Chapter 19 #2
"I know we cannot take on new trainees just now," she said finally, "not because the work does not warrant it, but because you are still refusing interviews — not only for your own peace, but to keep anyone from digging closely enough to discover how deeply involved I truly was.
" She met his eyes. "I am not foolish, Uncle. I have known that for some time."
Charles was quiet, then nodded slowly, something like reluctant admiration in his expression. "You are entirely correct. Though you are seeing the tree just now, and not the forest."
He reached for a folded card sitting at the edge of his desk.
"Which is precisely why I want you to have this."
She took it, and read it, and her brows rose. "The Barristers' Assembly. The annual gala."
"They have invited us," Charles said, not without a trace of dry amusement. "Formally. By name. It appears we are rather sought after now, in circles that would not have returned my letters twelve months ago."
"They invited us," she repeated, turning the card over as though expecting the ink to rearrange itself into something more plausible.
"I want you to attend in my place," Charles said.
"It is, in its own small way, the closest thing I can offer you to the recognition you have genuinely earned.
You may bring two guests. Take Jane, take Clara — whichever of your friends will best appreciate an evening among London's most self-important legal minds. "
Elizabeth's face brightened at that — and then fell, by degrees, as something else occurred to her.
Charles saw it immediately. "I know," he said, gently. "I know you wish you might attend such a thing with him instead."
"It is fine," she said, too quickly. "I know it is not possible yet."
"It will be." Charles's voice held no doubt at all. "I have every confidence he will find a way, in time, to make it possible. That man has proven himself rather more resourceful than I first gave him credit for."
She managed a small smile at that, though something behind it remained unconvinced.
"In the meantime," Charles went on, "you will attend, and you will be seen, and every person in that room will know precisely whose mind built the case that freed a duke — even if they are too well-mannered to say so aloud."
He raised his glass — poured at some point during the conversation, though she could not recall precisely when — and added, more quietly now, "And when I finally do step aside from this place, Lizzie, it will be yours.
With your name on the front door. I do not give a damn what society has to say about it. "
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment.
Then she set the invitation down carefully, as though it might still change its mind about existing, and rose.
"I should go and find a dress," she said. "If I am to be seen, I intend to be seen properly."
Charles laughed — a real one, warm and unguarded. "That," he said, "is precisely the spirit I hoped to hear."
◆◆◆
Damon stood across the street from Whitaker & Co., half-hidden in the shadow of a bookseller's awning, watching the office windows the way he had once watched card players across a table — patient, unhurried, missing nothing.
He told himself he had simply arrived early for his meeting with Charles. He did not entirely believe it.
The door opened a little past six, and Elizabeth stepped out into the last of the evening light, a folded letter in one hand, her satchel over her shoulder. She was happy and smiling and she was moving with the confidence of someone who just won.
Something in Damon's chest loosened at the sight of it, more than he had expected it to.
He had not realized, until that exact moment, how much he had needed to see her smile at something that had nothing to do with him.
He waited until she had turned the corner and disappeared from view before he crossed the street himself.
Then he gathered all of his courage and started walking towards the office.
Damon straightened his coat outside the door of Whitaker & Co., his hand hovering a moment longer than it needed to before he finally rang the bell.
He was nervous. It was an unfamiliar sensation, and he did not much care for it — the same steadiness that had once carried him through card tables full of strangers and courtrooms full of enemies seemed, today, to have abandoned him entirely at the threshold of a modest office door.
Now he rang the bell, and waited, and heard footsteps approach from within.
Charles opened the door himself, already reaching to usher him in. "Your Grace. I assumed you had come about the Alderton filings. I have the preliminary—"
"I have not come about the filings."
Charles paused at that, studying him properly for the first time since he had opened the door.
Something had changed in the man standing on his threshold.
It was not simply the posture, though that had shifted too — straighter, steadier, entirely without the careful performance Charles had grown accustomed to over the past year.
It was something beneath the posture. A stillness.
A man who had stopped auditioning for the room and had simply, finally, arrived in it.
"Come in, then," Charles said, stepping aside. "Sit."
Damon crossed into the small office and sat, though he found himself unable to settle fully into the chair, his hands folding and unfolding once before he made himself still.
"I see you did not come merely to sit quietly," Charles said, resuming his own seat behind the desk. "What have you come about?"