Chapter 26
“We are going to the opera. I managed to secure a box through Lord Ashton. It is an excellent position on the second tier, overlooking the stage.”
Frederick did not give Louisa much time to respond.
Instead, he had given her time to ready herself before picking her up.
As they sat in the carriage, his excitement was meant to be contagious and yet…
it left her empty. “It is simply delightful. Seats of velvet… I made sure to tell Lord Ashton how lovely it was. We shall ask him to use it again after we are married.”
Louisa sat beside him and watched the streetlamps slide past the window, each one flaring gold against the glass and dying as the carriage moved on.
“You are quiet this evening,” he said at last.
She attempted a smile. “I am listening.”
“I do appreciate that about you. Most women feel compelled to fill every silence. You understand the value of letting a man speak.” He adjusted his gloves, tugging the leather smooth across each finger as though the fit required his constant supervision.
He did not seem to hear himself. He did not seem to notice that he had just praised her for doing nothing, as though her finest quality were the absence of inconvenience.
She turned from the window. “Is that a compliment?”
“Of course it is.” He looked genuinely puzzled. “I have always admired your temperament, Louisa. You are restful.”
Louisa resisted the urge to scoff. Restful. Frederick meant it kindly. She believed that. He admired her the way he admired a well-appointed morning room: pleasant, requiring no alteration, unlikely to cause a draught.
Oliver had called her clever. He had called her funny. He looked at her and saw who she was, and who she wanted to be.
Frederick had called her restful.
The word gnawed at her even as they walked into the theatre.
The opera was Mozart. Die Entführung. The soprano’s voice climbed through the darkened theatre and filled the gilt ceiling. Louisa stared out in front of her silently.
The second act opened into a duet between two lovers separated by forces neither could control, and the soprano held a phrase so long and so precisely that the sound seemed to exist outside of time, hovering in the silence after it ended, still ringing in the space where it had been.
Louisa turned to Frederick.
He was reading the program. His head was bowed, tilted toward the lamplight spilling from the sconce beside the box.
His finger traced a line of text. He had not heard the duet.
He had been sitting beside her for the most extraordinary passage of music she had ever encountered, and he had missed it entirely, because it had not occurred to him that the performance might matter more than the program notes describing it.
She looked back at the stage.
Oliver would have heard it. The thought arrived before she could close the door against it, and it brought others in its wake, crowding the dark of the opera box like uninvited guests.
Oliver would have leaned toward her and murmured a remark about the tenor’s breathing, or the conductor’s posture, or the way the strings had entered two bars late and made the dissonance richer for the mistake.
He would have watched her face while the music played, not because the performance bored him but because her reaction interested him more than the stage.
He had always done that. At the Royal Academy, at Hartfield, at every event they had attended together, she had turned to find his gaze already on her.
She gripped the arm of her chair and pressed the thought down. The soprano sang on.
“The tenor is rather flat,” Frederick observed during the interval, setting the program aside at last. “Lord Ashton warned me. He heard the fellow in Bath and said the man lacked discipline.”
“I thought the soprano was extraordinary.”
“Was she? I confess I was distracted by the program notes. Did you know Mozart composed this in under six weeks? Remarkable, when you consider the complexity.” He sipped his champagne.
“I have been thinking about the wedding breakfast. I spoke with my housekeeper this morning. She suggests a cold collation rather than a formal dinner. Less expense, less fuss.”
“I thought your mother preferred a formal dinner.”
“She does, but my housekeeper has convinced me otherwise. The savings are considerable, and frankly I see no reason to spend sixty pounds on a meal people will forget by Thursday.”
Louisa huffed out a breath. “Then why did you ask me to present a united front about the menu if the decision was already made?”
He paused, his glass halfway to his lips. “I have not made the decision. I am simply telling you what I think.”
“It sounds rather as though your mind is made up.”
He set the glass down. His expression carried the faint, injured confusion of a man unaccustomed to contradiction, the brief stalling of composure that always preceded his recovery. “I did not realize you felt strongly about the breakfast.”
“I feel strongly about being consulted.”
“You are being consulted. I am consulting you now.”
“Are you consulting me or informing me?”
The interval bell sounded. Around them, guests rose from their seats and returned to the corridor, silk rustling, conversation resuming in the bright gaslights beyond the curtain.
Frederick studied her for a moment, then produced the careful, conciliatory smile he kept in reserve for conversations that had moved beyond the boundaries he had drawn for them.
“We shall discuss it further at home,” he said. “You are tired. The Season has been punishing.”
She was not tired. She was fully, painfully awake, sitting in an opera box beside a man who believed every objection she raised was a symptom of fatigue rather than a thought worth hearing.
She folded her hands in her lap and watched the curtain rise on the third act, and she did not look at Frederick once for the remainder of the evening.
* * *
“And the surveyor had the audacity to claim the measurement was approximate.” Frederick set down his spoon and addressed Lord Cresswell across the table. “Approximate. I told him I did not pay for approximation. I paid for precision.”
Lord Cresswell nodded politely. Louisa sat quietly. As expected, Frederick had not brought up the wedding breakfast in the past three days—and she did not expect him to bring it up again, especially today.
“I drafted the solicitor’s letter myself,” Frederick continued. “Three pages. Every discrepancy itemized. Every precedent cited. My solicitor said it was the most thorough correspondence he had received from a client in twenty years.”
“Very diligent of you,” Lord Cresswell said, reaching for his wine.
