Chapter 23
N,
One day, I’ll read your work and we’ll wonder how one ever thought you wouldn’t crumble foundations with your words alone. If Adelaide is anything like the person behind the pen, I’m excited to befriend her too.
Quite a Very loyal supporter
During the carriage ride through Mayfair, he’d struggled with the straining need in his lap that distracted him. The ricocheting of the carriage and her doubting him had caused his need to lapse. He’d made a promise to her, and he intended to keep it.
Upon his return home with the neatly wrapped manuscript under his arm, he had instructed his butler to close the draperies and turn away any callers. He had even had the butler lock up the wine cellar and liquor cabinet. Fitz wanted to be fully present and fully sober when he read her work.
When he was younger, he had avoided difficult tasks with drink, with procrastination, with diverting company. He had found just that…diversion…but never fulfillment. Not only that, his problems…with reading…with focusing… were heightened tenfold, he was loath to admit, when he was in his cups.
He wasn’t a heedless boy anymore, and he knew now he had to give her work his full and undivided attention. She deserved that much from him.
I’m trusting you with this, please don’t lose it, promise me you will protect it with your life. Promise me, Fitz. I need your word.
I give you my word, Princess, that you can trust me with yours, he had said, leaning to plant a kiss on her brow before taking the bundle of paper in her arms.
He loosened his cravat and removed both his coat and waistcoat, reclining at the escritoire in linen shirt and breeches.
She had trusted him, and he wanted to prove up to the task.
He could point to any number of occasions when he had proved a disappointment; but he found he cared so very much what she thought of him that it superseded anything else at the moment.
He thought of her, probably poring over some boring tome in her chamber, a braided strand of hair over one shoulder, candlelight limning her features, her spectacles perched on the bridge of her nose adorably.
God, he would give anything to know if she was thinking of him too; envisioning him slouched uncomfortably at his desk.
He’d once known she harbored feelings for him despite their verbal jousting and her mocking his intellect; but he wasn’t sure, that when it came right down to it, that she trusted him.
Which, admittedly, would have been entirely his fault if she didn’t.
That didn’t mean the realization had stung any less.
The facts glared at him in the face, accusing.
Over a year ago, before his grandfather had died, she had asked him to read her work.
He hadn’t had the heart, or the spine, whichever insufficient organ one wanted to blame, to tell her his problems then.
He had acted a cad; he had lied to her rather than tell her the truth.
He could only thank whatever twisted angel had taken to guarding over him that Noelle saw something in him he had not seen in himself and had not given up on him entirely. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but it had not been this.
Fitz lounged on his settee, pouring a glass of water instead of wine, popping a morsel of cheese into his mouth. She had him locked in, bound his wavering concentration to the page within the opening:
“Adelaide stared at the lady, not resplendently beautiful, but exquisitely garbed, sitting moody and silent in the inn.
The lady was taking it all in as one might when confronted with how the other half lives.
And then later, Adelaide watched as a gentleman escorted the plain-faced lady into a carriage, touching her gloved hand like something breakable.
As the carriage departed for destinations likely far superior to her small and forgettable village, Adelaide had heard the scraping of carriage wheels on the muddy juts of the road, and then a loud thump.
She exited the tavern, fearing someone had been harmed, only to find a beautiful lacquered and gilded trunk.
Just sitting there, unclaimed and alone in the muck, much like her.
She heard nor saw anyone else. With all her strength, she managed to stow it in the back of her stepfather’s stables.
The gilded lock broke with a groan as she smashed it with the head of a muck-crusted shovel.
Inside were finely stitched and delicately ornate clothes neatly packaged in paper.
Only….They weren’t just clothes.
She had seen the way people looked at her in the shabby clothes she wore, and the things people assumed about her.
The reverse could also be true. The clothes could make others believe things about her.
They could open doors and change her stars.
“A pretty girl with an ugly fate,” that’s what she’d overheard some of the people in the village say.
But the wardrobe falling into her path as it did? Perhaps her fate was changing.
Rather than be bound into marriage to a wretched man, the maid Adelaide had assumed the identity of a lady and traveled to London on credit and a commandeered carriage, claiming to be the legitimate daughter of a Lord Farthington of Nottinghamshire.
She had forged circumstantial proof that she was a gentlewoman.
There was humor, intrigue, and just enough mockery of society without being derisive.
Fitz could picture Lady Noelle, his beautiful wordsmith, watching others, storing bits of interactions and conversations into her magnificent brain, working them into a story.
The image of her writing in her chamber etched itself behind his eyelids when he closed his eyes.
Noelle bent over a desk creating something new, something altogether like a fairy tale and also not like any fairy tale he’d ever read.
With every word, he found something that revealed part of her: her dreams, her desires, her sleepless nights.
It felt…intimate, like seeing to the very core of who she was and all that she wanted to be.
He wanted to read more, to see more glimpses of the woman she withheld from the rest of the world behind her spectacles.
“Tell me all your secrets,” Lord Swindle murmured close to her ear. His voice curled around the loose tendrils of Adelaide’s hair, shaking something free within her.
Anything but that, those she would carry to her grave.
“The truth comes at a premium,” she whispered back, ducking underneath his arm.
He grabbed her by the arm and in one stride had her pinned against the wall, possessing her.
He might possess her in body at least, there were still so many more facets of her that she’d never allow him to hold in his hands.
“Name your price,” he whispered, a warm, dark taunt against the nape of her neck.
“Dear God,” Fitz breathed aloud, turning the page as he seated himself on the floor, leaning against the back of the settee. “She’s brilliant.”
