Chapter 8
Clara and Julian met the wet nurse properly later that afternoon.
He’d spoken to the woman for the briefest of moments that morning but hadn’t had a chance to devote much time to the matter.
Mrs. Holt took one look at David and declared him a fine, healthy boy with excellent lungs and a very sensible face for his age.
Julian stood slightly to one side while the two women talked, watching Clara more than he watched Mrs. Holt.
The nurse had a habit of asking the sort of questions that only a mother would know how to answer such as whether the baby had shown any preference for being held on the left or the right, whether he had had any trouble with wind, whether he had seemed bothered by bright light in the early days.
Julian had braced himself each time, expecting Clara to falter.
She did not falter once.
She answered with an easy confidence, occasionally glancing down at David with an expression that looked, to any observer, precisely like that of a mother who had spent months learning every preference and peculiarity of her child.
By the time Mrs. Holt declared herself satisfied with the arrangement and took David off for his morning feed, Julian was staring at Clara with something close to open admiration.
She caught him looking.
“I had younger cousins,” she said and picked up her gloves from the table.
He cleared his throat. “Shall we go?”
She nodded, but as they made their way toward the carriage, she stopped him with a hand briefly on his arm.
“Before we leave this evening,” she said, “I must make one other call. I need to see Helena.”
“Clara—”
“Before you say anything,” she said, “I assume you were planning to tell Nathaniel the truth?”
He did not deny it. “Nathaniel has been my closest friend for nearly the whole of my life.”
“And Helena has been mine for nearly the whole of mine.” She met his gaze. “She does not keep secrets from me, and I do not keep them from her. That is not a negotiation.”
He looked at her for a moment then he nodded once. “Very well. But be careful about what you say and where you say it.”
“I am always careful,” she said and walked to the carriage.
He followed, thinking that this was almost certainly not true, but he was not going to say so.
They returned to town mostly in silence. The morning was gray, the streets already busy with carriages. Julian watched the faces they passed and thought about what those people knew, or thought they knew, and what the papers would say before the week was out.
Clara sat across from him with her hands folded in her lap and looked out of the window.
She had gone somewhere inside herself. He recognized it because he did the same thing.
The interior gathering that happened before a difficult conversation, the ordering of thoughts into something that could be presented without trembling.
Lady Chatham was in the drawing room when they arrived, and she was upon Clara the moment the door opened.
“How could you simply leave in the middle of a ball?” she said, her voice pitched high enough to rattle the delicate teacups on the sideboard. “You left poor Mrs. Wainscott entirely on her own. The woman was absolutely beside herself. I have never been so mortified in all of my life.”
“She was beside herself for approximately four minutes,” Lord Chatham said from his armchair without looking up from his newspaper, “until the note arrived.”
“The note,” Lady Chatham said, turning to Julian with an expression that made it very clear she had not forgotten about the note, “which said almost nothing of any use whatsoever, except that my daughter had been taken off to the Duke of Lynden’s home.
“Mama.” Clara’s voice was steady. Julian noticed her hands were not. She had them clasped together at her waist and the knuckles were very slightly white.
Lord Chatham set down his newspaper. He was a tall man with Clara’s eyes and the stillness of someone who knew that sometimes, it was simply best to suffer through the present circumstances rather than challenge them. He looked at Julian directly.
“I think,” Lord Chatham said, “that we had better sit down.”
They sat. Lady Chatham perched on the edge of her chair, Lord Chatham settled back with his hands on his knees, Clara sat beside Julian on the settee and looked at him, and the look clearly said: You said you would do the talking.
Julian cleared his throat.
“I owe you both a very significant apology,” he said, “and I intend to give you one. But I would ask first that you allow me to explain fully, before you respond. What I have to tell you is somewhat involved, and I want very much for you to understand all of it.”
Lady Chatham opened her mouth. Lord Chatham placed one hand briefly on her arm. She closed it again.
Julian took a breath.
He told them that he had long been sensible of a great regard for Clara, had been so, in truth, since before she had ever become engaged to Benjamin.
But she had been taken, and then her situation had been what it was, and he had not thought it his place to press any attention upon a woman who was already suffering.
When she had gone to Scotland, he had found himself thinking of her with a frequency he could not explain and certainly could not justify.
He had gone to visit her with Arabella. And he had called upon Clara there. What had begun as a visit of barely a fortnight had extended and then extended again because he had found he had no desire to leave.
He paused. He was building the tale as he went along, using feelings he had felt in the past so as to lend the story credibility.
He had asked her to marry him, he said. Privately.
At his estate in Southampton with the local vicar and no one else present because he had not wanted to expose her to the spectacle of another large society wedding after everything that had happened with Benjamin.
He had wanted something that was only theirs.
He stopped speaking. Silence settled between the four of them.
Then Clara said, “I know it was reckless.”
Her voice was steady. Julian looked at her.
“I know how it must appear,” she said, looking at her mother directly.
“And I know that you will be disappointed that I did not tell you. But Mama—” She paused, her rigid posture softening just a fraction under her heavy velvet pelisse.
