Chapter 33
Alone in his study that evening, the fire burning low, Julian found his eyes drawn, as they so often did now, to the drawing still propped against his inkstand.
He picked it up and studied it properly, the way he had done a hundred times since Kit had first left it there.
Four figures. Himself. Louisa. Eleanor cradled in her arms. Kit standing close beside them, his sleeve brushing her skirts, entirely certain of his place in the picture.
For months I told myself that keeping my distance was protecting her, he thought, turning the page slowly in his hands.
That loving her would only set us both up for the same grief that hollowed out Elizabeth.
I built a whole promise on the strength of that fear, and I have spent three years defending it as though it were wisdom rather than cowardice.
He set the drawing down and rose from his seat. He crossed to the window, watching the last light fade over the stables where Kit had once torn a page from his sketchbook rather than let anyone see what he’d drawn.
I was never protecting her.
The realization settled into him with none of its old resistance, like something finally understood.
I was protecting myself. From wanting something I might one day lose. From loving someone so completely that her absence, however briefly felt this past week, could empty a house of its warmth.
He thought of Louisa keeping her promise to Nell, unwavering despite every difficulty society had placed in her path.
He thought of the fierce, unconditional love she had given Eleanor from the very first night, a child not her own by blood and yet entirely her own by choice.
He thought of her patient hands teaching Kit to speak again, of her laughter filling a house that had forgotten, across long years, how to make any sound at all beyond careful, grieving silence.
Elizabeth did not suffer because she loved too deeply.
The distinction arrived with a clarity he had somehow failed to notice before.
She suffered because she lost him. Because love, once given so completely, leaves precisely that large a wound when it is taken away.
But the answer was never to withhold love in the first place.
The answer was only to be braver than I have been, and trust that whatever time we are given is worth the risk of losing it.
He picked up his pen, considered writing to her, and set it down again almost immediately, the same instinct that had stopped him a week ago rising again now, though for entirely different reasons.
A letter will not undo what I said to her. Only standing in front of her and saying the words properly will do that.
He crossed to the bell pull and rang for Simmons.
“Have the carriage readied for first light tomorrow, and send word discreetly ahead to Henswick House that I mean to call on them.”
“Very good, Your Grace.” Simmons hesitated at the door. “Might I say that the household has missed Her Grace very much these past days.”
“So have I, Simmons.” Julian looked back toward the window, toward the dark grounds beyond it, and found, saying it aloud even to his own valet, that the admission cost him nothing at all. “So have I.”
He stood a long while after Simmons had gone, the drawing still resting on his desk, and thought, with a small bittersweet ache that he did not try to push away, how much he wished Louisa had been standing beside him that morning in London, watching Thomas Whitmore shake his hand before the entire room.
She, more than anyone, deserved to have seen it.
She had been the one to find Whitmore in the first place, the one to trust her own judgment when his own fear had told him to send her away rather than let her stand beside him.
Tomorrow, he thought, banking the fire before he finally retired. Tomorrow, I will bring her home, and I will not make the same mistake twice.
* * *
“You have rearranged that same pillow four times in the last quarter hour, Louisa. I’m beginning to think that it has personally offended you.”
“It has not offended me.” Louisa punched the pillow with both hands. “It is simply uncomfortable.”
She paused, staring down at the poor, innocent pillow.
“Oh, I am sorry,” she murmured, smoothing the crease she had made in its middle. “It is hardly your fault. You are not the source of my sorrow.”
“You cannot find anything comfortable at present, my dear, and we both know the pillow has very little to do with it.” Fiona sat curled in the window seat, one of Louisa’s old novels open in her lap, watching her with patient exasperation.
She had spent the better part of the week attempting, without much success, to lift her spirits.
“I have told you three separate pieces of news this afternoon, each one considerably more interesting than the state of your pillows, and you have heard perhaps half of one of them.”
“I heard all of them.”
“You did not. I told you that Lady Rothbury has run off to Scotland with her dancing master, and you merely nodded as though I had informed you of the weather.”
“That is dreadful. Poor Lord Rothbury.”
“Poor Lord Rothbury has been dreadfully cold toward her for eleven years, and I confess I find myself on the dancing master’s side, scandal or not.
” Fiona set the novel aside, studying Louisa with sudden seriousness.
“I did save the best news for last, actually. I heard from Lady Camden’s sister that your husband gave a public statement in London last week, admitting his father’s wrongdoing and restoring some ruined family’s good name at considerable cost to his name. ”
Louisa’s hands stilled over the pillow.
“He did it,” she said quietly, more to herself than to Fiona. “He truly did it.”
