Chapter 19
Louisa had not meant to walk this corridor at all. She told herself she meant only to fetch the shawl she’d left in the blue morning room, and that her path taking her past Julian’s door was simply the most direct route, nothing more calculated than that.
She saw the light first, a thin line of candlelight beneath his door. Her feet slowed before she’d quite decided they ought to.
He is awake.
She stood there, candle held low, and found herself absurdly considering whether to knock.
What would I even say?
She might ask about the eastern thatching. She might ask whether he’d eaten anything since dinner, since she’d noticed he often took something sweet like a biscuit or a small slice of cake with his coffee after dinner. She might simply call his name through the door and see what came after.
The thought of standing there and saying Julian into the quiet with nothing else prepared made her chest go tight with something close to panic.
This is absurd. You do not need a reason to speak to your own husband.
Except she knew the real reason had nothing to do with thatching. She only wanted to see him. Five more minutes of his low, even voice before the day properly ended, the same wanting that had crept up on her and left an ache in its wake.
I am the one who asked for this.
The thought landed with its familiar sting.
He agreed because I set those terms. I have no right now to stand outside his door at midnight, wanting something I told him I did not want.
Her hand had lifted, hovering some inches from the dark wood.
What if he answers, and I have nothing honest to say that does not unravel everything we have built?
She thought of Catherine and her words that evening.
“You do not have to name whatever this is today.”
She had not expected it to press quite so hard, standing there with her hand raised and her heart hammering as though she stood at some genuine edge rather than a corridor in her own home.
It is not fair to him to arrive at his door and ask him to account for feelings he never agreed to entertain.
She drew her hand back and made herself turn away.
She walked back to her room, her candle throwing unsteady shadows, and did not look back, though some small treacherous part of her strained to hear whether the door behind her opened.
It did not.
She reached her chamber and stood for a moment with her back against the closed door, her heart still beating too fast for a woman who had done nothing more than walk down a corridor and think better of a foolish impulse.
“It is better this way,” she said aloud, climbing into her cold bed.
I asked for a practical marriage. I have no right to want more than what I asked for.
She lay awake a long while after that, and did not manage, for the whole of that sleepless night, to talk herself fully out of wishing she had knocked regardless.
* * *
“My father used to say horses know when you’re sad before you do.”
Louisa slowed down at the stable door, watching Kit’s hands move in quick, easy bursts as he perched on his overturned bucket, Rosalind’s nose lowered toward him.
“He would take me out at dawn, before anyone else woke. He said the world looked different before everyone else woke up.”
Kit’s expression, as he signed, held none of its usual guardedness, none of the careful wariness he still wore for most of the household, even now, weeks into their lessons.
As she watched him from the doorway, he looked almost peaceful, his hands moving through the signs with an ease and fluency that had crept up on her gradually enough that she had nearly stopped marking each new milestone as remarkable.
“Good morning.”
Louisa turned to find Julian beside her, his coat still damp from an early ride, and pressed a finger to her lips before nodding toward the boy.
“He is telling not Rosalind about his father,” she said quietly. “Sharing memories. Happy ones, from the sound of them, before everything changed.”
His eyebrows flew up. “Why now, do you suppose?”
“Because he finally feels safe enough to remember them without the memories undoing him.” Louisa watched Kit’s hands continue their quiet conversation, something warm settling in her chest at the sight of it.
“Grief does that sometimes. It locks the good memories away alongside the bad, because a child cannot always tell the difference between remembering someone and losing them all over again. He has only just begun to trust that remembering his father does not have to mean reliving the worst of it.”
They stood there a moment longer, watching Kit, and Louisa found herself faintly aware of how close Julian stood beside her, close enough that she could smell the morning air and horse and leather clinging to his coat from his ride.
Kit’s hands stilled. He glanced toward the doorway, and his eyes found Julian’s. After a moment’s consideration, his hands lifted again, slower this time, deliberate.
“Good morning.”
Louisa’s breath caught, waiting to see what Julian would do with it.
Julian’s hands lifted in answer, careful, the shape not quite fluid but entirely correct, the sign Louisa herself had taught him the previous evenings in his study, patiently walking him through the angle of his wrist for the better part of an hour after supper.
“Good morning.”
Kit’s face broke into something close to a smile, quick and startled, and his hands moved again, a question this time.
Louisa watched Julian’s brow furrow briefly in concentration before understanding dawned and he answered correctly, the sign for horse threaded through his response with rather more confidence than she had expected from a man who had, by his own admission, only begun practicing a fortnight ago.
Kit’s smile widened, and he turned back to Rosalind, apparently satisfied, resuming his quiet, one-sided conversation as though nothing remarkable had occurred.
Louisa stared at Julian in astonishment. “You have been practicing considerably more than you let on, Your Grace.”
“I have had a patient teacher.”
“I taught you three signs that evening. That was an entire conversation.”
“I may have continued a little after you retired.” Something almost sheepish crossed his face, quickly smoothed away. “I found I did not wish to let the momentum go to waste, now that the house has gone quiet again.”
Louisa studied him for a long moment, the quiet stables around them, the empty house behind them now that Piers and Catherine and Alaric and both boys had left, leaving Ashvale to its ordinary rhythm once more, and found herself entirely disarmed by the honesty of his answer.
“That is remarkably fast progress, for someone teaching himself from a physician’s hasty sketches.”
