Chapter 32
“Your Grace, the left cuff is unbuttoned.”
James stood beside the dressing table, bleary-eyed and suppressing a yawn. It was half past four in the morning, and the footman had answered Evander’s bell with the resigned obedience of a servant who had been roused before dawn three times this week and had stopped expecting an explanation.
Evander looked down. James was right. The left cuff hung open, and the right one was buttoned to the wrong hole. He had been dressing himself since he was twelve years old, and he could not manage a shirt cuff.
“Thank you, James. That will be all.”
“Shall I send for coffee, Your Grace?”
“No. Go back to bed.”
James bowed and retreated, closing the door with the careful quiet of a man who understood that four-thirty in the morning was not a time for questions. Evander fixed his cuffs, tied his cravat by feel rather than by the mirror, and sat on the edge of his bed.
Nearly a fortnight. Twelve days since Mary stood in this room and told him she could not accept his offer.
Twelve days since she pushed him away because he could not give her his heart.
Twelve nights of lying awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling, listening for her footsteps in the corridor and hearing nothing, because Mary had stopped walking past his door.
She had stopped walking past his door. The absence registered as a sound louder than any footstep.
Each morning, he descended to the dining room and found her plate already cleared, her teacup rinsed, her chair pushed in.
She had taken to eating at six, before the rest of the household stirred, and by the time Evander arrived, the only evidence of her presence was the faint warmth on the coffeepot and the lavender scent that lingered in the air.
He had tried, once, to beat her there. He arrived at a quarter to six and sat with his coffee and waited. At ten past six, Harding appeared with a note on a tray.
I had breakfast in the nursery this morning. M.
The single letter. The same careful handwriting. The politeness of a woman who had drawn a line and would not cross it.
Evander had drunk his coffee alone and stared at the note and understood, with perfect clarity, that the distance he had cultivated for seven weeks had reversed direction. He was no longer the one retreating. Mary was.
And it was unbearable.
He passed her in the corridor outside the library that afternoon. She carried a stack of Charlotte’s correspondence and walked with her eyes forward, and when she saw him, she adjusted her path to the far wall without breaking stride.
“Good afternoon,” she said. Polite. Steady. A voice designed to carry no warmth and leave no opening.
“Good afternoon.” Evander flattened himself against the opposite wall to let her pass. Their shoulders cleared each other by six inches, and the air between them was charged, and he opened his mouth to say something, anything, and she was past him before the words arrived.
He stood in the corridor and watched her walk away, and pressed his hand against the wall where the plaster still held the warmth of her passing.
That evening, he heard her singing to Tommy through the nursery door.
A melody he recognized from the early weeks, the one she had told him that her mother had sung to them as children.
Her voice carried through the wood, low and steady, and Evander stood in the dark corridor and listened, and the longing in his chest expanded until his ribs ached.
He could knock. He could open the door and walk in and sit in the rocking chair beside her and tell her everything Richard and Lucrezia and Quentin and the whole stubborn, beating world had been trying to make him say for weeks.
He raised his fist to knock. He lowered it. He walked to his room, closed the door, and sat in the dark and hated himself with a thoroughness his father would have admired.
“You look like death.”
Richard handed Evander a glass of whisky as he entered Quentin’s drawing room. The fire was roaring, the lamps were bright, and the atmosphere was the exact opposite of Evander’s state of mind.
Quentin sprawled across a chaise with his jacket off, his sleeves rolled, a glass in his hand, and a grin on his face. William sat in the armchair opposite, his cheeks flushed, his cravat loosened, already two drinks into an evening that clearly intended to go further.
“You came.” Quentin raised his glass. “I told Richard you would not, and I am delighted to be wrong.”
“William is leaving for France in three days.” Evander took the whisky. “I wasn’t going to miss this.”
“Sit down, then. Stop looming. You are making the furniture nervous.”
Evander sat. The whisky was good. He took a careful sip, measured and controlled, the way he took every drink, one glass and no more.
