Chapter 29
“Mama, I need to tell you before he arrives.”
Elizabeth Fairchild set down her pen. The parlor clock read half past three. Frederick was due at four.
“Tell me what, Louisa?”
Louisa stood in the center of the room, still wearing her gloves, still wearing the sapphire.
She had rehearsed this conversation three times on the stairs and twice more in the corridor, and every version had begun with an apology.
She could not start there. If she apologized first, the apology would swallow everything that came after.
“I am going to end the engagement.”
Her mother looked at Louisa’s face, then at Louisa’s left hand where the sapphire sat loose on her fourth finger, then back at her face.
“I see,” she said, her voice curious.
“I do not love him, Mama. I have tried for weeks, and what I feel is not love. It is gratitude, and obligation, and the relief of finally being chosen, and none of those are enough to build a marriage on.”
Her mother folded the unfinished letter in half and placed it beneath the blotter. She aligned the ink pot beside the pen tray, her hands needing steadiness before her voice could follow.
“Your father will not be pleased.”
“Papa has not noticed the engagement. He has not noticed the Season. He noticed the canal scheme that lost our money and has not noticed anything since.”
The observation was blunt and true, and Louisa regretted it the moment it left her mouth. Her mother’s fingers stilled on the blotter.
Louisa closed her eyes and sighed. “I did not mean that.”
“You did. And you are not wrong.” Her mother looked up. “When Frederick arrives, do you wish me to stay or go?”
“Go. Please. I need to do this alone.”
“Then I shall be in the morning room. If you need me, I am twelve steps down the corridor.” She rose from the desk and crossed to where Louisa stood.
She lifted her daughter’s left hand and turned the sapphire once, slowly, watching the stone catch the light.
“A ring that does not fit is not a ring worth keeping.”
She kissed Louisa’s forehead. She left the parlor without looking back, and her footsteps retreated down the corridor, and the morning room door opened and closed.
The knocker struck at four o’clock precisely. The maid’s footsteps crossed the hall. Frederick’s voice carried from the entrance, warm and assured.
Louisa looked down at her hand, then away.
Frederick appeared, hat in hand, his smile already assembled. He glanced around the parlor and his brow creased at her mother’s absence.
“Your mother is not joining us?”
“She is in the morning room.” Louisa did not sit. “Frederick, I need to speak with you.”
He set his hat on the stand and crossed to the mantelpiece. “Of course. I wanted to tell you about the glazier Lord Ashton recommended. His work on the conservatory panels would be”
“Frederick.” She cut across him. “Please sit down.”
He studied her face. His hand went to his cuffs, straightening them.
“You look serious,” he said, brows lifted.
“I am serious. Please.”
He lowered himself into the blue damask chair, slowly, as though testing whether it would hold.
Louisa looked at the sapphire on her hand. She looked at Frederick.
“Frederick, I cannot marry you.”
The words tumbled over her lips, and she breathed a sigh of relief when they were out.
Frederick did not move. His hand rested on the back of the good chair, his weight balanced on one heel, his expression arranged into polite attention. He looked as though he were waiting for the second half of a sentence.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I cannot marry you, Frederick. I am breaking the engagement.”
He laughed. A short, startled sound, more reflex than amusement. He crossed to the window and back, three paces each way, then stopped and faced her.
“You are nervous. It is perfectly natural. My mother was terrified before her wedding. She told me she nearly fled to Bath.” He smiled, kind and patient, already solving the problem by explaining it away.
“These feelings will pass, Louisa. Once we are settled at Langley Park, you will wonder what all the fuss was about.”
“I am not nervous.”
“You are overwhelmed. The Season has been long, the preparations exhausting. I have been asking too much of you.”
“You have not been asking enough.” She held his gaze. “That is the problem.”
The smile faded. She watched it leave his face in stages, the warmth receding from his mouth, his brow, his eyes, replaced by a stillness she had never seen on him before. His hands settled flat against his knees.
“Tell me what has happened,” he said. “Tell me what has changed.”
“Nothing has changed. That is precisely what I am trying to say.” She remained standing.
She needed to stand. If she sat, the chair would catch her, and the cushions would soften the edges of what she had to say, and she could not afford softness.
“You have been the same man since the day we met. You are kind. You are generous. You are attentive in all the ways you believe matter. And you have never once asked me a question you did not already know the answer to.”
Frederick’s fingers pressed into the upholstered arm. “I have asked you a great many questions.”
“You have asked me about the conservatory. About the wedding breakfast. About whether I prefer glass panels or sash windows. You have asked whether I enjoy roses, whether I ride, whether I take sugar in my tea.” She heard her voice climbing and forced it level.
“You have never asked what I read, or why. You have never asked what I think about when I am quiet. You told Lord Cresswell I was boring him when I tried to share a story about a boundary dispute, and you did not understand why I stopped talking for the rest of the evening.”
“That was a dinner party, Louisa. I was trying to protect you from”
“From being heard. You were protecting me from being heard.” Her fingernails pressed into her palms. “At every gathering, you have praised my composure, my sensibility, my capability. You have told me I am restful. You have told me I would make a fine wife and a sensible mother. You have listed these qualities as though reading from a catalogue, Frederick, and not once have you asked whether the woman in the catalogue is the woman standing in front of you.”
