Chapter 28
“Julian!”
Dominic burst into the study without knocking, a folded pamphlet clutched in one fist, his face flushed with an anger Julian had rarely seen on him.
“What has happened?”
“Vane. The man has finally shown his hand, and I confess I did not think him capable of sinking quite this low.” Dominic thrust the pamphlet across the desk, his hand not quite steady with the force of his fury.
“It is being distributed through half the coffeehouses as we speak, and I have no doubt it will reach every drawing room in the county within the week. I have already had three separate acquaintances stop me in the street to ask, with entirely too much relish, whether the rumors were true.”
Julian snatched it up and read it.
A CONCERNING ACCOUNT OF THE DUKE OF ASHVALE’S HOUSEHOLD
His eyes moved down the page, the words arranging themselves into something that made his stomach turn cold and then hot by rapid turns.
A claim that Eleanor was his illegitimate child, conceived before the marriage and passed off as an orphan to disguise the scandal.
A suggestion that the hasty union with Louisa had been arranged purely to conceal the truth from polite society.
The arrangement, the pamphlet claimed, had been engineered by Julian himself, painting Louisa as an unwitting party maneuvered into rescuing his reputation rather than a woman who had walked into his study of her own accord and proposed the arrangement herself.
And beneath it, in language dressed up as concern rather than accusation, the further suggestion that Kit’s continued silence proved the whole household unstable, a boy left to suffer beneath a guardian too preoccupied with his own indiscretions to properly attend to his ward’s welfare, his years of silence recast not as grief slowly healing but as evidence of ongoing neglect.
“This is wild.” Julian’s voice came out low, his fury barely contained. “This is entirely false, every word of it. He has taken every private grief in this household and twisted it into something ugly enough to sell papers with.”
“I know that. You know that. Half of London will not trouble themselves to know it, Julian, not when a scandal this delicious is being handed to them in print.” Dominic dropped into the chair opposite, his own anger not yet spent.
“Vane has moved exactly as he threatened he would. You refused to discredit Whitmore on his behalf, so he has decided to discredit you instead, and your wife, and those children upstairs who have done nothing whatsoever to deserve being dragged into it.”
“Has it reached Henswick House yet?”
“I could not say for certain, though I would assume the worst rather than hope for the best. These things travel considerably faster than any of us wish them to.” Dominic ran a hand through his hair, some of his earlier fury giving way to weary concern.
“I stopped by my club before coming here. Some gentlemen were discussing it over their morning coffee as though it were a fact, one of them going so far as to suggest that the Duchess had known nothing of the child’s true parentage until after the wedding, poor deceived creature that the pamphlet paints her as. ”
“They are making her a victim of my supposed deception, and Eleanor a mark of shame, and Kit’s grief a symptom of neglect.” Julian’s hand curled into a fist against the desk. “There is not a single true word in the entire piece, and yet I imagine that will trouble almost no one who reads it. ”
“It will not stay contained, whatever we do now. The only question is how we answer it.” Dominic leaned forward. “Has Vane any notion of what he has actually unleashed, attacking a child this way? ”
“He warned me with veiled threats at the Camdens’ gathering that I would regret refusing him. I did not imagine even then that he meant to attack Eleanor’s parentage or use Kit’s silence as a weapon against us.”
“Then you underestimated him. As did I, and I have known the man longer than you have.” Dominic’s jaw tightened. “What will you do?”
Julian set the pamphlet down, his hand flat against the desk, and forced himself to think past the white-hot anger clouding every impulse. “I need time to decide the proper course of action. This cannot be answered carelessly or in anger, however much anger I feel at this moment.”
“You have very little time, if you mean to answer this before it hardens into fact rather than mere rumor. Every day it sits unanswered, another household reads it as gospel rather than gossip.”
“I am aware of that.” Julian’s jaw tightened. “Give me the afternoon. I will not sit on this longer than that. But I will not answer it half-considered either, not when the truth of my father’s actions must come with it if I mean to answer it properly.”
Dominic studied him for a moment, some of his fury settling into something steadier, more solemn. “Then think carefully, and quickly. And Julian, whatever you decide, I would advise you not to face it alone. Not this time.” With that, he rose from his seat and left.
Julian remained at his desk a long while after, reading the pamphlet a second time, then a third, each pass leaving him colder and more resolved than the last, before he finally gathered it up and went to find his wife.
He found her in the nursery, Eleanor cradled against her shoulder, and something in his face must have warned her before he’d said a single word, because she gently lowered the baby into her cradle and turned to face him.
“What has happened?”
He handed her the pamphlet without preamble and watched her read it.
Her expression remained composed even as her eyes moved across each fabricated line, though he could see the tightness gathering at her jaw, the color rising slowly into her cheekbones, which indicated how thoroughly the words had angered her.
“He is a coward,” she scoffed. “A coward who could not persuade you with reason, so has decided to attack you where you cannot easily defend yourself—through a child’s trauma and an infant’s parentage.”