“I wanted to be ready when he was.”
Louisa looked at him for a long moment, and the slow smile that curved his mouth undid her.
She thought, unbidden, of the candlelight beneath his door the night before and of every careful reason she had given herself for walking away rather than knocking.
She thought of the quiet satisfaction in his voice just now, entirely without vanity, a man who had spent hours teaching himself a language for no reason beyond wanting to be ready the day his ward finally turned to speak with him directly.
A sensible woman would remember why she married. Louisa, she reminded herself, and found the thought had never felt quite so difficult to hold onto as it did standing there, watching him watch his ward with such quiet hope.
She said nothing further. She turned back toward the stables instead, toward Kit’s hands moving once more against Rosalind’s patient flank, and found herself entirely unable to remember, for the length of several unsteady heartbeats, precisely why she had ever believed practicality alone would be enough to satisfy either of them.
* * *
“You are going to worry that shawl into pieces before we ever reach the door, Louisa.”
“I am not worrying it. I am merely adjusting it.” Louisa smoothed the fringe once more despite herself, watching the lit windows of Rosemere Hall grow larger through the carriage window as the horses slowed toward the drive.
“I have not attended a gathering of this size since the wedding, and I confess I have rather lost the habit of making conversation with people who are not either an eight-year-old boy or an infant.”
“You will manage admirably. By all accounts, you have never once failed to hold your own in a room.”
“That is not the same as wishing to.”
The carriage drew to a stop before the wide stone portico of Rosemere Hall, one of Ashvale’s neighboring estates, footmen already moving to open the door.
Julian handed her down himself rather than waiting for their assistance, his hand warm and steady beneath hers, lingering perhaps a moment longer than it should before he released it.
Rosemere Hall was ablaze with candlelight, every window glowing gold against the early dark.
Its owners had opened their home for one of the informal gatherings that regularly drew together the neighboring families of the district, the sound of a string quartet drifting through the open doors alongside the low murmur of perhaps sixty guests already assembled in the long drawing room.
Louisa took Julian’s arm as they climbed the steps, and felt, despite her earlier misgivings, the ease of moving into a room beside a man whose steadiness she had come to rely on more than she cared to examine these past weeks.
“Your Grace.” Their host, Lord Rosemere, met them just inside the door, a portly affable man who had known Julian’s father slightly and seemed determined to make up for the acquaintance’s brevity by talking at considerable length to the son.
“And Her Grace. How well you both look. Married life clearly agrees with you.”
“You are very kind, My Lord.”
“Not kind at all, merely observant.” Rosemere beamed. “Come, come, several people are rather anxious to make your acquaintance, Duchess.”
The introductions blurred pleasantly into one another for the better part of an hour, names and titles Louisa did her best to fix in memory, until Rosemere steered them toward a cluster near the card room, where a tall, silver-haired gentleman stood accustomed to being deferred to in any room he entered.
“Ashvale, allow me to present Sir Edmund Vane.”
“Your Grace.” Vane’s bow was correct in every way, his smile warm, his voice pleasant, and yet something in the careful precision of the gesture unsettled Louisa before he had said a single further word.
“I knew your father some years before his passing. A great man. I am glad to see the title in such capable hands.”
“You are kind, Sir Edmund.”
“And this must be the new Duchess I have heard so much about.” Vane turned his attention to Louisa, his small, shrewd eyes moving over her with a swift, assessing thoroughness that reminded her uncomfortably of a man appraising a horse he had not yet decided whether to purchase.
“Charming. I understand you have worked something of a miracle with the young ward. All of London speaks of it.”
“I have done very little beyond listen properly, Sir Edmund. Kit did the rest of the work himself.”
“How admirably modest.” His smile did not waver, though something behind his eyes seemed to file the answer away for later use rather than accept it at face value. “I confess I find modesty a rare quality these days, particularly among young women who have accomplished something worth boasting of.”
Louisa returned his smile with one of her own, equally correct, equally practiced, and found herself disliking him more with every polished sentence he offered, though in that moment she could not have named precisely why.
The evening wore on pleasantly enough after that. Louisa, drawn into conversation with Lady Rosemere and several other guests, danced once with Julian and once with Rosemere’s eldest son, out of politeness.
It was only near the evening’s end, as she gathered her shawl and searched the room for her husband, that she spotted him standing near an alcove window with Vane, the two men’s heads bent close together in a conversation clearly not meant for the general room.
She did not approach. Instead, she watched from a discreet distance as Vane spoke, low and urgent, and Julian’s expression, usually so carefully composed, darkened by degrees into something she had not yet seen him wear.
Neither man smiled. The exchange lasted only a few minutes, brief and clipped, before Vane inclined his head in something that was not quite a bow and withdrew toward the card room.
Julian lingered by the window a moment longer, his jaw set, before crossing the room to find her.
“Are you ready to go home?”
“Whenever you wish, Your Grace.” She studied his face, the careful blankness he had drawn back over whatever had passed between him and Vane. “Though I confess I noticed you speaking with Sir Edmund rather seriously, for a man who claims to have very little use for him.”
“It was nothing of consequence.”
“You do not look like a man who has just discussed nothing of consequence.”
Julian said nothing further until they had made their farewells and settled into the carriage, the door closed against the cold night air, the horses taking them back to Ashvale.