Chapter 22
“He is not receiving callers, miss.”
The butler delivered this verdict from the threshold of Ashford House diplomatically.
“I am not a caller,” Louisa retorted gently. “I am Miss Fairchild.”
“Indeed, miss. His Grace is not receiving callers.”
She stood on the front step with the noise of Grosvenor Square continuing behind her as though the world had not rearranged itself the previous evening.
“Would you tell His Grace that I wish to speak with him about last night?” she asked at last, working hard to keep the blatant desperation out of her voice.
The butler’s expression shifted by a fraction. It was quite evident that the story of a duke striking a baronet in a corridor at Lady Hathaway’s musicale had reached the kitchens of Mayfair before the broken vase had been swept up.
“One moment, miss.”
He closed the door. Louisa stared at the polished brass knocker, shaped like a lion’s head, its mouth frozen mid-roar. She pressed her thumbnail into the seam of her glove and counted her breaths. After what felt like forever, the door opened.
“His Grace will see you in the morning room.”
She followed the butler through the entrance hall quietly, all the way to the drawing room.
Oliver stood at the window with his back to the door. His right hand hung at his side, and even from across the room she could see the bandage wrapped around his knuckles, white cotton stained faintly at the edges where blood had seeped through overnight.
The butler withdrew, and the door clicked shut behind her.
Oliver did not turn.
“You should not have come,” he said, still staring at the window, his shoulders stiffened.
“And yet here I am.”
He turned then, and her prepared speech collapsed. She had rehearsed it during the walk from Curzon Street: thank you for intervening, the gossip is intolerable, we must discuss what this means for the arrangement.
But suddenly, she found that she could not.
“How is your wrist?” he asked, his eyes darting to her wrist, then back to her face.
She glanced down at her left hand. The bruise from Dacre’s grip had deepened overnight into a band of mottled purple and yellow that circled the bone like a shackle.
She had covered it with her glove, buttoned to the wrist, but the fabric pressed against the tender skin and she had been conscious of it with every step.
“It will heal.” She kept her voice steady. “Oliver, I came to talk about what happened.”
“What happened is that a man put his hands on you and I stopped him.”
“You struck him.”
“Yes.”
The word held no apology.
“Half of London is talking about it,” Louisa said softly.
“Mrs. Pemberton’s footman told my mother’s cook before breakfast. My mother received two calls before nine o’clock, both from women who wanted to know whether the Duke of Ashford had been defending my honor, and if so, whether that meant what they believed it to mean. ”
He scowled slightly. “Let them talk.”
“I cannot let them talk, and you know it. The arrangement, the progress with Frederick, the credibility I have spent months earning in rooms where I used to be invisible, all of it now sits beneath a story about a duke brawling in a corridor over Miss Fairchild.”
He crossed the room, not toward her but toward the writing desk, where he picked up a letter opener and set it down again without purpose.
“Dacre will not speak of it,” he said. “He was drunk, and he knows that if he contradicts my account, I will ensure every club in London hears exactly what he did in that corridor. His reputation is already thin. He cannot afford the cost.”
“That is not the point, Oliver!” She had raised her voice slightly, and his eyes narrowed at this.
“Then what is the point, Louisa?”
She took a breath, attempting to calm her racing heart.
“You cannot keep doing this,” she said at last. “You cannot appoint yourself my guardian every time the world becomes difficult. I managed a household at sixteen. I managed three Seasons of being overlooked without anyone coming to my rescue. I managed Frederick Langley smiling at me as though I were wallpaper for two years, and I did it alone, and I am still here.”
“This was not Frederick failing to notice you at a ball.” He set down the letter opener with a deliberate click against the desk. “This was a man with his hand around your wrist in a dark corridor.”
“I know what it was. I was there.”
“Then you know why I did what I did.”
“I know why you believe you did it. I am asking you to consider that the cost of your protection is becoming higher than I can afford.”
He stared at her. His hand found the edge of the desk and pressed flat against the surface, and she watched the tension travel up his arm and into his shoulder before she caught herself and looked away.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
She dug her thumbnail harder into the seam of her glove.
It meant that she had lain awake until four o’clock replaying the corridor: not Dacre’s grip, which had been frightening but brief, but the look on Oliver’s face when he rounded the corner.
The look before the punch. Before the rage.
The moment he had seen Dacre’s hand on her wrist and his entire body had reorganised itself around a single, absolute intention, and she had felt, in spite of everything, safe.
