Chapter 17 #2
Miss Trent did not move an inch, but her hand squeezed Julian’s arm a little tighter.
“You should return it at once,” Lady Henderson pressed, trembling with fury. “Give up the house and your courtship both, Miss Trent, and go back to the impoverished family you came from. You will not take my daughter’s place, for she is far more worthy of this than you.”
The fury that rose in Julian’s chest had him moving forward to silence her, but it was Miss Trent herself who held him back, her hand gripping his arm.
“Lady Warrington gave me Stoneleigh House,” she said, her voice clearer and stronger than Julian had looked for.
“She gave it so that my family might know a kindness long withheld. I believe she meant it to right a wrong done to us, and I am forever grateful for it.” Her chin rose. “I will not surrender it.”
“Selfish,” Lady Henderson hissed. “Nothing but selfishness.”
“Nor,” Miss Trent went on, louder now, over the older woman’s words, “nor do I intend to give up my connection to Lord Carrington.”
Lady Henderson fell silent, and Julian’s heart leapt into a wild, hopeful beating.
“I never anticipated that I should feel any affection for Lord Carrington,” Miss Trent continued, speaking plainly, careless of who might hear.
“Nor did I think such a feeling could ever be returned. And yet now I am overwhelmed with gratitude for so unexpected a blessing — for my heart is already, and I fear shall ever be, entwined with his.” She smiled, even as Lady Henderson’s jaw clenched.
“I would sooner give up every other comfort in this world than give him up.”
The force of her confession near staggered him. He turned to find her gaze already on his, and wanted nothing so much as to tell her, here and now, that he loved her with his whole heart, only for Lady Henderson to break between them with a snarl.
“Foolishness,” she hissed, her composure cracked clean through. “You were nothing to Lady Warrington. You do not deserve that house. You do not deserve him. It is my daughter who — ”
“Enough.” Julian cut his hand through the air, and Lady Henderson blinked, seeming to realize for the first time how far her discretion had slipped.
“Understand this, Lady Henderson. I have no thought of your daughter. I care only for Miss Trent. She is the object of my affection, and I believe she always shall be. The house remains hers — as does my heart.” He frowned as the color began to drain from the woman’s face.
“One question remains. Did you write those notes to Miss Trent? Did you seek to force her hand, to make her give up what was rightfully hers?”
Lady Henderson recoiled. “You dare ask me such a thing?”
“Mama?” Miss Galbraith’s voice was hoarse, her eyes wide. “You wrote cruel words to Miss Trent?”
For a moment Julian thought Lady Henderson would refuse to answer, would deny him the right to ask, and keep the truth wrapped close. Instead, with a glance at her daughter, she only shrugged. “I did what I believed was necessary.”
Miss Trent closed her eyes as anger drove into Julian’s heart. “You sought to push me from the house, and from Lord Carrington.”
Miss Galbraith shook her head, tears sparkling. “Why, Mama?”
“For you, my dear!” Lady Henderson exclaimed, as if her daughter were simply blind to the sacrifice. “I did it because I knew you were to be Lady Carrington — that you were to have that house and that standing. As I have always told you — ”
Miss Galbraith sniffed and shook her head.
“No, Mama. You forced me down a path I did not want, and now I find you have acted with a cruelty I can hardly bear to think of, for the shame of it.” She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, then looked to Miss Trent, her gaze steady through the tears.
“I would not ask you to surrender Stoneleigh House, Miss Trent.” Her eyes went to Julian.
“Nor would I ask you to give up your affections.”
Lady Henderson’s eyes went wide, and she took a step back, staring at her daughter as if she had said something scandalous.
Julian, feeling her anger fade, looked to her steadily, his tone brooking no argument.
“You will make it known there was never any courtship between your daughter and me. You will speak instead of Lord Brookmire’s regard for her, and be glad of it. ”
Lady Henderson closed her eyes.
She had written them, then. Julian felt the confirmation settle, and yet it did not settle cleanly, for even as she gave it, something in him refused to fit all of it to her.
The notes to Miss Trent he could hear in Lady Henderson’s voice readily enough, now that he listened for it: the sneering talk of insignificance and greed, the wounded snobbery of a woman who thought a great house wasted on a girl of no consequence.
