Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The butler's face said everything before the man opened his mouth.
When his particular expression – faintly resigned, professionally neutral, with a suggestion around the eyes of someone who had delivered enough unwelcome news to have developed a method for it – appeared in the study doorway, and Thomas set down his pen, knowing to expect the unexpected.
“Well?”
Mr Johnson cleared his throat, his expression apologetic as he announced,
“His Grace, the Duke of Montford, has arrived, Your Grace. He is –” There was a brief pause that contained multitudes. “He is in the entrance hall.”
Thomas closed his eyes for approximately three seconds, and when he opened them, he found that he was not any less annoyed, but had only strengthened his capacity not to let is show outwardly.
“Of course he is.”
He had not invited Edward. He had not, at any point in recent memory, expressed a desire for Edward's company, implied it, or done anything that could reasonably have been interpreted as an encouragement for that man to materialize in his entrance hall on a Tuesday. And yet here they were.
“Tell him I'm occupied,” Thomas instructed dismissively.
“I did, Your Grace,” Mr Johnson grimaced, looking as though the last thing he had wanted to do was admit as much.
“And?”
The butler's expression took on a shade that might very nearly have been sympathy. “He expressed that he was happy to wait. And that he knew his way around and was happy to pass the time in the drawing room.”
Thomas raised his eyes the ceiling, unsurprised to find that it nothing useful. Previously, he might have left Edward to do as he wished, but he did not want the man to bother Jane – which he suspected was Edward’s true motives.
“Send him in,” he groaned eventually.
Edward entered with a bright grin as though he had won something, which Thomas supposed he had, technically. He was dressed for riding, still carrying his gloves, and he looked around the study with bright, curious eyes, undoubtedly looking for changes likely caused by the duchess.
“Ravencroft. It is magnificent to see you. You look terrible,” Edward stated warmly.
“I was working,” Thomas replied, feeling his irritation grow.
This would not do. Edward was a polarizing person on a good day, and a pain in the rear on a bad one, so if he did not gain some tolerance for his friend soon, he would not be able to keep himself from grumbling over the smallest thing.
“Before noon? On a Tuesday?” Edward settled himself into the chair across from the desk comfortably, and set his gloves on the armrest. “That explains a great deal. You need to get out more. I've been telling you this for years.”
“You have been telling me a great many things for years. I have survived as long as I have by ignoring most of them.”
“And look at you – positively thriving. You may express your gratitude to me in the form of a fruit basket.” Edward glanced at the stacked correspondence on the desk with vague interest. “Now. I want to see her.”
Thomas shot a blank look at him, feigning ignorance, knowing it would not work, because Edward could not be fooled so easily.
“Your wife,” Edward clarified, as though this required clarification. “I gave you an entirely reasonable amount of time to settle in – don't look at me like that, several weeks is reasonable, given that some men take months before they're willing to introduce their –”
“This is not a good day. Perhaps some other time – with sufficient notice and preparation. I do not wish to ambush her with this. And stop making it sound as though you are my guardian,” Thomas glared at his friend.
Edward raised his hands in surrender. “You are right. It was my fault for not sending word first. But I only want to extend my well-wishes to the one who has managed to capture the attention and affection of my oldest friend.”
“It is wholly unnecessary.”
“My dear Ravencroft. I rode here. In the cold,” Edward spread his hands. “The minimum courtesy is a drink.”
Thomas was still thinking of how best to curate his response to carry the heaviest concentration of severity when he heard a gentle knock at the door.
“Come in,” he called out without thinking.
Jane appeared in the doorway, slightly out of breath, her hair loosely pinned and a small smear of what appeared to be ink on her left wrist – indicating that she had probably been writing letters.
She looked between them, her gaze going immediately to Edward with the cautious assessment she applied to new situations, and then to Thomas.
“I was told we had a visitor,” she said, slightly out of breath. “I thought it might be –”
She stopped herself, but Thomas could guess by her tense shoulders that she likely expected her father to be the one who called on them suddenly.
“Forgive me. I didn't mean to interrupt,” she apologized earnestly, lowering her head.
“Interrupt?” Edward was on his feet with the speed that told Thomas he had been waiting for precisely this moment.
