Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
“Is the Duke of Fairmont at home?”
The footman looked at the card, and at him, and took longer over both than a footman ought. “I shall inquire, Your Grace.”
He was left standing in the hall. Not the morning room, not the library where he and Lucien had sat over the Whitmore papers a fortnight past. The hall, with his hat in his hands and the long-case clock beside him finishing its eleven strokes.
Dominic set the hat on the table and waited.
He had slept through the night for the first time in months and woken with Annabelle’s hair across his arm, and he had lain in the early grey and understood there was one piece of the wreckage he had not yet gone back for.
It stood eighty yards from his own front door.
He had dressed, eaten, and told her nothing except that he had a call to make. She had looked at him over her tea with her head at an angle he had learned not to trust and said only, “Give my regards, then.”
The footman returned. “His Grace will see you.”
The study door stood open at the end of the passage. Lucien was on his feet behind the desk with a letter in one hand, and when Dominic came in, he laid it face down on the blotter and stayed standing.
“Silverford.” The pause ran well past its natural length. “I confess I assumed my man had misread the card.”
“He read it correctly.”
“Evidently.” Lucien came around the desk as far as the fireplace and stopped there.
He offered neither a chair nor wine. On the floor by the fender, half under the coal scuttle, lay a small painted horse with one wheel missing, and Dominic looked at it while Lucien looked at him.
“Say what you came to say.”
Dominic had arranged it on the walk over. Standing in the room, he abandoned the arrangement.
“You were right to be angry,” he said. “You have been right since the morning you hit me in my own study. I want that said plainly before anything else. You deserved better from me. Annabelle deserved better from me. Every bit of your anger was earned, and I have spent months resenting you for it because resenting you was easier than agreeing with you.”
Lucien’s jaw shifted. He set his forearm along the mantel.
“That is handsomely put.” His voice stayed flat. “It changes nothing about what happened to her.”
“No,” Dominic said. “It doesn’t.”
“You compromised my sister in a garden with half the ton in earshot. And by every account that reached me—and accounts did reach me—you installed her in your house like a guest of long standing and kept your distance from her.” He had not raised his voice at any point, which landed harder than shouting; Dominic had heard him shout exactly once, and it had cost less to stand under.
“Elinor sat with her more than once in those weeks. Do you know what my wife observed?”
“I can guess.”
“That Annabelle laughed in all the right places, asked after Charlotte, and never once said your name unless someone else had said it first.”
Dominic took that standing. There was no chair in the room he wanted.
“I handled it badly from the beginning,” he said.
“The garden. The wedding. Every week that followed. You asked me at White’s how she settled, and I gave you the household inventory, the lessons, the boy, how well she was managing, because the inventory was true and reciting it saved me from answering the question you had actually asked. You knew it. I watched you know it.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ll answer it.” He held Lucien’s eyes. “I love her.”
The coals shifted in the grate. Lucien did not move.
“Completely. I have loved her a great deal longer than I was willing to admit, and I let her live in my own house, believing otherwise, because I was terrified of ruining her life. You were never the thing I feared, Lucien. I have never once believed myself capable of being a good husband. Or a father. Every model I was given taught the opposite lesson, and you knew my father’s reputation well enough to guess at the curriculum.
I decided years ago that the decent thing was never to attempt it.
When I found it attempted anyway, I did what I have always done.
” His voice came out level, and he kept it there.
“I put a door between myself and the thing I could not afford to lose.”
Lucien had gone still against the mantel. When he spoke, the edge had come off his voice, though none of the weight had.
“I’ll not argue the quality of your models,” he said. “But fear does not excuse hurting people. It never has. My sister did not marry your father. She married you.”
“I know it. Fear explains the cowardice; it excuses none of it. That is why I am standing in your study instead of sitting at my club constructing reasons not to be. I am finished running. I have told her everything, and I mean everything, and I intend to spend whatever time it requires repairing what my caution broke. I came to say so to your face, because you are her brother.” He paused.
“And because for these past few years, you’ve been the nearest thing I had to one of my own. ”
Lucien looked at him. He pushed off the mantel, crossed to the window, and stood with his back to the room, hands clasped behind him.
Dominic let him have the time. Out in the square, a coster was crying his wares; a carriage went past, and its sound faded up toward the park; the clock in the hall ticked through the better part of a minute.
Dominic did not sit, and did not fill it.
When Lucien turned around, he had the look of a man who had finished an accounting.
