Chapter 2
He had bought the book.
That was the sensible part. Everything after it was less easily accounted for.
Sebastian stood at Benedict's study window and turned the wrapped parcel over once, slowly, the brown paper soft at the corners where he'd held it too long. Outside, the square was emptying into evening, the last of the light thinning to gray above the roofline.
He could not account for how long he had stayed. He was a man who kept time with precision. He had not kept it at all.
She had known the difference between a Vanilla pompona and a planifolia from memory.
She had corrected the price without being asked, pushed back on two of his observations about the specimens in his greenhouse, and then, when he had been wrong about the enclosure acts, or at least imprecise, had told him so in the same tone she used for everything else: level, direct, entirely without performance.
He had not met many people who argued like that. Who simply said what they thought without constructing it first into something more palatable.
He had not asked her name. He was not sure why, now that he considered it.
He had not wanted to break the particular quality of the conversation, perhaps.
Once names were exchanged, other things followed: introductions, connections, the machinery of the social world grinding into motion.
Without them, it had simply been… what it was.
He became aware, distantly, that his pulse had not quite returned to its ordinary tempo.
He set down the book.
He ran a hand through his hair. This was not why he had come to London. He turned and looked at the fire, burning bright in his friend’s office, and his mind went back to the fire in his home that he had left behind…
The coal had burned low in the study grate. No one had come to build it up. That was the state of things.
Sebastian Trevelyan, Duke of Ravencourt, sat across from Mr. Halberd and listened to the numbers being recited back to him. Rents, arrears, debts, the compounding, relentless arithmetic of negligence and misfortune, and found that he was not surprised.
This was not the same as being unmoved. He was moved, quietly, in the way a man is moved when the thing he has been dreading for years finally arrives and turns out to be as bad as he feared, but no worse.
"Without a significant injection of capital," Halberd said, peering over his spectacles with the pity of a man delivering news he has rehearsed, "I cannot in good conscience advise—"
"How long?"
"Your Grace?"
"How long before it is unrecoverable?"
Halberd set down his papers.
"If this year's harvest fails again, and if the eastern cottages continue to sit empty …" He paused. "Twelve months, perhaps fourteen. After that, the options narrow considerably."
Sebastian looked at the half-full bookshelf, the water stain above the window that he had been meaning to have repaired for three years, and the portrait of his brother above the mantle.
Alistair, broad-shouldered and easy in his skin the way Sebastian had never been, the heir to everything.
Dead at twenty-eight. Everything Alistair had left behind sat around Sebastian like furniture in a room arranged for someone else.
"Thank you, Halberd," he said. "I'll send for you when I've made a decision."
He was still sitting in the same chair, the papers still spread across the desk, when Benedict arrived. He heard the carriage before he heard the voice. Benedict's coachman had a habit of shouting at horses. Sebastian did not move.
The door opened without a knock. That was Benedict: constitutionally incapable of formality with anyone he actually liked.
"You look," Benedict said, surveying the cold grate and the untouched decanter and Sebastian's general aspect, "absolutely terrible."
"Halberd was just here."
"I know. I passed him on the drive. He looked very sorry for himself, which means he's just made someone else very sorry." Benedict came in, sat without invitation in the chair across the desk, and helped himself to the decanter. "How bad?"
"Twelve months."
"Ah." Benedict drank. "That's bad."
"Yes."
"You need to come to London."
Sebastian said nothing.
"Do not do that," Benedict said. "Do not go silent at me and expect that it ends the discussion.
It won't. I've known you for twelve years, and I have learned to interpret the silences.
That one means, ‘I heard you, and I disagree’, which is a starting position, not a conclusion.
" He set down his glass. "There are heiresses.
There are investors. There are men with more money than sense who would fall over themselves to be associated with a dukedom if you gave them the slightest encouragement.
You need capital. London has capital. Therefore—"
"I am not performing myself for the London season like a trick horse at Astley's."
"I am not asking you to perform. I am asking you to appear. There is a difference."
"There isn't. Not for me. Not anymore." Sebastian stood, stepped to the window. The lawn below was overgrown at the edges, the kitchen garden visible from there, the greenhouse beyond it. His greenhouse, the one corner of the estate not allowed to decline. "I am not going back."
"Then Marianne loses her inheritance," Benedict said.
The silence was different this time. Sebastian did not turn from the window.
"I'm not being cruel," Benedict said. His voice had changed, quieter, the casual manner stripped back to something more honest. "I am telling you what I see.
She is seven years old. In ten years, she will need to enter society, and if there is no estate, no title in good repair, no father who has shown himself in public in nearly half a decade—" He paused.
"The rumors are not going to disappear on their own, Sebastian. "
Sebastian turned.
"They have never been able to prove—"
"It doesn't matter what they can prove. You know that.
You know how it works." Benedict's expression was not unkind.
