Chapter 25
Two days back from Dover and he still had not quite found his footing.
It was not that anything had been said. Nothing had been said.
That was rather the problem. They had returned from Dover, resumed their places in the house, resumed their meals together and their evenings by the fire, and neither of them had mentioned the night at the Fox and Hare.
Not the scuffle or the tears. Not the fact that he had pressed his lips to her forehead in the dark and felt her breath catch.
Not the fact that he had lain beside her for the rest of the night with her arm across his chest and his hand over hers and had scarcely slept.
They had simply come home and continued.
That was the part he could not quite reckon with. The continuing. Because it felt so natural that it frightened him.
Last night she had come into the library with a book and settled herself in the chair across from his without asking, the way she had long since stopped asking, and they had read in silence for two hours.
At one point, Nell informed her that David was unsettled.
She had gone upstairs to see to him and come back down again with the baby on her shoulder.
Still carrying her book, she sat back down.
He had watched her read with one hand and rock David with the other arm and had thought, with a most unwelcome clarity, that he had never in his life seen anything he wanted more to keep.
This morning at breakfast, she had pushed the marmalade across the table before he asked for it because she had noticed three weeks ago that he always wanted it and had simply never stopped noticing.
He had thanked her, and she had smiled at him over her cup and gone back to her toast. It had been entirely, dangerously ordinary.
He had to stop this. He had told himself so on the road back to London. He was still telling himself so, and it was not working in the least.
“Julian,” Nathaniel said.
He looked up. He had entirely forgotten where he was or what they had been discussing.
“Yes. I beg your pardon. I was wool-gathering.”
“I know you were. I know precisely what my dearest friend looks like when he is wool-gathering, and it looks exactly like that.” Nathaniel settled back in his chair.
“As I was saying, Stanhope has made enquiries about Mrs. Holt. It appears she told the truth throughout. She has lived in the same parish all her life, and the father of the child was a married merchant passing through. A thoroughly unfortunate circumstance. We shall not sit in moral judgment of her, however. She seems an entirely upstanding woman otherwise.” He paused.
“Thanks to her information, we have also been able to confirm that Arabella did indeed stay at the inn she mentioned.”
“Anything further on this Bash?”
Nathaniel shook his head. “He was not at that same inn; that much is certain. Stanhope also obtained passenger lists from various vessels that crossed the Channel around the time they set off.” He leaned forward and slid the papers across the desk.
“His name was not on them however Arabella’s name did appear. ”
Julian picked up the papers, looked at them, then handed them back. “That tells us only that she crossed to France. We already knew that.”
“Indeed. I think it would be prudent to send somebody to Calais to make further enquiries.”
“Already done. I wrote to Mr. Stanstead, and he will go.” He paused. “Clara and I were in Dover two days ago. We found Giacomo’s surname on the return manifest. Vitello. They crossed back as husband and wife with the child listed between them.”
Nathaniel looked at him with some interest. “You went to Dover together?”
“With Mrs. Holt and Nell, Clara’s maid. She had contacts there and knew what the man looked like. It seemed the most practical course.”
“And was it? Practical?”
Julian looked at him steadily. “It was useful, yes.”
Nathaniel said nothing for a moment. Then he crossed his legs, uncrossed them, and crossed them the other way—a habit Julian had observed in him for twenty years and which reliably signaled that he was working up to something.
“Now, since all of that is settled, I think it is time we spoke about whatever is the matter with you.”
“The matter with me? I told you, I was wool-gathering.”
“You did. You did not tell me why.” Nathaniel looked at him steadily. “Would it, by any chance, have something to do with Clara?”
“If you have come here to tell me once more about the sparkle in my eyes—”
“No.” Nathaniel held up both hands. “I have no need to mention the sparkle in your eyes again because the sparkle has now apparently taken over your entire person whenever she enters the room. What concerns me rather more is that alongside the sparkle there is also a shadow. I want to make sure you do not do something foolish and ruin a perfectly good thing that stands directly in front of you.”
“I ruin nothing,” Julian said. “There is nothing to ruin. Clara and I have an arrangement, one that will conclude the moment we find Arabella.”
“A confederacy of two,” Nathaniel said. “Yes, you have mentioned it. Several times. And yet it is plain to anyone with eyes that that is no longer quite accurate. Particularly,” he added with the air of a man producing a card he had been holding for some time, “for two people who have just spent the night together in a Dover inn.”
“We were there on business,” Julian said, “and nothing happened.”
“I did not say anything happened. Although I notice,” Nathaniel said pleasantly, “that you felt the need to clarify that nothing did.”
Julian said nothing.
“Dover clearly affected you,” Nathaniel said, more quietly now. “I can see it. You came back different. Both of you, if Evelyn is to be believed, and Evelyn is generally to be believed.”
Julian pressed his lips together. The truth was that Dover had done something he had not been prepared for. Charlie Dunmore, dragging Marianne down the stairs, and the sound of fear in Clara’s voice had struck him hard.
It was holding her afterwards while she shook, her face against his shoulder, telling him she was afraid for Arabella, afraid for all of them, and the way she had felt in his arms as though she had always been meant to be there.
It was waking up in the gray morning light with her arm across him and her head tucked against his shoulder and not wanting to move for anything in the world.
He had lain there in the growing light, completely still, and thought: This is the most content I have ever been. And then he had thought: And that is precisely why I cannot have it.
“Even if there were more between us,” he said, “nothing would come of it. I will not allow it. There is nothing that makes a man more of a sapskull than allowing himself to be led entirely by his feelings.”
“That is absolute nonsense,” Nathaniel said pleasantly. “Love is a gift. A gift I have received and which every one of our friends has received and which you presently stand six inches away from and refuse to pick up.”
“You have all been fortunate,” Julian said.
