Chapter 30
The news reached Oliver before breakfast.
He was standing at the study window, watching rain flatten the last of the roses in the Grosvenor Square garden, when Phelps appeared in the doorway carrying the morning post on a silver tray and an expression he was trying very hard to govern.
“The letters, Your Grace.”
“Thank you, Phelps.”
Phelps did not leave. He set the tray on the desk and adjusted the position of the inkwell and straightened a pen that was already straight. Oliver turned from the window.
“Is there anything else?”
“I would not presume to mention it, sir.”
Oliver shook his head slightly. “You are mentioning it by not mentioning it. Out with it.”
Phelps drew a measured breath. “Cook heard from the grocer this morning, sir, that Mr. Frederick Langley’s engagement to Miss Fairchild has been dissolved.
The grocer heard it from Lady Caldwell’s housekeeper, who heard it from Mrs. Fenton’s maid.
” He aligned the pen tray a fraction to the left.
“I understand the news has been widely circulated.”
Oliver’s hand stilled on the curtain.
“When?”
“Yesterday afternoon, sir.”
Oliver released the curtain. The fabric swung back across the glass and cut the grey morning light in half. He crossed to the desk, picked up the post, set it down without reading a single envelope.
“That will be all, Phelps.”
“Very good, sir.”
Phelps retreated. The door clicked shut. Oliver stood at the desk and pressed his knuckles against the leather blotter until the ridges of his bones went white.
Frederick had ended the engagement.
He inhaled quickly. There was only one explanation.
Frederick had seen what half of London had whispered about since the Bancroft ball, since the coat, since the dances and the waltzes and the corridor at Lady Hathaway’s.
He had looked at the woman he intended to marry and believed that her affections had been claimed elsewhere, and he had done the decent, painful, inevitable thing.
Oliver sank into the desk chair. The leather protested beneath him.
Above the mantelpiece, the clock measured the silence in its steady, indifferent strokes, and he listened to it the way he had listened to clocks in this house since childhood, counting the seconds between one disaster and the next.
She would blame him. She had every right.
He had convinced the entire Ton that he was courting her.
Of course Frederick would believe it was true—that was what they had bargained on.
He never thought beyond Frederick noticing her.
Never thought that the man would not want to be second to another.
Then he had walked away, leaving her behind.
He should write to her. He owed her that much. An apology, though the word felt thin against the weight of what he had done. He pulled a sheet of paper from the drawer and uncapped the ink.
Dear Miss Fairchild,
The pen hovered. The ink dried on the nib.
Every sentence he composed after those two words collapsed.
What could he write that would not sound like a man trying to ease his own conscience?
What apology could survive the distance between his desk and her parlor, where she sat right now, bearing the consequences of his failures alone?
He capped the ink. He folded the blank paper in half and slid it beneath the blotter.
“Phelps.”
The door opened within seconds, and Phelps appeared.
“Sir?”
“Have Hargreaves prepare the travelling carriage. I will leave for Ashford Hall in the morning.”
Phelps hesitated. The pause lasted a quarter-second, but Oliver saw it and understood.
The household had expected this. They had watched him retreat from society over the past weeks, watched invitations pile unanswered on the silver tray, watched the study lamp burn past midnight while the rest of Grosvenor Square slept.
Servants saw everything. He’d known that all his life. Heard the whispers.
“Very good, Your Grace. Shall I instruct Mrs. Aldridge to open the house?”
“Send an express this morning. Tell her I will arrive by Thursday evening.”
“And your engagements, sir? Lord Tyndale’s agricultural committee meets on…”
“Send my apologies. To Tyndale and anyone else expecting me this week.”
Phelps nodded and withdrew. Oliver heard his footsteps descend toward the servants’ passage, heard the distant murmur of instructions being relayed, trunks being pulled from closets, the quiet machinery of departure.
He looked at the blotter where the folded paper sat. Three words. Dear Miss Fairchild. He had spent an entire Season calling her Louisa, and now he could not finish a letter that began with her surname.
He left the study without looking at his father’s portrait in the hall. He climbed the stairs. He stood in his dressing room while Colton laid out travelling clothes. He said nothing. The only person he wanted to speak to was the one person he had forfeited the right to address.
* * *
Eleanor arrived at half past two, carrying a basket of lemon biscuits from the Whitmore cook.
