Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
He drew a breath. “I want—” he said.
But before he could say anything more, the door from the service corridor opened.
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Howell stepped into the hall with her hands folded. “I beg your pardon. I only wished to confirm that Her Grace’s apartments are in readiness, whenever she wishes to be shown up.”
Dominic looked at the housekeeper. His eyes did not come back to Annabelle.
“Now,” he said. “Show Her Grace upstairs.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
“And I’ll be in my study.” He said this to Mrs. Howell as well, and then he turned and crossed the hall toward the east corridor, and Annabelle watched the corner receive him and give nothing back.
The moment was effectively broken. She might never get him to tell her the words he’d just been about to say.
She followed Mrs. Howell up the stairs, deciding to store away those thoughts and focus on what was right in front of her.
“Your Grace,” Mrs. Howell said, opening a door, and the title made her flinch.
Of course, she had watched herself being entered into the register that morning and seen her name there in the vicar’s hand; she had understood, in the procedural way of ceremonies, what was now true.
But standing in an entrance hall with a man who had said two words and then walked away had a way of making the truth feel less settled than the ink suggested.
The duchess’s apartments were at the far end of the first floor, opposite the wing Dominic occupied.
Mrs. Howell opened the door and stood aside, and Annabelle stepped into a room that was large and tastefully furnished and contained, she observed at once, no personal objects of any kind.
Cream walls, gold drapes, a writing desk by the window, empty of everything.
A room maintained for use and never quite inhabited.
Her trunk had arrived ahead of her, open near the dressing room door. A young woman was bent over it and straightened at once when they entered.
“Your Grace.” A quick curtsy. “I’m Ruth, your lady’s maid. Mrs. Howell and I have been seeing to the arrangements.”
Annabelle had met Ruth briefly that morning, in the press of final preparations at Fairmont House; there had been too much else to manage for more than an exchange of names. She had a purposeful quality about her, attentive without hovering, and Annabelle was glad of it.
“Thank you, Ruth,” she said. “I won’t need much this evening.”
Mrs. Howell withdrew with a curtsy. Ruth went back to the trunk. Annabelle went to the window.
The street below was the same she had looked out at for months from the house next door, from a slightly different angle.
One of Lucien’s sitting room windows was still lit.
She found James by sound before she found him by sight: a flat, patient voice drifting from behind the library door. “…and this one is about wars, and this one is about ships. I think this one may be about both, because the picture has cannons on a ship.”
She knocked and pushed the door open. He was cross-legged on the floor with three books open around him and a fourth in his hands, tilted toward the window to catch the last of the afternoon light.
James looked up. “Annabelle.”
“You’ve found the library,” she said.
“Yes. It’s bigger than Uncle Dominic’s other library. I didn’t know he had two.”
“Neither did I.” She settled into the armchair nearest him, close enough to see his pages. “Has anyone shown you around?”
“Mrs. Howell. She has a very loud walk.” He said this as a report. He turned a page and looked up at her again. “Uncle Dominic said I should leave you to settle. But you’re settled.”
“I am,” she agreed.
Newton opened one eye, surveyed the situation, and closed it again.
“There are twenty rooms on this floor,” James told her. “Mrs. Howell told me because I asked.” He set the fourth book flat. “One of them is locked.”
Annabelle said nothing.
He looked up at her. “I know which one.”
“So do I,” she said.
He returned to his page without pressing further, and she did not know whether that was discretion or simply a new direction of thought; with James, she had learned, it was generally wiser to wait and see.
And so, she sat while he turned pages and the fire settled low in the grate.
After a while, James set down the ship book and cleared his throat.
“Have you by any chance seen the morning room?” he asked. With each word, his excitement climbed. “It has a painting of two horses on the south wall. I find it remarkable.”
Annabelle shook her head with a small laugh.
“Well, will you show it to me?” She asked, and James nodded.
So she followed him down the corridor to look at the horses, and both horses were very fine, and she told him so; and then he showed her the second sitting room, which had better light but was colder and smelled faintly of a pipe no one had smoked in some time; and then the small breakfast room adjoining the kitchen stair, where Mrs. Howell had arranged white flowers on the sideboard for no occasion she could identify, except that white flowers had been arranged in every room that morning and Mrs. Howell was thorough.
They were coming back along the first-floor corridor when she heard a door close below, and then footsteps crossing the entrance hall, quick and even.
When she looked down through the railing, a footman was moving toward the front door with a folded letter in hand, the wax seal still dark and wet.
She watched him go.
James had stopped beside her. “A letter,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
He considered this, then said that the brushwork on the foreleg of the horse on the left was interesting, and she should look at it again from a closer distance.
She let him lead her back down the corridor.
James appeared in the dining room doorway at a quarter past seven, two full minutes before Annabelle, and had already stopped in front of the table when she arrived.
“There are three settings,” he said to the footman nearest him.
“Yes, my lord. One for you, one for Her Grace, and one for His Grace.”
James looked at the table. “I’ve never had dinner with Uncle Dominic before.”
Those words made Annabelle pause, her eyes flying wide. She snapped her head to stare at the footman, but he had nothing useful to offer on this subject and promptly retreated.
Annabelle sat, making sure James sat beside her.
She was about to ask him what he’d meant by the words he’d just said when Dominic arrived, still in the coat he’d worn that morning, his cravat somewhat less ordered than it had been at noon.
But at least he had no papers with him. He glanced at the three settings, then once at James, before taking his seat.
“Why are you eating with us?” James asked him.
