Chapter 4
“Have you lost your mind?”
Isadora said it quietly, because of the baby, but the words were not quiet. They landed in the room with the full weight of everything she had not said in the past thirty seconds while she sat and stared at him and tried to determine whether she had somehow misheard.
She had not misheard.
James stood before her chair with the expression of a man who had made a calculation and was waiting, with reasonable patience, for the other party to catch up.
“I am entirely in possession of it,” he assured her.
“You are standing in a nursery at midnight, asking your best friend’s sister to marry you.” She kept her voice low with some effort. “That is not possession of one’s mind. That is the opposite of it.”
“I just met with the solicitor, and he raised a problem,” he said. “I identified a solution.”
“I am not a solution.”
“You are, actually. A remarkably good one.”
She stared at him.
Violet stirred slightly against her shoulder. Isadora adjusted her hold immediately, stroking a slow circle across the baby’s back, and felt her settle again. She used the moment to collect herself, which she desperately needed.
“Tell me what the solicitor said,” she said evenly.
Something dark crossed James’s expression. He moved to the window and stood with his back half-turned, looking out at the dark grounds.
“There is talk,” he began. “About Violet. About whether she ought to be connected to the Ashbourne family at all.”
Isadora looked down at the baby in her arms. At her small, sleeping face, entirely unaware. “On what grounds?”
“Her origins.” He said it calmly, but she heard what was underneath it.
“Her mother was Miss Clara Bennett, a vicar’s daughter from Alderton.
” He turned slightly, still not quite facing her.
“She was hired as a companion to Lady Ellington, an old friend of the Ashbourne family.” A pause.
“She and the Duke met, eventually. Their relationship continued for a year but was kept entirely private. He supported them both, acknowledged the child in his personal correspondence, and named me guardian in his will.”
“He loved her,” Isadora said it simply because the picture assembled itself clearly enough—a man making a quiet, careful provision for a woman and a child he could not publicly claim.
That was not indifference. That was a man doing the most he could within the boundaries of what the world permitted.
James turned to look at her. “Yes. He loved them both, I think.”
“And then the accident happened.”
“A carriage. Three weeks ago. Both of them.” He said it without inflection, which was its own kind of inflection. “Violet was with the nurse at the time. She is the only one left.”
Isadora looked down at Violet’s sleeping face—the dark lashes against the chubby cheeks, the small mouth slightly open, the complete and devastating innocence of her—and felt something swell in her chest that had no tidy name.
This baby had lost everything in a single afternoon. Her mother, father, and the life she had been born into. She knew no language to understand loss, but had enough feeling to know that the arms she trusted were gone and that the world had overnight become uncertain and loud and full of strangers.
“She looks like him,” James murmured. “My cousin. She has the same eyes.”
Isadora looked up. He was watching Violet with an expression she had not seen on him before. It wasn’t the careful blankness he defaulted to when something mattered too much, but something more unguarded than that. Raw at the edges.
“The family knows this,” he continued. “Which is why what they are doing is particularly—” He stopped, clenching his jaw.
“The solicitor told me that several relatives are questioning whether the late Duke’s acknowledgment was legitimate.
Whether Violet has any true connection to the Ashbourne family at all.
Whether she should remain here.” The last word came out with a quiet, controlled fury that told her everything about how long he had been sitting with it.
“As though she is an inconvenience to be resolved rather than a child who has just lost both her parents.”
“And they want her removed?” she asked.
“They want the inheritance questioned,” he said, turning away from the window. “She could be removed totally.”
The shape of it settled into clarity. Isadora thought of Violet’s small fist against her collarbone and felt something harden inside her.
“And an unmarried guardian with a… colorful history,” she concluded, “makes the challenge easier.”
“Considerably.” He looked at her steadily. “A guardian with a wife of good family and steady character makes it a great deal harder. The household appears stable. The child appears wanted. Society loses interest in reforming a situation that no longer looks like a scandal.”
“So, the child remains safe, the household appears stable, society stops interfering.” She paused. “And you get a solution to all your problems.”
“Yes,” he confirmed, without apology.
“You do realize,” she said carefully, “that you are speaking about marriage as though it were another estate matter to settle before dinner.”
“In some respects—”
“James.” The name came out more sharply than she had intended. She softened her voice. “Marriage is not an estate matter.”
“It is often that. Half the marriages in England—”
“I am not interested in half the marriages in England. I am interested in the one you are currently proposing to me in a nursery in the middle of the night because a solicitor told you to find a wife quickly.” She held his gaze.
“I am interested in the fact that you have just asked me to bind myself to you for the rest of my life and offered me no reason to do so beyond convenience.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I am being honest with you,” he said. “That is the reason I am offering. I could have dressed it differently.”
“How chivalrous.”
“I mean it.” He did mean it; she could hear it.
“I am telling you plainly what this would be, because I think you deserve plainness more than you deserve a comfortable lie.” He took a deep breath.
“It would not be a love marriage. I am not capable of that. Grand declarations, love stories—” He stopped and shook his head slightly.
“That is not what I am. Any arrangement between us would be practical. I want you to know that before you answer.”
The words landed exactly where they were aimed.
