Chapter 27
For the life of him, he couldn’t balance the ledger column.
Oliver turned back to the top of the page, ran his finger down the row of figures for the third time, and arrived at the same discrepancy.
Fourteen pounds, six shillings. The drainage assessment for the lower fields at Ashford Hall did not match the surveyor’s estimate, and neither figure agreed with the sum his steward had sent by express two days ago.
He put his pen down on the desk with a scoff.
He did not care about the drainage.
Louisa was engaged to Frederick Langley, and Oliver was sitting in his club writing letters about drainage because drainage was a problem he could solve.
Drainage did not laugh until its eyes watered or press its forehead against a book or stand in a walled garden smelling of lavender and say his name in a voice that made every room he had ever entered feel inadequate by comparison.
“You are here. Again.”
Sebastian did not phrase it as a question. He dropped into the chair across from Oliver.
Oliver did not look up. “I have work.”
“You had work yesterday. And the day before. And every day this week. Benton tells me you have now spent more consecutive hours at that desk than any member in the club’s recorded history, including Lord Pratchett, who died in that very chair in 1793 and was not discovered until supper.”
“Benton exaggerates.”
“Benton is concerned. As am I.” Sebastian’s voice carried none of the dry amusement he usually wore like a second coat. “I told you she was unhappy, and I assumed you might, in the intervening days, have arrived at a thought.”
Oliver closed the ledger. “I have arrived at several. None of them useful.”
“Then allow me to supply one.” Sebastian leaned forward. “You love her.”
The words fell into the room the way a stone falls into still water. The surface broke, and the disturbance spread outward in every direction, reaching walls, corners, the edges of Oliver’s composure.
He said nothing.
“You love her, and you are letting her marry another man because you are afraid.”
Oliver picked the pen up and set it back in its tray. He aligned it parallel to the ledger’s edge.
“I have told you. She chose Frederick. The arrangement is finished. I fulfilled my end.”
“You have told me. It was not true then, and it is less true now.” Sebastian’s gaze did not waver.
“I have known you since we were fourteen years old. I have watched you charm ballrooms and manage estates and talk your way out of every corner life has put you in. I have never, in all those years, seen you lie to yourself this badly.”
Oliver rose and crossed to the window. “You already told me I am not my father,” he said simply. “I heard you.”
“Perhaps you heard me. You did not believe me.”
“I believed the argument. I did not believe it applied.”
Sebastian was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped.
“Help me understand. I have replayed that conversation every day since, and I do not think I reached you at all.” He paused. “What are you not telling me?”
Oliver pressed his fingertips against the windowpane. The glass was cool. Below, a boy swept the crossing at the corner, his broom moving in quick, efficient arcs through the puddles.
“When I hit Dacre,” he said, “I was not angry.”
Sebastian waited.
“Anger would have been bearable. Anger passes. It flares, and it subsides, and afterward a man can examine what he did and call it a lapse. A moment of poor judgement. A failure of discipline.” He watched the boy finish the crossing and lean his broom against the lamppost. “I was not angry, Sebastian. I was glad.”
Sebastian waited. Oliver let out a deep breath.
“In the fraction of a second between my fist leaving my side and connecting with his face, I felt a clarity I have never felt in my life. The absolute, undeniable certainty that I was going to hurt him, and the knowledge that it would feel good.” He turned from the window.
“And it did. It felt good. His head snapped back, and I watched him fall, and for one breath I understood my father perfectly. As a man who discovered that violence answered a need, and who stopped asking whether the need was justified.”
Sebastian’s face had gone very still.
“That is what I have not told you,” Oliver said.
“Not that I lost control. That I enjoyed it. That for one heartbeat, standing over Dacre in that corridor, I felt more like myself than I have felt in nine years, and the thought makes me sick, and I cannot go near her while that is true. Because if I love her, and I am capable of that, then I am capable of becoming exactly what destroyed my mother.”
He sat down, rested his head against the back of the chair, and looked at the ceiling, where a hairline crack ran from the cornice to the center medallion.
Sebastian drew a breath.
“Oliver. Look at me.”
He did.
“Your father hit your mother because she expressed an opinion about a drainage ditch. Because she spoke to a guest. Because she smiled at the wrong moment or failed to smile at the right one. He hit her in the privacy of his study, behind a closed door, where a nine-year-old boy sat in the corridor listening because he could not make it stop.” Sebastian’s voice was steady, stripped bare, carrying nothing but the plain weight of truth.
“You hit a man who was holding a woman against a wall in a dark corridor. You did it in front of witnesses. You did not hide it. You did not justify it. You have been punishing yourself every day since.”
“The satisfaction, Sebastian. The enjoyment. That is his.”
Sebastian shook his head. “One punch to protect a woman does not make you your father. And the satisfaction you felt was not his satisfaction. His pleasure came from dominance. From watching a person he was supposed to love cower. What you felt in that corridor was relief. You saw the woman you love being hurt, and you stopped it, and for one instant your body told you that stopping it was the right thing to do. That is not his legacy.”
Oliver stared at him. The club settled around the silence. Lord Barrington’s newspaper slid to the floor with a whisper. The billiards argument had ended. Through the window, the crossing boy had collected his broom and moved on.
“What if it is too late?” he asked at last. “Too late to tell her.”
“It may be.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“I am not trying to reassure you. I am trying to keep you from making the worst decision of your life and calling it virtue.” Sebastian set the glass on the table between them.
“You spent nine years becoming a better man than your father. You succeeded. But you have confused the absence of cruelty for the presence of courage, and they are not the same thing. Courage is not standing aside while the woman you love marries a man who will slowly, politely, armed by the very best of intentions, teach her that her voice does not matter. Courage is admitting that you are terrified, and going to her anyway.”
Oliver sat still. The clock struck four.
He thought of Louisa at the Royal Academy, standing in front of a painting, turning to find him already watching her.
He thought of her voice in a walled garden: I am nobody important.
He thought of her wrist, the white marks fading, and the sound she had made when he rounded the corner.
He thought of his mother lifting her chin in a lamplit study. And he thought of Louisa at the Davenport ball, smiling, and smiling, and smiling.
“I need to think,” he said.
Sebastian stood. He straightened his coat and looked down at Oliver with an expression that held no mockery at all.
“Do not think too long,” he said. “Fear dressed as honor is still fear. And it makes a cold bed.”
He left. Oliver sat alone in the quiet of White’s, surrounded by drainage figures and half-written letters.
He opened the ledger. Fourteen pounds, six shillings.
He closed it. He pressed his palms flat against the cover, and he let himself feel the full weight of what Sebastian had said.
He loved her. He loved Louisa Fairchild, and fear, not honor, had been making his choices, and if he did not stop hiding behind the ghost of his father, he was going to lose her to a man who would spend forty years without truly seeing how magnificent she was.