William leaned forward. “Your Grace, I wanted to say, once more, how grateful Charlotte and I are for everything you have done. The apartment, the university position, the passage. It is more than we could have dreamed.”
“You have thanked me enough, Harcourt. Another word and I will rescind the offer.”
William smiled. “Charlotte warned me you would say that. She told me to thank you anyway.”
“Charlotte is correct more often than is convenient.” Evander glanced at Richard, who sat beside the fire with a relaxed ease Evander had not seen on his brother’s face in months.
The tension was gone. The guilt remained; Evander could see it in quiet moments, but the crushing weight of it had lifted, and what emerged was closer to the Richard of before. Warmer. Lighter.
Quentin refilled William’s glass and raised his own. “To France. To Paris. To a life where no one knows your name, and no one cares about your scandal. More importantly, the wine is better than anything this miserable island has ever produced.”
They drank. The conversation turned to the apartment Evander had leased near the Sorbonne, to the colleagues William would meet at the university, to the neighborhood Charlotte had chosen from a map and declared perfect based on the proximity of a patisserie.
Richard described Tommy’s latest feat, rolling from his back to his stomach, which had caused Mary to applaud and Mrs. Bridwell to declare him a prodigy.
Mary’s name landed in the room like a stone in still water. Evander felt it. Quentin saw it. Richard, who had grown more perceptive in his five months of exile than in the previous twenty-eight years of his life, read the silence that followed and set down his glass.
“What happened?” Richard asked.
“Nothing happened.”
“Evander.”
“Nothing happened, Richard. Leave it.”
Quentin uncrossed his legs. “You realize that saying ‘leave it’ to three men who have known you for a cumulative total of sixty years is the equivalent of hanging a sign that reads ‘please inquire further.’”
Evander stared into his whisky. The fire popped. The three men waited. William, to his credit, occupied himself with studying the ceiling.
“I made her an offer,” Evander said. The words tasted like ash. “A child. A baby of her own. I told her I would help raise it, provide for it, and be present. But I could not be the husband she wanted.”
Quentin’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. Richard’s expression went very still.
“She came to my room to accept.” Evander’s voice was flat.
Recounting the facts. Managing the information.
Treating the worst moment of his life like an estate report.
“And I held her, and I kissed her, and she stopped me. She told me she would not accept a child without a marriage. A real marriage. With everything that entails.” He took a drink. “She left. I let her go.”
The room was quiet for a long time.
“You kissed her,” Richard said.
“That is not the point.”
“That is entirely the point. You kissed her. You offered her a child without offering yourself. Those are not the actions of a man who feels nothing, Evander. Those are the actions of a man who feels everything and is terrified of admitting it.”
Evander said nothing. Richard leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.
“No love is perfect.” Richard’s voice was quiet and sure.
“I spent five months hiding in a cottage because I believed the mess I had made was too large to fix. Charlotte spent five months hiding because she believed the shame was too great to face. We were both wrong. The mess was fixable. The shame was survivable. The only thing that was not survivable was the hiding.”
“Richard—”
“I know what you are afraid of.” Richard held his brother’s gaze.
“You are afraid of Father. You are afraid that loving someone will destroy you the way loving Mother destroyed him. You watched it happen. I watched you watch it happen. And you decided, at seventeen, that you would never let yourself be that vulnerable.”
Evander’s hand tightened on the glass. The fire crackled. William studied the ceiling with renewed intensity.
“But Father’s mistake was not loving Mother,” Richard said.
“His mistake was having nothing left when she was gone. No strength. No discipline. No purpose beyond her. When she died, he collapsed, because she was the only thing holding him up.” Richard paused.
“You are not held up by anyone, Evander. You have been holding yourself up since you were a boy. You held me up. You held this entire family up. The strength is already there. It has always been there. Loving Mary will not take it from you. It will give you something to use it for.”
The words landed. Evander felt them settle into the place where every other argument had bounced off, and this time, they did not bounce. They stayed. They pressed.
“Sometimes we cannot control who we are,” Evander said. The doubt came out raw, unfiltered, and the admission of it, here, in this room, in front of the two people who knew him best, cost him more than any confession he had ever made. “What if I am more like him than I think?”
