Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
The curtains were still drawn when he woke up.
The bedroom was dim and warm, smelling faintly of lavender and tallow. Julia was already sitting up against the mahogany headboard; her silk dressing gown pulled securely back over her shoulders. His heavy leather copy of Blackstone's Commentaries sat open in her lap.
She was reading the dense legal text with the exact same fierce, focused attention she had given to Fielding the previous afternoon, which suggested she either possessed much broader intellectual tastes than he had originally assumed or was determined to find the driest, most impractical reading material available purely to make a political point.
He watched her for a quiet moment. She had not noticed he was awake yet.
He looked at the ceiling and acknowledged, privately and without drama, that the marriage was no longer one in name only.
What had begun with honest words had continued with the particular, unhurried honesty of two people who had run out of reasons to hold anything back, and the version of this arrangement he had described to Anthony in the billiard room two weeks ago bore no resemblance whatsoever to what it had become.
He was not sorry about that.
He became aware, in a realization that arrived softly rather than all at once, that this was the very first morning in longer than he could accurately count that his first conscious thought had not been of Henry.
Or the court case. Or the ruin of Viscount Norish.
The brutal, necessary sequence of things to be done had always been his waking companion.
This morning, his first thought had been the strawberry-blonde woman reading his law books in his bed.
"Blackstone," he said, his voice raspy from sleep.
She looked over, her brown dove eyes adjusting to the dimness. "You have an interesting library, Your Grace."
"You are reading a legal commentary, my Lady."
"I am entirely aware of what I am reading." She turned a page with a crisp, deliberate snap of the paper. "You have very few novels."
"I have novels."
"You have Fielding. You have exactly one volume of Richardson." She lowered the heavy book slightly, looking at him over the top of the leather spine. "Do you have any Scott?"
"No."
"We should rectify that immediately."
Leander sat up, the linen sheets rustling as the mattress shifted.
Outside on the cobblestones, a dray cart was moving slowly along the street, the driver calling out something unintelligible into the foggy air. The ordinary London morning was assembling itself piece by piece beyond the heavy velvet curtains.
He looked at her, and she looked back at him. The heat of the previous night sat between them in the quiet room without either of them forcing it into something that required an awkward discussion, a mutual restraint he found himself deeply grateful for.
"You have broken every single rule you set," she said pleasantly, her head tilting as she returned her gaze to Blackstone.
"I have revised several."
"Is that what we are calling it?"
"It is a reasonable characterization."
A small smile touched her mouth.
She did not look at him. She smiled down at the page instead, which was somehow far more flirtatious.
"You made those rules at the dinner table. I sat across from you that night, and I thought…" She stopped abruptly, her fingers tightening on the edges of the book.
"What did you think, Julia?"
She glanced up, her brown eyes remarkably clear in the gray morning light. "I thought that was the most efficient way I had ever been told that I didn't matter."
The cart outside had moved on, the driver's voice fading into the distance. The room became suffocatingly quiet.
"Julia," he said, his chest tightening.
"I know it was not your intention," she said, her voice dropping into an even, measured tone.
"And I know why you did it." She closed the heavy volume on her thumb, marking her place.
"I am not raising the matter to wound you, Leander.
I am raising it because it is rather funny, in retrospect, that you are now lying in the very same bed those rules were constructed to protect. "
He looked at her.
Her mouth had assumed that particular, sharp shape it took when she was finding something genuinely amusing and choosing not to fully commit to the laughter.
Something in his chest moved in that strange, heavy way that had been happening with increasing frequency over the past weeks, a sensation he had completely run out of ways to reclassify as tactical.
"The rules," he said, his voice low, "were badly designed."
"Catastrophically," she agreed.
He reached across the space between them and took Blackstone smoothly from her hands. She let him take it without resistance, which meant she had finished using it as a shield anyway. He set the heavy book on the side table with a dull thud.
“I want to plan a ball, to become accustomed to my duties as Duchess.” She looked at him as she spoke.
"Tell me about this ball."
She straightened her posture against the pillows. He had not expected her response to be immediate, but Julia, with a plan, was never caught unprepared.
"A dinner first," she said, her eyes tracking across the ceiling as she worked through the logistics. "A smaller gathering so I can manage the numbers and learn the household's actual capacity properly. Then a grand ball, once I know the London staff well enough to trust them with the execution."
She glanced at him, her intelligence bright and sharp in the dimness.
"You were already planning this."
"I was thinking about it in the carriage home." She tilted her chin with a flash of her usual spark. "Is that permitted, or has that particular rule been revised away as well?"
"Plan the ball," he said.
She looked at her husband. She clearly did not know what to do with his surrender; he could see it in her face. The confusion lasted for half a second before she rearranged her features into perfect order.
"I will need to meet with Mrs. Hartley about the London house capacities today. And I want to send a formal card to Lady Harcourt; we should not appear ungrateful for the invitation last night."
"Agreed."
"And Poppy should be there." She said her sister's name without making it a request, a subtle assertion of her family's place that he did not fail to notice. "She will want to be involved in the planning. She is exceptionally good with flowers and arrangements and anything that requires a ball."
"She could move in," Leander said.
Julia stopped mid-sentence, her lips parting slightly.
"If she wanted," he continued, his voice steady as he looked toward the edge of the curtain. "If you both wanted it. There is more than enough room in this house."
She was staring at him now. He could feel the intense heat of her attention without turning his head to meet it.
