Chapter 33
“You are avoiding me.”
Hugo looked up from his desk.
Lily stood in the doorway of his study, dressed for morning calls in a green pelisse. Her hair was pinned neatly. Her expression carried the controlled composure of a woman who had rehearsed this confrontation and intended to conduct it without trembling.
“I am working,” he said.
“You have been working for five days. You take breakfast in your study. You dine in your study. You come home after I have retired and leave before I wake.” She stepped inside but did not sit. “That is not work, Hugo. That is strategy.”
He set down his pen. She was right, and the fact that she was right irritated him, because the entire point of the avoidance had been to make it look like something other than avoidance.
“I have a great deal of correspondence.”
“You have a great deal of cowardice.”
The word landed between them like a slap. Lily held his gaze, and Hugo saw the cost of the accusation in the tightness around her mouth and the brightness in her eyes. She had not come here to fight. She had come here to reach him, and the fight was what happened when reaching failed.
“Lily.”
“Do not. Do not say my name in that tone, as though you are about to explain something I am too fragile to hear.” She folded her arms. “I want to begin my travels. Now. Not next year. Not after more appearances. Now.”
“We agreed to wait.”
“We agreed to a great many things that no longer seem to apply.” Her voice did not shake.
Her chin did not drop. “I will not pretend anymore that staying in London like this is enough for me. Living in the same house as a man who will not look at me, who will not speak to me, who will not tell me what I did wrong…”
“You did nothing wrong.”
“Then why am I being punished?”
The question hung in the air. Hugo pressed his palms flat against the desk and breathed through the tightness in his chest.
He wanted to tell her the truth. He wanted to say that the avoidance was not punishment but protection, that every hour he spent in this study instead of beside her was an hour he spent convincing himself that she deserved better than a man with a broken voice and a broken past and a talent for destroying the things he cared about most.
She didn’t deserve to be doomed with him.
He said none of those things.
“If you wish to travel, I will arrange everything. A route. Letters of introduction for every city you wish to visit. Nell can accompany you.” He met her eyes. “You will want for nothing.”
“Except a husband.”
The words cut deeper than she could have known. Hugo held his expression steadily.
“I will ensure everything is arranged properly.”
Lily stared at him. He watched her search his face for something, anything. She found nothing.
“Fine,” she said. The word carried the finality of a door closing. “I will leave within the fortnight.”
She turned and walked out. Her footsteps faded down the corridor, and Hugo sat at his desk and listened to the silence she left behind.
He picked up his pen. He stared at the letter he had been writing and could not remember a single word of it.
He set the pen down and pressed his forehead against his hands.
This was for the best. She would travel.
She would see the ruins she had dreamed about and swim in foreign seas and fill her brilliant mind with the experiences that a stammering Duke in a cold London townhouse could never provide.
She would be free, the way he had promised her she would be, and the ache in his chest would fade eventually, because everything faded eventually.
And if it did not, then he would learn to carry it the way he carried everything else.
Quietly.
Alone.
The days passed in silence.
Lily ate breakfast with Nell for company and spent her afternoons with her family. She visited Sophia three times that week. She sat on the floor with Oliver and Leo and held baby Jane and let the warmth of her sister’s household fill the spaces that her own had emptied.
“How is Hugo?” Lady Brimsey asked during a visit to Brimsey House, her teacup poised, her eyes bright.
“Busy.” Lily stirred her tea. “He has a great deal of correspondence.”
“He always has correspondence. When does he not have correspondence?”
“He is a Duke, Mama. Dukes are busy.”
Lady Brimsey exchanged a glance with Lord Brimsey, who raised his newspaper higher and pretended to read.
At Heatherwell House, Sophia was less easily deflected.
“You have visited three times this week,” Sophia said, pouring tea while Leo built a fortress of wooden blocks at their feet. “You never visit three times in one week unless something is wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong. I enjoy your company.”
“You enjoy my company in measured doses. Three visits in five days suggest either devotion or desperation, and you have never been the devoted type.”
“Sophia.”
“Lily.”
“Everything is fine,” Lily said.
Sophia let it go. For now.
Aunt Margaret’s approach was different. She did not ask. She appeared at the townhouse on Thursday afternoon with a trunk of travel guides and a bottle of Italian wine. She sat in Lily’s parlor and opened the wine without being invited to do so.
