Chapter 23
“He is not coming, is he?”
Eleanor asked the question gently, carefully.
They stood near the tall windows of Mrs. Alderton’s drawing room, where the second musicale of the month was attracting its usual crowd of guests who had run out of better options for the evening.
The soprano from the previous gathering had been replaced by a violinist whose enthusiasm exceeded his ability by a considerable margin.
Louisa kept her eyes on the door.
“He may be late.”
“Oh, Louisa…” Eleanor cut off whatever it was she had wanted to say, and Louisa blinked furiously.
Louisa pressed her thumbnail into the seam of her glove again, a habit she had noticed herself developing and could not stop. The fabric was wearing thin at the spot. She would need to mend it again.
“He told me he would stop,” she said quietly. “I asked him to stop managing me. He is doing what I asked.”
“You asked him to stop shielding you. You did not ask him to disappear from the face of the earth.”
The distinction was precise and painful, and Louisa had no answer for it. She had spent the first three days angry. He had done exactly what she asked. He had stopped. Stopped calling on her. Stopped appearing at her elbow in ballrooms. It was as though he had ceased to exist.
She had asked for this.
On the fourth day, the anger thinned into an ache that lodged beneath her ribs where his laughter used to sit.
She caught herself listening for the knocker at three o’clock on Tuesday, then hating herself for listening.
She chose the blue dress he had complimented and then changed out of it.
She carried the fan he had insisted she learn to use and did not once raise it, because there was no one across the room watching for the signal.
By the second week, she had stopped pretending the ache was anger, or pride, or anything she could name without her voice breaking.
She missed him. She missed him the way one misses warmth after stepping into a cold room, wholly, physically, in every part of her body that remembered what it felt like to be near him.
“Frederick has been very attentive,” she offered, though it sounded hollow even to her own ears.
Eleanor’s silence said more than any reply could have.
Across the drawing room, Frederick stood beside the refreshment table, speaking to Lord Ashton. He caught her eye and smiled, and she returned it by instinct.
“I should go and join him,” she said, suppressing the sudden awful urge to sigh.
“You should do whatever you wish, Louisa. You are allowed to wish for things.”
Eleanor’s voice was gentle. Louisa turned away before the gentleness could undo her.
She crossed the drawing room toward Frederick, her eyes still searching for Oliver, even though she knew full well he wasn’t there.
Frederick guided her to a pair of gilt chairs near the corridor door. She sat. He sat beside her. His knee brushed hers, and he did not move it away.
“You have been quiet lately,” he observed. “These past two weeks.”
“I have had a great deal on my mind.”
She looked at his face. He was still handsome as ever, but it suddenly felt empty. He had been calling more frequently since Oliver’s withdrawal, doing everything right.
He reached for her hand. His fingers closed around hers, and she let him hold it. The violinist began his second piece.
Louisa stared at the far wall. Frederick was looking at her in the way she had always wished for. It was enough. It had to be enough, and she tried to focus on the satisfaction she knew she ought to feel until the violinist’s second piece was done and the applause allowed her to look away.
The ache stayed with her until Lady Ashton’s annual Garden Party. Louisa arrived beside her mother in the Fairchild carriage quietly. She had long since stopped hoping for Oliver’s presence. He would not be there.
She followed her mother to where crowds were softly talking.
Frederick found her before she had finished her first cup of tea.
“Miss Fairchild.” He bowed, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “You look lovely.”
“Thank you. You are very elegant yourself.”
“Am I? I was aiming for understated, but my valet insisted on the rosemary. He believes no gentleman is complete without a garnish.” He offered his arm. “Walk with me? Lord Ashton’s roses are at their finest this week. I have been told the south border is not to be missed.”
She took his arm. The gravel path curved away from the main gathering, past banks of delphiniums and lavender, toward the walled garden where the roses grew in ordered profusion. The noise of the party faded behind them. Frederick walked slowly, matching his stride to hers.
“I have been thinking,” he said, once the path had carried them beyond earshot of the other guests, “about what I want from life. Not merely the practical matters. The estate, the tenants, the obligations. I have spent years attending to those, and they are important, but they are not sufficient.”
Louisa watched a cabbage white butterfly settle on a spray of pale pink roses, then lift away.
“I want a home,” Frederick continued, evidently not noticing that her attention had drifted.
