Chapter 25 #2
“Your father was a man of tremendous charm and very little patience. Your mother was a woman of tremendous feeling and very little restraint. What they had was real, but it was also destructive, and I am not going to pretend otherwise because you were there and you know it better than I do.” He paused. “But William, you are not your father.”
“I am his son.”
“You are also your own person, which is a distinction worth making.You have spent years being the most deliberate man I know. You think before you speak. You consider the consequences. You are constitutionally incapable of the reckless, impulsive behavior that characterized your father’s worst moments.
” He held William’s gaze. “And Cecily is not your mother.”
“No,” William agreed. “She isn’t.”
“She is measured, whereas your mother was volatile. She is honest, whereas your mother was theatrical. She is the kind of woman who goes to a garden at midnight and says not yet when you say her name, which is not the behavior of a woman who is going to love you carelessly.”
William looked at him.
“Your father,” James continued, “pursued without thinking. You have been thinking about this since approximately the second morning she was in your house, I’d wager, and you have been careful and deliberate about every single inch of distance between you and”—he gestured—“the garden. That is not your father’s character. That is not remotely his character.”
“It is not about character,” William said. “It is about what love does to a household when it turns sour. Character had nothing to do with it with my parents. They were not villains. They were simply two people who had too much feeling and too little…” He searched for the right word.
“Steadiness,” James offered.
“Yes.”
“And you are the steadiest man I have ever known. To the point where it is occasionally maddening, and I have told you so at least twice.”
“Steadiness is not a guarantee of anything.”
“No,” James said. “But it is not nothing either.” He sat back in his chair.
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“Then I’ll save my breath. What are you going to do?”
William said nothing.
He looked at the rain on the window. He had made a decision in his study at seven this morning, in the grey early light with his coffee gone cold and the ball still very much present in his mind.
He had made it with the same methodical efficiency he applied to decisions about drainage ditches and parliamentary positions and tenant cottages—looking at the full shape of the problem, assessing the risks, and then making a conclusion.
The conclusion was not comfortable. It was correct.
“I am going to tell her,” he declared, “that we should begin living separately. As we agreed in Brighton. The Season is over, the scandal has died, and it is time to honor the original terms.” He held James’s eyes. “It is what we agreed on.”
James looked at him for a long moment. “What you agreed on was made in a Brighton drawing room between two people who did not know each other. A great deal has happened since then.”
“The terms don’t change because the circumstances have become complicated.”
“The terms should change when the terms are no longer true,” James countered. “And they are no longer true, William. You know that, yet you are choosing this anyway.” He paused. “Why?”
William said nothing.
“Because you are afraid?” James asked.
“Because I am careful,” William corrected.
“They are the same thing. In this case, they are exactly the same thing.” James looked at him with the unflinching attention of fifteen years of friendship.
“You are going to go home and tell a woman you love that you have decided not to, and you are going to watch her receive that, and you are going to call it caution.” A pause.
“I want you to understand what you are doing.”
“I understand what I am doing.”
“Do you understand what it will cost her?”
The question landed with the precision of something aimed carefully.
William looked back at the fire. He thought of Cecily’s face in the garden, the warmth of her breath, the way she had closed the last inch between them.
He thought of the nursery, the breakfast table, the library at night, the waltz, and the sense of not yet in the dark, and he thought of what it would feel like to walk into the study and say what he had decided to say, and what it would do to her face.
“Yes,” he mumbled. “I understand what it will cost her.”
James looked at him. He said nothing further, which was its own kind of answer.
He picked up his glass, finished his whisky, and set it down. Then he looked at the rain and let William sit with what he had said.
“You are not your father,” he insisted. “I know you have heard me say that, and I know it has not moved you, so I will say it differently.” James clasped him on the shoulder.
“Your father never once, in all the years I observed him, sat in a solicitor’s office at nineteen and put everyone else first. He never braided anyone’s hair.
He never checked a baby’s breathing in the night or extended a paddock or sent coal to an orphanage in November.