Quentin laughed.
The sound was so unexpected in the moment’s gravity that every head in the room turned. Quentin sat on the chaise with his glass in his hand and laughed, genuinely, the kind of full-bodied laugh that came from deep in the chest, and the absurdity of it cracked the tension open.
“Forgive me.” Quentin wiped his eyes. “But that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard you say, and I have heard you say some spectacular nonsense over the years.” He sat up straight.
“Evander. You are the most controlled man in England. You have been controlling everything around you since before your voice broke. You control your estate, your household, your staff, your finances, your diet, your wardrobe, your correspondence, the precise number of drinks you allow yourself in an evening.” He gestured at the whisky glass.
“You have had exactly one sip of that drink in the last twenty minutes. I have been counting.”
Evander looked at the glass. Quentin was right. One sip. Twenty minutes.
“Your father had no control,” Quentin continued.
“That was his failing. He could not manage his grief, so he drowned it. He could not face his children, so he hid from them. He could not hold himself together, so he fell apart and let a seventeen-year-old boy pick up the pieces.” Quentin leaned forward, and every trace of humor left his face.
“You are not that man. You have never been that man. You could not become that man if you tried. And the fact that you are sitting here, agonizing over whether loving your wife might turn you into your father, is the single greatest proof that it will not. Because your father never once asked himself that question. He never once stopped to consider the damage he was doing. You have not stopped considering it since you were a boy.”
The room was very still. The fire settled. Richard watched his brother’s face. William had abandoned the ceiling and was watching, too.
Evander sat with the whisky in his hand and Quentin’s words ringing in his ears, and the wall that had held for fourteen years, the wall built on a vow made in a dark corridor by a seventeen-year-old boy who had just carried his father to bed, the wall that had survived every kiss and every midnight and every moment Mary had pressed against it, trembled.
And fell.
It was just Mary. Standing in a nursery. Holding a baby. Saying his name.
Evander set the glass down.
“I have to go.”
Richard grinned. “Yes, you do.”
Quentin raised his glass. “About time.”
William looked between the three of them. “Should I—”
“Stay. Drink. Celebrate your wedding.” Evander was already on his feet, reaching for his coat. “I will see you in the morning.”
“Evander.” Richard caught his arm as he passed. Evander stopped. His brother looked up at him, and the face that had spent five months hiding in a cottage wore an expression Evander had not seen since they were boys. Pride. “Tell her.”
Evander gripped Richard’s shoulder once, hard, and let go.
He crossed Quentin’s drawing room in four strides, threw open the front door, and hit the night air at a run. The carriage waited at the curb, but Evander did not wait for the driver to climb down from the box. He wrenched the door open, hauled himself inside, and slammed his palm against the roof.
“Blackholm House. Now.”
The carriage lurched forward. London blurred past the windows, gas lamps streaking into ribbons of light, and Evander sat on the edge of the seat with his heart hammering and his hands gripping his knees and the ruins of fourteen years of careful, disciplined, meticulously constructed self-protection scattered around his feet.
The truth. Richard was right. The feeling had been living inside him for weeks, pressed against every wall he built, every corridor retreat had been an attempt to contain something that could not be contained. Mary had seen it before he did.
She had always known. From the kitchen to the carriage to the corridor to the bedroom, Mary had seen through every wall, every excuse, every careful deflection, and she had loved him anyway, and she had asked him for the one thing he was terrified to give, and he had let her walk away.
The carriage turned onto the Mayfair streets. Evander’s pulse raced. The house appeared at the end of the block, dark except for a single light burning in the nursery window.
The nursery. She was with Tommy. Of course, she was with Tommy. Because Tommy was leaving in three days, and Mary was counting the hours, and she was spending every one of them holding the child she loved in a house where the man she loved could not bring himself to hold her.
The carriage stopped. Evander was out the door before the wheels finished turning. He took the front steps two at a time, pushed through the entrance, and climbed the staircase toward the light.