Chapter 29
James had not slept.
That was not in itself unusual. There had been nights in the first few weeks after he had inherited the duchy that had yielded no sleep, the accumulated weight of the title and the child and the household pressing in from every direction.
He knew what sleepless nights looked like from the inside.
This was different.
This was sitting in the study, in the chair he had occupied for hours after the carriage disappeared down the drive, still in his travel coat, the letter he had written in London still in his breast pocket because he could not bring himself to take it out.
The fire had gone out sometime around two in the morning, and he had not called for it to be rebuilt. The decanter on the desk was untouched. He had simply sat in the cold study and looked at the window and felt the silence that was not peaceful but simply empty.
Violet had cried at three.
He had gone up before Mrs. Plum could. She emerged from the adjoining room with a startled expression.
“Your Grace.” She looked at him, at the travel coat, the undone cravat, the fact that he clearly had not slept. “I was just going to—”
“I have her,” he said.
Mrs. Plum hesitated. “She may be hungry. If you’d like me to—”
“Go back to bed,” he insisted. “I have her.”
She withdrew without further comment.
He lifted Violet from the cradle. She was warm and indignant. He held her against his shoulder even though his heart ached.
“I know,” he murmured. “I know. I’m here.”
She grabbed his lapel. “Oh no.”
“She has to come back,” he told her.
He was not certain whether he believed it.
Violet made a sound against his shoulder, the urgency going out of it as the warmth of his body did its work.
“I need to fix this. What do I do?” he asked quietly.
Violet’s grip on his lapel loosened.
“I am going to fix it,” he said again, more firmly, as though saying it twice made it more than an intention.
He stood there for twenty minutes more after her breathing had evened out. Then he put her back in the cradle.
He stood in the doorway and looked at the chair by the window where Isadora had sat the first night, where he had seen her hold Violet and sing in the low, unhurried voice that had stirred something within him.
Then he went back to the study and remained there until morning.
At some point, Reeves appeared. James had not heard him come in. He became aware of him gradually, standing near the door.
“Your Grace,” Reeves said carefully. “It is past seven. Shall I—”
“No.”
“You have been in that coat since yesterday morning, Your Grace.”
“I’m aware.”
A pause.
Reeves looked at the cold fireplace, at the untouched decanter, at the desk. “Shall I at least have the fire—”
“Yes,” James said. “The fire. Thank you.”
Reeves had the fire burning in ten minutes. He said nothing else and withdrew.
James heard the carriage at half past nine. Barely a minute later, a knock sounded at the study door.
“Come,” he called.
Briggs opened the door and stepped inside. “The Duke of Blackmoor, Your Grace.”
“I know,” James said.
Briggs absorbed this without visible surprise. “Shall I—”
“Send him in.” James paused. “And Briggs?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Whatever you hear in this room in the next twenty minutes, do not interrupt.”
Briggs bowed his head. “Of course, Your Grace.”
With that, he withdrew.
The study was very quiet. James did not stand.
He did not tidy the desk or put on a better coat or do any of the things he might have done to present a more composed version of himself to the man about to walk through the door.
There was no version in which such a presentation was going to help him, and he had run out of energy to pretend otherwise.
The door opened, and William came in.
He was dressed for a visit he had not planned the previous evening—James could see it in his coat, in the absence of his hat.
He had the expression James had seen perhaps four times in fifteen years of friendship, the one that meant William had arrived at a conclusion and intended to act on it, and the act was going to be uncomfortable for someone.
Today, that someone was James.
“Close the door,” James said.
William closed it.
He did not sit. He stood in front of the desk with his arms hanging at his sides and looked at James with the full attention he brought to things that mattered.
“Is it true?” he asked. “Caroline Pembley visited your townhouse?”
“She came uninvited,” James answered. “I sent her away within the hour. Nothing occurred.”
“Then why did my sister arrive at Blackmoor yesterday unable to stop crying?” William bit out.
The words landed hard. Not because James hadn’t known. He had known, had known it since the moment the carriage disappeared down the drive, and he’d stood at the window looking out at the pale gravel and felt the full weight of what he had let happen.
Hearing it said aloud was different.
