Chapter 17
“If you spend this entire meal praising my cook instead of speaking to the rest of us, Catherine, I shall begin to suspect your loyalties.”
“I ought to be offended,” Dominic remarked lazily from further down the table, setting aside his wineglass. “I’ve been making every effort to be entertaining for the better part of half an hour.”
“You have,” Catherine agreed. “The cook has simply been more successful.”
Laughter rippled across the table.
Catherine, who had known Louisa since their first London Season and had become as much a sister as any born to her, smiled. “Can you blame me? She has given me very little else to think about.”
Louisa laughed, motioning for the footman to refill Catherine’s wine, and glanced down the length of the table where Alaric, Catherine’s husband and the Duke of Coldmere, sat with his young son cradled in the crook of his arm, distracted by the boy’s determined efforts to seize his fork.
“Henry will have that fork in his mouth within the minute, Alaric, and then where shall you be for the second course?”
“Considerably poorer in cutlery, I imagine, though richer in whatever small triumph he intends to claim from the theft.” Alaric’s voice carried the dry warmth Louisa had come to associate with him across the handful of dinners she’d now shared with the Deverells, a man who wore command as naturally as his coat and yet softened entirely the moment his son’s fingers closed around anything of his.
Dominic watched the exchange with evident interest. “I admire his ambition. Most gentlemen wait until adulthood before attempting to rob a duke at the dinner table.”
Alaric extricated the fork from his son’s grip and replaced it with a spoon, which the boy regarded with immediate suspicion. “There. A fair trade, and one considerably less likely to end in an emergency that requires the services of the only physician present at the table.”
“Speaking of physicians,” Piers piped up from the other end of the table, “I shall have you know that I am considered excellent with children, and I would be delighted to examine any small person who swallows any small object this household might produce this evening.”
“By children, he means anyone under forty who has swallowed something they ought not,” Dominic remarked drily.
“An entirely respectable branch of medicine.”
“One upon which you’ve built an astonishing reputation.”
“Your help is not required, Piers, though I thank you for the offer,” Catherine said, smiling. “Oliver has already sworn to keep watch over his nephew’s cutlery for the remainder of the meal, and I trust him rather more than I trust most grown men in this matter.”
Oliver, eight years old and clearly delighted by the responsibility, nodded with tremendous solemnity from his place beside Kit, the two boys having fallen, within the first quarter hour of the visit, into the easy, wordless companionship of children who required no formal introduction to become fast allies.
Louisa had watched them from across the drawing room earlier, Oliver chattering happily while Kit listened beside him, content to let the boy carry the conversation alone.
Though Kit had offered no signs in return, he had not withdrawn, and the easy companionship between them had seemed to require remarkably little of either child.
“Kit tells me,” Louisa said, glancing down the table, “that Oliver has already learned the sign for play, though I suspect his pronunciation, if I may call it that, needs some correction.”
“Oliver has learned the signs for a great many things,” Catherine said. “Most of them, I regret to inform you, are related to biscuits and his considerable opinion of himself.”
The door opened quietly, revealing Henry’s nursemaid.
She looked toward the little boy. “I believe the young master has reached the end of his patience with grown-up conversation, Your Grace.”
Alaric glanced down to find his son valiantly suppressing a yawn. “I believe you may be right.” He kissed his forehead before passing him into the nurse’s waiting arms. “Good night, my boy.”
Henry waved sleepily at the table before being carried out of the room in his nurse’s arms, leaving the adults to their dinner.
Julian, seated to Louisa’s right, had said little throughout most of the meal, though she was aware of his attention returning to her at odd intervals, quick and quiet, gone again before she could properly catch it.
She caught it now, glancing sideways and finding his eyes on her rather than on the boy he was ostensibly listening to. Something in his expression struck her as considerably warmer than the moment strictly required, before he looked down at his wine.
“Ashvale,” Alaric said, drawing his attention, “I understand your ward has made remarkable progress these past weeks. Catherine tells me the whole affair has become quite the talk of the households that know of it.”
“He has, yes.” Something eased in Julian’s voice, the pride Louisa had come to recognize whenever the subject of Kit’s progress arose. “More than I dared hope for when I first wrote to Lady Louisa.”
“The Duchess,” Catherine corrected mildly, though a faint smile accompanied it.
“The Duchess,” Julian allowed, and glanced at Louisa again, briefly, before returning his attention to Alaric.
“Though I confess I have not yet fully accustomed myself to the title. I still think of her as the woman who proposed marriage to me across my desk with less ceremony than most people order a hat.”
“That does sound like her,” Catherine said, delighted. “I have known her for years, Your Grace, and I do not believe I have ever once seen her approach a problem sideways when a direct route was available.”
