Chapter 34
“You look like hell.” Edward dropped into the leather chair opposite Hugo’s and signaled the steward for a glass.
White’s was quiet at this hour. The late afternoon light filtered through the tall windows, and the handful of other members present had the good sense to keep their distance from a Duke who was drinking alone at three o’clock on a Tuesday.
Hugo raised his glass. “I am perfectly well.”
“You are on your third brandy before dinner, your cravat is crooked, and you have not shaved.” Edward accepted his drink from the steward and waited until the man withdrew. “When was the last time you slept?”
“I slept last night.”
“For how long?”
“Long enough.”
“Hugo.”
“Two hours. Possibly three.” He drained his glass and set it down with a thud that drew a glance from a gentleman reading by the fireplace. “What do you want, Edward?”
“Lily is leaving.”
“I know she is leaving. I arranged it. I booked the lodgings and wrote the letters of introduction myself. I am acutely aware that she is leaving.”
“She is leaving you.”
The correction landed in Hugo’s chest like a stone dropped from height. He reached for the decanter and poured another measure. The brandy sloshed against the sides of the glass, and his hand was not as steady as he needed it to be.
“She is traveling. It is what she always wanted.”
“She is running. Because you gave her no reason to stay.”
“I gave her every reason to stay. I gave her a title, a home, financial security, and freedom to travel whenever she wished. I gave her everything I promised.”
“You gave her everything except yourself.” Edward crossed one ankle over the other. “Are you really going to sit in this chair and drink yourself into a stupor while your wife boards a ship to France?”
Hugo’s jaw tightened. “She is a Duchess. She is free to do whatever she pleases.”
“She is your Duchess, Hugo. Yours. And she is leaving because you have spent the past month treating her as though she were a tenant in your house rather than the woman you married.”
“I did not ask for your opinion.”
“You never do. I give it anyway. It is the foundation of our friendship.” Edward leaned forward. “Do not let her go.”
“She made her decision. I respect it.”
“Respect is not the issue, and you know it. Avoidance is.”
Hugo’s hand stilled on the glass.
“You have spent your entire life controlling what people see of you,” Edward continued.
His voice was quiet, unhurried. “Every smile, every joke, every charm offensive you deploy in a ballroom is a calculated performance designed to keep people at exactly the distance you choose. And it works. It has always worked. Until Lily.”
“Edward.”
“Until Lily, who looked straight through every wall you had ever built, and she saw you. And she was not afraid. And instead of letting her stay, you are pushing her out the door because you would rather lose her than risk her seeing the one thing you have spent your life hiding.”
Hugo set down his glass. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
“Are you afraid of her finding out about the stammer?”
Hugo’s entire body went rigid.
The glass on the table beside him might as well have been a mile away. The room contracted to the space between his chair and Edward’s, and the blood drained from his face.
“I never told you about that.”
“No. You did not.”
“Then how…”
“I have known for years, Hugo.” Edward’s voice carried no judgment.
No pity. “When we were at school, I noticed that you drank before debates. Always. Without exception. That your speech was smoother after the first glass than before it. I noticed that you avoided certain words, substituted others mid-sentence, and that when you were caught off guard or emotional, your consonants caught. I noticed, and I said nothing, because you clearly did not want it noticed.”
Hugo’s hands gripped the arms of his chair. His knuckles whitened. “You dug into my past.”
“I dug into everyone’s past. I was young, paranoid, and had just inherited a Dukedom for which I was not prepared.
I investigated every person in my circle.
Yours was the file I closed the fastest, because nothing I found changed my opinion of you.
” Edward held his gaze. “You are my closest friend. A stammer does not alter that. It never has.”
“You had no right.”
“No. I did not. And we can fight about that later if you wish. But right now, your wife gets further and further away, and that matters more than a fifteen-year-old breach of privacy.”
Hugo stood. The chair scraped against the floor. He crossed to the window and pressed his palms flat against the sill and stared at the street below.
“She got stuck with me.” His voice came out raw, stripped of every defense.
“She was never supposed to be bound to me. She was supposed to marry Wilfrey and travel the Mediterranean and live a quiet, intellectual life with a man who would never stammer on a word in front of her and then send her away because he could not bear the shame of it.”
“Hugo.”
“I was never supposed to marry like this. I was supposed to be the temporary solution. The man who helped her fix her reputation and then stepped aside so she could have the life she deserved.”
“And instead?”
“Instead, I fell in love with her, and I do not know what to do with that, Edward, because every woman I have ever been with has seen the performance. Lily is the first person who has ever tried to see past it, and I sent her away because I am terrified that if she sees what is actually there, she will wish she had married the man with the ferns.”
The words poured out of him, and once they started, he could not stop them.
He pressed his forehead against the window glass and breathed.
The cool surface anchored him against the vertigo of having spoken aloud, for the first time in his life, the truth he had been carrying since the night Lily walked into his parlor and changed everything.
Edward was quiet for a long moment. “What are you doing, Hugo?”
“I do not know.”
“Yes, you do. You are standing at a window feeling sorry for yourself while the woman you just admitted you love is preparing to leave the country because you are too frightened to be honest with her.”
“It is not that simple.”
