Epilogue
ONE MONTH LATER
The opera had been Leander's idea, which still surprised her occasionally when she caught her reflection in the glass panels of the carriage.
The suddenness of the invitation, the private box, the particular care with which he had given her three days' notice so she might arrange a gown rather than a hurried hour.
It was a small thing. She understood that it was a small thing.
And yet she had stood in her dressing room when Ellen delivered the message and held it in her hands for rather longer than was strictly necessary, because nobody had ever given her three days' notice before.
Nobody had ever stopped to consider whether she needed time to prepare.
She had spent the better part of her adult life managing everything at the last minute because last minutes were what she was given, and the simple fact of being given more than that had done something entirely unreasonable to her composure.
He had learned by now the exact cadence of her days.
Which mornings she needed quiet, which evenings she was tired before she admitted it, when to speak and when to simply hand her a cup of tea and leave the room.
He had begun, without announcement, to make things easier.
Not by taking things from her hands. Simply by standing close enough that she did not have to carry everything at arm's length alone.
She had worn the garnets. She always wore the garnets to the events that mattered.
The performance was Handel, which she loved, and he tolerated with the heavy, focused attention he brought to things he was determined to appreciate on her behalf.
She had watched him from the corner of her eye during the second act, noting the slight forward tilt of his shoulders and the way his fingers had gone perfectly still against the velvet railing. She had filed that stillness away with everything else she was still collecting about him.
The interval had been spent in the crowded corridor with Anthony and his companion of the evening. The four of them talked with the easy, slack rhythms of people who had accumulated enough shared history to no longer need the armor of performance.
Anthony had looked at them both over the rim of his champagne glass and said absolutely nothing, which, from Anthony, communicated a deeper satisfaction than most men managed with a speech.
The journey home was warm and dark, the smell of damp wool and roasted chestnuts filtering through the leather curtains.
Leander had taken her hand into his large palm. A habit he had formed over the last fortnight, as though the transition between the public street and the private room required some physical marking. Julia had decided she found the custom entirely acceptable.
"You were watching me during the second act," he said, his voice a low vibration against the rattle of the wheels.
"I was watching the stage."
"You were watching me watch the stage."
Julia looked out the window, where the amber glow of the streetlamps moved across the glass in regular, passing bars. "You were absorbing it," she said, turning back to him. "I wanted to see the exact moment the music took hold."
"And did you?"
"The third aria." She met his eyes in the shadows. "Your jaw relaxed."
He was quiet for a long moment, his thumb tracing the seam of her glove. "It was better than I expected," he said.
From Leander, the admission was the equivalent of another man standing to applaud.
She smiled against the glass, and he pressed her fingers.
The house was lit when the carriage pulled up to the curb.
Mrs. Hartley had left the lamps burning low in the entrance hall and the drawing room before retiring, an arrangement they had settled into without a single written order.
The household now ran itself smoothly around two people who no longer required managing each other, and the rooms felt, consequently, larger, warmer, and a great deal calmer than they had in the sharp drafts of October.
Poppy's room on the second floor was dark.
She had been asleep since nine, having declared over the morning tea that she was not an opera person with that cheerful, unapologetic directness Julia had always guarded in her.
Poppy had lived in the room two doors down for two weeks now, and the space already bore her unmistakable markings.
A row of mismatched teacups she had collected from Aunt Violet sat along the windowsill, a stack of worn music sheets was wedged under the vanity mirror, and three dried heather sprigs were neatly pinned to the bedpost.
She had already transformed the empty corners. Her traveling trunk sat open at the foot of the bed, half-filled with books, while her favorite charcoal drawings were propped against the baseboards, and a bundle of dried lavender hung from the window latch.
There was a small, pale watercolor of a Berkshire hedge on the plaster. There was a fat, half-wild tabby cat that had arrived from the stables, which Leander had encountered on the stairs and chosen not to remark upon, an omission Julia considered one of his finest qualities.
Julia unbuttoned her gloves in the drawing room while Leander crossed to the sideboard, the crystal decanter clinking softly against the lip of the glasses.
The fire had been banked for the night, the red coals glowing beneath a thin skin of white ash, and the low lamplight caught the deep grain of the mahogany tables.
It was, she thought, looking at the familiar slant of the bookshelves, simply home. The word had been arriving in her mind with increasing frequency and conviction, and she had entirely stopped being surprised by its presence.
He brought her the glass and sat down beside her on the green sofa rather than taking the wingback chair across from her.
That, too, had changed incrementally and without announcement; one afternoon, she had simply looked up from her accounts and realized he had stopped choosing the opposite side of rooms.
"I want to say something," she said, her fingers curling around the cold stem of her glass.
He looked at her over his wine, his eyes dark and receptive.
"I have been trying to say it for several weeks," she said, her voice dropping into that precise, deliberate rhythm she used when an account needed settling.
"And I keep waiting for the proper moment, and I have decided there is no such thing as a proper moment in this house, so this will have to do. "
She kept her gaze fixed on the glowing embers of the grate.
"You gave Poppy back to me. You moved us to London, and you told me it was an operational necessity for Cuthbert's sake, and it was, partly. But you knew what the distance was doing to me, and you changed your plans anyway."
She turned her head to look at him squarely.
"You took me to Lady Harcourt's ball, and you danced with me in the center of the room, in front of every person who had spent the Season deciding what to think of my father's daughters.
And you said…" She stopped, her throat tightening around the memory.
"I remember what I said," Leander murmured.
"Yes." She looked back at the fire. "And you found me on Fleet Street. You had spent the morning at Cuthbert's, and you came home to find my note on the desk telling you where I had gone."
She felt the steady weight of his attention on her profile. "All of it. I want you to know that I have recorded all of it, Leander. I am not good at gratitude. I have had little practice at receiving things without looking for the cost on the back of the page. But I am trying."
Leander set his glass down on the small table, the wood ticking under the weight.
"It is my privilege," he said.
He did not say it quickly; he spoke with the heavy, unhurried care he gave to pieces of text he intended to stand by for twenty years.
"I told Anthony, before I had the honesty to say it to myself in the study, that taking care of you did not feel like an obligation. That was the word I used to him. Privilege." He reached over and took her free hand, his palm rough and solid against her skin. "The balance has not changed."
Julia looked down at his long fingers woven through hers. He looked back, steady and direct, and there was nothing deployed between them. No Duke's posture, no composure used to keep the room at bay. Just the man.
"Good," she said, her mouth softening. "Because I intend to give you ample opportunity to continue the practice."
The corner of his mouth moved upward, a dry crease forming in his cheek. "Is that a warning, Julia?"
"It is an observation."
He picked up his glass again, and she lifted hers, and between them the fire settled into the grate with a small, soft sigh of falling ash.
"There is something I want to give you," she said.
He went still.
She set her wine aside, stood, and smoothed the silk of her skirts. Leander watched her cross the carpet to the escritoire in the far corner. The small, slender-legged writing desk she had claimed during her first week in the house.
It had the settled, slightly crowded quality of a surface that belonged to someone who intended to stay. There was her blue ink bottle, her bone-handled scraper, and a small stack of letters that had been from Poppy.
She opened the deep lower drawer, her fingers reaching beneath the blotting paper. She lifted out a small object wrapped in a square of dark green wool, came back to the sofa, and sat down close enough that her skirts lapped over his boots. She held the package between them.
"I want to explain before you touch it," she said, her voice dropping an octave.
Leander looked down at the cloth. His hands remained flat on his knees, his shoulders rigid.