“Not merely a house. A place that feels alive. Warmth in the mornings, conversation in the evenings.” He paused beside a trellis heavy with deep red blooms. “I want a partner, Louisa. Someone who will sit across the breakfast table from me in twenty years and still find the conversation worth having.”
The roses smelled thick and sweet in the trapped heat of the walled garden. A gardener’s barrow stood abandoned near the far wall, beside a watering can and a trowel left blade-up in the soil.
“I want a marriage built on mutual respect,” he said. “On the understanding that two people can build a finer life together than either could manage alone.”
He stopped walking. He turned to face her.
“Louisa.” He paused, waiting for her to meet his eyes. “I have admired you for some time. I confess that my admiration was slower in arriving than it should have been. You were always there, and I did not see you clearly until circumstances forced me to look.”
She couldn’t help but lift her brows. This was the closest Frederick had ever come to acknowledging that his interest had been prompted rather than born. He flushed slightly and pressed on.
“But what I have seen has only deepened my regard. You are kind, capable, intelligent, and steadier than any woman I have met. You would grace any home. You would strengthen any family.” He reached into the pocket of his waistcoat. “I have spoken to your mother. She has given her blessing.”
He drew out a ring and held it between his thumb and forefinger. A gold band set with a small sapphire whose facets caught the afternoon light and threw faint blue sparks against his palm.
“Miss Louisa Fairchild, would you do me the honour of becoming my wife?”
The garden was still. The bees continued their work among the roses. The string quartet played on beyond the wall, faint and tinny.
Louisa looked at Frederick. His face was earnest, hopeful, arranged into an expression she had seen on him before at card tables, when he had calculated the odds and found them favourable.
She waited for the joy. She had imagined this moment so many times, lying awake in her narrow bed on Curzon Street, staring at the ceiling while the house settled around her.
She had pictured his face, his words, the flood of happiness that would pour through her when Frederick Langley finally chose her, when she was no longer the woman men appreciated but never pursued.
She had built the daydream across two Seasons, furnishing it carefully: his smile, his laugh, the way he tilted his head when he was listening.
To her mild surprise, it did not come.
What came instead was Oliver’s voice in a park, low and certain: You deserve to be noticed without having to hide in the background.
Oliver crouching beside a small painting hung too low for anyone to see, looking up at her and saying, Some things are positioned badly.
That does not diminish their worth. Oliver’s hand at her waist during the waltz at Lady Acker’s ball.
Oliver in the library at Ashford House, his fingers on her jaw, the word slowly falling from his mouth before he kissed.
She closed her eyes. When at last she opened them. Frederick was waiting, the ring held between his fingers, his eyes expectantly on her.
Oliver had walked away, however, and the fond memories would not change that. Frederick stood before her. Frederick, who was real, who was here, who had crossed a garden to ask her a question she had once believed would make her the happiest woman in London.
“Yes,” she said at last, trying her best to sound overjoyed. “I will marry you.”
He took her hand and slid the ring onto her finger. She looked at the sapphire.
“You have made me the happiest man in England,” he said, and kissed her knuckles.
His lips were brief against her glove. She smiled. After all, she supposed, that was what a woman did when a good man offered her the life she had once prayed for.
He took her arm, and they walked back toward the party together.
Lady Caldwell saw them first. Her hand flew to her mouth. Mrs. Fenton grasped Lady Caldwell’s elbow, and Lord Ashton raised his glass from the refreshment table.
“Congratulations!” Lady Caldwell crossed the lawn at a pace no one would have believed possible in heeled slippers. “Oh, my dear girl! How wonderful!”
Frederick’s hand tightened on Louisa’s arm. His pride was visible, radiant, a man standing in full view of his peers, certain of the world’s approval and warming himself against it from every direction.
Louisa smiled. She accepted the congratulations. She allowed Lady Caldwell to embrace her and Mrs. Fenton to clasp her hand and Lord Ashton to declare that the occasion called for champagne.
Eleanor did not approach. She met Louisa’s eyes across the lawn, and the look that passed between them was long and quiet and held no celebration at all.
Frederick leaned close. “Are you happy, my darling?”
“Immensely,” she said at once. She ignored the small part of her heart that accused her of telling a lie she would have to learn to swallow every morning for the rest of her life.