Epilogue #2
He stayed for an hour, longer than he should have given how tired Megan looked.
To her mother’s horror she refused to use a wet nurse.
His mother did not want to leave. Megan let her hold the baby until he woke and cried and required his mother, and then the Duchess kissed her daughter and her grandson and allowed herself to be extracted with only moderate difficulty.
“Harold will show you to your rooms. I’m glad you came.” And Oliver moved back to his wife’s side.
In the corridor, Harry paused and looked back through the door he’d left half-open.
Oliver was sitting on the edge of the settee.
Megan had the baby at her breast and was talking, quiet and low, and Oliver had his head bent toward her in the attitude of a man who is listening to something he cannot hear enough of.
His hand was on her back, very still. He was not performing anything for an audience.
There was no audience. He simply looked at her the way the sun looked at the ground, with the uncomplicated certainty of something that was not going to stop.
Harry pulled the door quietly shut.
He had promised Douglas he would go to Longmere Hall in the morning.
* * *
Cavendish’s property sat at the end of a lane that had seen better maintenance, behind walls that were high enough to be functional and not quite high enough to be extraordinary.
Harry rode rather than taking the carriage because he wanted to be able to leave quickly if the circumstances recommended it, and because men who arrived on horseback and alone were less remarkable than men who arrived in a ducal equipage with footmen.
He had Douglas’s information. He had the address of Arabella Langton.
He had, which he would not have admitted to Douglas because Douglas would have argued with him about it, the instinct of a man who had spent the last year watching what captivity looked like from a close distance and had developed a reliable sense for the shape of it.
The butler who admitted him was the kind of butler who asked too many questions.
Harry gave his name and title and watched the man recalibrate with the particular speed of a man whose calculations were primarily about status and was shown into a drawing room that was cold and over-furnished and felt somehow like a waiting room rather than a space where anyone lived.
He had at least achieved more than Douglas. He’d gained entry.
Ralph Cavendish appeared after ten minutes.
He was perhaps fifty, compact, with the eyes of a man who assessed everything he looked at for what it was worth and appeared currently uncertain of what to make of a duke on his threshold.
He was pleasant, measured, entirely cooperative, and Harry disliked him immediately and completely in a way he’d learned to trust.
“Your Grace,” Cavendish said. “An unexpected honor. You must forgive the modest surroundings. We’re only lately arrived and I’m afraid the house is still being got into order.”
That was Cavendish’s first lie. “Not at all,” Harry said. “I was in the area visiting family at Saxton Castle and recalled that my late friend Simon Langton’s sister was residing here. I hope Miss Langton will forgive the intrusion.”
“Of course.” Cavendish smiled. “I’ll send for her directly.”
He did, and he stayed.
Harry had expected that. He sat in the cold drawing room and made conversation about the road from Shrewsbury and the weather in October and the price of wool, and he watched the door.
She came in quietly.
Harry had not known what he was expecting.
He had a description from Douglas, auburn-haired and slight, and he had the reality of Cavendish, and he’d been building an impression in his mind on the road here that was, he discovered, nothing like the woman who stepped into the drawing room and stopped.
She was not slight in the way that meant frail.
She was slight in the way that meant contained, everything held carefully inward, and she moved with the practiced economy of a person who had learned to take up as little space as possible and was currently determining how much of that caution was warranted in this specific room.
Her eyes went to Cavendish first, which told him something.
Then to Harry, and he saw her assess him quickly and carefully and arrive at something, he wasn’t sure what.
She was, he noted with a precise and unwelcome clarity, quite astonishingly beautiful.
He filed that information away with the thoroughness of a man filing it somewhere he would not be revisiting, because Baron Frasier had looked at a table and said she’s a good woman in the voice of a man who hadn’t eaten in three days and was trying not to think about bread, and Harry Fairfax was not the sort of man who thought about bread that belonged to his friends.
“Miss Langton,” he said, and rose. “I hope I haven’t disturbed you.”
“Not at all, Your Grace.” Her voice was even. Composed. She sat in the chair furthest from Cavendish and closest to the door, which she may not have done consciously but which Harry noticed.
“I was a friend of your brother’s,” Harry said. “Some years ago. I’m sorry for your losses. Your father and Simon were good men.”
“The very best.” Something passed through her expression that was real. Grief, uncomplicated and honest. “Thank you.”
They spoke about Simon. Harry watched her hands, which were folded in her lap with the stillness of someone who had decided to be still rather than someone who was naturally so.
He watched Cavendish, who sat adjacent and said little and appeared to be listening to everything.
He watched the way she chose each word, not as someone being evasive but as someone navigating a room where the wrong word had consequences.
It took him twenty minutes to be certain.
He had spent a year understanding what it looked like when a capable, intelligent woman was choosing her words inside walls that had been built around her without her consent.
He recognized the latitude of movement permitted and the edges she’d stopped testing because she knew where they were.
He recognized the particular composure of someone who had decided that composure was what they had to offer and they were going to offer it absolutely.
He recognized the way she did not look at the door.
When he rose to leave, he shook Cavendish’s hand and said all the appropriate things about the road and the weather, and he turned to Arabella Langton and took her hand and said, with the formality the occasion required and a steadiness he was surprised to feel, “I hope we’ll have the opportunity to continue the conversation about Simon another time, Miss Langton.
I think you could tell me things about him that I would be glad to know. ”
She looked at him. For a moment, behind the composure, he saw something. Not relief, not yet. Something smaller than relief. The thing that came before it, when a person began to consider that it was possible.
“I would like that,” she said. “Very much.”
He bowed and left.
On the road back to Saxton Castle, with the October light going flat across the hills and his horse moving steadily south, Harry Fairfax thought about Douglas Algate, who loved a woman he couldn’t reach, and Ralph Cavendish, who was holding someone who wasn’t his to hold, and the particular clarity of knowing what needed to be done.
What he had to ascertain was why Cavendish was holding her. To what end did he want her kept away from society?
He thought about Oliver, sitting on the edge of a bed with his hand on his wife’s back, not performing anything for anyone.
He thought about what it had taken to get Megan to that room.
He thought about Arabella Langton’s hands, folded in her lap, and the way she had not looked at the door.
I’m sorry, Douglas, he thought, and knew that Douglas would understand, when the time came, that he wasn’t sorry at all.
He would go back to London. He would put his affairs in order.
He would say nothing to anyone about what he intended, because what he intended was the kind of thing that required speed and silence and a man who’d learned from watching his brother-in-law that sometimes doing it correctly and doing it through the proper channels were entirely different undertakings.
And then he would go north again.
And Harry would free her.
* * *
BONUS MATERIAL -
And read on for a taste of FREED BY THE DUKE - book #2 in the Damsels in Distress series.