He opened his mouth. “William—”
“No.” William lifted a hand. “Don’t even try.” His jaw tightened. “Do you know what it is like to watch your sister try not to cry because she doesn’t wish to burden anyone else?”
James heaved a sigh.
“How is she?” he asked.
“How is she?” William repeated flatly. “She was up until past midnight. She has not eaten properly. She spent the better part of yesterday evening trying to convince herself she had imagined everything that happened between you at Ashbourne so that it would hurt less.” His eyes flashed. “That is how she is.”
James remained silent.
“You know what’s making this so difficult? It’s you.”
He frowned slightly.
“If it were anyone else…” William’s voice hardened. “I’d have dragged him out into the courtyard. Instead, I’m standing here talking to my closest friend.”
James pressed his hand flat against the desk. “She didn’t imagine it.”
“I know she didn’t.”
“Then you know—”
“What I know,” William spoke over him, taking a step forward, “is that my sister came home with tears she was trying to hide and told me she was in love with her husband and then told me it didn’t matter because her husband let her walk out the door without a word.
Do you have any idea what it was like to hear that? ”
James lowered his eyes.
“She kept apologizing.”
James looked back up.
William swallowed. “She apologized for crying.” His jaw tightened. “I told you… I told you plainly, James, that if you felt something and said nothing, I would not forgive it. It seems you did feel something and said nothing.”
“Yes,” James sighed.
“Yes,” William echoed, his hands tightening into fists. “That’s all you have?”
“What would you like me to say, William?”
“That you fought for her.” A pause. “That you stopped her. Anything except watching her leave.” William’s voice dropped.
“I would really like to know why my closest friend, whom I have watched care for my sister over the course of several weeks, looked at her standing in his entrance hall and chose silence.”
The morning light filtered through the windows with the warm weather of August. James looked down at his hands. “Because she was crying,” he answered.
William frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“She was standing there, and her eyes were… She was trying not to cry. I could see that she had been crying before I arrived, and it was…” James shook his head.
“It was because of me. All of it. Because I went to London and basically shut her out, and Caroline Pembley appeared in a gossip column, and every fear she has ever had about love and what it does to people was standing there, looking at me from her face.” He paused.
“I had the words. I really had them. I came home specifically to say them. I even arrived early because I could not wait until a reasonable hour to come home and see them. Then I looked at her and thought…”
“Thought what?” William prompted, less sharply now.
“I thought about what you said.” James looked at him.
“In the study. About the slow hurting. The one where you don’t decide anything and you move at a careful distance until she’s given you more than you were willing to give back.
” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I thought about my father. About the kind of man he raised. About every person I have encountered and left exactly as I found them because I did not know how to do anything differently.”
He paused. “And I looked at her crying because of me, and I thought, what if I say it and she stays and I am still that man underneath it all? What if two years from now she is sitting across a breakfast table and I have become the thing she was most afraid of and she has become her mother?”
The room was very quiet.
William’s expression had shifted. It did not soften, exactly, but it was different.
“James,” he said.
“I know.”
“You arrogant idiot. That is the most…” William shook his head. “You decided what was best for her without giving her the chance to decide for herself.”
James closed his eyes. “Yes.”
“You thought loving her meant leaving.”
“Yes…”
“Did it never occur to you that she might have preferred to make her own choice?”
“I don’t know, William.”
“You let her leave because you were afraid of eventually hurting her,” William said, with careful slowness, “and in doing so, you hurt her immensely.”
“Yes.” James looked at the window. “I am aware of the irony.”
“It is not irony. It is the thing I warned you about. The thing I sat in this chair and said—”
“I know what you said.”
“Then why—”
“Because I looked at her and believed it.” James looked back at him.
“I believed that I was genuinely capable of becoming the worst version of what she fears, and that the kindest thing I could do was remove myself from the equation before it got that far.” He rubbed his jaw.
“Which I now understand was the most spectacular act of self-deception I have committed in thirty-one years—and that is, as you know, a competitive field.”
William looked at him for a long moment. Then he finally sat down.
“Do you know…” He exhaled. “I came here intending to hit you.”
James looked up. “That seems deserved.”