Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Lord Bendon set down his cup.
It was not a violent gesture. He was not a violent man. But it was the gesture of a man who had decided that pleasantness had run its course and something more direct was now required. The small ceramic sound of it against the saucer was enough to make Georgia lower her book by an inch.
"I beg your pardon?" he said.
"I think you heard me, Uncle."
"I heard you address me as though I were a tradesman being declined at the front door," he said, and the mustache was no longer moving in any direction because his jaw had gone tight underneath it.
"After I opened my home to you. After I, out of the goodness of my own consideration, allowed your aunt to bring you both here when no one else in London would have had you. "
"You allowed it," Julia agreed. "And you told us, very clearly, what the terms were. I am not revisiting those terms now. I am simply making the terms of the next arrangement equally clear."
"Julia." Lady Bendon's voice was quiet. It was not a warning. It was the voice of a woman who understood that what was being said needed to be said and was only asking, gently, that it be said carefully.
Julia was being careful. She was incredibly careful indeed.
Lord Bendon rose from his chair. He was not a tall man, which meant he had developed, over the years, the particular posture of someone who intended to occupy more space than his height allowed.
He stood at the full extent of it now. "Poppy stays here," he said.
"She is under my roof and my protection.
Whatever arrangements you make with your Duke, they do not extend to my household. "
"Poppy is my sister," Julia said.
"Poppy is an unmarried girl of twenty years with no income and no prospects, and she will remain here under proper care until a suitable match is made for her.
" He picked up his gloves from the arm of the chair.
"I will not have her shipped off to the countryside to live on the charity of a man who has no obligation toward her and every right to turn her out the moment it becomes inconvenient. "
"He is not that kind of man."
"You have known him for one week."
The words landed with the particular efficiency of accurate things, and Julia sat with them for a moment before answering.
"It is correct," she said, "that I have known him for one week.
And that he has no obligation toward her.
" She kept her hands in her lap and her voice even.
"But I am asking him. And I believe he will agree.
And when he does, Poppy will have the choice of where she wishes to be.
She is twenty years old, Uncle. The choice is hers. "
"Not while she is in my house."
"Michael." Lady Bendon set down her own cup, and there was something in her voice now that had not been there before, something that had moved past gentle into the tone of a woman who had been quiet long enough.
He turned. She looked at him with the full weight of twenty-two years of knowing precisely who he was, which was the most effective look available to her and always had been. "Sit down."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he sat.
The fire settled in the grate. Outside, the sound of Cavendish Street went on as it always did, carriage wheels and footsteps and the ordinary indifferent noise of London.
Poppy was looking out the window. She had not said a word throughout. She had the stillness of someone listening to a conversation about their own life, not yet invited to enter it. Julia made a private note that the moment Lord Bendon left the room, she would correct that immediately.
"I do not wish to be at odds with you," Julia said to her uncle.
She meant it. She was tired of odds. She had been at odds with something since she was fourteen years old, and she would like, whatever was coming next, to be at odds with as few things as possible.
"I am grateful for what you have provided for us, and I intend to say so to anyone who asks.
But Poppy's future is not a matter of your household management.
It is a matter of her own wishes, mine, and eventually my husband's. I would ask you to remember that."
Lord Bendon said nothing. He put on one glove. Then the other. Then he stood, and he left the room, and the door did not quite close behind him, which was the particular passive expression of a man who wished to make a point without the confrontation of slamming it.
The four of them sat in the quiet he had left.
Georgia turned a page.
"Well," said Aunt Violet, and picked up the teapot for the third time, though no one actually needed more tea.
Poppy turned from the window. Her expression was the complicated one again, the one Julia had seen upstairs. Gratitude and sorrow pressed up against each other. She opened her mouth and then closed it, and then simply said, "Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet," Julia said. "I still have to ask the Duke."
Poppy smiled. It was a real one. "I have no doubt that he will acquiesce. For who could deny you, Sister?"
The note arrived the following morning.
Julia found it on the breakfast table beside her plate, which meant it had come through the front door in the ordinary way and that whoever had delivered it had either been trusted with the address or had known it already.
She did not open it immediately. She finished her tea.
She waited for Poppy to take her toast to the window seat while the light was good, which she had also done yesterday.
She checked to see that Aunt Violet was engaged in conversation with the housekeeper in the hallway, then she opened it.
The handwriting was her father's. She would have known it anywhere. It was the looping, expansive cursive of a man who had once believed himself destined for better things and had never quite let go of the style that accompanied that belief.
My dearest Julia,
I cannot say how delighted I was to hear the news of your engagement. You have always been the most capable of my daughters, and I confess I always knew you would find a way to elevate yourself. The Duke of Pridewell is a man of considerable standing. I am immensely proud.
Do not reply to this note. Wait for word from me. I shall arrange a meeting very soon once I have had time to make certain preparations. We have much to discuss, you and I, and I look forward to seeing your face.
Your loving father
She read it twice.
The first time she read it, she felt the old familiar weight of it; the weight of a man who had written I am immensely proud about an outcome he had contributed nothing toward and intended to benefit from entirely.
The second time she read it, she felt something cooler and more specific, something that had not been available to her in the past because in the past she had been without any power of her own.
She was not without power now.
She folded the note and held it. Outside the breakfast room window, the street was bright and busy, a vendor calling something from the corner, a pair of women in good hats moving quickly along the pavement. London in the morning was indifferent yet alive.
Her father was somewhere in this city. He had written the word we as though they were partners in something, as though the distance between what she had built in a week and what he had destroyed over twenty years was a matter of circumstance rather than choice.
He had called it our arrangement before he had even made one.
She thought of Leander.
She thought of the watch in the sealed report Cuthbert had compiled, and of what Leander had said in the maze — then we are ready for him, both of us.
She had wondered, at the time, what both of us meant in practice. She was beginning to understand that it meant exactly what he had implied.
She would tell Leander about this new note today.
She set it on the table beside her plate and poured a second cup of tea she did not particularly want. Then Julia sat with the morning and the question of what came next, and for the first time in an exceptionally long while, she found that the question did not entirely frighten her.
The wedding was at eleven.
It was half past eight when Anthony arrived in the billiard room, already dressed, his cravat tied with the cheerful precision of a man who had no ambivalence about the morning whatsoever.
He found Leander at the table, coat off, cue in hand, in the middle of a break that had been going for some time, judging by the position of the balls.
Anthony poured two glasses from the decanter on the sideboard, set one on the edge of the table within reach, and picked up the second cue without asking.
They played in silence for a while.
The billiard room at Pridewell was on the north side of the house, which meant it caught none of the morning sun and stayed cool well into the afternoon.
The light that came in was flat, even, and good for concentration.
Leander had spent a huge portion of his twenties in this room, working through things that did not have solutions, because the geometry of the table gave the mind somewhere specific to go when it was otherwise inclined to wander.
He potted two and missed the third.
Anthony stepped up and studied the table. "How long have you been here?"
"A while."
"Did you sleep?"
Leander picked up his glass. "Some."
Anthony played his shot and made it, which he acknowledged with no expression beyond a slight adjustment of his grip on the cue. He walked the length of the table, assessed the next angle, and said, without looking up, "Are you certain about this?"
"Yes."
"That was very fast."
"It was a straightforward question."