Chapter 31
The carriage turned onto Grosvenor Square at a quarter past five. A breathless Louisa pressed her face to the glass and counted the houses in the grey light until she found his.
Ashford House stood at the far corner, its Portland stone facade pale against the overcast sky.
Two lamps burned in the entrance hall, visible through the fanlight above the door.
Below, on the pavement, a coachman and a footman were loading a trunk onto a travelling carriage.
A second trunk sat on the flagstones beside the mounting block.
The horses stood in their traces, stamping and blowing clouds of white breath into the June chill.
Her breath stopped for a second, then relief flooded through her. She was not too late.
Her own hired carriage stopped twenty yards short.
The driver had been reluctant to take her at this hour, a young woman alone, no maid, no companion, wearing a day dress buttoned crookedly at the collar because her hands had been shaking too badly to manage it properly.
She had promised him double the fare and climbed in before he could refuse.
Louisa stepped down onto the pavement. The morning air was cold and sharp against her bare neck.
Her shawl hung on the parlour chair. Her gloves sat on the hall table.
She had not brushed her hair but pinned it in a rough knot that was already slipping at the left temple, and she crossed the pavement toward Ashford House without stopping to fix it.
The coachman noticed her first. He straightened from the trunk he had been securing, his hands still on the buckle, and watched her approach in open confusion. The footman turned. Louisa ignored them both and climbed the front steps.
She pressed her palm flat against the door and heard his voice inside the hall, giving instructions to Phelps about forwarding the post.
The door opened.
Phelps stood in the frame, fully dressed despite the hour, his expression showing genuine alarm at the sight of the young woman on the duke’s doorstep before dawn.
“Miss Fairchild.”
She took a courageous step forward. “I need to see him.”
“His Grace is preparing to depart, miss. The carriage is…”
“I know that he wants to leave. I need to see him now.” Her voice softened slightly. “Please.”
Phelps hesitated. Behind him, the hall stretched toward the staircase, candlelit, smelling of beeswax and boot polish. A travelling cloak hung over the banister. A pair of leather gloves lay on the console table beside the morning post, sorted and tied, ready to travel.
Oliver’s boots sounded on the stairs before she saw him. He descended in his travelling coat, a letter in one hand, his attention on the page, speaking as he came down.
“Phelps, tell Hargreaves the second trunk can go on the boot. I will not need the books until…”
He looked up.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Oliver stood on the third step from the bottom, the letter hanging loose in his fingers.
Louisa stood in the open doorway, her collar crooked and her hands trembling.
The dawn light fell across the checkered marble between them, grey and cold, and the hall clock counted three seconds in the silence before Phelps, guided by forty years of service, stepped backward and vanished through the servants’ passage.
“Louisa.” Oliver’s voice came out rough. He cleared his throat. “What are you doing here?”
“You were leaving?”
“I am leaving. The carriage is loaded.”
“I know. I can see it.” She stepped inside. The marble was cold through the thin soles of her shoes. “You were going to leave London without telling me.”
He came down the remaining steps. He set the letter on the console table beside his gloves and stood at the foot of the staircase, six feet of checkered floor between them.
The skin beneath his eyes was shadowed, and his cravat was tied with less precision than usual, as though he had knotted it in the dark.
“There was nothing to tell you,” he said at last. “Your engagement ended. I heard through the servants’ gossip, not from you, which told me everything I needed to know about where I stood.
I assumed Frederick discovered the truth about the arrangement, and I assumed you blamed me for the consequences, and I decided the kindest thing I could offer you was my absence. ”
Her heart twitched at his words, and she nearly took another step forward, but her body would not obey.
“You assumed wrong.”
He stared at her.
“Frederick did not end the engagement,” she said. “I did.”
Oliver went very still. His hand found the newel post behind him, and his fingers closed around the carved wood.
He cast his eyes down, though not before she saw the light flicker in them. When he looked up, his voice was lighter. “You ended it?”
She nodded.
“Yes. I am the one who ended it. Because you see… I realized something. I can’t… I can’t marry him.”
“Why?”
