Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
“You miserable son of a—”
The door didn’t open so much as detonate against the wall, the inkstand on Dominic’s desk ringing with the impact, and Lucien was across the room before the latch had finished rattling.
The fist caught Dominic high on the cheekbone before he’d fully risen from his chair, knocking him back a step into the desk’s corner.
Papers slid to the floor. He tasted copper almost at once, sharp at the side of his mouth.
He had expected this. Had turned it over more times than the matter deserved in the days since the letter went to Fairmont, weighing what shape Lucien’s fury would take when it finally arrived on his doorstep.
He had settled, each time, on the same conclusion: that absorbing the first punch without answering it was a far better outcome for both of them.
Better than the version of this conversation that ended with pistols at dawn. Better than the version with one of them not walking away from a field outside town.
So he didn’t raise his hands. He let his weight settle back onto his heels and looked at his friend, and said nothing.
“Lucien!” Annabelle’s voice came from the corridor, and behind it, Elinor’s, both women crossing the threshold at a run.
The second blow landed before either of them reached him, glancing off his jaw and turning his head hard to the side. His vision whited at the edges, and when it cleared, Lucien’s fist was already drawing back for a third.
This one he caught.
He closed his hand around his friend’s wrist mid-swing, more reflex than decision, and held it there, the two of them locked together with Lucien’s knuckles trembling an inch from his face.
“Hit me again if it helps,” Dominic said, steadier than he felt, which was something. “I’ll stand here as long as you need me to.”
“Don’t you dare be noble about this!” Lucien wrenched his arm free and shoved him back with both hands flat against his chest. “You compromised her in a garden. My sister! In a garden, like she was some opera girl you’d no further use for once the dance was done—”
“Lucien, that is quite enough.” Elinor had hold of his sleeve now, both hands, pulling without much visible effect.
“It is not enough until I say it’s enough!” He shook her off, then he came at Dominic again.
This time, Annabelle moved faster than either of them.
“Stop!”
She put herself directly between her brother and Dominic’s chest, one palm flat against Lucien’s coat, the other raised toward Dominic as if she meant to hold them both back by will alone.
“Stop.” Her voice cracked across the room, louder than Dominic had heard it in all the months he’d known her. “Look at him, Lucien. He isn’t fighting you…he hasn’t fought you once. What is the use in this?”
“Get out of the way, Annabelle.”
“No.”
Lucien’s color was high, his collar gone crooked, a vein standing at his temple that Dominic had genuinely never seen before.
“You.” His attention swung to his sister, and Dominic watched the fury in Lucien’s face curdle into grief. “I had to learn this from Lady Rosenhall. Lady Rosenhall, of all people!”
“I asked her not to send the letter.”
“That is not the same as telling me yourself.”
“I didn’t have time! She sent it before I could stop her, before I could write you myself.”
Lucien went quiet, and his shoulders came down by an inch. He looked at her hand still pressed against his coat, then at her face, and something in the set of his mouth gave way.
“You are a fool,” he said, gentler now. “Both of you. An absolute, matched pair of fools.”
Annabelle’s shoulders sank, and Dominic swore he could see her eyes glimmer with tears.
She doesn’t deserve his words.
His stomach sank. Then fury pumped through the blood in his veins. He was angry at Lucien. Yes, Dominic had done an abominable thing, but Annabelle… She didn’t deserve this.
“Lucien,” he gritted out in response, trying to soothe the anger in his blood.
Lucien glared at him.
“Lucien… Please,” Elinor came to stand at his side and put her hand through his arm.
The last of the fight went out of Lucien’s shoulders the way a tide goes out, slow and complete, leaving the sand changed once it’s gone.
Lucien looked at Dominic properly now, his jaw still working, but no further blows came. “You’ll see to a special license,” he said. “Today, if it can be managed. I’ll not have my sister standing about for banns to be read three Sundays running while half of London counts on its fingers.”
“I already have one.”