“After Benjamin. After all of that. The humiliation of it. Being set aside for a more advantageous connection as though I were furniture that no longer suited the room.” She pressed her lips together for a moment.
“When Julian proposed, I said yes before I had quite finished thinking about it. Because for the first time in a very long time, somebody was choosing me. Not my family’s connections or my portion or my place in a room. Me.”
She looked down briefly.
“And then I was with child. And I know I should have written. I know it. But I had spent my entire life being the daughter who represented this family, who behaved as she ought and appeared as she ought and was placed wherever she would do the best for everybody around her. I had great feelings for Benjamin. I did. But at the end of it, I was a decoration on his arm. His family knew it, and he allowed them to use me that way. And then a better decoration appeared.” She looked back at her mother.
“I wanted something that was just mine. Julian and David were just mine. I was not ready to share them yet.”
The room was completely still.
Julian was not looking at Lady Chatham or at Lord Chatham. He was looking at Clara. Because threaded through every sentence, he could hear genuine feeling. She was not talking about him. She was not talking about David. But she was telling the truth about everything else.
She really had wanted something for herself.
She really had given everything else away and been left with nothing.
He felt, with a force that surprised him, that he wanted very much to make that less true than it currently was.
Lady Chatham made a sound that was not quite a word but apparently intended to be one. She pressed her handkerchief to her mouth and looked at her daughter, the hard lines of her maternal indignation giving way to an expression far more bewildered and fragile.
Lord Chatham said, “It sounds to me as though everyone has ended up with exactly what they ought to have.” He looked at Julian.
“My daughter has a husband who chose her. I have a son-in-law who is a great deal more than a baronet’s son.
” A brief pause. “And it sounds as though we have a grandson.” He stood and offered Julian his hand. “Welcome to the family.”
Julian shook it, and he was grateful that his voice remained level when he said, “Thank you, Your Grace. I am very glad to be in it.”
Lady Chatham recovered herself with impressive speed. “And what is his name?” she asked, dabbing at her eyes. “The baby. What have you called him?”
“David,” Clara said.
“David.” Lady Chatham considered this. “I would have thought you might have named him James, after your grandfather. You always adored your grandfather.”
Clara opened her mouth, and Julian saw it. It was just a fraction of a second’s hesitation, as though she were lost for words for once.
“Since he is the heir,” Julian said, “we thought it only right that he carry my father’s name. A son inheriting the title ought to carry something of his predecessor with him.” He looked at Lord Chatham as he said it, and Lord Chatham nodded immediately with the expression.
“That is most sensible, I agree.”
Lady Chatham accepted it. “David,” she said again, more warmly. “Yes, I suppose that is right.”
They did not stay much longer after that.
Julian explained that, given the rather disorganized fashion in which everything had come to light, he thought it wisest to remove Clara and the baby from London for a short time to allow things to settle before they returned to face society’s attention.
He suggested his estate in Southampton. A week, perhaps a little more.
Lord Chatham shook his hand again at the door. Lady Chatham embraced Clara with a fierceness that made Julian look away, feeling he was witnessing something private.
“We will want to meet our grandson soon,” the older woman said as they exited the house.
“Of course, the moment we return,” Julian offered though he felt bad because the baby was not their grandson at all.
They were halfway back to the carriage before Clara spoke.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the name. I had forgotten that my mother always wanted me to name my first son after her father. And truly, I had always planned to do so.”
“You recovered well,” he said.
“I nearly didn’t.” She was quiet for a moment. “I meant what I said. In there. About wanting something for myself.” She said it without looking at him, eyes forward. “I know it was not about us, but I meant it.”
He stopped walking.
She stopped too and looked at him.
“I know you did,” he said. “And for what it is worth, I am sorry that you have not had it. Something that was only yours.” He held her gaze.
“When this is over… when Arabella is safe, and the danger has passed, there will be a great deal to explain to a great many people. I know what it will cost you to tell them the truth.”
Her expression did not change, but something around her eyes did.
“It will cost me dearly to see the disappointment on their faces,” she said, “when they find out the marriage was not real and that the baby was not theirs to claim as a grandchild.” She looked down briefly.
“I could see it today. How happy they were. My father shook your hand. My mother… She never looked at Benjamin the way that she looked at you.”
Her quiet confession caught him entirely off guard, striking a heavy blow somewhere deep beneath his ribs where he had not braced for impact.
He reached out and took her hand. Not as he had taken over the breakfast table, not with purpose or urgency, but simply without a great deal of thought. His fingers closed around hers.
“When the time comes,” he said, “we will find a way to explain it that gives you back what you deserve. You protected a child and helped save a woman who could not save herself. That is the truth of what you did, and it will not be lost.” He pressed her hand once, gently.
“And whatever the rest of it turns out to be—you will still be a duchess. That part will not be undone by anything unless you wish it.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked down at their joined hands and gently withdrew hers.
“We should go,” she said. “I still have to see Helena.”
He nodded and followed her to the carriage. He did not try to take her hand again, but he thought about the way it had felt in his all the way back through the gray London morning, and he could not make himself stop.