Chapter 7
The flush had only just faded from Julian’s face by the time he reached home.
He handed his hat and gloves to the butler and went to his study without a word.
The house seemed unusually still, as if it waited for him to shut himself away with his embarrassment.
He closed the door firmly behind him, scrubbed a hand down his face, and let out a low groan.
“For shame,” he muttered, crossing to pour himself a very large measure of brandy. “My arrogance let me believe she would simply hand me the house.”
The memory of her steadiness, the way she had looked at him and spoken plainly, heated his face all over again.
Her voice had wavered, yes, and a flush had touched her cheeks.
But her resolve to keep all that Lady Warrington had left her was not a thing he could argue against. When Miss Galbraith had laughed and proposed an exchange of houses, he had held his breath.
He had wondered, for one moment, whether Miss Trent might yield.
She would not. She had made that perfectly clear.
“I misjudged her entirely,” he told the empty room. “And thought far too well of myself.”
He sat in the leather chair by the hearth and stretched out his legs, loosening his collar with one finger.
The brandy burned down his throat, and with it came the plain truth: there was nothing more to be done.
Whatever hope he had nursed of recovering Stoneleigh through influence or appeal had gone the moment she declared she would stay.
The loss sat sharper now. It was not that he had thought the house his by right — it was that he had imagined a life inside it, years of it, and watched that life dissolve in an instant.
He had planned it in the idle, half-conscious way a man plans a future he believes secure: the library catalogued at last, as Lady Warrington had shown him it wanted; the west-wing roof seen to before another winter got into the timbers; which room he would take for his study, and how the light would come into it of a morning.
He had even — he could admit it now, with the brandy burning — imagined the day he would carry a wife over that threshold, some faceless, gracious creature who would love the house as he did.
For as long as he could remember, Stoneleigh had lived in his mind as the place he would one day make his own.
To lose it, and beyond all argument, left him displaced and ill at ease and, if he were honest, a little broken-hearted.
A knock came at the door. With a sigh, he called the footman in.
The man set a single letter on a silver tray, sealed with wax, but bearing no stamp at all. Julian took it absently and waited for the footman to withdraw.
He frowned, and broke the wax, and read the few words written in a neat, deliberate hand.
Miss Trent is not as innocent as she claims.
His jaw tightened at once. The letter went on in vague, suggestive terms about Lady Warrington’s final months — private meetings, whispered threats against an elderly woman whose body and mind had both begun to fail.
It never said the thing outright. It did not need to.
The meaning was unmistakable: that fear, not affection, had guided Lady Warrington’s last decisions, and that Miss Trent had coerced an old woman into changing her will.
Julian made himself breathe slowly; he had not noticed how fast he had begun to snatch at the air. He rose, folded the page, and set it upon his desk.
“It must be a lie,” he said aloud, ready to dismiss it as the cowardly invention of someone in his own wider family who wanted the house for him. “I cannot believe it.”
And yet he unfolded it and read it twice more.
The insinuations were arranged with care; the tone was calm rather than hasty, which was somehow worse.
A furious letter he could have dismissed.
This had been composed. Weighed. Written by someone who knew precisely how much he had wanted Stoneleigh, and who had judged, coolly, that the want could be made use of.
He ran through the names of his wider family — the aunts who had petted him as a boy, the cousins who wrote at Christmas and when they needed something, in that order.
Any of a half-dozen might think to serve his interest by such means and call it loyalty.
He disliked every name he arrived at. He disliked more that there were so many to arrive at.
I cannot believe Miss Trent capable of threats, he thought, recalling the quiet way she spoke, the steadiness of her gaze while her voice trembled. I have known her only a few days. But there is a softness in her that would make such cruelty near impossible.
The study door opened a second time. Julian turned, ready to rebuke whichever servant had entered without knocking, and found his brother smiling at him.
“Forgive me, Carrington. I did wonder — ” Brookmire stopped, his smile fading. “Is something the matter?”
Julian held out the letter without a word, a sudden suspicion rising in him. Brookmire had been the one so eager to believe Miss Trent had swayed their cousin. “Did you write this, Brookmire?” He narrowed his eyes. “Recall that I always know when you are lying. We are brothers.”