It was the expression of a man who would prefer to say a comfortable thing but cares too much for the person across from him to do so.
"She will pay for your seclusion when she is seventeen, and no one will have her because her father is the man who murdered his wife on the cliffs of Devon. "
It landed. Sebastian had known it would. That was almost worse, the absence of surprise.
He was still standing in that position when the door opened again. He heard it before he saw her, the light patter of small feet on the stone floor, and then Marianne was in the doorway with her letters in her hand, ink on her fingers, and her hair in a braid coming slightly loose from its ribbon.
"Papa." She crossed the room without ceremony, as she had always done, and held up the papers. "Miss Pryor says my Is are improved, but my gs are still wrong. I do not see what is wrong with them."
Sebastian crouched down to her level. She had clear, light grey eyes, and her mother's pointed chin. And yet, also, some arrangement of features that was entirely her own, which he had spent seven years learning the way one learns a landscape, intimately and with great care.
Thankfully, she had more heart and grace than her mother. More honesty, too. He took the letters and examined them.
"Your gs descend too far," he said. "They fall below the line."
"But they look more interesting that way."
"That is not the purpose of letters."
"What is the purpose?"
"To be read."
Marianne considered this with the gravity she brought to most things.
"I think they can do both," she said.
He handed back the letters. He was aware of Benedict watching from across the room and chose not to look at him.
"Are you practicing your French?"
"Oui." Her accent was dreadful. She seemed delighted by this.
"Good. Go back to Miss Pryor. I'll come and read with you before supper."
She went, as straightforwardly as she had arrived, her ribbon trailing. He stood, slowly, and turned back to Benedict.
"All right," he said.
Benedict had the wisdom not to look triumphant.
Arriving in London hit him like a fist.
He had forgotten what it was, the noise, the scale, the way it pressed in from all directions at once, the smell, the relentless human mass.
The journey had taken four days, and by the end of the second, he had run through all the reasons this was necessary and begun constructing reasons it was not. By the fourth, he had gone quiet in a way that Benedict, beside him in the carriage, sensed and diplomatically did not address.
They arrived at Benedict's house in Grosvenor Square in the early afternoon. It was a fine house, well-kept, full of people, noise, and light, and Sebastian walked through it with the slightly glassed-over attention of a man who has misplaced his bearings.
"Dinner tonight," Benedict said, handing his hat and gloves to a footman. "Nothing taxing, just my cousin Aldworth and his wife; you'll survive them. Tomorrow, I thought we'd call on Fitch at the bank, get the actual numbers in front of someone competent—"
"The social calls," Sebastian said. "When do those start?"
"In principle, tomorrow. In reality, I'd give you a day." Benedict regarded him. "You need to be seen, Sebastian. That is the whole point of coming. You need people to see you and think of you as a perfectly ordinary duke, not at all murderous, and that requires being visible. Which requires—"
"Going to things."
"Going to things, yes. My brother, Samuel, is hosting a ball in three days. All of London will be there. Everyone who matters, and several who do not."
"And you expect me to—"
"Stand in a room, accept a glass of something, allow myself to introduce you to three or four people of consequence, and not flee before the supper interval.
" Benedict's expression was uncompromising.
"That is all I am asking. You can be grim the entire time.
I do not object to it. I am merely asking that you be grim in public. "
Sebastian said nothing, which Benedict had learned to read as a provisional agreement.
"And in the meantime," Benedict added, more carefully, "there are eligible women. Heiresses. Women of fortune whose families would consider the connection advantageous."
"No."
"Sebastian—"
"No." He was very certain about this. He had been certain about it for five years.
The very word, marriage, produced in him a specific sensation, cold and tight, that sat somewhere between the ribs.
"I came to find investors. I came to salvage the estate.
I did not come to—" He stopped. "I will not do it again. "
Benedict was quiet for a moment.
"All right," he said. He did not argue. Sebastian was aware, from long experience, that this meant Benedict had simply moved the argument to a different day.
They parted for an hour. Sebastian to wash away four days of road travel, Benedict to attend to some correspondence.
When Sebastian came downstairs again, he found the house too loud and the drawing room too full of people he would have to acknowledge, and before he could quite reason it through, he was outside.
He walked. He walked without a particular direction, which was unlike him, taking the city's geography back into himself a piece at a time.
The arrangement of the squares, the sound the park made when the wind was in the right quarter, the way the afternoon light came off the stone. London was not somewhere he had ever loved. But he had known it, once, and there was a difference.
Soon, he found what he had been looking for. A bookseller.
And that was how he had come to have the book, and the conversation, and where he had met her.
He swallowed hard and took a deep breath. He so desperately wanted to find her, but he had to think of his home, his child, the people who were relying on him.
Even as he thought of that, though, the smell of old books and vellum haunted him as he walked toward his chambers.