“You look dreadful,” she said, setting the basket on the tea table and pulling off her gloves.
Louisa flashed a tired half-smile. “Thank you, Eleanor.”
“I mean that I can tell you have not slept, which I fully understand, because you ended an engagement yesterday and I would be surprised if you had managed it.” She unbuttoned her pelisse and draped it across the chair.
“Tell me everything. Your note last evening was three lines long and one of them was illegible.”
Louisa had not moved from the blue damask chair since breakfast. The tea on the tray had gone cold. The toast her mother brought at nine sat untouched, its butter softened into a pale slick.
“The ring came off easily,” Louisa said softly, then shrugged.
“He never asked my size. He guessed, and it never fit, and I wore it for weeks without telling him.” She turned the teacup in her hands.
“When I… ended it... He claimed that I was nervous. He told me his mother had nearly fled to Bath before her own wedding, and that my feelings would pass once we were settled at Langley Park.”
Louisa leaned forward slightly. “And then?”
“Then I told him he had put milk in my tea for six weeks and never noticed I pushed the cup aside every time.” She set the cup on the saucer. “He stopped laughing after that.”
“Oh, Louisa…”
“He left quietly,” Louisa continued. “He did not shout. He asked for the ring. And then he walked out.”
“And you?”
“I breathed.” She looked at her bare hands. “Properly. For the first time in weeks.”
Eleanor reached across the table and squeezed her wrist once, firmly. Then she picked up a lemon biscuit and bit into it, because Eleanor had always dealt with unpleasant facts and food in the same manner: directly.
“I loved the idea of him,” Louisa admitted. “I never knew the man. Not really. And he never knew me.”
“The whispers will be vicious,” Eleanor said gently. Louisa nodded.
“I know. The Ton will have a field day.”
“Lady Caldwell will have told Mrs. Fenton by now. Mrs. Fenton will have told Lady Ashton. By Thursday every drawing room in London will have a version, and none of them will be yours.”
“I know.”
“The invitations will stop,” Eleanor continued.
Louisa sighed. “I know, Eleanor.”
“Good. Then we need not discuss it further.” She brushed crumbs from her lap. “What happens next?”
Louisa opened her mouth. She had no answer prepared, which was itself an answer.
For two years, every decision had pointed toward Frederick.
Every gown chosen, every conversation rehearsed, every evening spent studying his preferences from the safety of shadowed corners.
The compass needle had been fixed, and now the magnet was gone, and she did not have the faintest idea which direction to face.
The door opened. Rosaline, the only Fairchild maid, appeared carrying a fresh pot of tea. She was nineteen, freckled, constitutionally incapable of keeping gossip to herself for longer than it took to climb a flight of stairs.
“I… overheard something in the Ton today,” Eleanor said carefully, and Louisa looked up.
“About Frederick?”
Eleanor shook her head. “About… the Duke.”
Louisa’s fingers curled against the arm of the chair. She did not have to ask which duke. “What about him?”
“According to the whispers going about... The Duke is leaving London. Tomorrow, first light. Going back to Hampshire, they say. Having the whole house opened and aired.”
Louisa did not move. She simply stared out in front of her silently.
“Louisa.” Eleanor’s voice was careful.
“He is leaving London.” She said it slowly, her voice soft. “The Season is not over. He never leaves before the Season ends.”
Eleanor set down her biscuit. “No. He does not.”
Of course he was leaving. The arrangement had served its purpose, exceeded it and now nothing remained in London to hold him.
Frederick had proposed, the engagement had shattered, the gossip was spreading through every servants’ hall in Mayfair.
Oliver had built a stage, helped her stand on it, and walked into the wings before the final act.
She stood and crossed to the window. Rain ran down the glass in thin, wandering lines.
“I suppose that settles it,” she said at last.
“Settles what?”
“Oliver. Whatever I thought I felt, whatever I convinced myself might be returned.” She pressed her thumb against the windowpane.
“He… must be so humiliated. The entire city saw me choose Frederick, and it looks like I jilted him. Then I did the same to Frederick.” She laughed sardonically.
“And now… Oh, he must not want to be associated with me at all.” She traced a raindrop down the glass.
“A man does not flee the city over a woman he cares for. He flees because the obligation is finished and the city holds nothing that interests him.”