“I intend to answer it directly. I mean to make a public statement admitting my father’s wrongdoing, clearing Whitmore’s name, and exposing Vane’s role in covering the scheme all these years. It will end his hold over us entirely, whatever damage it costs my name in the process.”
“Good.” Louisa’s chin lifted. “I will stand beside you when you make it.”
“No.”
She blinked, startled by the immediate refusal. “No?”
“I want you and Eleanor to stay at Henswick House until the statement is made and the scandal has run its course.”
“You are sending me away.”
“I am trying to keep you safe.”
“I am your wife, Julian. I belong beside you, not tucked away at my father’s house while you face this alone.”
“You do not understand the danger of it.” Julian’s voice rose, frustration and fear tangling together in a way he could not properly separate.
“Vane attacked Eleanor's very parentage in print, Louisa, and he did it because he knows precisely what she means to you, and what you mean to me. That is not the action of a man merely trying to protect his own reputation. That is a man showing me exactly where I am most easily wounded, so that he might use it against me the moment I refuse to bend. I do not know what he intends to attempt next, but I will not have you and Eleanor within his reach while I find out.”
“So you would rather have me out of your reach entirely.”
“That is not what I said.”
“Is it not? You have decided, without consulting me, that the safest place for your wife is somewhere you are not. I am beginning to wonder, Julian, whether it is Vane's threats you wish to be rid of, or mine.”
“That is not fair.”
“Is it not fair, or is it simply uncomfortable to hear?” Louisa's chin lifted, though her voice had gone quieter now, something wounded creeping beneath the anger.
“You do not send Kit away. He remains here, under this roof, named in that same pamphlet, and yet somehow it is only Eleanor and I who require removing to safety.”
“Kit is my ward, under my legal guardianship, in my own household, surrounded by servants who would raise the alarm the instant anything seemed amiss. Vane cannot simply have him spirited away, nor threatened directly, without answering to me and to the law both. You and Eleanor are rather more easily reached, Louisa, through gossip, through whispers that follow you into every drawing room, through whatever further cruelty a desperate man might invent once print alone has failed to move me. I am not sending you away because I want you gone. I am sending you away because I do not know how to protect you properly while you remain within his reach, and that terrifies me considerably more than facing him alone ever could.”
“Then let me stand beside you and face it together, as we have faced everything else these past months. I did not run from Thomas Whitmore’s account, whatever risk it carried. I will not run from this either.”
“I cannot allow it.”
“Allow it.” Louisa’s eyes flashed, her voice sharp and wounded. “You speak as though the choice belongs entirely to you, Julian, as though I have not proven time and again that I am capable of judging danger for myself and choosing to face it regardless.”
“Why can you not simply trust that I am trying to protect you?”
“Because I do not need protecting from my own choices, Julian. I need a husband who trusts me enough to make them.”
“I cannot think clearly with you standing in the path of whatever comes next!” The words tore out of him louder than he had intended, and he lowered his voice, though the raw edge beneath it remained.
“Because I am afraid, Louisa. I am afraid of what a man desperate enough to attack children might do next, and I cannot think clearly with you in danger. I need you safe. I need you away from this house until I know what Vane intends to do.”
“So you have decided on my behalf what I am permitted to face.”
“I am trying to protect you.”
“By removing me from my own home, without my consent, the moment matters become difficult.”
“That is not—” Julian stopped, a desperate feeling rising in his chest, the words arriving before he could properly weigh them. “Louisa, I am only trying to give you the life you asked for. A marriage without burdens you never wanted to carry.”
The moment the words left his mouth, he knew, with sick and immediate certainty, that he had made a terrible mistake.
Louisa went very still. The color in her cheekbones deepened, and Julian watched helplessly as whatever warmth had existed between them a minute before vanished, replaced by something cold and considerably more frightening than her earlier anger.
“You’re right,” she said, very quietly. “That is exactly what I asked for.”
“Louisa, what I meant—”
“I will have Eleanor’s things packed within the hour.”
She turned away from him, gathering Eleanor from the cradle with hands that did not shake despite everything simmering beneath her composure, and walked out of the room without another word.
Julian did not follow. He stood alone in the nursery and knew exactly what he should have said instead, the words arranging themselves too late with perfect clarity.
I am terrified of losing you, and I do not know how to protect you from Vane without also protecting myself from ever having to find out what that loss would cost me.
He had not said that. He had said something else entirely, something that handed her back every careful word of the arrangement she had proposed months ago, as though nothing had changed between them since, as though their kiss had meant nothing, as though months of dinners and dances and quiet mornings in the stables had taught him nothing at all about the woman he had just wounded, however unintentionally.
I am right to send her away, he told himself, though he felt less confident now than he had a quarter hour ago. Whatever I have just cost us, she will be safer at Henswick House than here.
He stood a long while in the empty nursery, the cradle rocking faintly still from her hurried departure, and found no comfort in being right.