Chapter 20
“You have been quiet the entire drive,” Louisa noted, watching him across the carriage, his face half in shadow, half caught in the passing lamplight from the estate gates. “Is something wrong?”
Julian was quiet a moment longer, his hands loosely clasped, and Louisa kept watching him, her brow furrowed. He didn’t know how much he could say, but he was very reluctant to keep it from her nonetheless.
“Vane warned me about Thomas Whitmore,” he said finally.
“I do not know the name.”
“His father was a business partner of mine some years ago. A wealthy investor. My father spread false information that ruined him entirely.” His jaw tightened.
“Whitmore lost everything. He died some years later, and his son has apparently spent considerable time since trying to clear his father’s name. ”
“And Vane came to warn you of this tonight, of all nights.”
“He told me that Thomas Whitmore had recently come into possession of letters. Correspondence, he claimed, that proved his father’s innocence and implicated my father in the ruin.
He means to make it public.” Julian’s eyes met hers in the shifting light.
“Vane urged me to use whatever influence I have to discredit the man before the story spreads. To protect the family name, as he put it, before Whitmore ever gets the chance to speak.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I would not condemn a man I have never met on the word of another man I trust less than I ought to admit in polite company.” Something grim entered his voice.
“Vane did not care for that answer. Before he left, he warned me that if I would not protect my family name, I would come to regret it.”
Louisa listened without interrupting, and found herself considerably less troubled by the threat itself than by the manner of the man who had delivered it.
“If Sir Edmund is so determined to silence this Thomas Whitmore before anyone hears a word of what he has to say,” she said slowly, “then I wonder whether he has something more pressing to hide than simple family loyalty.”
Julian was quiet for a moment. It was definitely a recurring thought.
“The idea has crossed my mind,” he admitted.
“Then we shall make certain we learn the truth of it ourselves, before anyone else decides it for us.”
Julian looked at her for a long moment, the carriage rattling on through the dark, and found the word settling in his chest with a weight far beyond what so small a word ought to carry.
We. Not I will look into it, not you needn’t concern yourself, but we, offered so plainly, so immediately, as though there had never been a question of facing it alone.
He had spent the better part of three years, since Daniel’s death, building his full understanding of himself around the certainty that he managed difficulty by himself, that no one else’s shoulder was meant to bear any part of what belonged to the Cavendish name.
He had not expected, hearing that single small word from his wife’s mouth in the dark of a moving carriage, to feel thoroughly undone by it.
Keeping my distance from her, he thought, watching her face in the passing lamplight, steady and certain and already turning over the problem as though it were as much hers to solve as his, was never going to be so simple as I once believed it could be.
* * *
Sleep would not come.
Louisa had tried every remedy she knew. She tried warm milk sent up by a sympathetic Mrs. Whitfield, the same three chapters of a novel she’d already read twice this month, even counting the small familiar creaks of Ashvale settling around her.
Past midnight, she found herself giving up the pretense entirely and pulling on her dressing gown over her night rail instead, some vague notion of fetching a book from the library driving her out into the dark corridor.
She had scarcely gone ten steps when she nearly collided with Julian, similarly dressed for sleep and apparently similarly failing at it, a single candle in his hand throwing long shadows up the walls.
“Your Grace.” She gasped and pressed a hand briefly to her chest, startled. “I did not expect to find anyone wandering the halls at this hour.”
“Nor did I, though I confess I should have guessed, given how thoroughly your mind seemed occupied at supper.” Julian’s eyes moved over her, taking in her dressing gown, the loose fall of her hair over her shoulder, and his expression shifted, brief and quickly masked, though not quickly enough to escape her notice.
“Vane’s warning, I imagine, keeping you from sleep as thoroughly as it has kept me. ”
“Among other things.” Louisa drew her dressing gown a little closer, suddenly conscious of how underdressed she was. “I was going to fetch something to read. I find idle hands invite idle worry, and a book at least gives the worry somewhere useful to go.”
“A sound philosophy. Though I confess my own remedy tends toward pacing rather than reading, which accomplishes considerably less and tires me out considerably more.”
“Pacing where, exactly? I have never once seen you pace anything, Your Grace. You strike me as a man who sits very still and broods instead.”
“I resent that characterization.”
“Do you deny it?”
“I do not deny it. I merely resent that you have observed it so accurately.” A reluctant smile tugged at his mouth, visible even in the candlelight.
