Chapter 14
Tristan was already on the steps.
Henry had sent word from the last coaching inn. He had been entirely clear about the hour and the day. And yet there was Tristan, arms folded, wearing an expression that said he had received an interesting letter and had spent the intervening hours composing questions.
The carriage had barely stopped rolling when Tristan came down.
“Four days,” he said. “I expected three.”
“The road north of Grantham,” Henry said.
“Mm.” Tristan extended his hand. Henry took it.
The handshake held a beat longer than usual, and then Tristan clapped him once on the shoulder, firm and brief, which was as close to an embrace as either of them generally managed.
He stepped back, looked at Henry for a moment with those assessing eyes, and then turned.
Henry turned back to the carriage to help Charlotte alight.
“Duchess of Sappherton.” Tristan’s entire manner shifted—not into formality, but warmer and genuinely meant. “Welcome to Evermere. I am glad you are here.”
Henry opened his mouth to complete the introduction.
He did not get the chance.
“Your Grace,” Charlotte said, with a small, composed smile. “My husband has spoken of you.”
“Has he?” Tristan looked delighted. “Nothing accurate, I hope.”
“Nothing incriminating.”
“Then he has shown considerable restraint.” He turned to Henry. “I like her already.”
Henry did not comment on this. He was already looking toward Ian, who had descended last and was now standing on the gravel drive.
Tristan looked down at Ian. “You must be Master Ian Drummond.”
Ian said nothing. He looked at Tristan the way he had once looked at Henry from the stable roof, measuring every detail.
A footman appeared at the precise moment, tray in hand, and held it toward Ian. On it were biscuits.
Ian looked at the biscuits. Then at Tristan. Then back at the biscuit. He took it.
Tristan said quietly, “I had a feeling about that.”
Then Lavinia, Tristan’s wife, the Duchess of Evermere, appeared in the doorway, dressed in an emerald green velvet dress and a cream shawl.
She was a tall, graceful woman with bright blue eyes and dark hair.
She took one look at the group standing on the steps in the cold afternoon air and said, “Absolutely not,” and descended with a hand extended toward Charlotte’s elbow and the other reaching for Ian.
“Poor dears. You have been in a carriage for three days. I have tea waiting inside and a fire that has been burning for an hour,” Lavinia said, steering Charlotte and Ian toward the door.
“I will not have you standing in the cold while they do whatever it is they are about to do.” She looked down at Ian.
“Are you enjoying your biscuit, my dear?”
Ian smiled up at her and nodded.
“I have had the blue room prepared,” she said to Charlotte. “It has a fine view, though you will not care about the view until tomorrow at the earliest—”
The door closed behind them.
“Come,” Tristan said. “The library.”
The fire was already built up. Two glasses of brandy sat on the side table, which meant Tristan had been expecting this conversation and had made arrangements. Henry sat. Tristan sat across from him, crossed one ankle over his knee, and waited.
He was incredibly good at waiting. Henry had always found it irritating.
“Scotland,” Henry said, and began.
He gave Tristan the account in order: Charlotte’s situation, the carriage, the coaching inn, the discovery at Drummond Hall, Ian on the roof. The solicitor’s documents. The deed of guardianship, the London clause, the problem it created. The marriage as the resolution.
He kept it brief. The facts were the facts. They arranged themselves neatly.
“Right,” Tristan said, when he had finished.
Henry picked up the brandy.
“How precisely did she come to be in your carriage?” Tristan said.
“She had stowed away.”
“Stowed away.”
“In a valet’s coat. She was disguised.”
Tristan absorbed this. “And you discovered the disguise—”
“Immediately.”
“I see.” Tristan paused. “Why did you decide to help her?”
“Have you known me to leave a lady stranded?”
“No, but you would not have risked your reputation.”
Henry sighed. “I felt sorry for her when I learned her father planned to give her away to Redmont.”
Tristan nodded. “Ah, so you rescued her from Redmont.”
“Perhaps.”
