Chapter 29
The carriage disappeared down the long drive, gravel crunching beneath its wheels, and Julian stood alone in the entrance hall long after the sound had faded into the ordinary quiet of the afternoon.
The house had never struck him as particularly loud, even in the best of times.
Louisa did not fill rooms with noise the way some women did, all chatter and rustling silk.
And yet standing here now, in the same hall he had crossed a thousand times before her arrival, Julian found the silence sitting differently against him than it ever had before, heavier somehow and pointed.
He went to his study and closed the door, and did not, for a long while, do anything beyond stand at the window and watch the empty drive.
An hour passed this way, perhaps more. He had lost track of time, his thoughts circling the same sentences over and over, turning them each way in search of some angle that made them sound less damning than they had the moment they’d left his mouth.
“I am only trying to give you the life you asked for. A marriage without burdens you never wanted to carry.”
He poured himself a brandy he did not want, simply for something to do with his hands, and had barely lifted the glass to his lips when a soft knock sounded at the door.
Kit stood in the doorway, his sketchbook tucked beneath one arm as always, his dark eyes moving across the room, the empty chair Louisa usually occupied, before settling on Julian with an expression far too knowing for an eight-year-old.
“Where is Louisa?” he signed.
Julian set the glass down. “She has gone to visit her parents for a few days.”
Kit’s brow furrowed. “Why?”
“I asked her to go.”
The boy went very still, his hands lowering slowly to his sides, and fixed Julian with a long, searching look that made him feel absurdly smaller than a grown duke had any business feeling before an eight-year-old.
“Why?”
Julian could have sworn Kit sighed.
“There is trouble, Kit. A man has said cruel things about our family in print. I feared what he might do next, and I wanted her and Eleanor safely away from whatever comes next.”
“Does she know why she left? Or did you just tell her to go?”
Julian hesitated, the question landing somewhere he had not properly prepared for. “I told her why. I do not think she agreed with my reasons.”
“Then she did not want to go.”
“No,” Julian admitted. “I do not believe she did.”
Kit’s hands lifted again, slower this time, deliberate. “That was wrong.”
Julian felt the words land somewhere beneath his ribs, plain and unadorned like children’s honesty so often managed to be, stripped of all the careful diplomacy an adult might have wrapped around the same accusation.
“I was trying to protect her.” He kept the edge out of his voice.
“You always say that.” Kit’s hands moved faster now, some old frustration finding its way into the signs.
“You said it after the man came to the ball and made you angry. You said it when you would not let me ride Rosalind to the far field alone. You say it about everything, and I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Julian stared at him, genuinely startled by the sheer weight of the observation, delivered so plainly by a boy who had spent three years saying nothing and had apparently decided to make up for the silence all at once.
“What do you think it means, then?”
Kit considered the question seriously, his charcoal-stained fingers tapping once against his sketchbook before he answered. “I think it means you are frightened, and you would rather be frightened alone than let anyone stand beside you while you are frightened together.”
“That is not entirely fair, Kit. Like I said, I was simply doing what I could to protect her.”
“Is it not true, though?” Kit held his gaze for a long moment before signing one final question, brief and devastating in its simplicity. “Protect her from who?”
Julian opened his mouth, but no answer came out.
He stood there, a grown man, a duke, his resources and rank arrayed uselessly around him, and found he had genuinely no answer for the boy’s question.
He was not trying to protect Louisa from Vane, not really.
He had not sent her away purely to shield her from a pamphlet’s cruelty.
He had sent her away because standing beside her through whatever came next had frightened him considerably more than facing it alone ever could, and he had dressed that fear up as protection because protection sounded a great deal more noble than the truth.
“I do not know,” he finally signed back, the admission costing him something plain and real, offered in Kit’s own language rather than hidden behind the easier shelter of speech.
Kit considered the answer for a long moment, his expression softening slightly. “Then you should tell her that,” he signed. “Not me.”
When Julian did not respond to that, Kit simply turned and left the study, his footsteps fading down the corridor.
Julian was left alone with the unbearable silence of having been seen through by a child who had not spoken a single word aloud in years and yet had just managed to say more than anyone else had ever dared to his face.
He sat down heavily behind his desk. His eyes fell to the drawing still propped against his inkstand, the four of them close together, Kit’s small figure tucked naturally at Louisa’s side.
I promised her.
The memory hit him with brutal clarity: that written agreement they had both signed in this very room, her chin lifted, her terms laid out as plainly as a solicitor’s brief.
I will never attempt to change, quiet, or manage Lady Louisa’s character, in private or in company, and will consider any such attempt a breach of this agreement.
He had written those very words himself and had meant every syllable of them when he’d set his pen to the page.
But then, the moment fear had cornered him, he had done exactly what he’d sworn never to do.
He had decided on her behalf what she was permitted to face.
He had managed her, quieted her, packed her off to her father’s house as though she were something fragile to be protected rather than a woman who had negotiated her own marriage across a desk with more courage than most men he had ever known.
A woman who had walked alone to learn the truth about a stranger neither of them could otherwise have reached, who had knelt in the straw and taught a silent, grieving boy to speak again through nothing but patience and her own two capable hands.
He reached for a fresh sheet of paper, dipped his pen, and began to write.
Louisa—
He stopped, stared at the single word sitting alone on the page, and found every sentence that wanted to follow it arriving wrong, too small, too careful, the same restraint that had gotten him into this trouble in the first place.
He set the pen down, rose, and paced the length of the study once, twice. He briefly caught his reflection in the darkened window pane, a man he scarcely recognized, undone by a woman he had spent months insisting he could hold at a careful distance.
He sat back down. Picked up the pen again.
Louisa, I am sorry—
He stopped again, the apology sitting flat and insufficient against everything it needed to carry, and set the pen down a second time with more force than the gesture required, the nib skittering a thin line of ink across the page.
He fisted his hair in his hands and swore. He rubbed his jaw, his mind racing.
I do not deserve her.
The thought arrived with none of the careful hedging he usually applied to anything this unguarded.
I do not deserve a woman who fights for the people she loves without once considering the cost to herself, and I have just proven, in the space of a single cornered sentence, that I am not yet the man who deserves to stand beside her while she does it.
He looked at the drawing again, at Kit’s deliberate rendering of a family that had never once needed his permission to exist as one, and found that he did not know how to begin making this right, only that he intended to find out, whatever it required of him, however long it took.