Chapter 24
By the afternoon, she had reorganized three shelves in the library.
This was not something she had planned to do. She had gone to the library to read, had found herself unable to, had stood in front of the shelves for a moment, and had decided that the organization system was insufficient.
She had been reorganizing for two hours.
“Your Grace.” Mary, the maid who had taken to appearing whenever Isadora was doing something she could theoretically help with, stood in the doorway. “Mrs. Holt asks whether you want tea in here or the drawing room.”
“Here,” Isadora replied. “Thank you.”
By three, she was standing in the kitchen, having a conversation with Mrs. Farrow about the week’s menu that she had initiated and then lost track of the thread halfway through, which Mrs. Farrow was too professional to remark upon and too observant not to notice.
“Will that do, Your Grace?” Mrs. Farrow asked, having apparently just outlined something.
“Yes,” Isadora said. “Thank you. That sounds—Yes, that’s perfect.”
She went upstairs.
She took Violet from Mrs. Plum, wrapped her in the warmest thing available, put on her coat, and went outside.
The terrace was cool in the August afternoon, the sun present but not particularly committed to its work.
She sat in the stone chair at the far end with Violet in her lap.
The grounds spread out below her, the lake flat and silver at the bottom of the slope, the season’s light doing its best across the gardens.
Violet was in excellent humor. She had Sebastian in one hand and Archibald in the other and was conducting a silent arbitration between them with the serious focus of a very small judge.
She made no demands. She required no entertainment. She was simply present, warm and solid in Isadora’s lap, and the weight of her at this particular moment was the most grounding thing available.
Isadora looked at the rosevine. Deep pink, heavy-headed, exactly as they had been on the night James had reached out and touched one almost without knowing he was doing it.
“The color is the same as the pink gown you wore to dinner two nights ago.”
She thought about it—him saying it, his startled expression immediately afterward, as though the words had come out without his permission.
She thought about the kiss.
She had been thinking about it with varying degrees of directness since it happened, but she had been doing it in pieces, in controlled intervals, the way one looked at something bright—quickly, then away, then back.
Here, in the cold afternoon with the baby in her lap and no one to see her flaming cheeks, she thought about it properly.
He had kissed her with both hands—one on her jaw, deliberate and warm, the other on her waist, drawing her closer—and there had been nothing tentative about it. Nothing experimental or impulsive or easily explained by the charged atmosphere.
It was the kiss of a man who had made a decision, not a man who had acted on a moment.
Hadn’t it?
The problem with this line of thinking, she was discovering, was that it had a shadow side. The same certainty she had felt in the moment could, from a sufficient distance, be read differently.
A man with James’s history was not unfamiliar with charged moments. A man with his history knew exactly how to kiss a woman as though it were the only thing that had ever mattered to him.
She pressed her lips together.
Violet chose this moment to offer her Archibald. “Take.”
“Thank you,” Isadora said.
Violet took him back immediately.
“Of course,” Isadora snorted.
She looked at the rosevine, then at the lake, then at the sky, which was doing nothing useful.
“You know, he went to London,” she murmured.
Violet looked up at her.
“He went because of the letters, Mortimer, and the solicitor. There is a great deal to manage, and he is the only one who can manage it.” She paused. “I know that. I know that is why he went. It is entirely reasonable.”
Archibald was examined and replaced by Sebastian.
“What is less reasonable is his departure,” Isadora continued.
“Which was… He was distracted. He was in his study with his papers, and he said it would be better if I stayed. I think he already moved on to the next thing before I had finished processing the first one.” She adjusted Violet’s blanket.
“Which is… fine. It is fine. He is managing a crisis, and I am a grown woman who does not require…” She sighed.
A crow landed on the balustrade three feet away and regarded her with the flat, assessing gaze of a creature with no particular agenda.
“He forgot to say goodbye,” she said in a small voice.
The crow cawed.
“I was in the nursery. He could have… It takes two minutes to come to the nursery. He came to the nursery at midnight during a storm. He comes to the nursery at all hours for no particular reason. But this time, he…” She stopped and looked at Violet.
“He could have come to say goodbye, but he did not.”
Violet had stopped the arbitration between Sebastian and Archibald and was looking at Isadora.
“I am not being dramatic,” Isadora scoffed.
Violet’s expression suggested she was reserving judgment.
“He is in London,” Isadora said. “Where he spent the better part of his adult life, where he was… where he knew people and went places and—” She looked at the rosevine.
“He is a rake, Violet. That is a fact. Society knows it. My brother knows it. I knew it before I came to this house, and I have spent the past several weeks apparently deciding not to care about it, which is either growth or catastrophic foolishness. I cannot currently decide which.”
The crow flew away.
“There could be someone there,” she mumbled. “In London. Someone who has known him longer than I have, who knows his past, who does not… who was not his practical solution to an estate problem.” She looked at her hands. “Someone he would not have to ask twice.”
Violet pressed Archibald in her palm, and Isadora looked down at him.
“He kissed me,” she whispered. “He kissed me as though… He looked at me afterward and said my name, and his voice was—” She pressed her lips together.
“It did not feel like nothing. It did not feel like a rake kissing a convenient wife on a terrace because the moment presented itself.” She looked back at the rosevine.
“It felt like something he had been deciding for a long time. It was the most magical thing I have ever felt.”
The lake sat still at the bottom of the slope.
