Chapter 17 #2
Julia sat with her face turned toward the sun and felt, for the first time in ten days, that her shoulders were somewhere in the vicinity of her actual body rather than somewhere around her ears.
"You look better already," Poppy said.
"I feel better," Julia said, which was honest and more than she had expected to be able to say.
Aunt Violet handed her a cup and looked at her with the expression she wore when she was deciding whether to say the thing she was thinking or the softer version of it. She had always been transparent in this particular way, which Julia had always found one of her most endearing qualities.
She said the thing. "What he did, Julia. Moving to London."
"It was practical," Julia said. "My father is in the city."
"It was chivalrous," her aunt said, with the gentle certainty of a woman who had made up her mind and saw no reason to revisit it. "The proposal was chivalrous. The move to London is chivalrous. I will hear no other interpretation."
"The proposal was a solution to a problem," Julia said pleasantly. "He is a man who identifies problems and solves them. I happened to be adjacent to one."
"I think he likes her."
"What makes you say so, Georgia?" Poppy asked, before Lady Bendon could redirect her.
Georgia looked up from her book with the unhurried confidence of someone who had formed her opinion some time ago and was merely waiting to be consulted.
"He came out of the house three times while you were all sitting here.
The first time he said it was for a book.
The second time, he said it was for his coat.
He was not wearing a coat when he came back in.
" She returned to her page. "Men are not complicated. "
Lady Bendon pressed her lips together in a way that suggested she agreed but was not certain she ought to say so.
Poppy was watching Julia with the look she used when she was approaching something sideways.
Julia had been familiar with that look since Poppy was approximately four years old, and it had never become less readable.
She had also been away from her sister for nearly three weeks, staying in a house that was not hers, in a room that was not hers, waiting on a situation she had not chosen, and Julia could see all of that sitting quietly underneath the look as well.
"It is a marriage of convenience," Julia said, before her sister could begin. "It is what it is, and it will remain what it is, and I am quite content with the arrangement."
Poppy said nothing for a moment. Then: "He would not let you bring me to the manor."
"Not yet," Julia said carefully.
"That is not the same as no," Lady Bendon offered.
"No," Poppy agreed, in a tone that made it clear she was still deciding how she felt about the distinction. "It isn't."
Poppy straightened the edge of the blanket with elaborate attention. "You said something similar, once, about falling for him."
Julia looked at her.
"Before the party. After the incident on the street. You clearly thought he was the most disagreeable man on earth." She was still looking at the blanket. "So this news must be very welcome. That it is simply convenient."
Julia said nothing.
Above them, a pair of sparrows disputed something in the elm. The park moved around them in its afternoon way, dogs and children and couples and the ordinary indifferent life of a city going about its business.
Poppy looked up. Her eyes met Aunt Violet's, briefly, across the teacups.
Julia saw it. She reached for her sandwich and took a bite. Then, she glanced around the park and offered, “More tea, Cousin?” As she poured, the afternoon continued.
She heard a sharp percussive crash from somewhere toward the back of the house, followed by a brief and uncharacteristic silence from the hall. She had been handing her gloves to the footman, and stopped with one glove half-removed and listened. Then she followed the sound.
The study door was open.
Leander was on the floor.
He was uninjured. That was her first assessment.
Leander was already pushing himself upright against the bottom of the bookcase, which had apparently shed a considerable portion of its upper shelf onto both him and the surrounding floor.
Books were everywhere. A small decorative globe had rolled to the edge of the desk and stopped.
He had what appeared to be a volume of Blackstone's Commentaries open across his knee and the expression of a man who had decided that if he moved quickly enough and with sufficient dignity, this might still be recoverable.
It was not recoverable. It was entirely, perfectly unrecoverable.
Julia stood in the doorway.
She pressed her lips together.
She pressed them together harder.
"I am fine," he said, from the floor, with the composure of a man who had not just been felled by his own library.
"Of course you are," she said.
She crossed the room and crouched beside him. Slowly, Julia began gathering the nearest books before he could tell her not to, stacking them by size because it was the logical approach and because it gave her something to look at while she adjusted her face.