“And what precisely did the solicitor say about the guardianship?” Tristan asked. “The full extent of it.”
“Ian must reside at my primary household. The terms are clear and Chancery has the document.”
“And at what point,” Tristan said pleasantly, “did you determine that marriage was the most practical solution available?”
Henry set the glass down. “When the alternatives were examined and found insufficient.”
“What were the alternatives?”
“Leaving her in Scotland. Bringing her to London as a governess. Neither was viable.”
“And so you proposed.”
“Yes.”
“In the library at Drummond Hall.”
“Yes.”
“After knowing her for—”
“Ten days.” Henry held Tristan’s gaze. “The duration is not relevant.”
Tristan looked at him. “Henry. You have just described your wife of four days as a solution to a logistical problem.”
“I described the marriage as a solution to a logistical problem. There is a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Yes.”
Tristan picked up his own glass. He took a single sip and set it back down. “I noticed something when you arrived earlier.”
Henry waited.
“Your gaze followed your wife from the carriage to the door.”
“I was ensuring she had managed the steps.”
“Lavinia was with her.”
“It had been a long journey.”
“Henry.”
“You are projecting,” Henry said.
“I am observing,” Tristan said. “There is, as you have noted, a difference.”
Henry looked at the fire.
“In my experience,” Tristan said, “men who are entirely indifferent to a woman do not track her movements across a drive with the attention you gave her between the carriage door and the front step.”
“I was being attentive to a guest.”
“She is your wife.”
“All the more reason.”
Tristan smiled. It was not a triumphant smile. It was something more patient and considerably more annoying.
They had had versions of this argument before. Henry knew exactly how it ended. It ended with him declining to concede a single point and Tristan being, after sufficient time had passed, entirely right.
He picked up the brandy.
“Tell me about Ian,” Tristan said. He uncrossed his ankle and leaned forward, and the expression on his face shifted into something more genuine. “Of course. Is he—”
“He is managing,” Henry said. “Charlotte has been good for him.”
Tristan’s expression did not change. He simply looked at Henry and said nothing for a moment.
Henry gazed at the fire and wished, not for the first time, that his oldest friend was slightly less perceptive.
“Good,” Tristan said. “That is very good.”
He did not say anything else. He did not need to.
Lavinia poured tea the way she apparently did everything—without asking whether you wanted it, on the grounds that you clearly did.
“Sit,” she said, and gestured at the chair nearest the fire, which was large and soft and precisely right after three days in a carriage. Charlotte sat. A cup appeared in her hands.
“Now.” Lavinia settled across from her and tucked her feet up in a way that suggested she had no intention of standing on ceremony. “Tell me about the journey. All of it, not the version you give people you don’t know yet.”
Charlotte looked at her over the rim of her cup. “That is a great deal of faith to extend to someone you met an hour ago.”
“Twenty minutes,” Lavinia said. “And I have been told I am an excellent judge of character. Possibly by myself, but the observation stands.” She tilted her head. “Well?”
Charlotte told her. The journey, the coach stops, Ian on the stable roof. The broken soldiers. The woods at midnight. She included the parts that were strange and she included the parts she had not yet made sense of, because Lavinia was listening.
“Scotland suits you,” Lavinia said, when she had finished.
“Scotland was rather forced upon me.”
“Most things that suit us are.” Lavinia refilled her cup without being asked. “And Ian? Is he—better?”
“Better than he was. Still—” Charlotte stopped. “He knows something is wrong and he is managing it by deciding not to know it. That is the best way I can describe it.”
“Children are remarkable at that.”
“Adults also.”
Lavinia smiled. “Also.” She set down the teapot. “And how are you finding married life? You have had—what, five days of it?”
“Four.”
“Four days of it, then.”
Charlotte considered how to answer. “It is rather like learning the rules of a game while playing it,” she said. “You can see the board and the pieces, but the strategy is entirely unclear.”
“And your husband?”
“Keeps his moves guarded.”