“It is exactly that simple. Everything you carry, the stammer, your brother, your father, all of it, those are old fears. Real fears. I do not dismiss them. But you are using them as an excuse to stay untouched, and the cost of staying untouched is losing the one person who wants to touch you anyway.”
Hugo lifted his head from the glass. He turned and looked at Edward.
“Let her see you,” Edward said. “Not the Duke. Not the rake. Not the man who commands ballrooms and deflects every question with a joke. Let her see Hugo. The real one. The one who stammers. The one whose brother was cruel, whose father was cold, whose mother died before she could tell him he was enough.” He paused.
“Let Lily stand beside you while you exist as you are. That is all she has ever asked for.”
The room was quiet. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the club, a door opened and closed, and voices murmured.
Glasses clinked, and the ordinary business of the world went on without any awareness that a man in a leather chair by the window was being taken apart and put back together by his best friend’s words.
Hugo looked at the brandy on the table. He looked out of the window. He looked at Edward. “Marriage has made you insufferably wise.”
Edward’s mouth curved. The half-smile held warmth and relief. “If you go after her, you will grow too.”
Hugo stood motionless for a beat. The afternoon light shifted across the floor. The dust motes turned gold.
And something inside him, something that had been locked and bolted and reinforced with fifteen years of practiced indifference, released.
Not broke. Released. The way a fist unclenches. The way a held breath finally escapes.
He straightened his coat. He adjusted his crooked cravat. He ran his hand through his unshaved jaw and did not care.
He looked at Edward one last time. “Thank you.”
“Go, my friend. Go to her.”
Hugo walked out of White’s without looking back. The doorman held the entrance, and the afternoon air hit his face. London stretched before him, noisy and full of carriages that could take him anywhere.
He hailed the first one he saw.
“Thornwaite House,” he told the driver. “Quickly.”
The carriage lurched forward. Hugo sat in the cab and pressed his palms against his knees. He felt his heart hammering against his ribs, and the fear was still there, coiled in his chest, ancient and familiar and whispering every reason he should turn back.
He did not turn back.
He thought about Lily. Not the version of her he had constructed in his mind.
The real Lily. The one who had jumped naked into his lake on their wedding day.
The one who had pressed her hand against Dorado’s neck and let a broken horse lean into her.
The one who had looked at him across a hundred crowded rooms and seen, every single time, the man behind the mask, and wanted him anyway.
She had never asked him to be perfect. She had never asked him to be whole. She had asked him to be honest, and he had refused, and she had stayed anyway, and stayed, and stayed, until the stagnancy became unbearable because he would not meet her halfway.
The carriage rounded the corner onto his street. Hugo leaned forward and looked through the window.
The townhouse stood quiet. The front door was closed. No trunks on the steps. No carriage waiting.
She had already left.
Hugo threw open the carriage door before it had fully stopped. He strode to the entrance and pushed through the door.
Marsden stood in the hallway.
“Where is she?”
“Her Grace departed forty minutes ago, Your Grace. The Dover road.”
“Forty minutes.” Hugo ran his hand through his hair. “Was she… did she say anything before she left?”
Marsden hesitated. The hesitation itself was unusual. Marsden did not hesitate.
“Her Grace visited the stables last night, Your Grace. She spent some time with Dorado.”
“She visited Dorado?”
“Yes, Your Grace. And this morning, before she departed, she left something on the hall table. She asked that it remain there.”
Hugo turned. On the hall table, beside the silver tray where visiting cards were placed, sat a single folded piece of paper. He crossed to it and opened it.
It was the note he had written to her months ago, the one instructing her to wear her hair loose and let a few locks fall free. The one that ended with P.S. You have lovely collarbones. It would be a crime to keep hiding them.
She had kept it. All this time, through everything, she had kept it.
His hand closed around the paper. He pressed it against his chest and felt the edges dig into his palm.
“Have my horse saddled. Now.”
Marsden’s composure cracked by a fraction. “Your Grace?”
“My horse, Marsden. The fastest one in the stable. Five minutes.”
“Shall I prepare a bag? A change of clothes?”
“There is no time.”
“Your Grace, Dover is a considerable distance, and you are not dressed for—”
“Marsden.” Hugo tucked the note into his coat pocket. “Five minutes.”
Marsden bowed and moved toward the stables with a speed that suggested he understood, without being told, that the next hour would determine the course of his employer’s life.
Hugo was going to fix this.
He was going to ride to Dover and find her carriage and stop it in the middle of the road if he must. He was going to stand in front of her and tell her the truth.
All of it. The stammer and Sebastian and the marble floor and the woman who laughed and the father who turned away.
He was going to open every locked door and let her walk through, and if she looked at him differently afterward, if the knowledge of what he was changed the way she saw him, then he would survive it. He had survived worse.
But he would not survive losing her. That much he knew.
The stable boy brought his horse. Hugo swung into the saddle and gathered the reins.
“The Dover road,” he said. “As fast as she can run.”
He kicked the horse forward, and the cobblestones blurred beneath him. London fell away behind him, and Hugo rode toward the woman he loved with his heart in his throat and no mask left to hide behind.
For the first time in his life, he did not need one.