“Your Grace, please. The interruption is the entire point.
I am Edward Barton, Duke of Montford, your husband's dearest and most patient friend – a quality bestowed upon me by God himself. Pardon me for my lack of formal word before I visited, but I have been attempting to make your acquaintance since the moment I heard there was a new Duchess of Ravencroft, which Thomas – in a move I can only describe as selfish – has been preventing.” He bowed to her. “I am delighted to meet you.”
Jane blinked, clearly overwhelmed. She glanced at Thomas first and when he simply rubbed at his temple, clearly frustrated, she smiled – genuinely, and her eyes lit up.
“He never mentioned he was preventing it.”
“His actions in the matter were carried out very subtly,” Edward confided. “He's been doing it for weeks. I had to take matters into my own hands.”
“A drink,” Thomas proposed, hoping to put an end to this before it truly began. “We will have one drink, and then you will leave.”
“I love him dearly,” Edward told Jane, as though Thomas had not spoken. “He is my closest friend and I would do anything for him, but you should know that he has been deeply antisocial, practically for as long as he has been alive and I have been personally managing the consequences ever since.”
He tilted his head slightly – in what Thomas could only describe as an effort to look harmless. “Will you join us, Your Grace? I have seventeen years' worth of stories to share and he cannot stop me if you're interested.”
Thomas looked at Jane, hoping she could see how much he detested the idea and she gazed at him with an expression that could not conceal how much she wanted to say yes.
“One drink,” Thomas sighed, long-suffering.
They moved to the drawing room and Jane sat on the settee and Edward took the armchair across from her, easily making himself at home as Thomas poured three glasses. He told himself to say nothing, because if he said nothing, he could at least monitor the direction of the conversation.
This strategy lasted approximately four minutes.
“The wedding story,” Edward said. “Tell me about the details from your perspective.”
Jane tilted her head in surprise. “He told you about the wedding?”
“He told me about finding you.” Edward leaned forward. “He neglected to tell me how you actually made it away from the church. I need you to fill in the gaps.”
Jane's eyes moved to Thomas, amused. He gave her a look that showed he had made his peace with Edward and had nothing left to offer. Jane took that as permission and turned back to Edward.
“I had been waiting in a carriage outside, waiting for a distraction so I could steal a horse and ride it to an inn close to my friend’s estate,” she began, her lips pulling into a grin.
“The aforementioned friend was meant to be the distraction, so she got out of the carriage and pretend to faint in front of my parents and all the onlookers close by –”
“You had been planning it,” Edward said with delight.
“For most of the morning,” Jane confirmed with a grin.
Thomas sat next to Jane but angled away from them and watched the window and drank his whiskey and told himself he was not jealous of his own friend for making his wife laugh.
She had a particular quality to her laugh when she was genuinely entertained and he had grown to like it.
He liked to watch how she'd throw her head back slightly, and close her eyes for just a moment, as though the feeling were too large to take in with all her senses open.
He had been filing this in the deepest parts of his memories without intending to for weeks.
Edward was leaning forward in his chair, animated, delighted, telling her something about Thomas at seventeen and a horse that had not, technically, been his horse, and Jane was laughing, and Thomas returned his gaze to the window and thought about all the ways he was insufficient.
Edward was easy in rooms. Edward had always interacted with others as naturally as breathing, comfortable in his own skin, quick to warmth, the kind of man people gravitated toward without understanding exactly why.
Thomas had never had that. He had been the third son first, which made him invisible; then the scarred soldier, which made him something to stare at and step around; then the grieving widower with the silent child, which made him an object of careful avoidance.
He had built something with Jane – improbably, inadvertently, but he had built it slowly and in private, with difficulty, and Edward was in there with his charm and his stories and his ease and making it look –
“That is absolutely not true,” Jane affirmed strongly, and Thomas came back to the present, surprised to see that she was looking at him. “Tell him.”
“Tell him what?” Thomas questioned in confusion.
“Edward says that you are not as – how did you phrase it?” She glanced at Edward.
“Formidable,” Edward supplied as though he was being helpful. “As he believes himself to be.”