Chapter 30
“There now, my darling girl. You are home, whatever brought you here so suddenly.”
Lord Henswick took Eleanor from Louisa’s arms the moment she crossed the threshold, his weathered face softening at the sight of the baby’s sleepy, travel-worn frown, and began walking her slowly about the entrance hall without waiting to be asked.
Lady Henswick said nothing. She simply took Louisa’s hands in her own, studied her face for a long moment, the careful composure Louisa had maintained throughout the carriage ride, and pressed a kiss to her forehead, asking no questions Louisa did not yet have the strength to answer.
“There is my girl,” Lord Henswick murmured to Eleanor, bouncing her gently as he paced the length of the hall, her small fists shifting against his coat.
“You have had a long journey, have you not? Far too long for someone so small. Shall I tell you a secret? The roses have just come into their second bloom, and I intend to show them to you the very moment you are old enough to properly appreciate a rose, which I estimate to be sometime around next Tuesday, given how clever you already are.”
Eleanor’s frown smoothed, a small sound of contentment escaping her.
“There. Much better.” Lord Henswick’s voice lowered further, the cadence Louisa remembered from her childhood, half song, half story, entirely without melody and yet somehow more soothing for the lack of one.
“The world can be a difficult place, little one, full of people who say cruel things and mean them, and people who say kind things and mean those too. The trick of it is learning to tell which is which. You shall learn it in time. You have an excellent teacher in Louisa, who has never once in her life mistaken cruelty for kindness, whatever else she has mistaken.”
Louisa’s throat tightened as she watched them, her father’s low steady voice carrying Eleanor gently toward sleep as he had once carried Louisa herself through countless childhood nights.
By the time he’d completed a third slow circuit of the hall, Eleanor had gone entirely limp against his shoulder, her breathing deep and even. He glanced up at Louisa with a smile that held more understanding than his silence had suggested.
“I shall take her up to the nursery myself.” He pressed a kiss to Louisa’s cheek as he passed. “Rest, my darling girl. Whatever has brought you home, it can wait until you have had a proper night’s sleep.”
Louisa sat alone in her old bedroom that evening, the familiar walls pressing close around her with a childhood’s worth of memories, and turned the day’s events over in her mind, searching for a name for what she felt and finding it considerably more complicated than anger.
I am not angry that he wanted to protect me, she realized slowly, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve, unable to sit entirely still with the thought once it had properly formed.
I have never once doubted that his fear was genuine.
What I cannot forgive, what sits like a stone in my chest even now, is that he used my own words against me.
My own carefully chosen terms, offered in his study before either of us knew each other well enough to guess what we would become to one another, thrown back at me as though nothing had changed between us since.
She pressed the heel of her hand briefly against her eyes, willing back the unwelcome sting of tears.
Because everything has changed. I have known it for weeks, and I think he has known it too, and neither of us has been brave enough to say so plainly, so we have both hidden behind the same tired words rather than admit what stands in front of us now.
A soft knock sounded at the door, and Lady Henswick entered without waiting for an answer, settling herself onto the edge of the bed beside her with easy patience.
“Eleanor is settled. Your father has already claimed the chair beside her cradle and shows no sign of relinquishing it.” She smoothed a fold of the counterpane, her eyes moving gently over Louisa’s face, taking in more than Louisa wished to reveal.
“You have not said a single word since we sat down for supper, beyond thanking Cook for the soup. That is unlike you, Louisa. You have never once in your life been short of something to say.”
“I did not wish to trouble you both so soon after arriving.”
“You are my daughter, not a guest requiring careful handling. Whatever troubles you, I would rather hear it plainly than watch you pick that thread on your sleeve to nothing.” She reached over and gently stilled Louisa’s hand, where her fingers had indeed worried a loose thread nearly free of the seam.
“I raised you to speak your mind, my darling girl, however inconvenient the timing. I do not intend to let you drop the habit now.”
Louisa managed a small, unsteady laugh. “You raised me too well for my own comfort, on occasion.”