Lucien went still. He studied him, weighing this the way he weighed an estate ledger that had come out one column too clean. “Already.”
“Two days ago.” Dominic touched the corner of his mouth, and his fingers came away red. “I went to Doctors’ Commons the morning after I called at Fairmont House. I wasn’t waiting on your permission to do right by her.”
Lucien’s eyebrows lifted. He said nothing further on the subject, which from Lucien constituted high praise.
“A week, then,” he said. “We’ll have you wed by Thursday next.”
“A week is enough time to manage the settlements properly.”
“Good.”
Dominic exhaled slowly.
No glove had been thrown. No seconds would be named. Whatever the morning had cost him in blood at the corner of his mouth, it was a price he’d have paid three times over rather than stand across a field from Lucien at dawn.
It was the creak on the staircase outside the study that broke what was left of the quiet.
Annabelle’s head turned first. Through the open door, on the landing above the hall, a small shape had gone still against the banister rails the moment the floorboard gave him away.
James peered down through the gap in the spindles.
“James.” Annabelle’s voice gentled at once. “Come down. It’s only us.”
He came down one stair at a time, his eyes moving across the room and cataloging each person in it before he reached the bottom. He stopped a few feet from Annabelle.
“Annabelle,” he said to her, as though he were just meeting her for the first time.
“James.” She replied with a smile.
He turned his head and considered the rest of the room with the same care. “Uncle Dominic.” A pause while his gaze caught on the cut at Dominic’s mouth, but he didn’t ask about it; moving on as though. “Your Graces.”
“James,” Elinor said, and crouched a little to bring herself nearer his height. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Newton is a very nice cat,” James told her. “He sleeps on my chair when I practice, and he doesn’t mind the wrong notes.”
Her mouth curved, and the corners of her eyes creased. “I’m glad to hear it. He used to be choosy about whose lap he’d allow.”
“He allows mine.” James said this as an established fact requiring no further defense, and turned back to Annabelle.
He studied her, his head tilted at the angle he used whenever he was working toward a question and meant to reach it in his own time.
“Are you really going to marry my uncle?”
Dominic stilled.
“Yes… I am,” Annabelle said slowly.
James considered this with the same gravity he gave a difficult passage of music, then nodded once, as if a sum had come out correctly. “That’s good news. You’re very nice.” A shorter pause. “Will you still teach me the piano?”
“Of course I will, darling. We’ll find a way,” Annabelle said, glancing at him once, brief and unreadable, before James spoke again.
“You could teach me here,” James said. “Now that Annabelle is going to live here too.” He looked at Dominic directly, the way he rarely managed to look at anyone for more than a second or two. “Will you unlock the music room? Since Annabelle is going to be your wife.”
The room went very quiet.
Dominic felt the old door in his mind the way he always did when someone said the words aloud.
Not this. Not now.
Right then, Dominic realized that Lucien was watching him now with an entirely different attention than he’d brought through the door an hour ago. Annabelle’s eyes were on him too, careful, waiting.
“That isn’t a conversation for now, James.”
“Why not?” James asked, and his eyes stayed fixed on Dominic’s face, patient, unblinking, the way they did whenever a sum hadn’t balanced, and he meant to sit there until someone explained to him why.
But she did not get the chance to give him an answer because her brother said, “We’re leaving.”
Lucien said it to the room rather than to Annabelle, his hat already retrieved from the chair where he’d dropped it on the way in.
He did not look at Dominic or James. He simply crossed to Elinor and offered her his arm.
When he finally looked at Annabelle, it was a simple look that had just one command: closed as a shutter.
She went.
There was nothing else to do.
Lady Rosenhall was on her feet before the parlor door had finished opening.
Her embroidery frame was already on the side table, Helena rising behind her with a book still open in her hand, and the two of them stood in the parlor doorway with the concentrated attention of people who had been listening for footsteps for some time.
“Your Grace,” Lady Rosenhall came forward. “I am very glad you are come.”
