Chapter 3
Julian did not move.
The solicitor’s words passed through him and out the other side, leaving a strange numbness in their wake.
Stoneleigh House, given whole and entirely to a girl he had not laid eyes upon until a quarter-hour before.
For a long moment his heart seemed to forget its work.
He kept his gaze on the ribboned spines of Braithwaite’s shelves and did not let his face move at all.
Across the small office, Miss Trent had gone white.
He had expected — what, precisely? A schemer.
A bold, knowing creature who would meet his eye with quiet triumph.
Instead the young woman sat with her gloved hands pressed flat in her lap, staring at the solicitor as if he had spoken in a tongue she did not know, and when she said that cannot be right her voice had cracked upon it.
Either she was the finest actress in England, or she was as astonished as he.
To his great irritation, Julian could not decide which.
He took a half-step towards the desk and made himself stop.
His hand had curled at his side; he opened it, finger by finger.
Now was neither the time nor the place. He permitted himself a low word to Braithwaite, and a single cold look at Miss Trent that he regretted the instant he had given it.
He took his leave, before his temper could do it for him.
Glenbrae. That was to be his portion. A cold stone house in Scotland with another man’s smoke already rising from its chimney.
He had visited it once as a boy and had been glad to leave.
He bore the place no ill will. It was simply not the inheritance he had spent the better part of his life preparing to receive.
His brother was waiting at White’s. Brookmire took one look at his face and called for brandy before Julian had so much as found a chair.
“Well?” he demanded. “Is it settled? Is the house yours?”
“The house,” Julian said, lowering himself into the chair and tipping his head back, “belongs to Miss Viola Trent. Hers, and twenty thousand pounds besides.”
Brookmire set his glass down with a crack. “An unmarried girl. Inheriting Stoneleigh House.” His lip curled. “What in heaven could our cousin have been thinking?”
“I cannot understand it.” Julian closed his eyes. “The astonishment has sunk into my very bones, brother. I am cold all through.”
They could have been taken for twins, the two of them: the same dark hair, the same blue eyes, the same stocky build. But Brookmire’s eyes were blazing now, while Julian only felt hollowed out.
“That house was to be yours.” Brookmire leaned in, fierce. “The whole family knew it. We spoke of it openly, of how you would keep it in the high standing it had always held. What will they say now?”
The question hung between them. Julian had no answer for it.
Lady Warrington had been his mother’s cousin, not his own, but the bond had run close all the same.
As a boy he had spent long summers at the Warrington estate; he had seen with his own eyes the fondness between the lady and his mother.
A favorite, he had thought himself. And with that fondness had come the slow, settled certainty that Stoneleigh would one day be his.
Lady Warrington had taken pains to make it so, walking him through the house only last Season, directing his eye to the roof repairs wanting in the west wing, to the library that begged for careful cataloguing.
There is a responsibility coming to you from her, his mother had murmured afterward.
He had understood. He had prepared. He had let himself feel a quiet pride in the prospect of it, for it was the finest house in London, named with something near reverence by the ton.
One memory pressed in now, unbidden. He had been perhaps ten, a summer guest at Stoneleigh, caught halfway up the library ladder reaching for a book he had been told twice was beyond him, and Lady Warrington had come in and stood below him with her hands folded, watching, making no move at all to call him down.
And what would you do with this house, Master Julian, she had asked him, if it were yours?
He had answered with a boy’s whole confidence: he would keep it exactly as it was, every room, every book, and never let a thing be changed.
She had looked at him a long moment in that way she had, as though reading a ledger only she could see.
Hm, she had said. Only that. And then she had taken down the forbidden book and given it to him, and told him a house was not a monument, and gone away again.
He had thought of it, over the years, as the day she marked him for Stoneleigh.
It occurred to him now, in the cold of White’s with a brandy going warm in his hand, that he might have had it backwards.
“Mayhap she was influenced.” Brookmire took two glasses from the footman’s tray and pressed one into Julian’s hand. “Mayhap Miss Trent had a hand in changing our cousin’s mind.”
“We know nothing of Miss Trent, nor of her family.” Julian shook his head. “We cannot let ourselves think such a thing.”
“Knowing nothing of her does not clear her of having worked upon our cousin.”
Julian swirled the brandy and let the thought press where he did not want it. For Lady Warrington to change her will, her mind, her long-held intention — it was strange indeed. Was it possible she had been pushed to it?
“It invites speculation,” Brookmire said.
“It does. And I can do nothing about that.” Julian’s voice came heavy. “Society must always be fed, and a will such as this is rare meat. Whatever the truth, they will twist it to suit their own mouths.”
His brother said nothing, only watched him, the question plain in his face.
“What would you have me do?” Julian set his glass down hard. “The will is read. The bequests are made. It is finished.”
But Brookmire took his time, and when he spoke his voice was steady in a way Julian envied.
“You should discover why she gave the house to Miss Trent. You were always meant to have it — you, and not some unmarried stranger with a family and an inheritance of her own.” He shrugged.
“Glenbrae is half a ruin with a tenant already in it. You will have no peace until you understand what our cousin did, and why. Nor, I confess, shall I.”
Julian rubbed a hand across his chin and tried not to feel the sting of it.
