Chapter 8
The letter arrived with the morning post, and Jamie read it three times before setting it down.
Not because it was difficult to understand. In fact, it was the opposite. The words were clear, the intention unmistakable, and the tone so carefully shaped that Jamie had to read each sentence again to separate what Lawrence wrote from what Lawrence meant.
The Marquess of Feversham had spent decades composing letters meant to produce the desired effect. This letter sought to sound like the concern of a devoted relation.
Jamie sat in his study and looked at the page and thought about Margaret. His sister had possessed sharper instincts than anyone Jamie had ever known. Sharper than his, sharper than Logan’s, sharp enough that she had understood Lawrence years before Jamie reached the same conclusion.
Margaret had never accused him plainly, for she was too kind to give a charge without proof. Instead, she had moved north with her husband. Far north. Far enough that Lawrence’s visits became rare, his letters shortened, and his attention had to turn elsewhere.
At the time, Jamie had accepted the relocation as a preference for the countryside. He had been a fool. He looked at the letter again. Dear Jamie.
That alone was wrong. Lawrence had not called him Jamie in fifteen years. Not before Margaret’s marriage, not after it, not during the years when the two men maintained the careful distance of men bound by family and disinclined to examine the bond too closely.
He had always been Lord Macalpine, or my dear Macalpine, with the possessive offered as warmth rather than feeling.
Dear Jamie.
He set the paper down and rose from his chair.
The estate grounds were gray that morning, the sky low and flat, the sea hidden beyond the hills. He stood at the window and thought about Lawrence Feversham. The memory that formed was not reassuring.
Lawrence’s pursuit of Margaret had been subtle enough to deny and persistent enough to be plain in hindsight. Invitations arrived at precisely useful moments.
He appeared at gatherings she had mentioned attending. He monopolized conversations with the ease of a man who knew how to hold a woman’s attention without appearing to try.
Then came her engagement to Lawrence’s younger brother, and Jamie remembered Lawrence’s face when the announcement was made: the look of a man told that what he considered his had been given away.
Margaret had seen it. She had smiled through it with the composure she brought to everything, and three months later she and her husband had moved north.
Jamie had not asked her directly. He wished he had.
He returned to the desk and looked at the letter once more. Concern for the children. Affection for family. Gratitude for Jamie’s care. A wish to renew family ties. A desire to discuss Duncan’s and Maisie’s future.
Nothing objectionable that any reasonable person could call suspicious. There was nothing that would hold up as evidence of anything at all. Which was, of course, precisely the point. But Jamie remembered the way Lawrence had pursued his sister before she married.
He recalled the veiled crude comments and the possessiveness masked as affection. And he knew that his sister and brother-in-law had moved away, in large part, to escape Lawrence and his jealousy. Jamie had never trusted Lawrence, and he felt certain he should not begin doing so right then.
Logan arrived an hour later with coffee and the expression of a man who had judged the mood in the corridor and lowered his expectations.
He sat down in the chair across the desk without being invited, which was standard, and read the letter without being asked, which was also standard, and spent considerably longer with it than Jamie had expected.
“He writes a pleasant letter,” Logan said.
“He always does,” Jamie said.
Logan wrapped both hands around his mug. “Tell me what you know about him. Not what you suspect. What you know.”
Jamie looked out the window. “He pursued Margaret for two years before her engagement.”
“You know that.”
“He was present at every event she attended during that time.”
“You know that too.”
“He disliked the engagement.”
“Disliked, or showed visible displeasure?”
Jamie paused. “Showed visible displeasure. Briefly.”
“That could be wounded pride rather than anything worse.”
“It could be.”
Logan waited.
Jamie sat back. “After the engagement he wrote her letters. Not many. But for the first year of the marriage, there were letters.”
“You know this how?”
“Margaret told me. She did not say they were inappropriate. She said there were letters.” He looked at Logan steadily. “She also said she had stopped answering them.”
Logan absorbed this. “When did they stop?”
“She did not say.”
“Did she seem frightened of him?”
“No.” Jamie turned the word over with the care it deserved. “Not frightened. Tired of him. There is a difference.”
“There is.” Logan picked up the letter again and read the final paragraph. “He says he wants to discuss the children’s future.”
