Chapter 2
Isadora stayed exactly where she was for four full minutes, and then she moved. Not toward the dancing, not toward William and Cecily, but toward the far end of the room, where the terrace doors stood open to the night.
The crowd was thinner there. The air was better. And if she happened to step outside for a breath of it, that was entirely unremarkable.
She heard voices, low and deliberate, coming from the far end of the terrace. She turned.
Three figures stood together in the shadows beyond the last lamp. One she recognized immediately—James, his broad back half-turned toward her, very still in a way that had nothing to do with ease.
Beside him stood an older gentleman with white at his temples and a coat that spoke of money but not frivolity.
And to his other side was a smaller man with a leather satchel over one shoulder and a sheaf of documents under his arm.
He had the quiet, careful bearing of a man who dealt in other people’s difficult circumstances for a living.
A solicitor. Without question.
She had grown up watching solicitors appear at Blackmoor at the worst of times. She knew how they looked.
The conversation had clearly already happened. The older gentleman was looking at the ground. The solicitor held his documents with the slightly too careful grip of a man waiting to be needed again.
And James…
James stood perfectly still.
The older gentleman said something quietly, turned, and walked back through the terrace doors with his hat in his hands. The solicitor followed with a small, formal inclination of his head, clasping his satchel against his side.
They passed within ten feet of Isadora. The older man glanced at her briefly and then away.
She waited until the doors had closed behind them before crossing the terrace.
James did not turn when she approached. She wondered if he had seen her already and said nothing, or if he had simply ceased to register the room entirely.
“James.” She kept her voice low.
He turned then.
The light from the nearest lamp reached him, and she saw his face properly.
It took everything she had not to ask immediately, not to reach out and touch his arm. She had always been good at composure, but tonight it cost her more than usual.
“What happened?” she asked.
He looked at her for a moment. Then he looked back out at the dark garden, as though he needed somewhere else to put his attention while the words arranged themselves.
“My cousin,” he replied. “The Duke of Ashbourne.”
Isadora went still. “Is he—”
“Dead.” He said it evenly. Too evenly, the way people said things they had just heard and had not yet quite processed. “Carriage accident. Some days ago.”
“James,” she breathed. “I am so sorry.”
He shook his head, a slight, almost reflexive motion. Not dismissing the condolence, but not knowing what to do with it either. He was looking at the garden. His hands, she noticed, had closed around the stone balustrade.
“There is more,” he added.
She waited.
“He was unmarried, but he left behind a child.”
She blinked. “A child?”
“A daughter.” He paused. “One year old.”
Her heart sank for the little child.
“Her mother?” she asked carefully.
“Also gone,” he replied quietly. “They were together in the carriage.”
“Who is caring for her now?” she asked.
James turned away from the garden. He looked at her with the stillness of a man who already knew what came next and hated it.
“As the closest male heir,” he said, “I have inherited the duchy.”
It made sense, but the shock still ran through her.
Of course, yes. If there are no direct heirs, the duchy would go to the closest male heir.
Then she realized the other thing he had not yet said. It had been making itself known since the moment he started speaking, waiting in the gap between the words like a held breath.
His eyes had not left her face.
“And guardianship of the child,” he added.
* * *
“I think,” Letitia announced, appearing in the doorway of the breakfast room with her hair only half-pinned and an expression of profound conviction, “that Lord Bellamy was looking at me last night.”
Isadora looked up from her book. “You were at Blackmoor last night.”
“Sorry, I meant last week.” Letitia crossed to the sideboard and began piling food on her plate with focused energy. “I meant at the Duchess of Fernleigh’s ball. Before we left. He looked at me twice from across the room, and the second time was definitely deliberate.”
“How do you remember such a detail from so long ago? Also, Lord Bellamy is fifty-three years old.”
“Not that Lord Bellamy.” Letitia dropped into the chair across from her with a decisive clink of silverware. “His son. The younger one. Thomas.”
“I do not know Thomas Bellamy.”
“Nobody knows Thomas Bellamy, which is precisely what makes him interesting.” She pointed her fork with conviction. “The ones everyone knows are dreadful. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch.”
Isadora looked at her sister for a moment—bright and sharp, still flushed from sleep, utterly certain that the world was arranged for her attention—and felt something warm and slightly tired curl in her chest.
“Eat your breakfast,” she said, then returned to her book.
The breakfast room at Blackmoor was the best room for mornings. East-facing, flooded with light by eight o’clock, it smelled of toast and the roses that Cecily had arranged in a low bowl at the center of the table, white and yellow and very slightly overblown.
Outside the window, the park was looking unreasonably beautiful, the long grass silvered with dew, the old oak at the bottom of the slope throwing its shadow in the wrong direction at this hour so that it seemed larger than it was.
