Chapter 23
ONE YEAR LATER
The London market was a crush of color and noise even at this early hour, and Frederick found himself trailing half a step behind Rachel.
“I don’t know why I allowed myself to be dragged out here, just to watch you march through the stalls like a general surveying a battlefield.”
“Oh, come now, brother. It is not that bad.”
“Not that bad? I do not know if I have the strength to survive another half hour of ribbon comparisons—”
A familiar voice cut through the din, and they turned their heads to find its source.
“Rachel! Rachel, is that you?” the voice called out.
Rachel spun, and the basket on her arm swung wildly enough that Frederick had to catch it before it toppled.
By the time he’d righted it, Rachel had already closed the distance and thrown her arms around the newcomer, laughing in a way Frederick hadn’t heard from her in a long time.
It hit him at his core, as if an arrow had been shot straight into his heart.
“Anna! Oh, you wretched creature, why did you not write to tell me you were coming?”
“And spoil the surprise?” Anna laughed, holding Rachel at arm’s length to look at her properly before embracing her again. “How could I do such a disservice?”
Frederick stood back, watching the reunion and awkwardly clutching the basket. When at last the two women separated, Anna turned to him and dropped into a curtsy.
“Your Grace,” she said with a small smile.
“Lady Birchall.”
He bowed. If his eyes lingered a fraction longer than propriety dictated, he told himself it was curiosity.
A single year had dramatically changed her.
Time had softened the sharper angles of her face, no doubt a product of all she had endured, and warmed her complexion with a vibrant color he did not realize she once lacked.
She looked healthy, whole, and undeniably beautiful.
“You look… healthy,” he said.
“I am, Your Grace. And you look well, too,” Anna said with a polite smile.
“When did you arrive?” Rachel had already looped her arm through Anna’s. “You must tell me everything. How is your aunt in Scotland? Is the cottage still standing? Or did you finally set it on fire as you always threatened?”
“The cottage stands, more’s the pity, and my aunt is well.
She had a lovely visit a few weeks ago and has returned to Edinburgh.
As for me, I arrived only yesterday. I felt ready to return…
” Anna’s gaze flicked to Frederick, then away again, quick as a bird.
“Rachel, you were kind enough to have visited me three times this year.”
“Three times was not nearly enough,” Rachel said. “I would have come every month, if my brother had allowed it. Something about appearances, securing a husband, the usual.”
“And you, Your Grace?” Anna’s tone was light, almost teasing, but there was something underneath it Frederick couldn’t name. “Not once in a twelvemonth. I had begun to think you’d forgotten I ever existed.”
“I had business that kept me in London through much of the year,” Frederick said, which was true, though it was not the whole of it, and he suspected she knew that as well as he did. “I have not been in the country much, except to check on my estate.”
“Of course.” Anna’s smile didn’t waver, but it didn’t reach her amber eyes either. “Well, I am here now, and so are you, and Rachel has clearly dragged you both out to suffer through the market together. So, let us suffer together properly.”
They fell into step, the three of them, just as they once had so easily. Rachel stood between them at first, then drifted ahead toward a stall of dyed silks that had caught her eye.
“I must look at these!” She said, calling over her shoulder. “Only be a moment.”
Frederick watched her with the cynical caution of an older brother who knew that, where his sister was concerned, “a moment” could easily span an hour.
Never in his life had he felt so terribly divided, at once fortunate and utterly cursed to be standing at Anna’s side. He had dreamed of a moment much like this more times than he could count. The realization that she had fallen silent stole over him gradually.
When he turned to look at her, he found she was blind to the nearby milliner’s wares.
Instead, her eyes were fixed across the square upon a cluster of fashionable young mothers, oblivious to the children tumbling about their feet.
A pair of overwhelmed nursemaids struggled to keep order, particularly with one tiny toddler who had snarled her bonnet ribbons.
She was currently protesting the injustice with a magnificent, piercing outrage unique to early childhood.
“Lady Birchall.” He said her title once, twice, and she didn’t stir. “Anna.”
She turned at last, and there was something unguarded in her face for just a moment before she composed it. “Forgive me, Your Grace. I was woolgathering,” she said as she turned her attention back to the wares.
“What were you looking at?”
She hesitated. He watched her decide something, watched the decision settle into her shoulders.
“I want a baby.”
The space around him swirled as he tried to make sense of the four words she had just spoken, slowly registering them.
Frederick opened his mouth and found, for what might have been the first time in his adult life, that no words arrived to fill it. He stared at her. The market noise seemed to recede very far away.
“I beg your pardon,” Anna said, and now color was rising in her cheeks, “that was abominably blunt of me. I oughtn’t have said it like that, standing in the middle of a market with you looking at me as though I’d announced I meant to rob a bank.”
“It is all right… I merely, erm… I think I am missing something…” he stammered, running a hand through his hair.
