Chapter 14 #2
What she did not say was that she had felt both things simultaneously, which was the more complicated truth, and one she was not yet ready to hand to her sister in full. She would get there. She always got there eventually.
"Poppy." She straightened and chose the next words with care, the way she had learned to choose words in any conversation that mattered. "I need to ask you something, and I want you to answer honestly, not the way you think I want you to answer."
Poppy put the necklace down and gave her full attention, which was the gift her sister had always given her in moments like this.
"When I am married," Julia said, "I would like you to come and live with us. With me. At Pridewell." She kept her voice level. "I have not asked him yet. I do not know what he will say. But I want you to know that it is what I want, and that I intend to ask."
Poppy looked at her for a long moment. Then her face did something complicated, something that moved through gratitude and sorrow and some private relief that she was not quite ready to give a name to either, and she reached out and took Julia's hand.
"You have been taking care of me since I was seven years old," she said.
"I know," Julia said.
"I do not always know how to say thank you for it."
"You don't have to say anything."
"I know I don't." Poppy squeezed her hand once, firmly. "Ask him."
They sat together for a moment in the particular quiet of two people who knew each other completely and had run out of words, which was a different kind of quiet from all the others.
Then Lady Bendon's voice carried up the stairs, bright and insistent, calling them both down for tea.
The drawing room on Cavendish Street had always been Aunt Violet's domain.
She had spent countless hours arranging and rearranging the furniture with a lot of care.
There were good chairs and a fire laid even in the milder weather, and always something on the side table that had no business being there in the afternoon but appeared regardless — a small plate of sugared almonds, a dish of preserved ginger, a cake that had simply materialized.
She had a way of making a room feel inhabited rather than merely furnished, which was a talent Julia had never seen her take credit for.
She was pouring tea when they came in, her long dark hair pinned with the efficiency of a woman who did not have the patience for elaborate arrangements but always managed to look elegant regardless.
Georgia, their cousin, was folded into the corner chair with a book that she was only nominally reading.
"Sit, sit," Lady Bendon said, with the air of someone who had been waiting longer than was strictly accurate. "I want to look at you both."
They sat. She looked. Then she set down the teapot, pressed her hands together in front of her, and said, "The Duke of Pridewell."
"Yes," Julia said.
"The Duke of Pridewell." She appeared to be tasting it, turning it over with the satisfaction of a woman whose instincts had been confirmed in a much more spectacular fashion than she had anticipated.
"I told Michael at the start of the week that there was something in the way that man looked at you.
He told me I was making things up. He is going to be insufferable about having been wrong, and I intend to be worse about being right.
" She picked up the teapot again and poured with the determined energy of someone who had several more things to say. "Now. Tell me everything."
"There is not very much to tell," Julia said. "Only what you already know."
"Julia." Her aunt gave her the look that had stopped both girls cold since childhood, gentle and immovable in equal measure.
"I have been a married woman for twenty-two years.
I know the difference between an arrangement and a beginning, and I know which of those I saw when that man made his announcement.
" She set a cup in front of Julia and held it there until Julia met her eyes.
"You do not have to have it all worked out.
I am not asking you to have it worked out.
I am only asking you to tell me the truth. "
Julia looked at the cup.
Then she said, "He is not what I expected."
"No," Lady Bendon agreed, with the particular gentleness of someone who had been watching quietly and was glad to have her suspicions confirmed. "I don't imagine he is."
"I do not entirely know what to make of him yet." She picked up the cup. "He is… he notices things. More than he lets on. And he has been — " She paused. "Kinder than the situation required."
"That is a great deal, coming from you," Georgia observed from her corner, without looking up from her book.
Julia glanced at her cousin. Georgia was sixteen and had the unnerving quality of all perceptive young people, which was that they said the true thing before anyone had decided whether it was the appropriate time to say it.
Lady Bendon gave her daughter a look that meant hush, darling, and Georgia turned a page without expression.
"I want to ask him about Poppy," Julia said. "About her living with us."
Lady Bendon's face moved through several things quickly.
Warmth, and something underneath it that was the expression of a woman who had her own opinions about what Poppy's future ought to look like, weighing itself against the knowledge of what was available and what was not.
"You should ask," she said. "I believe he will say yes. "
"You don't know that."
"No. But I have watched him watch you all week, and what I saw was not a man who intends to make your life more challenging than it already is." She settled back with her own cup. "Ask him, Julia."
Poppy, beside her, said nothing. She was looking at her tea with the expression she wore when she was trying not to show that she was moved, which she had never been successful at hiding.
Julia would ask him.
The matter was settled, with no further ceremony required.
Lord Bendon arrived home at half past four.
He came into the drawing room, already in the middle of removing his gloves, when he stopped and took in the assembled company and rearranged himself with a speed that would have been comical in any other man.
The severe eyebrows rose above the thin, round spectacles. The gloves were removed more slowly.
"Nieces," he said. "I wasn't aware you were back."
"We arrived this morning, Uncle," Julia said pleasantly.
He crossed to his chair by the window, the one that everyone in the household understood was his by longstanding territorial right, and settled himself into it with the measured deliberateness of a man composing his next sentence. He looked at Julia. Then he looked at his wife. Then back to Julia.
"Well," he said. "Engaged to the Duke of Pridewell."
"Yes. I am," Julia said, for the second time that afternoon.
"Extraordinary business." He cleared his throat. His mustache bristled, and Julia could tell he was working up to say something in a magnanimous manner. "I want you to know, Julia, that I have always had the highest confidence in you. From the very beginning."
Julia set down her cup.
She said nothing for a moment. Across the room, Aunt Violet studied the middle distance with the careful attention of a woman watching something that required no contribution from her.
"I remember your confidence very clearly, Uncle," Julia said. Her voice was even, warm, and entirely controlled. "I believe the phrase you used was that it would mean nothing to you to throw us into the streets."
Lord Bendon's mustache moved again, this time in a different direction. "I may have been perhaps forthright in my opinion, but the point is, now that things have resolved themselves so satisfactorily, I think we can agree to let the past remain in the past.”
"I love my aunt very much," Julia said. "She and Georgia are the reason I will always welcome you in my home.
" She met his eyes with the same directness she had been practicing since she was fourteen years old in rooms that required it.
"But I would not expect any particular benefit from my husband, Uncle. "
Lord Bendon looked at her.
Julia looked back.
Aunt Violet picked up the teapot.
"More tea, Michael?" she said, with the serenity of a woman for whom this afternoon had gone entirely according to expectation.