” He paused. “The man you are afraid of being does not do those things. You have been doing those things your entire adult life.”
The room fell quiet.
William stood. Put on his coat. Straightened his cuffs with the automatic movement of a man restoring order to himself.
“Thank you,” he said. And meant it.
James raised his glass slightly.
William knew he did not say, You’re welcome, because he understood that some things didn’t require it.
He left.
* * *
Cecily had told herself on the way downstairs that this was going to be a simple conversation.
When Mr. Prentiss informed her that William had come home and was already in his study, she felt a thrill run through her and couldn’t help the little skip to her steps.
She was going to knock on the study door. She was going to say, I have found something you need to see. William would look at the pages and would understand, and that would be that.
She had also, somewhere between the third-floor landing and the second, decided she was going to say something about the garden, or about his warm, deep voice in the dark, or about the fact that she had not seen him since then.
Not dramatically. She was not going to make a speech or demand a love declaration or do any of the things that the heroines in Letitia’s novels did with such frequency and conviction.
She knocked on the study door.
“Come.”
He was sitting at his desk with his coat still on, fully composed. The posture of a man who had returned from somewhere and had been at work for long enough that the work had become his expression.
He looked up with the expression of someone who didn’t want to be bothered.
He must be swamped by work.
It hit her like cold water.
“Cecily.” He set down his quill. “Come in. Sit down.”
She came in and sat. She set the notes on the arm of the chair, looked at him, and waited for a moment.
“I wanted to–” she began.
“I owe you an apology.” He folded his hands on the desk.
His eyes, that particular clear green she had spent two months not thinking about, met hers, giving her nothing.
She stopped.
“For last night,” he continued. “For the garden. It was…” A pause, small and precise, the pause of a man selecting a word with surgical care. “…ill-considered. I want to apologize.”
He held her eyes with the full composure that she had learned to read as a kind of armor.
“Ill-considered,” she repeated.
“I was not measured. The evening, the dancing, the–” He stopped and started again, from a cleaner position. “I behaved in a way that was not in keeping with the terms we agreed on. I am sorry for that.”
The terms we agreed on.
She had the odd sense of watching herself sit very still and breathing very carefully.
“You are apologizing,” she said flatly, “for the garden.”
“I apologize for what it may have implied,” he clarified. “Which was not… accurate. To our situation.”
Our situation?
Her whole body felt like fluid that could spill at any moment.
She looked at her hands. At the notes on the arm of the chair. Then she looked back at him.
She was aware of him on the other side of the desk, watching her with the careful composure of a man who had made a decision in private and arrived here already resolved.
She had been kissed in that garden. She had kissed him back with everything she had not been saying for weeks, and she had meant every word of it, and he was calling it inaccurate.
“It seemed quite accurate at the time,” she said lightly, because the lightness was something to hold onto. “You were there.”
“I know I was there.” A pause. “That is precisely the point. I should not have–” He stopped again.
He was choosing every word the way one chose footing on uncertain ground, and she recognized it because she had watched him do it before, in the early days, before she had learned his vocabulary well enough to read what the choosing meant.
He was frightened.
The recognition dawned quietly, without drama, and she held it carefully.
“Then what is the apology for? The inaccuracy, or your being there?” She couldn’t keep the plea out of her voice.
“We must be cautious,” he said. “Appearances, particularly here in London, require a certain care. What happened last night… if it were to become a pattern, if it were to be caught–”
“William.”
He stopped.
“I am not asking about appearances,” she said.
He looked at her.
“I am asking about us,” she said. “About what happened in the garden, which was not—it was not an appearance. It was not for the benefit of anyone watching, because no one was watching. It was”—she held his gaze—“real. And I would like to understand what you intend to do with something real.”
The room was very quiet.
He looked at her for a long moment. She could see him making the decision, the precise moment it was made, the shift in his expression.
“I stepped closer,” he rasped. “That was a mistake.”