“The fact that so many of my dearest friends found happiness in matrimony tells me only that such luck cannot persist indefinitely. The odds, Nathaniel, are that at least one of us will not have his happy ending. I would rather it be me than any of you since you have all already committed yourselves, and there is nothing to be done about it.”
Nathaniel’s eyes performed a maneuver that Julian was fairly certain no physician would recommend.
“Do not play the martyr,” he said. “Do not stand there and tell me you sacrifice yourself from having love so that the universe does not take it away from one of us. That is the most mutton-headed thinking I have ever heard from a man of your intelligence.”
“It is not mutton-headed. In any case, what would be truly foolish is walking headfirst into another attachment that ends with me making a complete cake of myself in front of the entire ton. I will not do it again.”
“This is about Josephine,” Nathaniel said.
“It is not about Josephine.”
“You cannot compare Clara to Josephine.”
“I am not.” Julian stopped. He had not meant to say that so quickly or so decisively.
It was true of course—Josephine had never been a quarter as gracious or as warm or as steadying as Clara, and he did not compare them because there was no comparison to be made.
But it was not something he wished to hand to Nathaniel.
Too late. “So you admit that she is everything a man of sense ought to want in a wife.”
“I admit that she is, yes. All of those things. But it makes no difference. My attention must be on Arabella. That is where it belongs.”
“Of course,” Nathaniel said, recrossing his legs with great deliberation. “But when Arabella is found, what will your excuse be then?”
Julian said nothing.
“Your parents’ marriage,” Nathaniel suggested after a moment.
“Do not.”
“Julian. My own mother and stepfather entered a perfectly practical arrangement and have been thoroughly content for twenty years. You know my views on this. You know that I myself did not precisely search for a wife when Evelyn appeared, and yet—”
“Yes, yes,” Julian said. “You, James, Lucian, Gideon, Rhys. I am well acquainted with the catalogue.”
“Then take note of it.” Nathaniel leaned forward. “You were not even in love with Josephine. You told me so yourself.”
“No,” Julian said. “I was not.”
He thought of the way he had explained it to Clara at the menagerie—the blank canvas of painted dreams. He repeated it now to Nathaniel, briefly, without embellishment.
Nathaniel listened. Then he said, “Well then. Perhaps it is time to begin drawing again. With rather more care about what you put on the canvas.”
“I already know what my future looks like,” Julian said. “I will be very peacefully content on my own. I do not require a happy marriage. I do not require any of it.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “Then you must stop being so damnably attentive to Clara, for she will begin to think there is more between you than an arrangement, and I should not like to see her hurt again.”
“I would never hurt her,” Julian said. The words came out fast and firm.
Nathaniel looked at him for a long moment and said nothing. Which was, in its way, worse than anything he might have said.
Because even as Julian heard his own words, he knew they fell short of the truth.
They already walked a path riddled with dangers.
The afternoons at the menagerie. The walks in the park.
The evenings in the garden while David slept between them.
Dover. All of it. Every moment he had allowed himself to simply be near her without keeping his guard properly up.
Each one a cannonball yet to go off.
And the most dangerous part was not that he might set one off by accident.
The most dangerous part was that he was no longer entirely sure he wanted to avoid it.
* * *
Later that afternoon, he retreated to his study to attend to estate business he had neglected since recent events took shape. He was three-quarters through a steward’s assessment on a drainage project when a knock came at the door.
“Come.”
He looked up and then, despite himself, looked again.
Clara stood in the doorway in a rose-colored gown with three-quarter sleeves that he hadn’t seen before. She had put flowers in her hair. Small ones, pale, tucked just above her ear. Were they part of her?
He reminded himself, with some effort, of his conversation with Nathaniel.
“Clara,” he said, “I beg your pardon, I am rather occupied at present.”
“I can see that. I only came to tell you that Helena, Evelyn, and I have finalized the plans for the ball.”
“Yes.” He remembered now. Saturday. Standing before the assembled ton and performing the fiction of a love match with such conviction that nobody would think to question it.
He dreaded nothing more. “Good,” he said, and turned a page of the ledger.
Nothing on it, so he moved forward two pages to something he had already worked on, not wishing her to see that he paid no attention at all.
“I also thought of taking David out. A walk in the park—St James’s, perhaps. And afterwards I thought I might call on my mother. She has written again and is quite insistent on seeing him. I am afraid if we do not bring him to her she will grow suspicious.”
“A sensible plan. You should do it.”
“I thought perhaps you would come.”
He looked up. Her voice carried an unmistakable note of hope, and her eyes when he met them were open and clear and without guile. She did not maneuver. She simply wanted him to come.
He wanted to go. Not only because being seen with her in public served their purposes, not only because his mother-in-law expected the performance of a devoted husband, but because he wanted to be there.
He wanted the afternoon in the park, David in the pram between them, the pretend ordinary pleasantness of it.
He wanted to go on wanting it which was precisely why he could not.
He looked back at the ledger. “I cannot. I am behind on this.”
“Oh. Well, if you are busy, I can wait a little while. We need not leave for an hour.”
“No,” he said. “Go without me. The air will do you and David both good.” He picked up his quill and made a note that was, in truth, largely a squiggle.
“I see,” Clara said.
Those two words. The slight change in her voice—not sharp or reproachful, simply quieter—struck him somewhere he had not expected.
He heard the rustle of her skirt, the soft click of the door behind her.
“Clara,” he said and stood.
Then he stopped. His hands pressed flat on the desk. He looked at the closed door.
Fool.
He was not entirely sure what he meant by it. A fool for letting her walk out when every part of him wanted to call her back? Or a fool for letting it reach the point where calling her back was something he wanted at all?
He sat back down. He looked at the squiggle in the ledger.
He did not pick up the quill again.