He was quiet. The clock measured five strokes of its pendulum before he spoke again.
“This is about Ashford.”
She could feel the heat rise to her cheeks.
“It is not about Oliver.”
He scoffed and barked out a laugh. “You are breaking an engagement three weeks before the wedding, and you expect me to believe the Duke of Ashford has nothing to do with it.” Frederick rose from the chair.
He crossed to the fireplace and stood facing the empty grate, his back to her, his shoulders rigid beneath his coat.
“He spent the entire Season at your side. He danced with you, walked with you, whispered to you at every gathering in London. Half of society believed he was courting you before I ever proposed. And now you tell me this has nothing to do with him.”
“Oliver did not make this decision. I made it.”
“When? Tonight? Or weeks ago, while you were sitting beside me at dinners and letting me believe we had a future?” He turned from the grate.
His voice had changed, each word clipped and precise.
“Because it does not sound like you, Louisa. The woman I proposed to did not argue. She did not make demands. She did not accuse me of failing to ask the right questions.”
“No.” Louisa kept her voice level. “She did not. And that should trouble you, Frederick, because you chose a woman who would never argue. You were not looking for a partner. You were looking for a wife who would agree, and nod, and sit quietly while you arranged her life without consulting her. And when I finally stopped being quiet, you blamed Oliver rather than ask yourself why I had been silent for so long.”
He gripped the mantelpiece. His knuckles whitened against the marble.
“You put milk in my tea for six weeks,” she said. “I pushed the cup aside every single time. You never noticed. You never noticed because noticing would have required curiosity, and you were never curious about me. You were satisfied.”
“I have been more than generous with you.”
“You have been generous. Generosity is not the same as interest. You told me where we would live, how often I could see Eleanor, which charities I could support. You wrote a schedule for every day of our marriage and handed it to me as though I were a new housekeeper learning her duties.” She took a step toward him.
“You never asked what I wanted because it did not occur to you that my answer might differ from yours.”
“I was building us a life, Louisa.”
“You were building a life for yourself and installing me in it. You wanted a wife who would run your household, host your dinners, produce your heirs, and never once disrupt the order you had planned. And I nearly agreed to it, Frederick, because I spent so long wanting to be chosen that I forgot to ask what I was being chosen for.”
Frederick released the mantelpiece. He stepped back into the center of the parlor and stood still, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
“You have allowed Ashford to fill your head with ideas,” he said.
His voice was quieter now, the anger losing ground to a bewilderment he could not fully conceal.
“He flattered you. He told you what you wished to hear, and you believed him, because a duke’s compliments carry more weight than a gentleman’s honest devotion. ”
She held his gaze. “Oliver taught me to stop hiding. But I am not leaving you for Oliver. I am leaving you because I loved the idea of you, and you love the idea of having a wife. A restful one.”
Frederick looked at her. She watched the fight drain from his posture, his shoulders loosening, his hands unclenching at his sides.
“I see,” he said at last.
She looked down. “I am sorry.”
“Are you?” A short laugh followed his words, and she looked up.
“I am sorry that I let this go so far. I should have spoken sooner. I owed you that.”
He was quiet for a long time. She waited for him to argue again, to reach for the comfortable authority that had carried him through every previous conversation, but he did not reach.
“You are certain?”
She nodded and shifted uncomfortably.
“Yes.”
He nodded once.
“The ring, please,” he said then, holding his hand out to her.
She pulled it from her finger. The band slid off easily, as it always had. She placed it in his palm. He closed his fingers around it and put it in his waistcoat pocket without looking at it.
“I hope you will not regret this,” he said. “Society will be unkind.”
“I know.”
He collected his hat from the stand and buttoned his coat. He walked to the door and paused, his hand on the frame. She thought he might turn.
“Goodbye, Louisa,” he said, without turning, and let himself out.
The front door closed. His footsteps faded on the pavement, quicker than his usual stride, carrying him away from the house, away from the engagement, away from the version of Louisa Fairchild he had chosen and the real one he had never troubled himself to meet.
The knocker settled against its plate, and the house went quiet.
Her mother appeared in the doorway. She looked at Louisa’s bare hand.
“It is done,” Louisa said.
Her mother crossed the room and took Louisa’s left hand between both of her own.
“I shall write to Mrs. Ansell and Lady Cresswell before supper,” her mother said. “They will hear of it by morning regardless. Better the version comes from us.”
“Mama, I am sorry.”
Her mother squeezed her hand once, firmly, then released it. “Bravery and foolishness look identical from the outside. I shall reserve my judgement until I see which one this turns out to be.”
She returned to the morning room. Louisa heard the scratch of pen on paper resume behind the closed door.
The parlor was still. The sapphire was gone. The late afternoon sun had shifted while they talked, and now it fell across the far wall where the wallpaper had faded to a paler shade, the outline of a painting that had hung there for years before being sold.
Tomorrow the whispers would start. Lady Caldwell would tell Mrs. Fenton, who would tell Lady Ashton, who would tell everyone Louisa had ever smiled at across a ballroom.
The invitations would stop. The cream-colored cards would cease their arrival on the silver tray.
The doors that had opened would close for the woman who had jilted Frederick Langley.
She looked at her bare finger. She looked at the empty chair.
She drew a breath, and her lungs filled completely for the first time in weeks.