“It is a policy that has served me well,” Louisa spoke up. “Sideways approaches waste time, and I have very little patience for wasted time.”
“No,” Julian said quietly, almost fondly. “I have gathered that.”
After the final course had been cleared and the men had retreated to the study with the boys trailing along, Kit’s hand tucked into Piers’s sleeve and Oliver chattering happily beside him, Catherine looped her arm through Louisa’s and steered her toward the terrace doors.
“A walk in the garden, I think, before the evening grows too cold for it.”
The garden had gone soft and blue in the last of the light, the roses past their full bloom now but still fragrant. Catherine walked slowly, her arm still linked with Louisa’s, the easy familiarity of a friendship that required no effort to maintain.
“You watched him rather a lot this evening,” she noted, once they had gone some distance from the house.
“Watched whom?”
“Your husband, Louisa, whom else? Though I suppose I ought to say that he watched you rather a lot, and you simply happened to notice each time he did.”
“He is attentive at dinner. I imagine most hosts are.”
“Most hosts do not watch their wives with that particular expression, as though they have momentarily forgotten what they meant to say next because they were considering something else entirely.” Catherine’s smile was warm, entirely without malice, though it held a knowing quality Louisa found herself faintly resisting.
“I do not think your husband realizes quite how often his attention returns to you, Louisa. I honestly found it rather charming, watching it happen four times across a single soup course.”
“He is simply a kind man. Thoughtful. He notices things other people overlook, and I imagine that habit extends to dinner as much as to his ledgers.”
“I am sure that is part of it.”
“You do not sound convinced.”
“I am not entirely convinced, no.” Catherine paused beside a late-blooming rose, touching one petal absentmindedly.
“I have watched a great many marriages since my own began, some built on affection from the start, others on rather less, and I have learned to recognize the look of a man discovering he wants something he did not expect to want. I saw it in Alaric, eventually, though it took him considerably longer than I would have liked, and I confess I have seen something of the same shape in your husband tonight.”
Louisa said nothing for a moment, watching the last light fade behind the garden wall, and found the words arriving before she had properly decided to share them.
“I was the one who asked for a practical marriage, Catherine. I proposed the whole arrangement myself and told him plainly that I expected nothing beyond respect and a name for Eleanor. He agreed to those terms because I set them, and I have no right to be surprised now if he holds to precisely what I asked of him.”
“And has he held to it?”
“Entirely. He has never once overstepped what we agreed on. He is respectful and kind, and I have no complaint whatsoever to make about him.” Louisa drew in a slow breath and found the rest of it harder to say plainly, though she made herself continue regardless.
“It is only that I find myself looking forward to our conversations more than a practical arrangement strictly requires. I miss him, absurdly, when his correspondence keeps him occupied through an entire afternoon. I have caught myself more than once arranging some small question simply to have an excuse to seek him out in his study, when the answer could easily have waited until dinner. I do not know what to make of any of that, and I confess it unsettles me rather more than I like to admit.”
Catherine was quiet for a moment, studying her with a gentleness that held no judgment in it, only a careful, patient understanding that made Louisa suspect, not for the first time, that her friend had arrived at some hard-won wisdom of her own before she ever offered it to anyone else.
“I did not expect anything of my own marriage when it began,” Catherine said finally.
“I was given to a man who barely spoke to me before our wedding day, and considerably less after it, and in those early months I built my whole life around the expectation that I would simply endure it, the way my mother endured her marriage before me, and call the endurance itself a kind of success. I did not go looking for anything more than that. I certainly did not expect to want it.”
She glanced toward the house, toward the lit windows of the study, where the boys’ laughter carried faintly across the darkening lawn.
“And then, quite without my permission, I found I did want it after all. Sometimes people discover that life asks something different of them than what they first agreed to want, Louisa. It does not make the wanting foolish or the original arrangement a failure. It simply means circumstances shifted beneath you while you were occupied looking elsewhere.”
“I am not speaking of love, Catherine.”
“I did not say you were.”
“You are implying it.”
“I am implying nothing at all.” Catherine’s smile turned gentle, entirely without pressure.
“You do not have to name whatever this is today, Louisa. You do not owe yourself, or me, or your husband, a tidy explanation before you are ready to have one. Give yourself a little time to simply notice what you notice, without deciding immediately what it must mean.”
Louisa looked back toward the house, toward the warm light spilling out of the study windows, and found she had no ready answer for that.
Only the same unsettled, unnamed warmth she had been carrying quietly for weeks now, and no particular wish to examine it any further than Catherine had already gently invited her to.