Fitz spent the next few hours entranced, he hadn’t read a book that had captured him like this.
Adelaide was a triumph. It was a tale of woe and desperation, a tale of danger and intrigue and temptation.
And greed. The ending to Adelaide had been a shock, just as the entire story had been a shock to his system.
He had to publish this book. Not only would this story be a fresh start for the publishing house, it would be a success for Noelle, and beyond all of that, it was a story that needed to be told.
He thought of the women he had known across many social calibers, of his mother, of his grandmother Lady Althea, of Lady Rosamunde Pembrooke, of Lady Moria’s near-ruination, of the women in his employ, of Letitia.
How many women in dire straits dreamed of turning the hands of fate and making fate work for them rather than serve the cruel master called destiny?
There were many, from both sides of the sides of the class divide if his mother were any example, and they would all identify with this complex heroine.
He was as sure of it as he was proud of her.
The fire crackled in the grate. The dog slept at his feet. Fog rolled over the city streets, positioning itself in between morning, and the sun. Howler needled his nose onto Fitz’ lap, he leaned down to scratch him between the ears. Fitz looked at the clock, nearly 6 am.
In the glass of the curio cabinet nearby, he looked at his reflection.
He looked like he had never gone to bed this night.
Before he could think better of it, he was rushing to the front door, putting on his overcoat, stuffing his legs into his fine boots.
Howler was at his heels. He tried to push his mutt back inside, but the dog would not obey.
“Fine, you can come along. But don’t be a nuisance,” he said to the shaggy-haired hound.
Fitz checked his pocket watch. He had walked for nearly an hour, meditating on the image of his city covered in fog, waking from a long night and stretching its legs.
A haze of gray and white drifted over the streets, obscuring the traffic of horses and carts and carriages.
There was a din of activity, the working classes starting their labors, carrying the city on their backs with them as they completed their tasks.
Those who most benefited from their labors still idle or abed at this hour, of whose number he was usually included.
He had walked for a long time, his long coat nearly grazing the ground, his dog staying close to his side, stopping to purchase a cup of dark coffee from a cart near Covent Garden, giving in to finally complete the errand he’d set out to do.
And then he saw it.
In all its every day, unadorned splendor.
It stopped him in his tracks with a vision of what could be.
On the street corner stood a plain, run-of-the-mill book shop, with gilt-edged lettering in the windows and a hand-painted sign hanging from the eaves above.
Morning sunlight painted iridescent light on the window panes. So unassuming, and yet.
In his mind’s eye, he could see it all. A display with signs, copies of her book perched there for all passersby to stop in and purchase. And purchase they would.
He could see her, watching as all those folks stopped in that unassuming little shop and left with Adelaide tucked under an arm, laid flat under their nose, or a copy held out to share with a fellow shopper.
And emblazoned brilliantly on the book that all those people would devour like so much sugar and cream in one’s tea, would be her name on the cover.
Her christian name and the given name of his that she would take.
In that bookshop window, he saw a future that would belong to the two of them. Maybe he was desperate for her, but he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Publicly.
And a public admission was just what he had to do.
Fitz pounded the door knocker on the ornate green door, lately realizing how early the hour was; and that, with his attire and partly unbuttoned shirt and tousled hair, he looked a spectacle. The butler, Briarley, opened the door and showed him inside with an unimpressed glower.
In the study, The Earl gave Fitz a glance over. He looked from Fitz to the dog close at his heels. Fitz knew what he likely saw. Pembrooke moved in closer.
“Did you go home last night? You look…unwell.” He said, his voice low and even.
Unwell..that word carried a wave of meaning Fitz could only begin to guess.
Fitz pulled in a deep breath and decided on the truth. “I was home all night. I…couldn’t sleep.”
“Why ever not?” The Earl said, showing little concern as he pulled on his hat.
Fitz ran a hand through his hair to steady himself. “Have you read any of Lady Noelle’s writing before?”
Jasper narrowed his eyes at him and resignedly removed his hat again. “Please elaborate.”
Fitz paced, with the dog following, then decided to give the poor dog a break, and just let the words fall out.
“I feel like a cad. She asked me a long time ago if I’d read something she wrote. If I thought The Gladstone would publish any of her work,” he made his way from the entry way into the library, the hound and The Earl following him (the dog in earnest, the Earl in reluctance).
“I should have taken her seriously; I should have done what she asked. It’s a bloody marvel. She’s a marvel.”
Fitz found his way to a chair and sat, propped a leg on top of another, then decided he preferred standing.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how I’m going to procure new authors, turn a profit, make the damn business respectable again in order to compete with other new publishing houses…The answer was staring me in the face all along. It’s her.”
Jasper checked the clock, throwing his arms up and seeming to decide he might as well pour himself a brandy anyway.
The Earl spoke as he poured liquid into cut crystal, “Given your…well, your history…would you be offended if I asked what makes you so sure? And why should I let my ward be the answer to your problems?”
“You’ll have to take my word for it. I’ve never read anything like this. If I had read anything like it, maybe I’d have read more. I want to publish her work, and I want to marry her.”
“In that order?”
“In whatever order she wants… She deserves to feel heard, and her story deserves to be read. I’d be stupid and blind to ignore that. If I marry her, it would allow her to publish whatever else she decided to take into that beautiful head of hers to write.”
“Well, it sounds like you’ve decided my future for me and it isn’t even 7:00.”
Noelle was angry. He could hear it in her voice before he turned to the sound.