Outside, one of the horses stamped and the harness jingled. The coachman’s voice carried faintly through the door, asking the footman whether the departure time had changed.
“Because the ring never fit,” she said. “He guessed my size and never asked. And I wore it for weeks without telling him, because I had spent so long wanting to be chosen that I convinced myself the wrong fit was close enough.”
Oliver said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs holding the newel post as though releasing it would cost him his balance.
“And I suppose…” she continued, pushing through the fear. “Well, you can’t marry someone when you’re… in love with someone else.”
His eyes found hers, and widened.
“I did not choose Frederick because I loved him.” Her voice was steady.
The effort cost her, and she let it. “I chose him because I was afraid. I was afraid that if I admitted what I truly felt, I would be reaching for a man who did not reach back, and I could not survive being overlooked by you the way I had been overlooked by everyone else. Frederick was safe. Frederick was possible. You were terrifying.”
“Louisa…”
“Let me finish. Please.”
He closed his mouth. His fingers tightened on the newel post and then deliberately released, one at a time, until his hand hung at his side.
“I spent four years wanting Frederick to see me,” she said.
“He never did. He saw a capable woman, a sensible woman, a woman who would manage his household and agree with his opinions and stop speaking when he changed the subject. He saw the outline of a wife and never troubled himself to look at who was standing inside it.”
She took a step toward him. “You saw me, Oliver. From the very first evening, when I was standing at the edge of a ballroom holding a glass of vile lemonade, you saw me. Not the version I had rehearsed, not the version I performed for Frederick. You saw the real one, and instead of looking away, you told me she was worth seeing.”
Oliver turned from her. He walked to the console table and braced both hands on its edge, his head bowed, his shoulders rigid beneath his travelling coat. When he spoke, his voice was stripped of the charm, the deflection, the careful ease she had grown accustomed to hearing from him.
“You did nothing wrong,” he said. “After the kiss. After Dacre. You did nothing wrong. I left because I was afraid of what I was becoming.”
“Then tell me.”
He pushed back from the table and faced her. His hands hung at his sides.
“When I hit Dacre, I enjoyed it.”
She waited.
“I have spent nine years trying to become a man my mother would have been proud of. Kind. Patient. Controlled. And in one second, in a corridor, I drove my fist into a man’s face, and I felt relief.
Not shame. Not regret. Relief. And the part of me that I have been trying to outrun since I was nine years old, the part that remembers every sound I heard through that study door, told me that relief was his.
My father’s. That the satisfaction I felt standing over Dacre was the same satisfaction he felt standing over a woman he was supposed to protect. ”
His voice had grown quiet. He stood at the center of the checkered marble, the morning light from the fanlight falling grey across his shoulders.
“I could not go near you while that was true. Because if I loved you, and I do, Louisa, I love you in a way that makes the word feel insufficient and terrifying, then I was capable of becoming the man who destroyed my mother. I believed that the kindest thing I could do for you was to let you go.”
Louisa crossed the remaining distance between them. She took his hands. His fingers curled around hers, as though he’d been waiting to hold on to her as desperately as his next breath.
“Oliver, listen to me.” She looked up at him. “I cannot tell you why your father would ever have hurt your mother. But I can tell you that I know in my heart of hearts that you will never hurt me.” She tightened her grip on his hands. “You didn’t hit him to hurt me. You tried to protect me.”
He pulled one hand free and pressed it over his eyes.
“The man who protected me in that corridor,” she said, and she reached up and drew his hand down from his face so he had to look at her, “is the same man who crouched beside a painting hung too low in a gallery and told me that poor positioning did not diminish worth. The man who handed me a parasol and sat on a bench for ten minutes while I talked to a botanist about ferns, and who told me afterward that he was proud of me.” She held his gaze.
“That man could not become his father. He does not have the capacity for it. He never did.”
Oliver looked at her for a long time. His hand was still in hers, and she could feel the tension in his grip shifting, loosening, releasing by degrees.
“You sound very certain,” he muttered, his voice tinted with uncertainty. Louisa smiled.
“I am very certain.”
“Even after the version of me that you saw in that corridor? Even after I put a man on the ground in front of you.”