Page 47 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
"Pridewell." Anthony crossed the clearing and gripped his hand, and his face held the warmth of a man who was genuinely pleased and the raised brow of a man who intended to have a very thorough conversation about this at the earliest private opportunity. "I can't say I'm surprised."
"I expect not," Leander said.
"Miss Norish." Anthony turned to her with a bow that carried all the easy grace of a man who was liked everywhere he went. "Welcome to the pride."
The Northamptonshire lords offered congratulations. The women followed. The one who had murmured with hercompanion a minute ago now congratulated Julia with every appearance of delight, which was the particular genius of polite Society and one of the things Leander found most wearing about it.
He did not look away from Julia for long.
She received each congratulation with the composure that seemed to be her natural countenance. Gracious, measured, a little dry when the occasion allowed, and across the clearing, he watched her meet her sister's eyes. Something passed between them that he could not read entirely, but the set of Poppy's shoulders eased, and she pressed Lord Blackwell's arm briefly before releasing it.
Mr. Finch's brass horn sounded somewhere on the far side of the maze, recalling the party to the lawn. The group began to move, gathering itself, its various congratulations, and the very comprehensive store of the latest information, toward the paths leading out.
Leander fell into step beside Julia.
She glanced at him. The careful smile had settled into something sober and without performance.
"I did not ask you to do that. I do not need rescuing," she said, in a voice low enough for only him to hear.
"No," he agreed. "You did not."
"Then why?"
He looked ahead at the departing guests rather than at her. "Because you were about to disappear. And because I needed you not to."
She was quiet for a moment. Around them, the others moved ahead, voices carrying on the afternoon air, the maze releasing everyone back into the ordinary business of the day. "And yet here we are."
"Here we are," he said.
She looked ahead at the sunlight visible through the final stretch of hedge, the open lawn beyond it, and the rest of the afternoon waiting. Her chin was at its customary angle. Her hands were settled at her sides. She looked, to any observer, like a woman entirely at ease with the shape of her future.
He knew better than that now.
He walked beside her into the light.
Chapter Fourteen
The lawn received them in a wash of afternoon light and noise.
Julia walked beside him and let the party reorganize itself around them with congratulations, curious eyes, and the particular social electricity of a group that had just been handed something to talk about extensively. She received each word directed at her with the appropriate response and felt, beneath all of it, the quiet dissolution of a plan she had spent the last ten minutes building in careful detail.
She glanced across the lawn to where Poppy stood with Lord Blackwell, still receiving what appeared to be his very earnest congratulations on her behalf. Her sister's color had returned. The pallor that had come over her in the clearing was gone, replaced by something that Julia recognized as the expression Poppy wore when she was trying not to cry from relief, which she had seen on that face precisely twice before in her life and both times had taken several years off her own.
This was what it meant.
No Worcestershire. No sold dresses. No letter composed in a hired coach moving away from London at dawn. Poppy would have her Season, Lord Blackwell's very earnest attention, and the future she had been promised and had very nearly lost twice in the space of a single week. Julia was not naive enough to confuse the announcement for something it had not been declared to be. But she understood its weight, and what it had just secured, and that was enough for her.
Julia looked ahead and said nothing for a moment.
And her father.
Lord Norish would be sitting in a room at the Tavistock Inn, writing notes on windowsills and waiting for a daughter he had never once in his life put first to come and save him again. The curtains would be half drawn, and he would have a glass of something close at hand, composing in his head the precise version of events that cast him in the most forgivable light.
That was what he did. She knew it because she had watched him do it her whole life. He rearranged the facts until the story became one he could live inside comfortably, until the people he had wronged became the authors of their own misfortune, until he was merely a man of bad luck surrounded by a world that had never quite understood him.
He would hear about the engagement before the week was out. London talked, and the Tavistock Inn was not so far away that it existed outside London's reach.
He would hear it, and he would assume proximity to money created an entitlement to it. He would also decide that someone else would manage the consequence.