“I brought you the guides I used when I traveled through Provence in ’09.” Margaret poured two glasses. “The roads have improved since then, but the inns have not. Bring your own sheets.”
“Thank you, Aunt Margaret.”
“Do not thank me.” She sipped her wine. “Travel is an excellent remedy for many things, Lily. Restlessness. Curiosity. The particular variety of loneliness that comes from living with someone who is present in body and absent in every other respect.”
Lily’s hand tightened on her glass.
“I did not say that.”
“You did not need to.” Margaret set down her wine.
“When your uncle was alive, God rest him, there were years when we occupied the same house and barely spoke. Not from anger. From the stubbornness of two people who loved each other and were too proud to say so.” She paused.
“Travel helped. Not because it solved anything, but because distance has a way of clarifying what proximity obscures.”
“I am not sure there is anything to clarify,” Lily said.
“Then you will enjoy the scenery.” Margaret picked up her wine. “And if, somewhere between Calais and Rome, you discover that there is, you will know what to do about it.”
Hugo knew something was wrong when Edward poured him a second brandy without being asked.
They sat in the study of Heatherwell House, the fire burning low. Hugo had come to discuss an investment in a shipping venture. Edward had listened, nodded, asked three questions, and then produced the brandy decanter.
“Lily visited Sophia three times this week,” Edward said.
“She enjoys her sister’s company.”
“She enjoys her sister’s company the way a drowning person enjoys a piece of driftwood.” Edward swirled his brandy. “What have you done?”
“Nothing.”
“Hugo.”
“I have done nothing. That is the problem, and I am aware of it, and I do not wish to discuss it.”
Edward regarded him across the desk.
“She is leaving for the Continent.”
“I know. I am arranging it.”
“You are arranging your wife’s departure from England.”
“I am honoring our agreement. She wanted freedom. I am giving it to her.”
“You are driving her away and calling it generosity.”
Hugo drained his brandy. The burn did nothing to dull the accuracy of the observation.
“She deserves better than what I can give her, Edward.”
“What you can give her, or what you are willing to give her?”
Hugo said nothing. Edward did not press. They sat in silence, and the fire cracked.
“I am not good for her,” Hugo said. The words came out low, stripped of charm. “I am not built for this. She wants a man who will open every door and let her walk through, and I cannot do that.”
“Cannot, or will not?”
The echo of Lily’s question from weeks ago cut like a blade. Hugo flinched.
Edward set down his glass. “I will not tell you what to do. But I will tell you this. She has been fighting for you since the day she met you, Hugo. The question is whether you are going to let her leave believing she lost.”
Hugo stared at the fire. Edward’s words settled over him, quiet, devastating, and true.
He said nothing.
He only finished his brandy and left.
The day before her departure, Lily asked Sophia to invite their family to Heatherwell House. Sophia arranged the drawing room with tea and sandwiches, and Edward excused himself to his study with the quiet tact of a man who understood when a room belonged to the women in it.
Lord and Lady Brimsey arrived first. Aunt Margaret followed, dressed in traveling green, her opera glasses tucked into her reticule despite the fact that they were indoors.
“I have something to tell you,” Lily said.
Lady Brimsey set down her teacup. “You’re pregnant.”
“No, Mama. I am not pregnant.”
“Then what is it?”
“I am going to travel. To France, and then south through Europe. I leave tomorrow.”
Silence settled over the room. Lady Brimsey’s teacup rattled against its saucer. Lord Brimsey folded his hands in his lap and studied his daughter with the careful attention of a man who was listening for what was not being said.
“Tomorrow,” Lady Brimsey repeated. “That is very sudden.”
“It is something Hugo and I have discussed. He wants me to see the places I have always dreamed about, and the timing felt right.”
“When will Hugo be joining you?” Lord Brimsey asked.
Lily held her father’s gaze and summoned the most convincing smile she had ever produced.
“Later. He has business to address first. Estate matters, investments. You know how Dukes are.”
“I know how Dukes are when they are avoiding something,” Margaret observed from her chair. She did not look up from the glove she was examining.
“No one is avoiding anything, Aunt Margaret.”
“Of course not. Silly of me.”
Lady Brimsey reached for Lily’s hand. “Darling, are you certain about this? Traveling alone, without your husband, so soon after the wedding…”