"You said at the dinner table, you explicitly said…"
"I know exactly what I said at dinner, Julia." He turned his head, forcing her to look at him.
She looked at him for a long, heavy moment, and he let her look, refusing to pull his gaze away.
What moved across her face in those quiet seconds was not the careful, composed version of herself she offered to the judging eyes of London drawing rooms. It was something entirely underneath that armor. Unguarded, vulnerable, and specific.
Her eyes went briefly, brilliantly bright with unshed tears.
Then, she looked away, clearing her throat softly.
"I will ask her," she said.
He nodded. He looked back at the velvet curtain, and in the peripheral space of not looking at her directly, he allowed himself to simply exist in the warmth of the room.
The morning was expanding around them, the gold light leaking in at the seams of the fabric, warming the woman beside him who had been reading his law books when he woke.
He thought, for no reason he had intended, about Henry at thirty-two. It was before the ruinous debts, before Norish’s claws had dug into him, back when Henry had still been the kind of man who laughed easily, and organized chaotic shooting parties.
Henry had wanted a life that accumulated—a house with more than one person in it who actually mattered.
Leander had told him, in the cold wisdom of their youth, that such things came in their own time and could never be forced.
But Henry had died at thirty-seven with the heirloom watch stolen, the accumulation undone, and none of his life in its proper order at all.
The warmth of the bedchamber shifted.
It was not a change in temperature. It wasn't anything an observer could see. But something cold and sharp moved through Leander’s chest, carrying the crushing weight of a thing he had been carrying for three brutal years.
He had set it down this morning without noticing, and now that he picked it back up, he found it heavier than before.
Henry had been owed better than this. Leander had promised his dying friend better. Yet here he was, lying in a warm bed with his wife, while his solicitor’s last urgent letter sat unanswered on the desk in the study downstairs.
Viscount Norish was somewhere in this very city, and nothing had moved forward in four long days because Leander had chosen not to move it.
He had been here. He had been very much here, drowning in Julia's eyes, and nowhere near where his vengeance was supposed to be.
"I should get dressed," he said, his tone turning abruptly clipped.
Julia looked at him, her attention sharpening instantly. "It is only half past eight."
"I have urgent business to address."
The defensive quality of her observation locked onto him. He could feel it without looking at her face.
She was reading the sudden change in him; she was entirely accurate, and she would not press him on it because she had learned by now where pressing landed with a man like him. The absolute accuracy of her silence was somehow far worse than a question would have been.
"Of course," she said quietly.
He got out of bed. He found his clothes. He did not look back at the pillows and did not look at her face. He chose both of those omissions deliberately because he was not ready for the guilt he would find if his eyes met hers.
"The Scott," he said from across the threshold, his hand on the brass doorknob, not quite looking back at her. "I will have the volumes ordered from the bookseller today."
"Thank you," she said. Her voice was perfectly even, perfectly remote.
He left the room, the latch clicking firmly behind him.
The study was cold. He had not had the fire lit yet, a luxury he rarely required before ten o'clock, and the morning light leaked through the tall window gray, flat, and entirely practical.
It was a sullen atmosphere, which suited his current frame of mind far better than the warm, lavender-scented, curtained room upstairs.
Cuthbert's letter lay exactly where he had left it four days ago, resting on the right side of the heavy mahogany desk. He picked it up, the thick parchment stiff between his fingers.
The solicitor had made undeniable progress. A verified sighting near Aldgate, a contact at the Tavistock Inn who had confirmed Viscount Norish was indeed still resident in the city, and a tactical suggestion on how to proceed that was careful, precise, and urgently required a response.
He had left it untouched for five days.
He read the legal script again, his features hardening. He set the page down, took up his quill, and dipped it into the inkwell. Without giving himself another second to hesitate, he wrote his reply, the nib scratching loudly against the paper in the quiet room.
The following morning, he was fully dressed and downstairs long before Julia ever came down.
Mrs. Hartley appeared at the study door at half past eight, carrying the morning correspondence.
Leander did not look up from his ledger, and she dropped it on the table.
Mrs. Hartley withdrew with a quiet dip of her chin. Leander immediately stood, grabbed his heavy wool coat and his top hat, and went out into the damp London morning before he could do anything as ill-considered as going back upstairs first.
Cuthbert's office was located on the Strand, a mere fifteen minutes on foot if the thoroughfares were clear.
They were not clear, choked with coal wagons and fruit vendors, but he walked anyway.
The biting frigid air was useful, the deafening noise of the city was useful, and the constant, demanding forward motion of it was especially useful indeed.
The only alternative to this walk was standing frozen in the grand entrance hall of his own house, fully aware that directly above him, Julia was still sleeping.
He lengthened his stride, walking faster against the wind.
Cuthbert was already at his desk, which was the only way Leander had ever found the man, day or night. The solicitor looked up when Leander pushed open the heavy oak door.
"Your Grace," Cuthbert said, adjusting his spectacles. "Shall we begin?"
"Yes," Leander said.
He sat down in the leather chair opposite the desk.
He placed his hat on the seat beside him, squared his shoulders, and forced himself to think about Henry.
Henry, who had been owed so much better than a broken life, and about a solemn promise that Leander had made to a dying man and had not yet kept.
He thought, briefly and entirely without meaning to, about the quiet room that smelled of lavender four streets away.
Then, he broke the wax seal on the file before him and opened the letter.