Chapter 25
“Why does it look as though you are about to attend your own funeral?”
Sebastian dropped into the chair beside Oliver and stretched his legs toward the fire, crossing his ankles on the brass fender. The club was quieter than usual for a Thursday evening. Half of London had gone to the Davenport ball, which was precisely why Oliver had come here instead.
“I am reading,” Oliver mumbled, turning a page to prove his point, though he could not say for the life of him what the words had said.
“You are holding a newspaper, and you’ve been reading the very same page for over thirty minutes.” Sebastian plucked the paper from his hands and glanced at it. “Corn prices. How riveting.”
Oliver took the paper back and folded it. “Did you come here to be tiresome, or is there a secondary purpose?”
“Both, as it happens.” Sebastian signaled a steward for brandy.
“I came because Benton told me you’ve been here every evening this week, and because you turned down four invitations in three days, including Lady Davenport’s, which you have attended every year since inheriting your title.
Benton thinks you are unwell. I think you are hiding. If I were a betting man…”
Oliver scowled at his friend. “I am not hiding. I am choosing to spend my evenings in comfortable silence rather than in rooms full of people who want to discuss the weather and their daughters.”
“You used to enjoy rooms full of people.”
“I find it tedious now.”
Sebastian studied him across the dim lamplight, a frown between his brows. Oliver shifted. Sebastian knew him far too well. There was no hiding from it.
“I saw her tonight,” Sebastian said. “At the Davenport ball. Miss Fairchild. She was wearing blue.”
Oliver’s hand tightened on the arm of the chair. He released it, deliberately. “I trust she looked well.”
“She looked miserable.”
Oliver kept his face still, though he swallowed dryly.
“She was smiling, naturally,” Sebastian continued. “But we both know that smile. The smile one gives when it is expected, even when lives fall apart around us.” Sebastian paused. “She is not happy, Oliver.”
Oliver stood. He crossed to the fireplace and rested his forearm against the mantel, looking down into the coals. The fire was low, banked for the evening, glowing without heat.
“She accepted his proposal,” Oliver said at last. “She chose him.”
“She chose him after you vanished from her life without a word of explanation.”
“I gave her an explanation.”
“You gave her an excuse. You told her you could not protect her, and then you proved it by leaving.” Sebastian accepted his brandy from the steward and waited until the man withdrew. “That is not honor, Oliver. That is fear.”
Oliver closed his eyes, and allowed the bitterness to envelop him.
“I struck a man,” he said quietly.
“You struck a man who was hurting her.”
“I lost control.”
“You acted. You are not him, Oliver, and if you spent less time torturing yourself and more time thinking clearly, you would see that the comparison you are drawing is grotesque. Your father beat a woman who could not defend herself. You hit a man your size, who had his hand around a woman’s wrist. Those are not the same act. They are not even the same language.”
Oliver did not move. He could still feel the impact in his knuckles if he closed his fist. The vibration of bone against bone, the man’s head snapping back, the gasps from the corridor. And beneath the memory, older and sharper, the sound of a palm meeting flesh through a study door.
“I cannot be certain,” he muttered softly.
“Of what? That you are not your father?” Sebastian set down his glass. “I have known you for fifteen years. You are a good man, Oliver. You do not get angry without cause, of which you had more than enough. Your father was different.”
The fire shifted. A coal broke apart and resettled in a scatter of sparks.
“Regardless, it no longer matters. She is engaged, Sebastian.”
“Yes.”
“To a respectable man who will provide for her and treat her decently.”
“Decently.” Sebastian shook his head with a sigh. “Langley will give her a comfortable house and a predictable life. Like every gentleman who marries a gentlewoman, he will be perfectly content without caring whether she is.”
Oliver looked at him sharply. “You do not know that.”
“Do I not? Oh, he will most probably not abuse her, you can rest assured. But will he ever allow her to be more than a pretty face?”
Sebastian closed his eyes. “That… He will. He must. She has a fierce will and…”
“And he will kill that will. We both know men like him. That is what you are delivering her to,” Sebastian said.
“Not cruelty. Not violence. Erasure. The slow, polite, well-intentioned erasure of everything she is. And you are standing here telling yourself it is the honorable choice because he will never raise a hand to her.”
“It is her choice.”
“It was her choice in the absence of another option. You made certain of that.”
The clock on the mantel chimed ten. Oliver counted the strokes. Somewhere beyond the club’s paneled walls, a carriage clattered past on St James’s Street, wheels striking the cobbles in a quick, reckless rhythm.
“What would you have me do?” he asked finally.
Sebastian picked up his brandy and drank. He set it down and looked at Oliver directly, all the usual amusement burned away.
“I would have you stop pretending that standing aside is the same as letting her be happy. Because I watched her tonight, Oliver. I watched her stand beside a man who adores the idea of her and has never once troubled himself to learn the reality. And I watched her smile, and smile, and smile.” He rose from the chair and straightened his coat.
“And it was the saddest thing I have ever seen in a ballroom.”
He left Oliver alone beside the dying fire.
Oliver stood there for a long time. He turned his hand over and looked at his knuckles, healed now, the skin smooth where it had split.
He thought of Louisa’s face the last time he had seen her, pale and furious and searching his expression for an answer he had refused to give.
He thought of her reading alone in a library, tucking a book beneath a cushion before Frederick could see it, hiding the best parts of herself because the man she had chosen did not care to look.
He thought of his mother. Lifting her chin. Arranging her mouth into the shape of composure. Agreeing, because agreeing was the fastest route to the end of it.
The comparison arrived before he could stop it, and it was not the one he had feared. Not his father’s temper, reflected back. His mother’s silence, repeated in another woman’s smile.