Louisa finished her soup. She had not spoken since the fish course, when Frederick had answered a question Lady Cresswell had directed at her about the wedding date. He had answered it pleasantly, thoroughly, and without pausing to check whether Louisa might prefer to answer it herself.
“The trouble,” Lord Cresswell said, turning his glass by the stem, “is that our own registry has complicated matters further. The western boundary has been in dispute since my father’s time, and the county office cannot seem to locate the original survey.”
“You should write to them,” Frederick said. “Firmly.”
“The registry office at Guildford handled a dispute for my father’s property in Surrey,” Louisa offered.
Frederick glanced at her. Lord Cresswell set down his glass.
“The eastern boundary had been recorded incorrectly since 1794,” she continued. “My father discovered the error when the adjoining landowner attempted to fence a strip of meadow that had belonged to our family for three generations.”
Lord Cresswell leaned forward, his eyebrows rising above his spectacles. “And how was it resolved?”
“We spent a fortnight in the county archive, cross-referencing the original deed against the tithe maps. The discrepancy traced back to a clerk’s transcription error. Once we had the original survey, the resolution was straightforward.”
“You examined the tithe maps yourself?”
She shrugged. “My father could not afford a solicitor that year, so I learned to read the documents in his place.” She allowed herself a small smile. “I developed quite a fondness for boundary law, though I suspect that is not a talent many young ladies boast of.”
Lord Cresswell’s face opened into genuine pleasure. His wife glanced over from her end of the table and smiled. Two ladies further down turned to see who had drawn their host into such visible engagement.
Frederick touched her elbow. “Darling, you need not bore Lord Cresswell with household anecdotes.”
The table went on eating. Lord Cresswell glanced at Frederick, then at Louisa, and returned to his wine without pursuing the conversation further.
A footman cleared the soup. Mrs. Fenton asked Lady Cresswell about her plans for the autumn, and the moment passed as moments do in polite company, swallowed by the machinery of courtesy that kept fourteen people smiling and pretending that nothing of consequence had occurred.
Louisa picked up her water glass and drank. Her hand was steady. She had years of practice at this.
She could feel the place inside her chest where the warmth had been, the brief, bright flare of being listened to, already cooling.
Lord Cresswell had looked at her as though her words carried weight.
As though she were a person in the room and not an ornament placed beside the window for the light.
After luncheon, the ladies withdrew to Lady Cresswell’s drawing room.
Eleanor appeared beside her near the tall windows, two glasses of cordial in her hands and a look on her face that Louisa recognized from a decade of friendship as the expression Eleanor wore when she was containing a fury too large for polite company.
“Lord Cresswell thinks you are magnificent,” Eleanor said, handing her a glass.
“Lord Cresswell thinks I am a curiosity.”
Eleanor took a measured sip. “Frederick told him you were boring him.”
“He said I was boring him with household anecdotes.”
“Yes.” Eleanor set her glass on the windowsill and turned to face her fully.
“He corrected you. At the table. In front of fourteen people. You offered Lord Cresswell a genuinely intelligent contribution to a conversation Frederick had been monopolizing all afternoon, and he dismissed you as though you had interrupted the adults.”
Louisa drank the cordial. It was too sweet and left a film on her tongue. Through the window, she could see the garden wall, the climbing roses heavy and full in the afternoon heat, the gravel path where two sparrows fought over a crust.
“Oliver never corrected me.” The words left her mouth before she recognized them, quiet, almost inaudible beneath the hum of conversation filling the drawing room.
Eleanor went still beside her.
“At the Royal Academy, he put me in front of six strangers and asked me what I thought about a painting,” Louisa said.
“He did not tell me what to say. He did not smooth it over afterward. He did not lean across and say that I was boring him with observations about Carthage. He stood beside me and let me be right, and when I was finished, he walked me through the gallery as though he had spent the afternoon in the company of someone whose opinions had value.” She turned the cordial glass between her fingers.
“At Hartfield, I spoke to a botanist about ferns for ten minutes, and Oliver sat on a bench twelve feet away holding my parasol, and when I came back he told me he was proud of me.”
She pressed her thumb against the rim of the glass. The cut crystal left a faint impression on her skin.
“Frederick tells me I am capable,” she continued, her voice low enough that only Eleanor could hear above the drawing room’s chatter.
“He tells me I am restful. He tells me I will make a fine wife and a sensible mother. He recites these qualities as though reading from a list of specifications for a piece of furniture he intends to install in his dining room.” She looked at Eleanor.
“Oliver told me to stop hiding. He told me the room was ready to hear me. He never once suggested I was too much or not enough. He looked at me as though I were already exactly right.”
Eleanor’s expression held no triumph. No vindication, none of the satisfaction Louisa had braced herself against. She looked sad, and somehow this was more frightening than anger would have been.
“Louisa…”
Louisa shook her head and forced a smile onto her face. “All will be well,” she muttered. “Frederick will make a fine husband. I know he will.”
She looked down at her hand. The sapphire sat on her fourth finger, small and blue and chosen by a man who had never asked what stone she preferred, who had never asked whether she wanted a ring at all, who had produced it from his waistcoat pocket and placed it on her finger as though the question of her preference had simply not occurred to him.
She turned it once. The gold was warm from her skin.
“Louisa… do you love Frederick?”
Eleanor spoke softly, and Louisa looked at her friend—careful not to show anything. “I have loved him for a long time,” she said simply.
She did not say that she had loved the idea of the man before getting to know that man. She did not mention Oliver.
It was too late.