“Lady Rosenhall.” Lucien took her hand and inclined his head with the full formal address, which he generally saved for occasions requiring it.
“I want to thank you. For writing. For being here when you were needed.” He held her hand a moment longer than courtesy required.
“You have done considerably more than I had any right to expect.”
Lady Rosenhall’s chin lifted. Her hand closed briefly around his before releasing it. “I did only what your family was owed.”
“It was more than that.” He released her and straightened and looked between her and Helena with the deliberate steadiness of a man who has decided what he means to say and will say it plainly.
“There will be a wedding. My sister and… Silverford. Next week. We have the license. We’ll have the settlements in order by tomorrow.
” He paused. “I hope you will both stay until it is done. We’ll want familiar faces, and I suspect Annabelle will want yours. ”
Lady Rosenhall pressed her fingers briefly to her collarbone. “We would not dream of being elsewhere.”
Helena looked at Annabelle. Annabelle looked at the pattern on the carpet runner and found it unexpectedly absorbing.
“Good,” Lucien said. “Then that’s settled.” He bent to kiss Elinor’s cheek, brief and distracted, the gesture of a man finishing one task before moving to the next. “I need an hour.”
“Lucien.” Annabelle stepped forward. “Please. I only want a few minutes.”
He stopped. He did not turn immediately. She watched the set of his shoulders, the way they held for a moment before he came around to face her.
“Not tonight,” he said.
“When, then?”
“When I’ve decided what it is I want to say to you.”
She held his gaze, and he did not look away. Then, without another word, he turned and went up the stairs without hurrying, one hand on the rail, and the sound of his footsteps moved along the corridor above until a door closed quietly and the house went still.
Elinor squeezed Annabelle’s arm once, her fingers firm through the sleeve.
“He’ll come round,” she said, low. “I’ll speak to him. He always needs the night, first.”
She looked at Annabelle’s face, held it for a moment, then gave her arm a final press and went after her husband.
Lady Rosenhall made a small, dignified production of remembering something she needed from her room. Helena waited until her footsteps had gone fully up the stairs before she moved.
“Come on,” she said.
As soon as they entered her chambers, Helena shut the door behind them and leaned against it.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Say it.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Yes, you do.”
“You’re angry,” Helena said.
“I am angry.” It surprised her how clean that sounded. “And I don’t entirely know if I have the right to be. He is going to marry me, but he didn’t have to. But he obtained a license, and I—” She stopped, her voice faltering.
“Say it,” Helena said.
“I don’t know what right by me even means to him.” She turned. “I don’t know if I am a debt he’s settling or a…”
She stopped herself again, trailing off. The end of that sentence was too much to say plainly, in this room, with six days until the wedding.
“Annabelle.” Helena’s voice dropped. “What do you feel? Not what he feels. What do you feel?”
Annabelle looked at the glass, her own face looking back at her, pale and uncharacteristically uncertain.
There were a number of things she could say that were true. She could say she was angry, which she was. Or that she was frightened, which was also true. She could also say she did not know what to expect from Thursday, or from the days that followed it; all of those things were true.
What she did not say was the other true thing…he was the one who made the rest of it considerably worse: she had wanted him to come to her. She had wanted him to say what he had said in that garden in the daylight, without an audience requiring it of him.
She had wanted to be chosen, not worked around.
“Ask him,” Helena said. She said it the way she said everything, she had already finished deciding. “Before the wedding, for yourself. You deserve to know what you’re walking into.”
“And if the answer…” Annabelle trailed off, unable to get herself to finish the words.
“If the answer is wrong, you’ll know. And knowing is better than going in wondering.” Helena finished for her, leaving Annabelle nowhere to hide behind.
Annabelle looked at the window for a long moment before glancing back at Helena with Newton resettled in her lap.
Six days.
She had six days to decide whether she was brave enough to ask the question, and brave enough to receive whatever came back.