Brookmire took the letter, frowning, and unfolded it. As he read, his frown gave way to lifted brows and a rush of color. “What ridiculous foolishness is this?”
Julian watched him closely. His brother’s mouth twitched at the corner whenever he lied, and it did not twitch now. “You did not send it?”
“Send it?” Anger flared in Brookmire’s eyes. “Carrington, I cannot think why you would ask me such a thing.”
The hurt in his voice struck Julian hard. “I ask because it speaks of Miss Trent’s influence over Lady Warrington — the very thing you have been suggesting. I know how eager you are for me to have the house back, and — ”
“And I have never once thought to write you an anonymous letter stuffed with lies.” Brookmire’s face was hot. “I would not. It is contemptible.”
Julian searched his face and let his suspicion settle. No — there was no untruth in him. “It is,” he agreed quietly. “Forgive the accusation, brother. I had to be sure.”
“Then who would do this?” Brookmire returned the letter with a sharp nod. “Who would write such cruelty, to set you against the lady?”
“I do not know.”
Brookmire tilted his head, his eyes sharpening. “For a moment — did you believe it?”
Julian closed his eyes and scowled. “Yes. Fool that I am.”
“Because you want the house.”
“Because I want to understand.” The heaviness sank deeper into him.
“I have just come from Miss Trent and her sister. She means to remove to Stoneleigh very soon. She says it was Lady Warrington’s wish that she take it, and so she must. There is honor in that.
” His brow furrowed. “She also said that she wishes to understand why Lady Warrington did it. She spoke of a letter, and — ”
“A letter? From Lady Warrington to Miss Trent?” Brookmire set a hand on his arm. “Then you must go to her. You must ask.”
“Ask after a private letter the lady left her?” Julian raised an eyebrow, his mouth flattening. “Come now, Brookmire. You know I can do no such thing.”
His brother shrugged. “Take this letter to her. Ask if she knows who might have written it, and then ask about the one Lady Warrington left her. It may be that, in reaching toward her, you find her willing to reach back.”
Tension spread across Julian’s chest at the thought of facing her again.
He had embarrassed himself once already.
Did he truly wish to do it twice? And there was a harder thing beneath, which he did not say: if he went to her with this letter in his hand, he would be choosing a side, and hers, before he understood the game or the players.
A wiser man would wait. A colder one would keep the letter in a drawer against the day it proved useful.
He had been raised by just such a man, and the thought of that drawer, and of his father’s hand closing it, decided him more surely than anything his brother had said.
“She may have little desire to speak with me,” he said honestly. “After our last conversation, she will think poorly of me.”
“But you share an aim,” Brookmire said simply. “You both want to know why the house went to her and not to you. Offer to find the truth alongside her, and you may find she lets you.”
Julian turned to the window. The anonymous letter was one matter. Whether he wished to pursue any of this was another. He could do as his brother said — or he could let it lie, accept that Stoneleigh would never be his, and turn his mind to what came next. To finding a wife. To his own future.
But the niggle would not leave him. It bit and pushed and whispered, and he knew it would go on whispering until it drove him to distraction.
No. He had to have his answer. Even if the house was never to be his, he needed to know why his cousin had given it to Miss Trent.
“Well?” Brookmire came to stand beside him, as if he had felt the decision settle. “What are your intentions?”
“I will speak with Miss Trent.” Brookmire grinned with relief. “You are right. We share an aim — to learn what Lady Warrington meant by all of this.”
“Capital.” His brother laid a hand on his shoulder, and his voice dropped low and steady.
“I want you to know I did not push you to it for any reason but that I care for you, Carrington. I can see what this has cost you. I should like you to have some peace — the peace you have not held since the will was read.”
Julian’s mouth twitched ruefully. “That much is true.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “I must only hope she will speak to me of the letter. She will not trust my intentions at first. But I shall prove them, I hope.”
As Brookmire went to pour them each another measure, Julian let himself think of her.
Of brown eyes full of questions and confusion.
Of the flush that had drawn his attention to the curve of her cheek, a thing he had never let himself notice.
Of the tendrils of hair at her temples, and the flash in her eyes the instant she had understood what Miss Galbraith was suggesting.
His toes curled inside his boots.
With a scowl, he planted both hands on the sill and dropped his head, and told himself he had no right, and no reason, to think of the lady so.