Lavinia nodded once. She turned her cup between her hands, and Charlotte sensed that she was choosing between several things to say and selecting the most useful.
“I have watched Henry Kingswell across a great many dinners and social occasions,” Lavinia said.
“For years. And I will tell you something that is not a comfort, so please do not receive it as one.” She met Charlotte’s eyes.
“His actions are consistently well ahead of his words. Sometimes by days. Sometimes by considerably longer. He will not tell you what he is thinking. He will not tell you how he feels about a thing. But he will do things. Watch what he does.” She paused.
“That is not a reassurance. It is simply how he is put together.”
Charlotte sat with that for a moment.
It was not a reassurance. It was more useful than a reassurance. It was a framework.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Do not thank me yet,” Lavinia said.
* * *
At dinner, Lavinia sat her stepdaughter Sophia beside Charlotte and Ian beside Henry. The meal was warm and abundant and entirely without the formality that might have made the evening stiff.
Sophia was sixteen and watched everything with careful eyes. She would ask Charlotte one question about Scotland and then listen to the answer with genuine attention, which Charlotte found immediately endearing.
Ian was on a cushion to Henry’s left, because the chair was too large and Henry had simply reached for a cushion from the sideboard without comment and placed it there. Ian had accepted this arrangement with dignity and was currently working through a second helping of roasted chicken.
“The wine,” Henry said to no one in particular, “is the clearest evidence I have yet encountered that Tristan’s cellar is managed by someone other than Tristan.”
Tristan laughed. “I will pass your gratitude along to my steward.”
“It was not gratitude. It was an observation about delegation.”
“A distinction I choose to ignore.” Tristan raised his glass.
Charlotte picked up her own. “It does rather suggest,” she said, without looking up from her plate, “that the quality of any enterprise improves when the person nominally in charge of it is kept at a remove.”
There was a beat of silence. Charlotte caught Henry staring at her, his expression momentarily stripped of its usual administrative severity, replaced by a raw, unguarded intensity that made her breath catch.
Tristan laughed again, but he did not look at Henry.
The conversation moved on. Sophia asked Ian about Scotland.
Ian answered as though he considered himself an expert on the subject, which he was, and Sophia listened with the same careful attention she had given Charlotte.
Lavinia asked Henry something about London timing that Charlotte did not entirely follow, and Henry answered it in three sentences, and the evening moved.
But Charlotte was assembling.
She had done it on the road, without knowing she was doing it. A remark here, a silence there, the way he held a letter he had already decided to close. The laughing in the garden, unexpected and genuine, there and then gone. The cushion, placed without comment.
Henry had inherited the Dukedom at twenty-two, Lavinia had mentioned, in passing, in the drawing room.
Then, there was the cousin in Scotland who had written every month, Nathan Drummond.
She had gathered that Henry had sent quarterly estate summaries in return, which told her a great deal about both men.
A man who sent estate summaries in response to letters was a man who did not know how to write the other kind.
She had been so consumed with her own situation—the escape, the relief, the uncertainty still waiting in London like an unpaid debt—that she had not fully turned and looked at his.
She looked at it now.
She watched Henry say something to Ian that made Ian sit up straighter with the expression of a child given a responsibility. Henry turned back to Tristan.
She looked down at her plate.
A footman appeared at Henry’s elbow. He held a small, folded note on a salver.
Henry took it. He read it in the time it took Charlotte to set down her fork.
His expression did not change. That was the problem. It was entirely still; in the way it went still only when something required controlling.
He folded the note. He set it beside his plate.
He did not look at Charlotte. He looked at Tristan and said something easy and light about the second course, and Tristan responded in kind.
Charlotte watched Henry reach for his wine. His hand was steady.
She picked up her fork. She did not taste whatever she was eating.
What was in that note?
She did not ask.
She sat at the warm table, in the easy light, in the comfortable company of people who had been kind to her, and she watched her husband’s face from the corner of her eye and she waited.
She knew, with the particular certainty that had yet to fail her, that whatever the note had said, it was not good.