She let out a shuddering breath and folded her arms around her chest, as though she could protect herself in this manner.
“It means that I cannot become the woman who needs rescuing,” she managed.
“Every time you step between me and the world, I lose ground I fought to gain. People will see me as a woman who requires a duke’s intervention to navigate a corridor, and they will see the protection and assume I am helpless without it.
” She paused. “And the worst part, Oliver, is that I am beginning to wonder whether they would be right.”
He flinched, a quick involuntary motion he controlled quickly, but she saw it and understood that she had found the nerve she had been afraid to touch.
“Are you angry with me?” he asked, his voice quieter now.
“You struck a man.”
“He was hurting you.”
“I never asked you to save me.”
He looked at her across the width of the morning room, six feet of Persian carpet and accumulated silence between them.
“I protected you,” he retorted.
“I never asked you to.”
A silent minute followed her words. Oliver looked at his bandaged hand.
He turned it over, studying the stained cotton, the swollen ridge of his knuckles visible through the wrapping.
When he spoke again, his voice had changed, stripped of the composure he had been holding in place like plaster over a crack.
“I would do it again.”
“Oliver.”
“If I walked into that corridor tomorrow and saw him standing over you, I would do exactly what I did. I would not hesitate. I would not stop to calculate the cost to your reputation or mine or the arrangement or the opinion of a hundred guests.” He looked up from his hand.
“I would hit him again, Louisa. And I am telling you this because you deserve honesty, and the honest truth is that I do not trust myself to do otherwise.”
Her heart skipped a beat, and she took an involuntary step towards him.
“That frightens me,” she said quietly.
His gaze snapped to her face. “I would never hurt you.”
“I know that. That is not what I mean.”
“Then tell me what you mean.”
At once, a part of her wanted to cross the six feet of carpet and taken his bandaged hand and told him the truth: that she was not afraid of his fist, or the gossip, or the ruin of her careful plans, but that no one in twenty-two years of living had ever made her feel as protected as he did, and she had no idea how to survive losing that when the arrangement ended and he walked out of her life.
Instead she straightened her shoulders. “I mean that I cannot afford to rely on someone who might not always be there.”
Oliver was quiet. The clock on the mantelpiece counted the seconds, and in the kitchen passage below them a pot lid rang against a stone floor, and a servant’s voice muttered a mild oath.
“You are right,” he said at last.
The agreement stunned her. She had braced for an argument, for the stubborn, charming pushback she had come to expect from him, and he gave her nothing to push against.
“I overstepped,” he continued flatly, each word laid down like a brick in a wall she could watch him building between them.
“I allowed my judgement to lapse, and the consequences have fallen on you, and that is precisely what I swore would never happen. You are correct that the arrangement requires boundaries. You are correct that I cannot appoint myself your protector. And you are correct that the gossip will cause you harm.”
She tried to interrupt him. “Oliver, that is not what I meant.”
“You said what you needed to say.” He reached for his coat, draped over the back of a chair, and pulled it on mechanically, buttoning it without looking at her.
“You were right to say it. I will speak with Lady Hathaway this afternoon and ensure the incident is framed as a disagreement between gentlemen, unrelated to you. Frederick will hear a version that protects your standing. I will manage it.”
“Stop.”
He buttoned his coat without looking at her.
“Stop managing,” she said. “Stop arranging and correcting and shielding me from consequences. That is what I came here to say.”
He raised his head, and her heart suddenly ached inexplicably as their eyes met.
“Then I will stop,” he said.
He crossed the morning room. His sleeve brushed her arm as he passed her. The contact lasted less than a second, and yet it carried more honesty than anything either of them had said.
He opened the door.
“Oliver.”
He paused with his hand on the frame, his back to her, the tension visible in the locked line of his spine and his whitened fingers against the wood.
“Please do not walk away from me,” she whispered.
He stood motionless, and for a few seconds she believed that he would turn. Then he let go of the door frame and walked into the corridor. His footsteps moved away from her, measured and even, growing fainter until the house absorbed them and left her standing in the empty drawing room.
Louisa pressed her bruised wrist against her ribs. She had not even begun an attempt to make sense of what she was feeling, when the butler appeared at the threshold. “Shall I call a carriage for you, miss?”
“No, thank you. I shall walk.”
The truth followed her all the way home, grabbing at her heart with icy fingers. She had come to depend on him. And she had no idea how to stop.