“I have been walking the gallery, if you must know. Something about looking at all those disapproving Cavendish ancestors reliably distracts me from whatever is actually troubling me. I often wonder which of them would have most disapproved of me, and it is remarkably effective at driving out lesser worries.”
Louisa laughed, softer than she had intended, the sound carrying oddly in the sleeping house. “And who wins that contest?”
“My great-grandfather, without question. He is rendered in a coat so aggressively unfashionable that I cannot look at it without losing my train of thought, and his expression suggests that he found the whole business of having his portrait painted a personal insult.”
“I should like to see this coat.”
“I will show you, if you truly wish it, though I warn you it may ruin your appetite for tomorrow’s breakfast.” He gestured, half invitation, half question, toward the gallery’s dark entrance.
Louisa found herself, despite every sensible instinct telling her to simply continue toward the library and leave well enough alone, falling into step beside him.
The gallery, lit only by his candle, held rows of dim, gilt-framed faces watching them pass, and Julian stopped before one particularly severe gentleman in an alarming shade of puce.
“There. Great-grandfather Cavendish. I believe he is glaring at me, though I have never managed to find out what I have done to earn it.”
“He does look rather put out.”
“He looks as though someone has just informed him the wine has gone off.” Julian tilted the candle, throwing his great-grandfather’s disapproving features into sharper relief.
“When we were boys, Piers used to claim that the old man haunts the east wing on account of that coat, still furious no one ever properly appreciated it.”
“Does he haunt it?”
“Not to my knowledge, though I confess I have never gone looking hard to find out.” He glanced sideways at her, warmth rather than teasing entering his expression now.
“You are better company for midnight wandering than my own thoughts, Louisa. I find I have rather enjoyed this small distraction from worrying about Vane.”
“I might say the same.” She studied the portrait a moment longer, acutely aware of how close he stood beside her, close enough that she could feel the faint warmth radiating from him against the gallery’s night chill.
“Though I confess I am somewhat surprised to find you so easily distracted, Your Grace. I had rather thought you the sort of man who worries a problem until it surrenders, rather than abandoning it for portraiture.”
“I am, ordinarily. This past week, I have found that my usual methods have grown considerably less reliable than they once were.”
“Why is that?”
Julian was quiet for a moment, though something in his stillness told her the question had landed somewhere he had not entirely prepared for.
“I could not properly say,” he said eventually.
Louisa suspected, watching his jaw tighten faintly, that this was not entirely true.
The candle guttered between them, throwing their shadows long and close together against the gallery wall.
She became aware of her loosely tied dressing gown, of his shirt open at the collar in a state of undress she had rarely seen outside their most private hours together, of the charged quality the silence had taken on in the last several seconds.
Julian turned his head and found her already watching him, and neither of them looked away.
His eyes moved briefly to her mouth, and Louisa felt her own breath catch, her pulse suddenly loud in her ears, some old careful voice in her head reminding her too late that this was precisely the sort of moment she had spent weeks telling herself did not exist between them, not truly, not beyond ordinary friendship and partnership.
“Louisa.” Her name came out low, almost rough, and she felt it land somewhere beneath her ribs with considerably more force than a single word had any right to carry.
“Yes?” she whispered.
He did not answer immediately.
The candle flickered again, and somewhere in the house, a floorboard settled. The small, ordinary sound seemed to startle them both back into some semblance of sense at precisely the same instant.
Julian cleared his throat and stepped back, putting a proper distance between them that had not existed a moment before. “You ought to fetch your book before you catch a chill standing in this drafty gallery.”
“Yes.” Louisa’s voice came out unsteady, and she gathered her dressing gown closer, grateful for something to do with her hands. “Yes, I ought to.”
“I shall walk you back to the library, if you like.”
“That is not necessary, Your Grace.”
“No,” he agreed quietly, something regretful in it that she could not properly interpret in the dim candlelight. “I suppose it is not.”
They parted at the gallery’s entrance, Julian returning to his chamber, Louisa continuing toward the library with a book she no longer wanted, her heart still beating far too quickly for a woman who had done nothing more than admire an unfashionable portrait with her own husband.
That was nothing, she told herself, climbing the stairs a while later, book unread and forgotten under her arm. A midnight conversation. Nothing more than that. Right?
She did not entirely believe it and suspected, from the careful distance Julian had kept from her at breakfast the following morning, that he did not entirely believe it either.