Isadora was on her third cup of tea and had read the same paragraph four times. She knew this because the paragraph talked about the migratory habits of swallows, which was not in itself difficult. She had simply not been reading it. She had been looking at it, which was different.
“Stay here.”
She turned the page, read the first line of the next paragraph, but did not retain it.
It had been a week. She was aware that it had been a week, and she was furthermore aware that a week was a sufficient amount of time to have processed the events of one evening and cataloged them appropriately. But she had not managed to do this, which was irritating.
She kept seeing James’s face on the terrace. Not the easy, jovial face, but the pale, shocked one.
James Harcliffe was many things. She had spent years compiling an exhaustive and well-evidenced list. He knew exactly how charming he was, which should have diminished the effect, but somehow never did.
He was irreverent on principle and occasionally on purpose just to see what happened. He moved through difficult situations with an ease that suggested either nerves of steel or a complete failure to appreciate their gravity, and she had never been entirely sure which.
She had never seen him shaken.
That was the thing she could not set down.
In all the years she had known him—watching him across dinner tables, enduring his commentary in her brother’s study, existing in the same rooms as him with the particular resigned familiarity she had not once seen him look the way he had looked on that terrace.
It had done something to her that she was not willing to admit to.
She turned another page.
The door opened, and William came in.
He had been up for hours, with the way he moved to the sideboard with the ease of a man who had already managed three things before the rest of the house was awake. He was still in his riding clothes, which meant he had been out already, which meant it was later than she thought.
He poured his coffee, glanced at the table, then looked at her book.
“Swallows,” he said.
“Migration patterns,” she confirmed.
“Riveting.”
“Extremely.”
He sat at the head of the table, a comfortable silence falling over them. Letitia was cutting her toast with the focused deliberation of someone still composing a mental argument about Thomas Bellamy.
Cecily appeared a few minutes later, slightly breathless in the pleasant way she often was in the mornings, as though she had already been in motion for some time and the breakfast room was simply one stop on a longer journey.
She pressed a kiss to William’s temple before sitting, which was such a habitual and unstudied gesture that Isadora suspected neither of them noticed they did it anymore.
She noticed.
She looked back at her swallows.
“A letter had arrived this morning,” William said.
Something in his tone made Isadora look up.
“From James,” he added.
She set down her book.
William had his coffee in one hand and the expression of a man choosing his words with care. Cecily seemed to know; her expectant posture suggested she had been told already, probably upstairs before they came down.
“How is he?” Isadora asked, then regretted the quickness of it.
William glanced at her briefly. “Managing. The estate is in a bit of disarray. The former Duke’s affairs were not… He did not leave things particularly organized, and James would like to remain there for the time being.” He set his cup down. “The more pressing matter, it seems, is the child.”
“The baby,” said Letitia, who had been listening despite every appearance of focused toast-cutting.
“Her nurse is overwhelmed. The household is unsettled. James writes that the child has been fretful for days.” William paused. “He has asked whether Cecily and I might stop at Ashbourne on our way to Buxton. Briefly. He thinks that Cecily’s experience at the orphanage—”
“I’ll go,” Isadora blurted.
The table fell quiet in the way tables did when something had been said faster than anyone expected.
William looked at her. “The original plan was only for Cecily and me to go,” he said carefully.
“I know.”
“Ashbourne is not… It is not a social call, Isadora. The household is in disarray, and James is under considerable strain. It is not—”
“I understand that.”
“You do not know James particularly well in these circumstances. He is not—” He stopped, reconsidering. “He is not at his easiest when he is dealing with difficulty.”
“I am aware of that.” She held his gaze steadily. “I was there on the terrace, William.”
William looked at her, thinking for a moment.
“You barely know the child,” he said more quietly.
“I do not know her at all. But that is not my reason.”
“Then what is?”
Isadora considered the question.
“He asked for help,” she began. “And a baby is crying, and I have nothing more pressing to do than read about swallows. Besides, Cecily will need my help.” She looked at him evenly. “Let me go with you.”
William said nothing for a moment. He turned his coffee cup, once, in his hand, looking at the table. Cecily, sitting across from him, was looking at Isadora with an expression that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one.
“Letitia stays here,” he said finally.
“That is profoundly unfair,” Letitia protested.
“You are in your first Season. A household dealing with a bereavement and an unsettled baby is not—”
“I am wonderful with babies—”
“Letitia.”
Letitia subsided; she knew she had lost the immediate battle and was already planning the longer campaign.
William looked back at Isadora. Something moved through his expression. Not quite reluctance, not quite acceptance, but the settling of a man who had made a decision and intended to stick to it.
“You come, you help where you can, and you do not stand in James’s way.”
“When am I ever in anyone’s way?”