The guileless question made both of them freeze, and Annabelle glanced towards Dominic only to find him already looking her way, with eyes slightly wider than they normally are.
“It’s my table,” Dominic said, and Annabelle blinked at the uncharacteristic slight reddening of his cheeks.
It was so slight that it was almost impossible to note, but she caught it…and it made her pulse skip.
“You’ve never eaten here with me before.” James pressed with that innocent confusion that made Dominic clear his throat.
“I eat late, generally. My hours are different from yours.” He reached for his wine. “I didn’t want to disturb your routine.”
James blinked at him, then glanced once at Annabelle sitting beside him. “Your routine is different now?”
Dominic finally looked at him. “I see no reason to eat late when there’s company.”
James looked at Annabelle again, then back at Dominic. And then he picked up his spoon without another word.
Annabelle turned to him. “Would it suit you, James? Dinner together, the three of us, going forward?”
He looked up as though confirming the question was meant for him. “Yes,” he said, and returned to his soup.
The corners of his mouth turned up and stayed up.
She smiled at him. He kept his eyes on his bowl, but the expression did not leave his face.
They managed the first course without incident. Then James looked up from his plate with the air of a person who had been carrying a question for some time and had now arrived at its place in the order of things.
“Uncle Dominic,” he said.
Dominic looked up.
“What about the music room?”
Dominic set his fork down. The hand beside his plate went flat on the table. “We’ll have a piano brought in,” he said. “A different room. There are more than enough rooms in this house. We’ll find one.”
“Why not the music room?” James asked. “The music room is made for music.”
“Because this is simpler.” Dominic responded, an edge creeping into his tone.
James considered the answer again and obviously found it lacking because his brows drew down over his eyes. “Before, you said you don’t like the piano.”
At this, Dominic took in a breath and said, “I recall what I said.”
James blinked. “Oh. I thought you might have changed your mind. People change their minds.” He turned to Annabelle. “He should hear you play. After that he’ll like pianos. He should hear you.”
“He has heard me play,” she said, her gaze flicking once to him to find disapproval already deepening the grooves of his face.
“I have,” Dominic said, the words coming out a degree harder than they required, and he must have heard it too, because his jaw moved once after he’d said it, and then he picked his fork back up. “The subject is done with.”
James stared at his uncle. “When will the new piano come?”
“I’ll arrange it.”
But James was not satisfied. “When?”
The muscle at the corner of Dominic’s jaw moved again, tighter now. Annabelle put her fork down.
“James,” she said, “did anyone show you the garden before it got dark?”
He turned to her. “No.”
“It runs along the full south side of the house. There is a gate in the wall between this garden and the one at Fairmont House.” She folded her hands on the table. “Perhaps we can find Newton on the other side of that gate.”
James appeared satisfied that there was at least one explanation for the behavior. “Then, can Newton go through the gate tomorrow?”
“I’ll ask Mrs. Howell about the key in the morning.”
“Mrs. Howell has lots of keys,” James said.
“Then she’ll have this one too.”
Dominic had returned to his dinner. He kept his eyes on his plate, and he did not raise the subject of pianos again, and neither did James, and the rest of the dinner was quiet and, on the whole, rather better than Annabelle had anticipated.
Mrs. Howell appeared for James at eight o’clock on the mark, and James slid from his chair and folded his napkin with the attention of a person who had been told many times how it ought to be done.
He came around the table to Annabelle and stopped directly in front of her.
“Goodnight,” he said.
“Goodnight, James.”
He stood with his hands at his sides, looking at her face in a direct and unhurried manner, as though he were taking proper inventory.
“I’m glad you live here now,” he said. He said without preamble.
Her heart warmed, and she knew she had no clever response to that, so she didn’t try for one. “I am too,” she said.
He nodded once and went to the door. His footsteps moved up the stairs in the steady, reliable rhythm she had grown to know over the past months, and Mrs. Howell’s heavier tread followed.
She looked at the table. Dominic was already on his feet at the sideboard, his back turned.
“I have correspondence to attend to this evening,” he said. “I’ll be in my study.”
“Of course,” she said.
He left without looking at her.
After Annabelle went to her room, Ruth helped her out of the wedding gown, put her hair down, and withdrew at half past nine. Annabelle sat in the chair by the window in her nightgown and robe and looked at the dark street below.
Lucien’s window, which had been lit earlier, was dark now.
She told herself, quite firmly, that she had no reasonable expectations.
She had been telling herself this with some regularity since that damned evening, with varying degrees of success: that this was not a conventional marriage.
Dominic had not come to her house at midnight because he had decided he was in love with her, but because Lady Rosenhall had stood in a garden and told him what would happen if he did not.
She had no grounds for expecting him to come to her room tonight. Or any night, until they had arrived at some understanding of what they were to each other.
She should have asked. She hadn’t asked.
She got up and paced.
The room was large enough to make pacing possible: window to fireplace, fireplace to dressing room door, dressing room door back to window. She did this circuit twice, stopped at the window, looked at the street, and found it unhelpful, and then went and sat on the edge of the bed.
The ring was still warm on her finger. He had kept it against his chest all morning, and she had felt the warmth of it when he’d slid it on, and she did not know what to do with that information except to keep having it.
The clock on the mantelpiece marked eleven. Footsteps came down the corridor, and she lifted her head, and her hand tightened on the counterpane.
But the footsteps continued past her door without any change in their pace, moving on down the hall.
She sat, looking at the door.
He…he wasn’t coming.