Chapter 16 #2
“I always loved the monkeys,” she said, as they rounded the corner towards the primate enclosure. “They seemed so much like people. Somehow better than people, though. Less vicious.”
Julian looked at her sideways. “You haven’t spent enough time here.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He gestured toward a cluster of monkeys arranged on a rocky outcrop at the center of their enclosure.
They were, on the surface, charming—small, bright-eyed, chattering amongst themselves.
“I was here some months ago,” he said. “You see that one on the left? The one with the particularly self-satisfied expression?”
She looked. “Yes.”
“He grabbed the smaller one by the ear, pulled him clean off the rock, and then settled back into exactly that expression as though he had done nothing at all.”
Clara stared at the monkey. “Animals,” she said, “are not supposed to be mean.”
“At the end of the day, we are all animals in rather fine packaging,” Julian said. “There is genuinely very little difference between that monkey and half the men I have encountered in the House of Lords.”
“When is the last time you pulled a peer by the ear and pushed him off a rock?”
He grinned at this. “I have not, not yet. But I have been tempted more than once.” He looked down at David, who was reaching one small fist towards a nearby bird cage with intense concentration. “Would you like an ice? I think I saw a vendor near the entrance.”
“Yes, please, I would.” She had never been able to resist shaved ice.
He had already gone which she might have known he would do. He didn’t ask what flavor. She stood with the pram and watched David, who was staring at a parrot.
“It is you, is it not? You! You there.”
Clara turned. Coming toward her, with an expression of barely suppressed excitement that she recognized immediately, was Miss Dorothea Finch—Dottie Finch as she had been at Mrs. Allenby’s finishing school, who had always been the first to know everything and the last to stop talking about it.
“That was the Duke of Lynden, was it not? So you are Lady Lynden,” Dottie said, reaching her and grasping both her hands before Clara had quite consented to it. “So it is true. You really are the Duchess of Lynden, with a baby and everything. You have absolutely astonished everybody.”
“It was not our intention to astonish anyone,” Clara said pleasantly. “We were simply being a little private for a time. I’m sure you understand.”
“Private,” Dottie repeated, with the tone of someone for whom that concept held a faint but detectable whiff of suspicion.
“I suppose. It is only…” she leant in, her voice dropping to a register that was somehow louder than her normal one, “… it is only that we all thought you so terribly in love with Benjamin not so very long ago. And then, of course, there was the business with His Grace Lynden himself and Miss—well, that other business. It does make one wonder,” she added with a bright, merciless smile, “whether this wasn’t perhaps rather a sudden sort of arrangement. A rebound, some might say.”
Clara held her gaze with perfect composure. “How kind of people to take such an interest,” she said. “As for sudden, I think you will find that the happiest marriages are often the ones that surprise everyone, including the parties involved.” She smiled. “Now if you’ll excuse me —”
“Here.”
Julian had appeared at her elbow, silent as smoke, and was holding out an ice. Coconut. Her favorite. He had remembered. Again.
He looked at Dottie Finch with an expression of easy, pleasant authority. “Miss—?”
“Finch,” Dottie supplied, visibly flustered by his sudden presence. “Dorothea Finch. Clara and I went to finishing school together.”
“How delightful,” he said, with a smile that was perfectly, disarmingly warm. “I hope you will come to our ball. We are looking forward enormously to celebrating properly with all our friends. It is two Saturdays from now.” He tucked Clara’s free hand into his arm. “Do excuse us.”
They walked away together, and Clara kept her eyes forward until she was quite certain Dottie Finch was out of earshot.
“She said it was a rebound,” Clara said quietly.
“I know. I heard.” He glanced down. “Are you all right?”
“I am. But do you think that is what everyone will say?”
He shrugged. “If they do, then it works in our favor. Especially if we decide to part ways.”
She looked up at him, her throat tight. She hadn’t thought about the end of their arrangement, not truly. Not while they were still so involved in it all.
They found a bench beneath a chestnut tree near the monkey enclosure where David could watch the creatures.
Julian settled the baby against his arm.
David curled his fist around Julian’s finger.
The way Julian smiled at that made her heart warm, but she reminded herself that such feelings had no place in their arrangement.
“Can I ask you something?” Clara asked. She didn’t want to, but Dottie’s words were bothering her.
“You may ask me anything.”
She hesitated. “Josephine.”
He was quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortably so but in the way of someone choosing their words with care.
“What do you wish to know?”
“Did you love her?”
He rocked David gently, his gaze resting somewhere in the middle distance.
“I believed that I did,” he said at last. “At the time, I was quite convinced of it. But when I examine it now, honestly—I think I was more in love with an idea than with her.” He paused.
“Do you remember what you said at breakfast about your wedding? How the plans had been built around everyone else’s wishes until almost nothing of it was actually yours? ”
“Yes.”
“It was something like that, I think. She was a blank canvas upon which I had painted everything I thought I wanted. She was doing very much the same thing to me—painting her picture of what a duke ought to be. We were both deeply in love with our own paintings.” He glanced at her.
“So no, I don’t think I actually loved her. Not really. Why do you ask?”
“No particular reason,” she said which was not entirely true.
The real reason was standing twenty paces away in the form of Dottie Finch’s parting shot, still rattling around in her chest. But knowing he had not loved Josephine settled something in her, and she did not wish to look at that too closely either.
“You are good with him,” she said instead, nodding at David. “Is that really just because of Arabella?”
Julian looked down at the baby with something soft and unguarded in his expression.
“Not only that. All my friends have children. I have spent the better part of five years being handed somebody’s baby at somebody’s country party.
One becomes practiced.” He paused. “Did you ever want children? Your own, I mean.”
“Always,” she said, without hesitating. “I always imagined—yes. A husband, and children and a house that was full.” She stopped. “You?”
“I assumed I would have them eventually. One always does assume.” He was quiet for a moment. “Though I confess I know rather less now about what eventually looks like than I once did.”
The words settled between them. They both looked at David, who had fallen asleep against Julian’s arm with the sudden completeness that only very small children can manage.
“I promise you,” Julian said quietly, “that I will do everything in my power to make sure your wishes still come true. In whatever form that eventually takes. You will have what you wanted.”
“You cannot promise that.”
“I am a duke,” he said, and there was a wryness to it but also, she thought, a sincerity beneath. “I am influential. I have been known to make things happen.”
She smiled despite herself as she remembered his speech at the House of Lords.
She looked at him and felt, with a kind of quiet alarm, the image she had carried for years of her future beginning to shift.
It had always featured a husband whose face she couldn’t quite make out.
She had assumed it would resolve itself into Benjamin.
Though, in that moment, the image that revealed itself wasn’t Benjamin at all.
She looked away and focused on her ice. She told herself that she was being extremely foolish, that she was in an unusual situation under unusual pressures, and that any woman would find herself confused in similar circumstances.
She told herself this several times.
It didn’t help as much as she would have liked.