Chapter 17
“The soil composition along the eastern border is remarkable.” Lord Wilfrey stood at the window of the breakfast room, gazing out at the grounds of Thornwaite Hall.
He held a cup of tea in one hand and a small leather notebook in the other, and Hugo suspected he had been awake since dawn, cataloging.
“Is it?” Hugo poured himself coffee and settled into the chair beside Edward, who was reading the morning post with the focused efficiency of a man who had learned to process correspondence between bites of toast.
“Exceptionally. The clay content suggests a glacial deposit, which would account for the unusual drainage patterns I observed near the lake. You have a natural watershed on your property, Thornwaite. It is quite extraordinary.”
“I shall alert the watershed immediately. I am sure it will be flattered.”
Wilfrey blinked. The sarcasm sailed past him with the graceful indifference of a bird clearing a hedge. He returned to his notebook and scribbled something with the intensity of a man recording a discovery of national importance.
Edward’s mouth twitched behind his toast.
“I also noticed a stand of Quercus robur near the south meadow that appears to predate the house itself,” Wilfrey continued, oblivious. “English oak of that age is increasingly rare. You ought to have them surveyed.”
“I shall add it to my list of urgent matters. Right between the drainage patterns and the soil composition.”
“Excellent.” Wilfrey closed his notebook with satisfaction. “I am glad you take an interest in your land, Thornwaite. Too many gentlemen of our class neglect the natural assets of their estates.”
Hugo took a long sip of coffee and said nothing. Edward’s toast trembled in his hand.
Wilfrey tucked the notebook into his coat pocket and straightened his cravat with the precise movements of a man preparing for an expedition rather than a country house breakfast.
“If you will excuse me, I thought I might take a walk before the morning’s activities. Lady Lily mentioned an interest in the gardens yesterday, and I was hoping to show her the oak stand, if she is amenable.”
Something cold settled in Hugo’s stomach. He kept his expression pleasant.
“By all means. Though I believe Lady Lily is with her aunt in the gallery at present.”
“I shall find her presently. Good morning, gentlemen.”
Wilfrey bowed and departed with the unhurried precision of a man who had never rushed toward anything in his life, including the woman Hugo could not stop thinking about.
The breakfast room fell silent. Edward set down his toast and looked at Hugo with the patient, assessing gaze of a man who had known him long enough to read the tension in his jaw.
“You are grinding your teeth.”
“I am not grinding my teeth.”
“You are. I can hear it from here. It sounds like someone stepping on gravel.”
Hugo unclenched his jaw and took another sip of coffee. The liquid burned his tongue. He did not care.
“He wants to show her the oak trees, Edward.”
“He does.”
“He wants to walk her through my grounds, on my estate, and show her trees that have been standing on my land since before the house was built, as though he discovered them himself.”
“He is courting her. That is what you arranged.”
“I am aware of what I arranged.”
“Are you? Because your face suggests a man who has arranged his own firing squad and is surprised to find the rifles pointed at him.”
Hugo set down the coffee cup with more force than he intended. The porcelain rattled against the saucer.
Edward folded the morning post and set it aside. He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, and the shift from Duke to friend happened in the space between one breath and the next.
“Talk to me.”
“There is nothing to talk about.”
“Hugo.”
“He confused Pliny the Elder with Pliny the Younger at dinner last night, and she let it pass. She caught it. I saw it in her eyes. She caught the error, and she smiled and redirected the conversation, and he had no idea. No idea that the woman sitting beside him was smarter than he was and had chosen to hide it so that he might feel comfortable.”
“That is what you taught her to do.”
“I know what I taught her to do.” Hugo pushed back from the table and stood.
He crossed to the window where Wilfrey had been standing moments before and looked out at the grounds, at the green sweep of lawn and the distant tree line and the lake glinting silver in the morning light.
“I taught her to diminish herself so that a man who cannot tell one Roman historian from another might find her palatable. And she did it. She did it beautifully. And I stood across the room and watched it happen and felt as though I had taken something precious and filed down its edges until it fit inside a box it was never meant to occupy.”
The words hung in the air. Hugo had not planned to say them. They had risen from somewhere below the armor, from the place where he kept the things he did not examine, and now they were out, and he could not retrieve them.
Edward was quiet for a long moment. The clock on the mantel ticked. A bird sang outside the window, oblivious and cheerful.
“You are in love with her.”
“I am not in love with her. I simply find her an interesting diversion.”
“Hugo, you just delivered a speech about Roman historians and the filing down of precious edges.”
Hugo pressed his forehead against the window glass. It was cool against his skin, and he closed his eyes and let the cold anchor him.
“She wants Wilfrey.”
“She wants what Wilfrey represents. Travel. A life which she won’t have to fuss over a needy husband.”
“And I represent what? Scandal sheets and whipped cream?”
Edward’s chair scraped against the floor. Footsteps crossed the room, and then Edward stood beside him at the window, shoulder to shoulder, the way they had stood a hundred times before. At school. At funerals. In the aftermath of disasters, both public and private.
“You represent something she has not allowed herself to want.” Edward’s voice was quiet.
“You represent the possibility that a man might see all of her, the sharpness, the stubbornness, and the fire, and want more of it rather than less. Wilfrey will appreciate her mind if it does not outshine his. You would hand her a torch and stand back to watch her burn.”
Hugo opened his eyes. The grounds stretched before him, impossibly green, impossibly peaceful.
Somewhere in this house, Lily was walking through a gallery with her aunt, wearing a gown he had chosen and a hairstyle he had suggested and a set of skills he had taught her, all of it designed to deliver her into the arms of a man who would spend the rest of his life showing her oak trees and never once understanding what he had.
“We kissed. At the opera. On the balcony,” Hugo said flatly, as though he was mentioning the weather. “And then she ran. So no, Edward. She does not want me.”
“She kissed you and ran because she felt something she was not prepared to feel. That is not rejection. That is terror. And terror, in my experience, is a far more promising foundation for a marriage than oak trees.”
Hugo almost laughed. The sound caught in his throat and came out as something closer to a breath, half amusement, and half despair.
“When did you become an expert on courtship?”
“I married Sophia. I navigated a scandal, a gossip columnist, and a mother-in-law who wept at breakfast. I am eminently qualified.” Edward clapped his shoulder. “Tell her.”
“Tell her what?”
“You want her.”
“I do not want her. The engagement is a performance. If I tell her the truth, it changes everything. She will feel trapped, obligated, guilty. I will not do that to her.”
“So, your plan is to suffer in silence while you help her marry another man.”
“My plan is to honor the arrangement.”
Edward studied him. The assessment was thorough, unflinching, and carried the weight of fifteen years of friendship and from a man who had once been exactly this stupid about a woman and had lived to tell the tale.
“You are an idiot,” Edward said.
“I know.”
“An extraordinarily well-dressed idiot, but an idiot.”
“Noted.”
Edward squeezed his shoulder and released it. He returned to his chair and picked up his toast, which had gone cold, and bit into it with the philosophical acceptance of a man who recognized that some problems could not be solved over breakfast.
Hugo remained at the window. The morning light warmed his face, and the grounds of Thornwaite Hall stretched out before him, beautiful, vast, and empty.
He thought about Lily walking through his gallery, looking at portraits of his ancestors, standing in the house where he had grown up and been broken and had rebuilt himself piece by piece into the man he was now.
He thought about what Edward had said. That terror was a more promising foundation than oak trees. That she had kissed him and run not because she felt nothing but because she felt too much.
He thought about telling her the truth.
Then he straightened, adjusted his cravat, and went to play the gracious host.
The truth could wait. The house party could not.