“I only meant that I spent a year in the country with nothing to do but think, and I have decided: I want a child of my own. A family of my own. A chance to do it all right. I’ve always loved children.”
“You…” Frederick said at last, and then had to start again. “You require a husband first, my lady.”
“I am aware of that, Your Grace.” There was an edge to her voice now, amusement and something sharper both. Her eyes met his. “It is in fact why I have come to London. To find one.”
He blinked at her. “To find a husband.”
“Is that so very shocking to you?”
“I…”
“It is the entire purpose of the Season, is it not, to display the year’s marriageable women like prize mares and see who bids highest?
” She said it without bitterness, almost cheerfully, but Frederick found he didn’t care for the comparison at all.
“I have decided to stop waiting for it to happen to me, and instead go and accomplish it myself. You ought to admire the efficiency, even if you find the sentiment distasteful.”
“I don’t find it distasteful.” He wasn’t entirely sure what he found it. “I am only… surprised. You’ve never spoken so before.”
“The circumstances of our… time together… were unique. I’ve had time, things are different now. I’ve never wanted anything so before.”
She looked back across the square, to the children and their nurses, and something in her face was unguarded again, hungry in a way that made Frederick’s chest tighten uncomfortably. She turned and looked at him, and for a moment, he felt she might return a bit of that hunger.
“It will be your turn soon enough, you know,” she said. “If Rachel marries this Season, every matchmaking mother in London will turn her sights on you next. You can only avoid it for so long. You’ll be hunted exactly as I mean to hunt.”
“I shall look forward to it with tremendous dread,” Frederick said, and was relieved when it won a real laugh out of her.
“You’ll survive it. You survive everything with that endless composure of yours.” She studied him a moment, head tilted, and there was something else assessing in the look, something he hadn’t seen from her before. “I daresay, you’ll have your pick.”
He didn’t know what to say to that either, and so, he said nothing. Frederick always found that easiest and yet, for a moment, they simply looked at each other. It was, in that moment, that Frederick saw something shift in Anna’s face.
A flicker of surprise, quickly masked.
She looked away first, a faint color climbing her throat that had nothing to do with the morning chill, and busied herself smoothing a wrinkle from her glove that did not exist.
“There you are!” Rachel reappeared in a swirl of skirts and good humor, oblivious, already pulling Anna by the hand. “You must come and see this silk, Anna, it is precisely the green speckles of your eyes. I told the woman I should have to drag you over to prove it—”
And then she was gone again, towed away into the crowd, throwing one last unreadable glance back at Frederick over her shoulder before the press of people swallowed her from view.
Frederick was in a foul temper by the time he returned home, and he could not have said precisely why, only that the feeling sat in his chest like a stone he’d swallowed and couldn’t dislodge.
He tossed his hat onto the hall table with more force than the hat had done anything to deserve and made for his study, where Percy was curled in the single patch of late sun on the windowsill.
The cat opened one eye, assessed him, and apparently found him acceptable.
He uncurled himself, stretched at length, and dropped to the floor to wind himself around Frederick’s ankles.
He purred with the loud, unbothered satisfaction of a creature who had never once in his life had to find himself a match.
A life of solitude was his future, only interacting with others as he saw fit.
“I think you have the right idea,” Frederick told him, and sank into his chair.
Percy took this as an invitation, leapt into his lap, and arranged himself. Frederick let his hand fall to the cat’s back without quite meaning to, stroking absently while his mind turned over the morning.
I want a baby.
He could not seem to dismiss the words, nor the picture they conjured.
He could see Anna standing up at some ball in a fortnight’s time, smiling that same determined smile at some other man, some man with better prospects or better looks or simply better timing.
He was unable to think of one single reason why the image should make him feel as though someone had reached into his chest and wrung something vital out of it.
I have come to London to find a husband.
He did not examine the feeling closely enough to name it, and willed the words to leave him be.
He told himself it was only that he disliked change, that a year’s absence had made him unaccustomed to Anna’s straightforward manner, that any man would be put off his stride by such an announcement delivered without warning in the middle of a public market.
It was the unexpected nature of it more than the words themselves.
He started to mentally list the correspondence he had to attend to that day, none of which made the stone in his chest any lighter.
He grabbed a book and began to turn the pages, hoping they would absorb him.
Percy, sensing perhaps that his attentions were not having their usual effect, headbutted Frederick’s hand insistently until he resumed petting in earnest. He stayed there, purring long after Frederick had stopped pretending to read and simply sat, staring at nothing, until the room had gone dim around him.
What a miserable sight it will be to have to watch her court other men, he finally admitted to himself and slammed the book.
He set it on a nearby table, and Percy looked up at him, wide-eyed and unfazed.
“It’s none of your business.”
He went up to bed still out of temper. He closed the curtains and lay a long while in the dark without sleeping, turning over a season that had not yet begun.
It already felt utterly unbearable.