“I raised you exactly as well as you needed, and I stand by every part of it.” Lady Henswick’s expression softened further, and she reached up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind Louisa’s ear.
“Something has happened between you and your husband. I saw it on your face the moment you stepped down from the carriage, and I have said nothing all evening because I hoped you might come to it in your own time. But I find I have run out of patience, watching you sit here in silence.”
Louisa’s throat tightened, the careful composure she had maintained through the journey home finally beginning to fray at the edges. “We quarreled.”
“Husbands and wives quarrel, Louisa. That alone should not put shadows under your eyes.”
“He said something in the heat of the moment. Something true, and yet felt like the cruelest thing anyone has ever said to me, precisely because it was true.” Louisa’s voice cracked, and she pressed her lips together for a moment, willing it to steady before continuing.
“He reminded me that this was only ever meant to be a practical marriage. That he was only giving me the life I asked for. A marriage without burdens I never wanted to carry.”
“And that wounded you.”
“More than I expected it to.” A tear slipped free before she could stop it, tracing a warm path down her cheek, and she quickly wiped it with the back of her hand, embarrassed by her loss of composure.
“Because I did ask for that, Mother. I sat across from him in his study and set every term of that arrangement myself, certain it was all I wanted, all I would ever need from a husband. I did not expect, when I proposed it, that I would come to want anything more.”
Lady Henswick was quiet for a moment, watching her with a gentleness that held no judgment in it, only a patient understanding.
“Do you love him?”
The question arrived so plainly, so entirely without preamble, that Louisa felt the last of her composure shatter, more tears slipping free. She made no further attempt to hide them.
“Yes,” she said, and admission felt like something breaking open in her chest, equal parts relief and grief.
“Does he know?”
“No.” Louisa picked at her nail, unable to look her mother in the eye.
“I have been too frightened to tell him. I was the one who insisted on a practical marriage, Mother. I set every term of it myself, and these past weeks, I have been trying to take back a promise I made before I understood what it would cost me.”
“Do you think he loves you?”
Louisa was quiet for a long moment, turning the question over in her mind, letting herself remember, without flinching from it, everything that had passed between her and Julian.
The warmth in his voice as he read estate correspondence to a fretful infant.
The way his hand had lingered on her waist through an entire dance, his eyes never once leaving her face.
The searing urgency of his mouth against hers in his study, as though he had been holding something back for weeks and had simply run out of strength to hold it any longer.
The way he had looked at her in that same study, fear plain in his eyes even as his words had done such damage.
“I think he does,” she said finally. “I think he is afraid. Afraid of losing me the way Elizabeth lost her husband years ago, before he ever knew me. I think that fear has been sitting beneath everything he has said and done since the moment I proposed this arrangement, and today, when he was frightened enough, it finally spoke louder than anything else he meant to say.”
Her mother studied her face for a long moment, her expression soft still. “Then you are both letting fear make your decisions for you,” she said simply.
Louisa opened her mouth to argue, some old, practiced defense already rising, and found she had nothing to offer.
Her mother was entirely right.
She sat with that truth a long while after her mother had kissed her goodnight and left her alone with the candle burning low, and found that knowing it changed nothing about how frightened she still felt, only that she could no longer pretend the fear belonged to Julian alone.
* * *
“You look as though you have not slept properly in a week, and I confess that makes two of us, since your mother’s letter alarmed me thoroughly enough that I very nearly left Alaric to manage Henry’s teething alone to come see for myself.”
Catherine swept into the drawing room in a swirl of traveling cloak, her cheeks pink from the carriage ride, and crossed to embrace Louisa before she could properly rise from her chair.
“You needn’t have troubled yourself to come all this way, Catherine.”
“I most certainly needed to. Alaric practically pushed me out the door, insisting he could manage the household without me for two days, which I confess I do not entirely believe, given that he once wasted an entire afternoon searching for his spectacles while they sat perched on his head.” Catherine settled into the chair opposite, shrugging off her cloak, and studied Louisa.
“How is Henry managing without me, do you suppose?”