“One question.” He came back to the desk and stood behind his chair with both hands on it. “Do you intend, truly, to spend the rest of your life making her happy?”
“I do.”
The answer was out before the question had fully finished. Lucien studied him a while longer. The breath he let out was long and audible, and he drew back the chair and sat down in it properly at last, his shoulders coming down an inch as he leaned into the leather.
The knock came before either of them had found the next thing to say.
“Are you finished in there,” Annabelle’s voice arrived through the wood, “or shall I send in tea and a surgeon?”
Lucien’s eyebrows went up at Dominic.
“She was at breakfast when I left,” Dominic said. “I told her nothing.”
“She has never in her life needed telling.” Lucien raised his voice. “Come in, Annabelle.”
She came in dressed for walking, bonnet ribbons already loose at her throat, and stopped two steps inside the door. She looked at Lucien seated behind his desk, and at Dominic upright on the carpet, and the corner of her mouth curved.
“No blood,” she said. “I’m encouraged.”
“You followed him,” Lucien said.
“I finished my chocolate first. He put on his good coat for a Tuesday morning and told Mrs. Howell he would be out an hour.” She untied the bonnet and set it on the shelf of books nearest the door as though the shelf had been installed for the purpose.
“There is exactly one call in London fitting that description.”
Lucien watched her do it. “Since you’re here.” He set both hands flat on the desk. “Have you forgiven him?”
The lightness went out of the room. She looked at Dominic while she answered her brother. “Yes.”
“You have?”
“Yes, Lucien.” She turned to face him fully.
“I love him. I have loved him for longer than either of us managed to say aloud, which I begin to think is a failing of the whole family. And he has shown me, not told me, shown me, that he will be there. This past week, he has done things that cost him more than I am able to explain to you, and he did them unasked. He did them for me and for James.” Her chin came up.
“I am not forgiving him to keep the peace. I am forgiving him because he has earned it.”
Lucien looked at his sister through all of it without interrupting. Whatever ledger he was keeping, he closed it; he rose, came around the desk, and stopped in front of Dominic with a yard of carpet between them.
“Then hear this while she is standing in the room,” he said. “If you hurt her again, no friendship will save you. Nothing will.”
Dominic felt the pull at the corner of his own mouth and did not fight it entirely. “That sounds fair.”
Lucien put out his hand. Dominic took it, and the grip on the other end was hard enough to mean what it meant.
“Then you have my blessing,” Lucien said. “For whatever a blessing is worth arriving this long after the wedding.”
“It is worth a great deal,” Annabelle said. Her voice caught on it, and she crossed the carpet and kissed her brother’s cheek, and he suffered it in the manner of a man who would have been wounded had she not. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” Lucien went to the side table, where the decanters stood in a row, and poured Madeira into three glasses without asking anyone whether eleven in the morning was an hour for it.
He handed them round. “Elinor will have this out of me before your hats are on, and then you will both be dining here Thursday, whether you consent or not. Bring James. Charlotte has learned a new word and requires an audience.”
“What word?” Annabelle asked.
“No.” Lucien lifted his glass an inch. “She deploys it with tremendous range.” He looked at the pair of them over the rim. “To the matched pair of fools.”
“Absolute matched pair,” Annabelle said. “That was the phrase. I remember it distinctly.”
“I stand by every syllable.” He drank, and set the glass down, and for the first time since the door had opened that morning, he looked at Dominic without weighing anything at all. “Go home, Silverford. You’ve a house to fill.”
Annabelle retrieved her bonnet and took Dominic’s arm in the hall, and they came out onto the step into a street going about its ordinary Tuesday, and she waited until the door had closed behind them before she spoke.
“You might have woken me.”
“You’d have insisted on coming.”
“I did come.”
“You’d have insisted on coming in.”
She considered this with her eyes ahead, down the eighty yards of pavement toward their own door. “That’s true,” she conceded. “And it needed to be the two of you.” Her hand tightened briefly on his arm. “Was it terrible?”
“It was owed.” He walked a few paces with the morning cold on his face and the Madeira still warm behind his sternum. “He asked whether I intend to spend the rest of my life making you happy.”
“And you said?”
“I said yes before he had finished the sentence.”
“Good,” she said. “Because your first opportunity begins this evening. James made an announcement at breakfast. You are to have your first lesson. I am to teach; he intends to supervise.”
Dominic stopped on the pavement outside his own railings.
“Then I had better learn my E from my F before six o’clock,” he said, and opened the gate for her.