Isadora kept her face composed because she had learned composure young and had long since made it reliable, and because some things were nobody’s business but her own. Certainly not his.
But underneath it, in the quiet place she kept carefully separate from her expression, something turned over slowly and did not right itself.
Not romantic. Not a love story.
She had known this, of course. She had known it about him for years, known it consciously, cataloged it among her numerous and well-evidenced opinions about him, filed it alongside charming and reckless and constitutionally opposed to anything resembling permanence. She had known it.
It was remarkable, she thought distantly, how much it was possible to know a thing and still feel it when it was said aloud.
“Then you need not worry,” she said, her voice perfectly even. “I have no intention of marrying you.”
James did not look away. He studied her with the quiet attention he reserved for things he was genuinely trying to understand.
“You would have no more Seasons,” he pointed out.
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“London. The endless performance of it.” He moved slightly closer, as though proximity would help him make the point.
“The ballrooms and the suitors and the careful conversations with women who are measuring whether you are a threat and men who are measuring whether you are an asset. All of it gone.” He watched her face.
“You could live here. Quietly. Exactly as you prefer. Read your books. Walk the grounds. Avoid society entirely if you wish.”
She looked at him.
“You are attempting to appeal to my preferences,” she said.
“I am presenting the terms.”
“James—”
“I will build you a library,” he added. “Larger than Blackmoor’s.”
There was a pause.
Despite every intention, despite the lingering sting of his words, Isadora felt the corner of her mouth attempt something she refused to let it complete—a smile.
Because he was serious.
That was the remarkable thing. He was entirely, genuinely serious, offering her a library as though it were a dowry, as though he had thought carefully about what she valued and decided to come at her from that direction, which was both deeply calculated and, she had to admit, impressively accurate.
“Isadora, I am trying to demonstrate that I have considered what this arrangement would cost you and intend to account for it,” he said, with the patience of a man who believed he was being reasonable.
“What it would cost me,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“You have not considered what it would cost me.”
“Then tell me.” The words came out with a quiet directness that stopped her.
She looked at him, at the steadiness of him in the low light, the exhaustion behind his eyes that he was not bothering to conceal, the fact that he was still here, still asking, with the patience of a man who had made a decision and intended to hold it.
It unsettled her more than it should have.
She looked at him. He looked back.
He had the expression of a man who had played a card he thought might work and was watching carefully to see whether he’d been right.
She looked away first.
“You are impossible,” she muttered.
“I am practical.”
“Those are not opposites in your case. They are the same thing.” She smoothed her hand over Violet’s back again, more for her own steadiness than for the baby’s. “Even if I accept—and I am not saying I do—my brother would never allow it.”
James was quiet for a moment.
She looked up to find him watching her with an expression that was not quite a smile and not quite something else.
“Your brother,” he said, “is not the one I’m asking.”
She frowned. “He is my guardian.”
“He is your brother. There is a difference, and you know it. Besides, your brother’s opinion is not what matters most.”
She stared at him.
“He matters to me, greatly,” she said.
“He does. And his opinion will be… harsh, and I will deserve most of it.” He held her gaze without flinching. “But it is not his answer I need, Isadora.” A pause, quiet and precise. “It is yours.”
Violet breathed against her shoulder, steady and small and entirely trusting.
One dangerous moment. That was all Isadora permitted herself.
One moment in which she let the picture assemble—the quiet mornings, the grounds, Violet growing steadier in a house that felt like a home.
Books in a room built for her. Peace, genuine peace, the kind that three Seasons in London had convinced her society had no interest in providing.
Just this. The quiet and the baby and the books and—
She stopped that train of thought there.
Reality was harsher.
He was asking her to bind herself to him.
James, who had spent thirty-one years moving lightly through the world, committed to nothing.
Who wore charm the way other men wore coats and had never once, to her knowledge, allowed anyone close enough to see what was underneath it.
Who was standing in this nursery not because he wanted her, but because the solicitor had identified a solution and she happened to fit it.
A rake who spoke about marriage the way he spoke about estate management. Practical. Efficient. Nothing more.
She stood carefully so as not to wake Violet, then shifted the baby and lowered her into the cradle with the slow, deliberate patience the task required.
Violet’s face tightened briefly, and Isadora held her breath. The baby’s features smoothed again, her breathing evening out, and Isadora straightened and turned.
James was standing still, watching her quietly.
She lifted her chin. “Then it is fortunate,” she said softly, “that you shall never have it.” A pause. “Because my answer is no.”
He went very still.
She moved toward the door, unhurried and composed, her hands folded before her with the steadiness she had been maintaining since the age of ten and had never needed more than she did at that moment.
“Isadora—”
“Good night, James.” She did not look back. “The fire is dying. You should call for someone.”
The corridor was dark and cool and mercifully quiet. She walked the length of it with her shoulders straight and her breathing even, and she did not think about his expression when she said no.
She closed her bedroom door and went to sit on the edge of the bed, both hands pressed flat against her knees.
Practical and nothing more.
She knew who James was. She had always known.
She only wished, with a force that surprised her greatly, that knowing it felt more like protection and less like loss.