"I do not need assistance," he said.
"I know," she said. She handed him Blackstone without looking at him.
He took it without looking at her. She picked up two more volumes, set them on the shelf, and turned back for the next armful.
She was doing very well until she glanced at him and found him sitting on the floor of his own study with a slight volume of Milton open in one hand and his hair disordered from the descent.
The Duke wore the expression of a man who was maintaining his dignity through sheer concentrated effort.
She laughed.
It came out before she could stop it, which was perhaps why it sounded as genuine as it did. She pressed her hand over her mouth, and it escaped anyway. Julia looked at the ceiling, then at the books, and absolutely not at him.
"I beg your pardon," she managed.
"Quite," he said.
She got herself under control but looked back at him anyway.
The Duke was watching her with the expression she had not seen in ten days, the one that was not quite a smile and was always better than one.
Something loosened in the room, some quality that had been present for the past several days and that she had grown used to in the particular way that one grew used to a window being stuck.
She picked up the last of the books. He stood, with less difficulty than his dazed position on the floor had suggested he might, and they replaced the volumes on the shelf in a more sensible arrangement than they had evidently been in before.
"You were trying to reach the top shelf," she said.
"I was returning something to the top shelf," he said. "There is a distinction."
"Of course." She straightened the globe. "Do you often conduct your cataloging from the floor?"
"This is a singular occasion."
"I will try to look surprised if it happens again."
He glanced at her sideways. There it was. This look…this teasing exchange had been missing from her life for ten days. She had yearned for it without allowing herself to name it as missing.
She turned to the shelf and ran her eye along the spines, steadying a volume that was leaning at an unstable angle.
He moved to the other end and did the same.
They stood at either end of the bookcase in the late-afternoon light streaming through the study window.
The silence was the comfortable kind rather than the careful kind, which was different enough to be notable.
"We are alike in this," he said. He was looking at the books, not at her.
She waited.
"You organize things," he said. "People, situations. You walk into a room, and within three minutes you have identified what needs managing and begun managing it." He moved the volume half an inch. "Without being asked."
"It is a habit," she said.
"So is mine." He looked along the shelf. "I have been told it is not always welcome."
"By whom?"
"Anthony, primarily." A beat. "Regularly."
She found she was smiling again. "We are both guilty of it."
"Both overprotective," he said. "Both too proud to ask for help when we need it." He glanced at the floor, briefly, with the expression of a man acknowledging an example he would have preferred not to provide. "Both carrying things we did not choose to carry."
She was quiet for a moment. Outside, the London street went on as it always did, and the fire in the grate was low. Suddenly, the study felt smaller than it had when she came in a few moments before.
"My father did that to us both," she said.
"Yes."
"I am sorry for it. For what it cost you, Henry, and all the rest."
He looked at her. "You did not do it."
"I know." She looked at the books. "But the circumstances that brought you to this point and brought me to yours — they were all set in motion by the same man."
"They were," he said. He turned back to the shelf and was quiet for a moment. "Those same circumstances led you to my house party. To all of it." Something shifted in his voice, not quite bitterness, but its close relation. "And to your ruin. And forced you to marry me."
The room was incredibly quiet.
"They led me to you," she said.
She said it matter-of-factly, then she turned to the shelf and straightened a spine that needed no straightening and said, "I believe dinner will be soon. I should — "
He kissed her.
He had been watching her mouth while she spoke, when some impulse had taken over him.
He had simply closed the remaining distance between them and covered her lips with his.
His hand came to the side of her face, and she went still at his touch.
Leander kissed her in the way of a man who had run out of the thing that had been holding him back and found, on the other side of it, something he had no more words to express.
She sighed and kissed him back.
The books stood where they were. The fire settled.
When they stopped, he was looking at her in the way she had first seen in the chapel and had not seen since. She gazed back at him with everything she had not yet decided whether to say, and neither of them said anything for a moment.
Then she straightened her dress with the efficiency of long practice, glanced at the shelf, and said, "I really should change for dinner."
"Yes," he said.
She left the study.
She did not look back, but she was smiling as she went up the stairs, and she did not try to hide it.