Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
“Tell me about Chesham,” Dominic said.
Miles did not look up from his glass. “I told you about Chesham. In the note. Viscount Chesham. Shropshire. Solvent. Unremarkable on all fronts.”
Dominic was doing his best to keep his impatience from bleeding through to the expression on his face. He did not think he was doing a good job of it, but even that knowledge could not stop him from pushing for more.
“There must be more.” He said, grateful for the calm in his voice despite the ruckus happening within his chest.
“There isn’t.” Miles set the glass flat. “I am not the Debrett’s supplement. I told you what I knew.” He looked up. “Why do you want more of it?”
“Lucien is away,” he started, and Miles’ brows perked up.
He hummed, his lips curving slightly. “You have said that more than a hundred times now.”
Dominic hated it when his friend got smug even before he had the chance to lay his defense. “Annabelle has no one looking out for her interests.” He laid the defense anyway, no matter how hollow it sounded between the two of them.
And Miles was more than happy to shatter those defenses.
He said, “She has Lady Rosenhall, who looks out for interests with the thoroughness of a naval engagement. She has Miss Thrupton, who misses nothing. She has herself, and by all accounts, she is entirely capable of managing her own acquaintances.”
Dominic sighed, reaching for any solace he could find in the decanter next to him.
Miles chuckled, “Chesham has called on her four times and attended two of the same events. What would you like Lucien to do about that from Shropshire that you could not do standing in her drawing room?”
Dominic downed a glass of brandy, focusing on the burn as it went down.
“Right,” Miles said, as though the silence constituted an argument he had already won.
“I am looking out for Lucien’s sister.”
“You are.” Miles studied him a moment. The card rooms were warm behind them; some wave of noise had crested and settled.
“But your jaw is doing the thing it does when you are trying to pretend not to know something that is already bothering you in your mind.” He picked up his glass, spreading his hands in a gesture of mild surrender.
“I am not telling you what to do…just what it looks like.”
Dominic breathed through his nose and turned a narrow-eyed stare on his friend. “I am not jealous.”
“Of course not,” Miles said pleasantly.
Dominic got to his feet.
“Silverford.” He said it without moving. “If there is no version of this in which you are prepared to do anything at all, you are going to be very unhappy watching someone else do it.”
Dominic said goodnight and went out.
The street was cold after the warmth of the club, and he turned without deciding which way.
He was not going to think about Chesham.
He was not going to think about the way the man had tilted his head at the mention of Dio Cassius in Annabelle’s drawing room, that careful, unhurried recalculation of a man revising his opinion upward, or the way Annabelle had clocked it and filed it in the catalog she kept of accurate facts about people.
Dominic had stood in the doorway with his hat in both hands and watched all of it.
He had not liked any part of it, and he had no intention of examining why.
The man called four times a week. He arrived in a good coat with flowers from a respectable florist and asked about Montaigne, and Annabelle laughed for him, and Annabelle looked interested for him.
Dominic had kissed her on a balcony three weeks ago and had not managed a civil sentence to her since.
He was not jealous. He was simply noting that a man with agreeable conversation and a good florist had been given access to something he had not earned.
He was the one she had kissed. The Viscount could not lay claim to that intimacy, and Dominic found that he despised the idea of him ever doing so, at all.
He thought about the way she had looked at the card Chesham had left, standing in Fairmont House’s entrance hall.
He thought about how often, in the past month, he had arrived at Fairmont House at one minute past the hour on some thin errand and found reasons to stand in the doorway longer than dropping off a boy required.
No, he was not jealous. The whole situation just struck him as extremely audacious, and that was the end of it.
He gave it no further thought for two days, and then on the third morning, he called his secretary in and gave him the Viscount’s name.
The report came back Thursday, sealed, before breakfast.
There was nothing notably irregular in the Viscount’s finances. What his secretary had found instead was a story, the kind that circulates between men at certain clubs and never quite dies because the men who were present keep it alive.
In the autumn of 1813, Chesham had been called out by Lord Archibald Fenn over a debt of honor. He had accepted. He had named his second, confirmed the location, and confirmed the hour. The location was Chalk Farm, the hour was four in the morning, and Fenn had arrived at both on time.
Chesham had not.
He sent a note that afternoon citing a sudden indisposition. Fenn had accepted this in public. In private, by the account of three men who were at White’s when Fenn returned from Chalk Farm alone, he had been brief and entirely clear about what he thought of the explanation.
The story had followed Chesham at a distance of a few months and a few rooms ever since. Not close enough to ruin him. Close enough that it was always there, behind the pleasant manner and the well-cut coats, being quietly repeated by men who had heard it from men who had been there.
Dominic folded the report and set it on the desk. He looked at the courtyard below the window. Grey, still, a stable boy crossing with a bucket, the morning going about its business without him.
He thought about Chesham in Annabelle’s drawing room, eager to hear Annabelle play the piano.
He pocketed the report. Lord Arbuthnot was hosting that evening, and Chesham had confirmed his attendance at Mrs. Laing’s last week. He went downstairs and called for his coat.