“But I do not know,” she continued. “That is the problem. I do not know because I have never… I have not had sufficient experience of James Harcliffe kissing people to know which version that was. Perhaps that is always what it feels like. Perhaps he is simply very good at it.” She paused and bit her bottom lip.
“He is very good at it. That is not actually reassuring, given my concerns.”
Violet took Archibald back, examined him, and put him on Isadora’s knee as though placing him there for safekeeping.
Isadora looked at the baby. The baby looked at her and smiled.
Something was building in her chest, had been building since the carriage left that morning, the accumulated weight of a day of not-quite-thinking-about-it finally reaching the point where not-quite was no longer a feasible strategy.
“I am in love with him,” she whispered softly.
A brief silence followed.
“I am in love with him,” she repeated louder, her voice trembling as if in shock.
It was the first time she had said it aloud.
It sounded… She had not known how it would sound.
She had been aware of the feeling in pieces, in guarded increments, and had been careful not to assemble the pieces.
But here, in the cold afternoon with Violet in her lap, it simply came out. Clear and quiet and irrevocably true.
“I am in love with my husband,” she said.
Violet blinked.
“I know.” Isadora nodded. “I know. I specifically… I told him the arrangement was not real, Violet. I stood in a corridor at midnight and told him the marriage was not real and that it was better if we both remembered that, and he agreed with me. I have spent every day since then—” Her voice caught slightly.
“I have spent every day since then discovering that I did not mean it at all. Not a single word of it. I said it because I was frightened, and it was true when I said it, but it is not—it stopped being true. I do not know when it stopped being true. It was true and then it was not, and I kept saying it anyway because saying it felt like protection.”
Her eyes stung, and she blinked.
“I am not going to cry about this,” she declared.
A tear, small and entirely unwelcome, spilled down her cheek with the calm inevitability of something that had been decided.
“That is—” She dashed the back of her hand across her face. “This is completely—”
Another tear fell.
Violet looked at her with the intent expression she wore when something was happening that she did not fully understand but was taking very seriously.
“I am fine.” Isadora gave a watery laugh. “I am perfectly fine.”
She was not fine.
Violet reached up and patted her cheek. Isadora looked at her, and she did it again.
“Thank you,” Isadora murmured, with slightly unsteady dignity.
Violet seemed satisfied and returned to Sebastian.
Isadora sat for a moment in the aftermath of it—the tears retreating, the feeling still entirely present but no longer quite so overwhelming, the way a storm settled into something quieter without disappearing.
She pressed her lips together. “What is wrong with me? What am I thinking? He went to London to protect you.”
Violet looked up again.
“He went because Mortimer is threatening to take you away, and he will not allow it. The only way to stop it is to go and uncover the truth about those letters before Mortimer can use them. Yet here I am, worried and bothered about another woman.” Isadora paused.
“He did not go because of another woman. He went because of this one.” She looked at Violet. “He went because of you.”
The baby offered her Archibald again. This time, Isadora took him properly.
“I am being ridiculous,” she laughed weakly.
Violet appeared to withhold judgment on that.
“I am being paranoid and ridiculous, and I have spent the afternoon crying on a terrace with a baby present about a man who has given me absolutely no evidence of anything except…” Isadora considered.
“Except consistently showing up. Which is, it turns out, the thing I find most difficult to trust.” She looked at the wooden horse in her hand.
“Because I grew up watching someone stop showing up, and I decided very early that the safest thing was to not need anyone to show up in the first place.” She paused.
“That is Cecily’s theory. She is correct.
I find it very irritating when she is correct. ”
The afternoon light was dimming, the sky shifting from pale gold to the grey-blue of early evening.
“He forgot to say goodbye,” she said again.
But it came out differently this time, with less weight in it and more of the observation of someone filing something honestly.
“Which was… not ideal. And I would like him to know that.” She nodded to herself.
“When he returns, I will tell him. Calmly. Without crying. Unlike this afternoon, which we will not be discussing with anyone.”
Violet cooed.
“I mean it,” Isadora insisted. “This stays between us. You cannot tell James I cried on the terrace.”
Violet looked at her with a toothy grin.
“You are just a baby,” Isadora sighed. “You cannot actually tell anyone anything yet.”
Violet babbled something at length and with conviction.
“That is not reassuring,” Isadora said. “That sounded like a great deal of information.”
She looked at the rosevine. The remaining blooms were darker now in the fading light; the deep pink turned into something richer, the way colors changed at this hour.
“He is coming back,” she said quietly to the vine, or to herself, or to Violet, or perhaps to no one and all of them. “He is coming back because Ashbourne is his home now, and Violet is here, and I…” She hesitated. “And I am here.”
The unease was still there. She was not going to pretend it wasn’t. It sat in the corner of everything, small and persistent, the worry that distance would undo something proximity had built.
She did not entirely know how to trust the thing she was feeling, because trusting it meant trusting James, and trusting him meant being vulnerable in a way she had avoided her entire adult life.
But she was in love with him regardless.
That had happened without her permission and apparently was not going to reverse itself simply because she found it inconvenient.
“Right,” she muttered.
She looked at Violet, who was leaning against her, her head lolling and her eyes growing heavy with sleep.
“Right,” she said again, more quietly.
She pulled the blanket closer around Violet. The feelings running through her were frightening and real. She stayed with them until the cold finally made the decision for her and she carried Violet back inside.