He let out a long breath. His brother was right. Neither of them could simply accept that a woman as deliberate as Lady Warrington had done this without reason. And under the cold weight of his shock, something else had begun to stir — a faint, hard thread of purpose.
“Very well,” he said. “I will do as you suggest. I must speak with Miss Trent.”
Relief washed over Brookmire’s face. “It might be,” he ventured, “that she could be brought to consider giving the house to you.”
“I doubt I should get far with that.” Julian grimaced. “My first task is only to speak with her, to learn what she knows of Lady Warrington, and whether she knows anything at all.”
He drained the last of his brandy and rose. He told his brother he had much to consider, and it was no lie.
Outside, he turned his collar up against a wind that had no business being cool in summer, and he let himself imagine the long halls of Stoneleigh, the portraits, the ordered rooms he had thought one day to call his own. The house had always been meant for him. He believed that still.
And yet it was not the house that followed him into the carriage and would not leave.
It was her face — the white shock of it, the cracked voice, the gloved hands pressed flat as if she were holding herself in one piece.
The inconvenient, unwelcome suspicion that Miss Viola Trent had been as wronged in that office as he.
He would have his answers. He told himself the house was his reason — and almost believed it.
* * *
Pendleton called the following morning, before Julian had broken his fast.
He came in with the slight, apologetic stoop he had always had, as though forever conscious of taking up more of a room than he was entitled to, and he waited to be asked to sit before he sat.
Julian had not seen him in five years, perhaps six.
He was a spare, narrow man, a little grayer at the temple than Julian remembered, his moustache neatly kept, his dark coat well cut but not new — the dress of a man who spent carefully and meant it to show as economy rather than want.
Everything about him was quiet: the voice, the movements, the way he set his hat upon his knee as though it might disturb someone were he to put it down too hard.
It was the manner, Julian thought, of a man who had spent thirty years in other people’s troubles and learned never to startle a client.
For that was Pendleton’s trade. He kept a small solicitor’s practice in the City — estates, wills, the quiet untangling of family money — and had done since he was a young man with no fortune of his own and a mother’s connection to a marquess that fed him nothing but the occasional grudging invitation.
He had made his way by being useful where his betters were careless, and by never once forgetting which of those two things he was.
“You will forgive the hour, cousin. I would not have come so early, only I heard the news, and I confess I could not rest easy until I had come to say — well. To say that I was sorry for it.” Pendleton settled his hands on his knees.
“Stoneleigh was always spoken of as yours. The whole family understood it so. To learn it had gone elsewhere — and to a stranger, no less — I felt the wrong of it keenly on your behalf. As, I think, did everyone who knew what was intended.”
“It is kind of you to call.” Julian heard the stiffness in his own voice and could not soften it. He and Pendleton had never been close; the cousin belonged to his mother’s side, and to a branch of it that had had to count its shillings. “Though I am not certain there is anything to be done.”
“No. No, perhaps not.” Pendleton said it readily, as a man agreeing that the weather was poor.
And then, after a moment, with the air of one venturing where he was not sure he would be welcome: “Although — you will tell me if I overstep, cousin, for it is hardly my place — there are sometimes paths to redress in these matters that are not at first apparent. Where a will surprises a family. Where its terms run contrary to long and settled expectation.”
Julian looked at him. “You mean to contest it.”
“I mean nothing so crude, nor so costly.” A small, deprecating motion of the hand.
“A contest is a public thing, and an uncertain one, and it does the family’s name no favors whatever the outcome.
No. I meant only — ” He paused, as though selecting the gentlest possible word and not quite finding it.
“A young woman, suddenly possessed of a great house and a fortune she did not look for, and with no very firm footing in society to steady her — such a person may, in time, come to feel the weight of it. May come to wonder whether she would not be easier, and happier, with the matter quietly settled and herself comfortably provided for, in exchange for relinquishing what was never truly hers to expect.” He spread his hands.
“It wants only a sympathetic intermediary. Someone to put the case to her gently. A solicitor with a steady hand, perhaps, who understands the family’s wishes and means her no unkindness at all. ”
The room was very quiet. Somewhere below, a door closed.
“You have given this some thought,” Julian said.
“I have given you some thought, cousin.” The correction was mild, almost wounded.
“We are not close, I know it — the fault is as much mine as anyone’s, and the years have a way of widening these things.
But family is family, whatever the distance.
And I should be a poor sort of relation indeed if I sat by and said nothing, when I have spent my whole career in just such tangled matters, and might be of some small use to you at last.” He rose, gathering his hat.
“I shall say no more of it. I only wished you to know that I am at your service, should you wish to understand your position more fully. There is no harm, surely, in understanding one’s position. ”
“No,” Julian said slowly. “I suppose there is not.”
“Just so.” Pendleton smiled, and for a moment something in it did not quite reach his eyes, but it was gone before Julian could name it, if it had been there at all. “You know where to find me. Whenever you should wish it. There is no hurry in the world.”
When he had gone, Julian stood a while at the window, turning the conversation over.
It had been kindly meant, he told himself.
A cousin’s concern, clumsily offered. And yet some part of it sat ill with him, like a meal taken too fast — though when he tried to fix on what, precisely, had troubled him, he could not.
The man had said nothing wrong. He had offered help, and only help.
Julian put it from his mind, and thought no more of it that day.