By nine, the drawing rooms were warm, and the east terrace had been given over to air and quiet conversation, and it was there that Dominic found them: Chesham at Annabelle’s left, closer than the space required, her glass in her hand, her head tilted at something he had just said.
Dominic crossed the terrace. “Chesham.” He reached the balustrade and settled one hand on the stone, speaking without much preamble. “I believe you know Archibald Fenn.”
Chesham turned. “Your Grace.”
“I ran into him at White’s this week. He spoke of you.” His voice was easy. “Something about an old appointment that never came off. Chalk Farm, I think he said. He seemed to feel the explanation he received at the time had been somewhat insufficient.”
The torches along the rail threw warm light across the flagstones. Chesham’s color had gone in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. His chin came up.
“I don’t see what that has to do with the present company,” he said.
“Nothing at all,” Dominic said pleasantly. “I merely thought you’d want to know he was asking after you.”
Chesham looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at Annabelle. His manner hardened past pleasantness entirely.
“I see that you are very well attended, Lady Annabelle,” he said. The warmth of the drawing room was entirely gone from his voice. “I wonder that you require it.”
Annabelle frowned, “Lord Chesham—”
He gave a short, stiff bow. “Goodnight.”
He was through the door before either of them spoke. Dominic looked at the garden below: the dark shapes of the flower beds, the smell of something beginning to bloom in the warm air.
Annabelle counted to three, then she turned.
Dominic was at the balustrade with his back half toward her, one hand on the stone, looking out over the darkened garden as though he had merely stepped out for air. The torchlight caught the right side of his face. He did not turn.
“That was deliberate,” she said.
He turned then. “He was called out two years ago and didn’t show.”
“I see.” She kept her voice level. “And you felt it appropriate to deliver that here. On Lord Arbuthnot’s terrace. In front of his guests.”
“I felt it appropriate to deliver it before he had any further opportunity to present himself as something he isn’t.”
“In front of eight people.”
“He left of his own judgment.”
She set her glass on the balustrade. Her hands needed somewhere to be, and the rail was the safest available surface. “You made sure of it. That is not his judgment…that is yours.”
He said nothing to that, infuriating her even more. “What is Chalk Farm?” she said.
He looked at her.
“I know what Chalk Farm is,” she said. “I want to know what your story about it was.”
“He was called out two years ago. He accepted, arranged a second, confirmed the location and the hour.” He paused. “He didn’t appear.”
She held this for a moment. “Men miss appointments.”
“He had his pistol cleaned the evening before. He sent someone to check the ground. At four in the morning he dressed, called for his horse, and rode in the other direction.” He met her gaze. “Fenn waited an hour.”
She said nothing. She looked at the garden below.
“You have done this before,” she said at last. “Lucien’s ball, the suitor you warned me about. Lord Penworth at the Mallory soiree. And tonight.” She held his gaze. “Every man who has approached me this season, you have found the defect and produced it at the first opportunity.”
“The pattern is that the men who approach you have things to conceal.”
“Some of them.”
“All of them, so far.”
“And your solution is to humiliate them on terraces.” She watched him. He met it without moving. “For my benefit.”
“For your benefit. Yes.” He did not even sound the least bit remorseful or ashamed.
“You commissioned a report on him,” she said, and he held her gaze for a stretch of time without answering, and the not-answering told her what the answer was.
“Did you?” She heard what was in her own voice and did not take it back. “You had someone make inquiries. For my benefit.”
“Yes.”
“I see.” She turned away from him briefly and looked at the garden, the dark shapes of the flower beds, the smell of something cool and green in the night air. Then she looked back. “And at the ball? And the Mallory soiree? Was that a report, or simply your own judgment?”
“My own judgment.”
“Your own judgment,” she repeated. “Which you have deployed consistently across this season, on every man who expressed any sincere interest in me. And what happens next season? And the one after that? You think no man can be decent because you cannot make yourself believe decency is real. You think no one can be happy.” Her voice dropped to the register where she stopped measuring it.
“Because you are not. And you want everyone in the same dark room you have shut yourself in.”
“I am trying to keep you from—”
“You are trying to keep me from everything.” She did not raise her voice.
There was no need for it; the terrace was quiet enough, and so was she.
“From a man who may have been dishonest, from a man who may not have been… from the ordinary risks of an ordinary life. You are very accomplished at finding reasons why every person around you should stay at the same careful distance.” She paused.
“You despise yourself. And because of it, you have decided no one around you deserves any better.”
She picked up her glass.
“Annabelle.” He said her name at last, without the title, without any form of address at all, and she stopped with her hand not yet on the door.
“He is a coward,” Dominic said. Now, his voice was low and entirely without ornament.
“A man who runs at four in the morning runs in drawing rooms too. He will run from debt, and from appointments, and from anything that requires him to stand still and face something. You would have seen it eventually. That is why I could not let him near you.”
She stopped with her hand on the latch.
The drawing room was on the other side: warm and lit, full of the ordinary sounds of an evening proceeding entirely as planned.
She stood at the threshold with that last sentence still in her ears; not the account of Chesham, not the cowardice, not the appointment at Chalk Farm—but the word could. Not should. Not ought.
Could not.
She did not turn around. “Good night, Your Grace,” she said, and went through the door.