Page 48 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
What Leander intended to do about that, she still did not know.
She was aware, walking beside him now with the party thinning out ahead of them toward the orangery, that she had handed him everything this morning. The location. The note. The full shape of the situation, and she had done it deliberately, with open eyes, and she did not regret it.
He had received it without comment, and she was beginning to understand this was his own focused way of handling information until the precise moment it was needed. They had been in public. The maze was not a place for that conversation, and they had both known it. What he intended to do with the Tavistock Inn, and whether she would be part of it, was a conversation still waiting to be had. She intended to have it before the evening was out.
"You did not ask me," she said.
"No," he agreed. He was watching the lawn ahead with the unhurried attention he brought to everything, apparently untroubled by this observation.
"It is customary," she continued pleasantly, "for the question to precede the announcement."
"It is," he said. "On balance, I judged there was insufficient time for the customary order of events."
She considered the circumstances that led to their current situation. It was accurate, which was almost more irritating. "And if I had objected?"
He glanced at her sideways, and the look he gave her was the one she had first noticed at Aldgate Street, dry and direct, carrying something underneath it that she had still not entirely categorized. "Would you have?"
She pressed her lips together. "That is not the point, Your Grace."
"I know," he said. And then, after a beat that she suspected was deliberate, he repeated: "Would you have?"
She did not answer that. She looked toward the orangery, where guests were beginning to gather, and took a breath. She told herself very firmly that it did not matter what the answer was. The arrangement was what it was. She had said yes with open eyes and a clear head and the full understanding of what she was stepping into. She straightened her shoulders.
Would she have objected? No. And that, she thought, was precisely the problem.
Ready for the next one?
Julia straightened her shoulders and decided that some questions were better left where they fell.
He let it rest. That was another thing she had noticed about him. He did not press a point past where it was useful to press it. He made his argument, observed the response, and filed it. It was either very disciplined or strategic, and she had not yet determined which.
"What happens now?" she asked.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Now we give them something more to talk about." He looked ahead at the assembled party, the faces already turning toward them, the air of the afternoon carrying that particular charge that preceded something being decided. "The most spectacular wedding this county has seen in a generation. We give thetonsomething to occupy itself with, and we give your father every reason to walk through a door."
She looked at him.
He met her eyes with the composure of a man who had thought this through and found it satisfactory.
"And when he does?" she said quietly.
"Then we are ready for him," Leander said. "Both of us."
The orangery doors opened ahead of them, light and voices spilling out across the lawn. Julia walked forward into it, and the Duke of Pridewell walked beside her, and somewhere behind them, the maze stood quiet and green in the afternoon, holding everything that had been said inside it.
The week came apart at the seams almost immediately.
Within twenty-four hours of their return to Aunt Violet's house on Cavendish Street, the dressmaker arrived. Then the modiste. Then a jeweler’s representative with a locked case and an expression of practiced discretion. The man asked Julia and Poppy to be seated and then opened the case on the drawing room table and said nothing further, because nothing further was required.
Julia sat with her hands folded in her lap and looked at what was inside.
There was a necklace of pale garnets set in gold that caught the morning light coming through the sash windows and threw it back in small, warm pieces across the ceiling. Earrings to match. A bracelet of seed pearls that would have taken someone's breath away in any other week and in this one sat alongside three other pieces as though it were the least remarkable thing in the room.
For Poppy, there was a set of sapphires, deep blue and simply mounted, exactly right for her coloring, which meant thatsomeone had paid attention to the details and considered what might please her most. Poppy held the necklace up and looked at Julia over it with an expression that asked several things at once without saying any of them.
They said thank you to the representative, saw him out, and went upstairs.
Poppy's room had become a staging ground. The dresses the Duke had sent were spread across the bed, the chair, the window seat, and the writing table, each one wrapped in tissue that Poppy had been carefully folding back layer by layer since the first trunk arrived. She sat on the edge of the bed amid the silk and muslin and held the sapphires in both hands and said nothing for a moment.