“Yes.”
“That could mean a great many things.”
“Yes.”
“You believe it means one thing.”
“I believe it means the children are a means to an end, and the end is something he wants enough to travel to Scotland for.”
Logan set the letter down. “That is a significant conclusion from a warm family visit.”
“I know.” Jamie kept his voice flat. He had spent enough time in the Navy making decisions from intelligence that could not be verified. He knew the difference between instinct and evidence. He also knew instinct could be clouded by pride, anger, and fear.
“He has friends in Parliament,” Logan said. “He has friends at court. He has friends in drawing rooms where men pretend gossip is policy and policy is principle. If he wants sympathy, he will know where to find it.”
“I know his reach,” Jamie said.
“Then know this as well. A polished reputation is not proof of guilt.”
“Nor is it innocence.”
Logan’s mouth curved faintly. “There is the admiral.”
“I was a captain.”
“You command like an admiral when you dislike a man.”
Jamie looked back at him. “I dislike men who take liberties behind manners.”
“And if Miss Beauchamp finds him charming?”
The question struck too quickly. Jamie kept his hand on the arm of his chair and made himself leave it there.
The image came too readily: Lawrence, whole and elegant in a morning coat, smiling with the ease of a man who had never watched strangers turn from his face, never felt a room measure him by damage before hearing a word he said.
Jamie hated the thought before it had fully formed, and hated more that the thought had found him so quickly.
“Miss Beauchamp may form whatever opinion she chooses,” he said.
“That was not an answer.”
He heard the stiffness in his own voice and knew Logan heard it as well. That was the trouble with friends who had survived fire and smoke beside a man; they noticed the wounds that had nothing to do with skin.
“It was the only answer you are receiving.”
Logan leaned back. “So you have considered it.”
“I have considered many unpleasant possibilities.”
“Including that she might smile at him.”
Jamie said nothing.
“Including that he might make her laugh.”
“Enough, Logan.”
“There it is.”
“There is nothing.”
“Then you will not mind if he admires her.”
Jamie looked down at the letter. The imagined sight of Lawrence turning his practiced smile toward Eloise had no right to disturb him. It did all the same.
“I will mind,” he said at last. “That is not the same as being wrong.”
“He is handsome,” Jamie said, after a moment.
Logan looked up.
“Whole. Polished. The kind of man who walks into a room and it rearranges around him.” He kept his voice even. “I am aware that my opinion of him is not formed in a vacuum, and I am aware of what that means.”
Logan regarded him. “You think you might be wrong because you dislike the comparison.”
“I think it is possible.”
“That is more honest than I expected.”
“Do not make it into something.”
“I am not.” Logan lowered his mug. “But it is worth knowing the difference between suspicion and jealousy before Lawrence Feversham walks through your door.”
Jamie said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say to that.
“You are not going to say anything to Eloise,” Logan said. It was not a question.
“No.”
“Because?”
“Because I have no evidence. Because she has known this household for less than a fortnight and I am not going to instruct her to distrust a man she has never met on the basis of memories I cannot verify.” He paused.
“And because she is perceptive enough to draw her own conclusions without my interference.”
Logan nodded slowly. “That is sensible.”
“I am occasionally sensible.”
“You are occasionally sensible,” Logan agreed, and stood. “For what it is worth, I think your instincts are usually right.”
“They have been wrong before.”
“Yes. But not often about people.”
He left, and Jamie sat alone with the letter and the gray morning. He knew something was wrong. He could not prove it. He had also admitted aloud that Lawrence’s handsome, unmarked ease might sharpen his own dislike.
He folded the letter and put it in the drawer and thought about Lawrence Feversham arriving in this house with his easy smile and his whole, unmarked face and his cultivated warmth, and thought about the children who had gone rigid at the mention of his name.
He had not imagined that. Whatever else he might be wrong about, he had not imagined that.
He went to the schoolroom that afternoon for the first time since Eloise had arrived. He had passed the door often enough. Had stopped outside it more times than he would have admitted.
Had listened to the sounds within, the questions, the arguments, the occasional burst of laughter, and had each time found a reason not to go in. It was her domain. The children seemed settled. There was no call to disrupt the arrangement.