That was Lady Henderson to the life, and he did not doubt her hand in a line of it.
But there had been another letter, before any of those — and not to Miss Trent at all.
To him. Miss Trent is not as innocent as she claims. It had come to his own table in the first raw days, cold and exact, troubling not to wound but only to persuade: to set him against her, to make him believe the will was got by some low coercion, to turn him into a man who would wish her gone.
He had laid that letter at his brother’s door, and been wrong.
And Lady Henderson, who wanted nothing of him but that he marry her daughter, had no earthly reason to write to him in such a strain, to make him doubt the very woman she might have wished him free to forget.
Two hands, then. There were two hands in this, and they had wanted different things. One sneered at him now across the ballroom, caught and diminished. The other had never been in this room at all — it had sat, once, in his own morning room, wearing a familiar face, and called itself help.
He said nothing of it. This was not the place, and Lady Henderson was not the quarry — not the true one. He let the silence do its work upon her, and turned his mind, cold and certain now, toward the man it had so long refused to name.
“It is for the best,” Brookmire said quietly. “We want no hint of scandal now, do we?” He smiled gently at Miss Galbraith, who looked near to breaking. “I am not turning from you, Miss Galbraith. You need not fear that.”
“Nor I from you,” Julian murmured, looking down at Miss Trent, who was gazing at Lady Henderson with something like wonder. “Are you quite all right?”
She nodded, but did not smile. “It is all at an end now, is it not?” she whispered, and he lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “We know all.”
“We do,” he said softly. “Though there are still things to be said — on my part, at the very least.”
Her lips curved, the sweetness of it near undoing him. “And on mine.”
“Then come, my dear Viola.” He offered his hand, and she took it at once. “Let us waltz, just as we planned, and think no more of the past.”
With one last look at Lady Henderson, Miss Trent turned from her and gazed up at him instead. “We forget the past,” she agreed, whispering up at him as they returned to the ton, “and think only of the future. And I suspect it will be a truly wonderful one indeed.”
The waltz was forming as they came onto the floor, and he took her into his arms in the sight of every soul in the room.
She had confessed him before them all — loudly, deliberately, past any unsaying — and now the whole ballroom watched to see what he would make of it, and Julian found he wanted nothing so much as to let them look.
His hand settled at her waist. Hers came to his shoulder as though it had always known the way.
They turned into the music, and the room blurred to candle-streaks around the clear, still center of her face.
“You are being watched, Miss Trent,” he murmured. “More than usual, even.”
“I know.” Her chin was up, her color high — the very picture she had made at the reading of the will, he realized, only now the lifted chin was no longer armor. “I find I no longer mind it. Let them look. I said nothing tonight I am not glad to have said.”
“Gladder to have heard it.” The turn drew her closer — an inch, no more, and every part of him marked it. “When I have done what remains to be done, Viola, I have a great deal to say to you. I should like to say it somewhere no one is watching at all.”
Her breath caught, and the smile she gave him then was small and entirely private, a thing worn for one man in a room of two hundred. “Then finish it soon, my lord.”
They did not speak again. The music carried them, turn upon turn, her hand warm in his, and for the length of one waltz Julian let himself stand in the middle of his own future and simply look at it.
Then the last chord stood and released them, and he bowed over her hand, and set his mind to the errand that stood between him and everything.
* * *
Pendleton’s chambers were on the second floor of a narrow building off Chancery Lane, up a stair that smelled of tallow and old paper.
Julian had never been to them before. He understood, climbing, that this was itself a kind of answer: that in all the years of the man’s usefulness, he had never once thought to learn where his cousin actually worked.
The clerk showed him in without ceremony. Pendleton rose from behind a desk stacked with the orderly business of other people’s lives, and if he was surprised, only the briefest stillness betrayed it before the warmth came up over his face like a lamp turned high.
“Cousin. This is an unexpected honor.” He gestured to a chair. “Sit, sit. You have caught me at my drudgery, but there is nothing here that will not keep. May I send for — ”
“No.” Julian did not sit. “Thank you, no.”
Something in his tone reached Pendleton. The hand that had risen toward the bell sank slowly back, and he folded both hands upon the desk. “Then it is business that brings you. Of course. How may I be of service?”