Chapter 21 #2
The words were plain. Not extravagant. Still, Duncan’s face broke open with unmistakable pride. He straightened. His shoulders lifted. For one second he looked exactly like a boy who had been seen and approved of.
Eloise turned away from the window before the feeling in her chest could become too much.
Maisie was on the fence with Logan nearby, both of them watching the horses. The child seemed content to balance there, one hand on the rail, the other waving at the stable boy with great enthusiasm while Logan kept a hand lightly at her back to steady her.
Jamie looked up from the horse and spotted her. “Maisie. Come down and join us.”
The little girl shook her head. “No.”
Jamie frowned. “Why not?”
She looked toward Eloise first, then back at him, her expression a little subdued. Mrs. Maggie’s words were still sitting heavy in Eloise’s mind, and Maisie’s quietness sharpened the ache of them.
Jamie seemed to notice it too, because his expression gentled. He looked at Eloise, then back at the child. “I have had an idea for how to one up your Uncle Lawrence.”
That got a small smile out of Maisie, the kind that arrived reluctantly but was real enough. “You do?”
“I do.”
Maisie considered him, then nodded once. “All right.”
Jamie smiled back at her. Small. But there.
The sight of it made something in Eloise shift so fully that she had to look away from the window at once.
The household had become something she had not expected.
Not employer and position. Not duty and arrangement.
A family, not one she had chosen in any ordinary way, but one she had stumbled into and somehow begun to love.
She thought of Mrs. Maggie’s words. A man needs a household that looks right. She thought of what she had told Jamie in the garden.
A home with noise in it. Children who feel safe.
She thought of the court taking the children away to a man who saw them as banknotes.
She thought of Jamie alone in that cold house again, the walls closing in.
And then she thought of herself. Eight-and-twenty.
No dowry. No prospects. A ruined name. She had made peace with those things.
Mostly. But she understood something she had not wanted to understand.
She loved him. Not the dramatic sort of love with great declarations and promises, but with the firm knowledge that she would give almost anything to see him keep the children. That she would sacrifice herself if it meant he could have what he wanted.
And because she loved the children too, she knew what must come first. Their safety. Their future. Not her longing. Not her ruined name. Not the life she might have wanted.
If that meant another woman must stand at his side while she stepped back, then so be it. The realization hurt. She accepted it anyway.
***
That evening she found Jamie in his study.
The fire was lit, the room dimmer than the hall beyond it. He was standing beside the desk when she entered, and when she closed the door behind her, he looked up at once. His face told her nothing. His hand, however, was tight on the desk, and that she noticed immediately.
Her own hands were clasped so tightly her fingers had gone cold.
She had spent the afternoon turning the matter over until there was no more room for hesitation.
If the petition was to be resisted, they needed a household the court would accept.
Jamie could not present that household alone.
He needed to be married. Soon. And well.
He needed someone the court could not question.
The answer had been clear all afternoon, and it had become more certain with every passing hour.
“You wanted to speak?” he said.
“Yes.”
He waited.
She took a breath. Her voice did not falter. “The petition will succeed unless you can present a household the court will approve of. You cannot present that household alone. You need to be married.”
The words hung in the room. Neither of them moved.
She forced herself to continue. “Soon. And you need to be married well. To a woman whose name and standing are above any possible question.”
Jamie stared at her. The silence between them stretched. She did not look away.
The pain in his face was not dramatic. It was worse than that. Brief. Contained. Wounded in a way he would not have wanted her to see.
She went on before she could lose nerve or change her mind. “Lady Catriona Drummond is precisely that woman.”
The sentence was said clearly, calmly, without hesitation.
Jamie did not speak. He only looked at her, and in that look she saw something she could not quite bear to name. Disappointment, perhaps. Maybe something deeper and sadder than that.
He had likely thought, for one impossible moment, that she might offer herself. She understood that only after seeing his expression fall. He had not thought it because he assumed she would be reckless, but because he might have hoped.
She told herself she must be reading him wrong.
He would only see her as a governess, after all.
But she could not forget the thought, however wrong it was.
Nor could she forget the foolish hope she suddenly realized she had had that he would immediately reject her suggestion and confess his love for her.
The understanding made her chest ache. She had not meant to wound him. If she had any other life, any other name, any other possibility, perhaps she would have offered something different. But she did not. She had to think of the children. She had to think of what the court would see.
Catriona was the right answer. Catriona was good, steady, kind to the children, above question. She was not a liability. She was not a governess with a hidden name and no family standing. She was the better choice. The only one Eloise could in conscience name. Jamie still did not speak.
Eloise held herself steady and hoped he did not see what it cost her, because it was costing her a great deal.
And she knew, with a cold and painful clarity, that that was what she had been fearing all along.
Not only losing the children and the house, but also losing him to the life he must choose.
A life that would not include her. She could not change that.
She could only do what was best for the people she loved.
Even if it meant standing in front of the man she had begun to love and offering him a bride who would suit him better than she ever could.
The thought of it made her feel as though something inside her had gone quiet in the wrong way.
And she believed that if Jamie married Catriona, that quietness might never disappear.