“So it would seem, and rather bravely too, from every account I have heard. Lady Camden’s sister says that half of London cannot decide whether to admire him or pity him for it, though I confess I find myself in the admiring camp.
” Fiona’s expression softened as fresh tears welled up in Louisa’s eyes.
“Oh, Louisa. I did not mean to make you cry, only to tell you something good for once.”
“It is good.” Louisa pressed her fingers briefly beneath her eyes, willing the tears back before they could spill over. “I only wish I had been there to see it. More than that, I wish I had not left him to face it alone.”
Eleanor stirred in her cradle nearby, making a drowsy sound, and Louisa rose to smooth her blanket, grateful for the small distraction, when a soft knock sounded at the door.
“Your Grace.” The butler’s voice called through the door. “The Duke of Ashvale has arrived and asks whether he might have a word.”
Louisa froze, one hand resting on Eleanor’s blanket. “He is here?”
“In the drawing room downstairs, Your Grace. He has asked specifically for you.”
“I—” Louisa’s heart had begun hammering with a force that made her voice sound strange to her ears. “I do not know that I am ready to see him.”
Fiona was on her feet at once, crossing to take Louisa’s hands in her own. “You do not have to see him, Louisa. Not until you are ready. I can send him away myself if you wish it; no one will think the worse of you for needing a little more time.”
“I am not ready.” The words came out fast, almost panicked, Louisa’s heart beating so fast she could feel it in her throat.
“What would I even say to him? I have spent a week rehearsing a dozen different things, and now that he is actually here, standing in my father’s drawing room, I cannot remember a single one of them. ”
“Then say nothing at all, if that is what you need. Stay here with me.”
“Mother—” Louisa turned toward her mother as the door opened, her mother appearing in the doorway..
Her mother stepped inside, looking eager.
“Tell him—” Louisa broke off, because she did not know what she wished to tell Julian, only that not yet felt both true and entirely inadequate. “I do not know what to do.”
“Then do nothing, my darling.” Her mother went to sit beside her, taking her other hand. “Until you know what you wish to do, you are not obligated to go down simply because he has come. Whatever he means to say to you, he can wait until you are ready to hear it.”
The butler withdrew, and Louisa remained exactly where she stood, her mother on one side, Fiona on the other, Eleanor’s soft breathing the only sound in the room.
Minutes passed, and Louisa found herself, despite every intention otherwise, drifting slowly toward the door, straining to catch some fragment of whatever was happening two floors below.
“Can you hear anything?” Fiona whispered, joining her at the door.
“Only voices. Nothing distinct.” Louisa pressed closer, catching the low murmur of Julian’s voice, careful and measured, though she could make out no words, only his steady cadence, unmistakable even through two closed doors and a full flight of stairs.
Several more minutes passed this way, Louisa’s whole body strung tight with waiting, before footsteps sounded on the stairs and the butler came once more to the door.
“His Grace says that he understands and that he does not wish to trouble you further. He has asked me to convey that he is leaving now, and that he will call again whenever you feel ready to receive him.”
Louisa stood very still. Something in her chest cracked open at the words, a sharp ache that had nothing to do with relief and everything to do with loss. Before she had properly decided to move at all, she crossed to the window, drawn there by some instinct she could not have named.
Below, in the fading afternoon light, Julian was crossing the gravel drive toward his waiting horse, his shoulders set in the careful composure she had come to recognize as the shape he wore whenever something cost him considerably more than he wished to show.
Her hand pressed flat against the cold glass, her breath fogging faintly against it as she watched him go.
He is leaving. He came all this way, and I let him leave without a single word.
Just before he reached his horse, Julian stopped. He turned and looked up.
Their eyes met across the drive, and Louisa’s heart slammed against her ribs so hard that she thought he might somehow hear it from where he stood.
In that unbearable instant, she wished the ground would open beneath her and swallow her whole. She was mortified at having been caught watching, at having let him leave at all, at every careful, frightened choice that had brought them both to this exact moment.
Slowly, deliberately, Julian raised his hands.
“I. Love. You.”
The signs were clear and unmistakable despite the distance, each one formed with the same slow, careful precision she had taught him months ago in a sunlit morning room, his wrist angled exactly as she had shown him.
Louisa stood perfectly still for one heartbeat, the whole world narrowing to nothing but the shape of his hands and the unwavering certainty in his eyes.
Then she turned and ran.
“Louisa!” Fiona’s startled voice chased her out of the room, but Louisa did not stop, did not slow down, her skirts gathered in both hands as she flew down the staircase two steps at a time, past a startled footman, through the entrance hall, and out the front door just as Julian’s foot had found the stirrup.
“Julian!”