisters, and I will not do it to–” William broke off.
James leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He was quiet for a moment, looking at William with the expression of a man who understood the ground was not stable.