Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
"When you find my father," she finally broke the silence, "and this arrangement has served its purpose, what happens to me?"
His spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. He looked at her. "What do you mean?"
"I mean precisely what I asked." She kept her eyes on him. "You will have what you came for. I will have served my function. Do you plan to simply leave me to manage this house alone while you return to whatever your life was before?"
"Do you think me that dishonorable?"
"I think you are a man with a plan," she said. "I am asking where I fit in it once the plan is complete."
He held her gaze with the steadiness that she had stopped finding reassuring. "You are my wife. That does not expire."
She nodded once, then looked at the table.
He set down his glass. "I will ask you the same question."
She looked up.
"If it came to it," he said, "would you choose him? Your father, over this?"
The firelight moved across the table between them. She did not look away from him, and he did not look away from her, and the question sat in the space between them with the particular weight of something that had needed asking for some time.
"My father abandoned Poppy and me when it suited him. You also had a choice, but instead you chose to marry me, so no. I will not choose father."
After a moment, she added, "Thank you for being so clear about what this is." Her voice was the same as it had been all evening. Even, composed, giving nothing away. "It is useful to know where one stands."
She reached for her wine glass and held it without drinking from it.
"My father has written to me again," she said. "Since the last note. There was nothing specific about it. He says only that he will be in touch."
Leander was very still.
"I thought you should know," she said.
She drank her wine and set the glass down, and the dinner continued.
He had wanted clarity. He had it.
Julia was courteous at breakfast and again at dinner. She asked appropriate questions about the estate. She remembered the names of everyone he introduced to her. She thanked Mrs. Hartley for things before being asked. She was, by every observable measure, doing everything correctly.
Knowing how frank she was about her mind and passionate her opinions, he found her aloofness deeply irritating.
On the second morning, he came down to find she had already eaten and gone out to the gardens, which was her right and which he had no grounds to object to. He sat at the table with his coffee and the morning paper and stared at neither of them for a considerable amount of time.
The paper had a paragraph about the wedding.
He had expected that. The Duke of Pridewell and Miss J.
Norish, daughter of the notorious Lord N.
, united in a quiet ceremony at the Pridewell chapel.
The tone was the particular tone of a publication that found the situation interesting enough to cover and insufficiently scandalous to condemn outright. He read it once and turned the page.
She was being careful with him.
He had asked her to be careful with him. He had sat across a dinner table and laid out the terms with the flat efficiency of a man drawing up a contract, and she had received every word of it with composed grace.
He should be satisfied. The arrangement was functioning exactly as designed.
He turned another page of the paper and read nothing on it.
The issue, which he identified, was the banter. He missed it the way one misses a season when the seasons changed — not dramatically, but constantly, in small ways that accumulated.
He reminded himself that sentiment was not the point. The point was the plan. Norish would come, and when he did, Leander would be ready. Then Henry would have what he had been promised.
He reminded himself of that quite firmly.
He thought, despite this, about the dinner table. About Julia sitting across from him with her wine glass held and her voice even, asking him, with perfect composure, whether he intended to abandon her once she had served her purpose.
He had not slept especially well since that question.
Not because he lacked an answer. He had an answer. He had given it: “You are my wife, that does not expire.” The answer was correct, and he stood behind it.
What he had not expected was the anger that had arrived alongside it, sitting just beneath the surface, waiting for him to examine it.
He had been carrying anger for three years, a specific and purposeful anger directed at a specific and purposeful target, and he knew its shape and weight so well that he had stopped noticing it the way a man stopped noticing a scar.
This was different.
Norish had taken Henry's money, heirloom, and last years of ease, and that was what Leander had built his plan around and from which he would not deviate.
But Norish had also taken something from Julia.
He had taken the ordinary childhood of a girl who should have been reading novels, attending assemblies, and being insufferable about it, the way girls of that age were entitled to be, and had given her instead an accounting ledger and a set of responsibilities that belonged to an adult.
He had taken the last twenty-four years of her life and turned them into a continuous exercise in handling consequences that were never hers to manage.
And she was still protecting him.
That was what sat beneath the irritation, hot and specific. She had not answered the question at dinner.
If it came to it, would you choose him?
She had looked at him with those steady eyes, and she had said nothing, and he had not pressed her, and the silence had answered anyway.
She would not choose her father. He believed that. But she would not condemn him either, and the difference between those two things was the length and breadth of what Norish had cost her, laid out plainly in a single unanswered question.
He closed the paper.
He was not going to think about Julia in terms that required him to want anything from her beyond the functional.
That had been the point of the rules. Clear lines produced clear expectations, and clear expectations produced no disappointment, which was a system he had operated under successfully for thirty years and had no reason to abandon now.
He did not need her to look at him the way she had looked in the chapel. He did not need the conversation that had happened in a hedge maze clearing, the specific quality of talking to someone who was listening completely rather than waiting to be heard. He did not need the banter.
He was fine without all of that. He had been fine without all of that for thirty years.
He stood, pushed back his chair, and went to find his estate manager because there was work to do, and work had always been, in his experience, the most reliable remedy for everything that thinking made worse.
But as he worked, a thought began to form in his mind. For the next two days, he could not get it out.
The Pridewell townhouse in London had been closed since the wedding.
Leander had assumed their stay here would be longer, but that could be easily remedied.
Cuthbert had the keys, and the staff could be recalled within the week.
The London house was also, as Leander was aware and chose not to examine too closely, four streets from Cavendish Street.
He had thought about it practically. Norish was in London.
The note had said nothing specific, which meant contact was coming, and when it came, it would come to wherever Julia was.
Having her in London when that happened was operationally sensible.
It removed variables. It compressed the geography of the thing into something manageable.
That was the reason.
He found her in the library after breakfast, which had become her habit in the mornings when the weather kept her from the garden.
She was at the window with a book she was not reading, which he recognized because it was the same book she had not been reading for two days. She looked up when he entered.
"I have been thinking about London," he said.
She waited.
"It makes more sense for us to be there.
" He withdrew the letter Cuthbert had sent, because having something in his hands gave the conversation the practical quality he intended.
"Your father will reach out again, and when he does, I would rather be in the city than have the correspondence making the journey back and forth.
It will also be easier to manage Cuthbert from there. "
"Of course," she said.
"The townhouse is on Grosvenor Square. It is comfortable." He set the letter down. "You would be closer to your sister."
He said it straightforwardly, as a fact among other facts, in the same way he had mentioned Cuthbert and the townhouse and the management of correspondence. He did not add anything to it. He looked at the letter as though he were reviewing its contents, which he had already reviewed twice.
She was quiet for a moment.
"When?" she said.
"End of the week, if that suits you."
She looked at him. He met her eyes briefly, with the composure of a man who had made a practical decision for practical reasons and was ready to discuss the logistics whenever she wished.
"Yes," she said. "That suits me very well."
She looked back at her book. Something had shifted in her expression, well contained, but it was there. What he had seen was gratitude.
He picked up the letter again and left the library. He did not think about the way her expression shifted when he gave her the information and went to write to Cuthbert.
Hyde Park in the afternoon was exactly what she had not known she needed.
The grass was dry enough for the blanket Aunt Violet had thought to bring, along with a basket that contained considerably more food than four people required and a small folding table for the teacups that Georgia set up with focused efficiency.