Chapter 12 #2
His brows drew together. “What?”
“She acted out of kindness.” She held his gaze. “That matters. Please do not make her answer for my father’s sins.”
He said nothing. The anger in him faltered.
She stood very still in the center of the room, pale and resigned, but upright.
The sight angered him in an entirely different way.
Not at her, but at the situation, the unfairness of it, and the fact that she had likely been driven into this choice by the same world that stood ready to judge her for it.
He looked at the letter in his hand, then set it carefully on the desk. The gesture felt too controlled for the storm still moving through him.
“I need to think,” he said, his voice lower than he intended.
She nodded at once. That answer also had the feel of a sentence already accepted.
He walked around the desk, stopped by the chair, and forced himself to look at her directly. “You may go,” he said, more coldly than he meant to.
She held his gaze for one final moment, then nodded. “Of course.”
She left, and the door shut behind her with terrible softness. The room felt suddenly empty. He had expected the anger to remain at full strength. Instead, it had broken somewhere in the middle, and he did not like that either.
Logan came in a few minutes later. He did not knock. He took one look at the room, at the desk, the letter, the empty doorway, and exhaled. “Ah.”
Jamie turned toward the window. “Do not begin.”
Logan shut the door and crossed to the desk. “What happened?”
“You know perfectly well what happened.”
“I know there was a letter.”
“Yes.”
“And I know Eloise came in looking as though she expected thunder.”
Jamie rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Her father is Baron Lawing.”
Logan froze. For a moment, even he looked surprised. Then it passed. “And?” he asked, quieter.
“And she lied.”
“She used her mother’s name.”
“After letting me believe otherwise.”
Logan nodded slowly. Jamie looked away. “She knew exactly who she was. She knew what the name meant.”
“She told me,” Jamie went on, turning back, “that no household in England would hire a Lawing.”
Logan exhaled once through his nose. “She is probably right.”
“That is not the point.”
“Then what is?”
“She lied.”
“Yes.”
“In my own house.”
“Yes.” Logan sat down in the chair opposite the desk, settling in intently. “Did she deny it?”
“No.”
“Did she crumble?”
“No.”
“Did she make excuses?”
“No.”
“That sounds irritatingly dignified,” Logan said.
Jamie glared. Logan ignored it. The room fell into tense silence.
“What exactly did she say?” Logan asked.
“That her father ruined families. That she took her mother’s name because she needed work. That no household in England would hire a Lawing.”
Logan nodded once. “She was not wrong.”
“That is still not the point.”
“No,” Logan agreed. “It is not.”
“Then what is?” Jamie asked, with faint irritation.
Logan leaned back. “The point is that the woman who walked into a strange village, found your wards, fed them, and then stood in your study and told you the truth without begging for mercy does not sound like a woman who means to be measured by her father’s debts.”
“That is exactly what it means.”
“Does it?”
“Yes.”
“No,” Logan said softly. “It means she is a baron’s daughter who took a governess position in a stranger’s house to earn her own keep, because the alternative was ruin. That has cost her something.”
Jamie said nothing.
Logan glanced at the letter. “Quite a lot, I suspect.”
The sudden silence was heavy. Jamie turned toward the window. The grounds had begun to darken outside. Clouds pressed low over the sea. The wind moved against the glass.
He wanted to reject what Logan was saying. He wanted to keep the anger exactly where it was. It was easier there. Cleaner. Safer. But the truth remained. Eloise had not come to him trembling.
She had not lied for amusement. She had not hidden because she meant him harm. She had hidden because the world had made a Lawing into a problem before he had ever seen her as a woman.
That did not excuse the lie. It did not remove it. But it did make it harder to hold onto fury without complication.
“You are angry because she withheld her name,” Logan said.
“Yes.”
“And because you told her things you do not tell anyone.”
Jamie did not answer.
“I thought so,” Logan said. His mouth flattened slightly.
Jamie looked away again. That was the worst part.
Not that she had lied. That he had trusted her.
That he had spoken of the explosion. That he had given her part of himself in a room lit only by moonlight, the sort of honesty one only admitted when one stopped pretending to be fine.
“She did not come here dressed as a lady seeking comfort,” Logan said, more gently. “She came here to work. She is a baron’s daughter making herself useful in a stranger’s house to feed herself. That is not nothing.”
Jamie stared at the window. It was not nothing. That was the problem. He did not want to weigh pity against fury. He did not want to wonder what it had cost her to stand in his study and tell the truth so plainly.
He did not want to think of her carrying a false name like a shield, or of her mother, or the debts, or the fact that she had likely walked into this house with every expectation of being rejected the moment the truth came out.
“She should have told me,” Jamie said stiffly.
“Yes,” Logan agreed at once.
Jamie looked at him sharply. Logan nodded. “She should have.” The agreement was immediate, and Jamie exhaled once.
“But before you decide what to do,” Logan continued, “you might consider what it cost her not to tell you.” He rose from the chair. “You know what she did in that village. You know what she did with the children. You know what she did when you insulted her on your doorstep.”
Jamie’s jaw tightened.
“She is not defined by her father’s debts,” Logan said.
The words left him with nothing to say in return. Jamie looked down. The room had grown cold, or perhaps he had.
Logan said nothing more. At the door he paused. “You may be angry. You have every right to be. But do not pretend she is the only one in this house hiding from something.” He met Jamie’s eyes. “Including you.”
The door shut.
Jamie stood alone. He stared at the desk for a very long time, at the letter, the seal, the name that had altered everything. Lawing. Beauchamp.
He could hear the house settling around him, the distant movement of servants, a door closing somewhere above, the muffled sounds of dinner preparations, and beneath it all, the strange, unwelcome absence where Eloise’s voice had been only an hour before.
He had thought he wanted silence. He had been wrong before. He was wrong now.
***
By nightfall he had not reached a decision. He had reached several. None of them useful.
He did not sleep. He crossed the hall once, then twice, and then, because he could not bear the stillness of his own room, he found himself standing outside the library without intending to be there.
The door was closed. The room beyond it was dark.
He opened it and stepped inside. The moonlight lay across the floor in long pale strips. The chair by the fire was empty. The window seat was empty too. He had expected that. It still bothered him.
Jamie crossed to the chair nearest the hearth and sat down slowly. The room seemed larger without her in it. Or emptier. He was not certain which.
The silence in the library was the same as it had always been. And yet it was not.
He sat there in the dark and realized, with a sort of grim annoyance, that the quiet bothered him far more than the lie did. Not because the lie did not matter. It did. But because her absence from the room seemed to leave the place colder.
That was an unwelcome conclusion. A dangerous one.
He leaned back and looked toward the dark window. Eloise Beauchamp. Not Beauchamp. Lawing. The difference should have made her smaller in his mind. Instead it made her more complicated. And, against his will, more interesting.
He had already decided he liked her. Not in any romantic sense. He was not a fool. But he liked the way she spoke to children, the way she asked questions, the way she saw the world, the way she could be sharp without being cruel.
She had stood in the schoolroom corridor and told him plainly that Duncan needed his uncle. She had listened in the dark and offered him no pity at all. And she had once looked at him on the shore without flinching.
That did not mean he could dismiss the lie. It only meant the anger had become more complicated than he wanted.
Jamie sat in the library chair until the candles burned low. He closed his eyes briefly and wished, with some bitterness, that this could have been simple. It never was.