Page 50 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
"The Duke of Pridewell." She appeared to be tasting it, turning it over with the satisfaction of a woman whose instincts had been confirmed in a much more spectacular fashion than she had anticipated. "I told Michael at the start of the week that there was something in the way that man looked at you. He told me I was making things up. He is going to be insufferable about having been wrong, and I intend to be worse about being right." She picked up the teapot again and poured with the determined energy of someone who had several more things to say. "Now. Tell me everything."
"There is not very much to tell," Julia said. "Only what you already know."
"Julia." Her aunt gave her the look that had stopped both girls cold since childhood, gentle and immovable in equal measure. "I have been a married woman for twenty-two years. I know the difference between an arrangement and a beginning, and I know which of those I saw when that man made his announcement." She set a cup in front of Julia and held it there until Julia met her eyes. "You do not have to have it all worked out. I am not asking you to have it worked out. I am only asking you to tell me the truth."
Julia looked at the cup.
Then she said, "He is not what I expected."
"No," Lady Bendon agreed, with the particular gentleness of someone who had been watching quietly and was glad to have her suspicions confirmed. "I don't imagine he is."
"I do not entirely know what to make of him yet." She picked up the cup. "He is… he notices things. More than he lets on. And he has been — " She paused. "Kinder than the situation required."
"That is a great deal, coming from you," Georgia observed from her corner, without looking up from her book.
Julia glanced at her cousin. Georgia was sixteen and had the unnerving quality of all perceptive young people, which was that they said the true thing before anyone had decided whether it was the appropriate time to say it. Lady Bendon gave her daughter a look that meanthush, darling, and Georgia turned a page without expression.
"I want to ask him about Poppy," Julia said. "About her living with us."
Lady Bendon's face moved through several things quickly. Warmth, and something underneath it that was the expression of a woman who had her own opinions about what Poppy's future ought to look like, weighing itself against the knowledge of what was available and what was not. "You should ask," she said. "I believe he will say yes."
"You don't know that."
"No. But I have watched him watch you all week, and what I saw was not a man who intends to make your life more challenging than it already is." She settled back with her own cup. "Ask him, Julia."
Poppy, beside her, said nothing. She was looking at her tea with the expression she wore when she was trying not to show that she was moved, which she had never been successful at hiding.
Julia would ask him.
The matter was settled, with no further ceremony required.
Lord Bendon arrived home at half past four.
He came into the drawing room, already in the middle of removing his gloves, when he stopped and took in the assembled company and rearranged himself with a speed that would havebeen comical in any other man. The severe eyebrows rose above the thin, round spectacles. The gloves were removed more slowly.
"Nieces," he said. "I wasn't aware you were back."
"We arrived this morning, Uncle," Julia said pleasantly.
He crossed to his chair by the window, the one that everyone in the household understood was his by longstanding territorial right, and settled himself into it with the measured deliberateness of a man composing his next sentence. He looked at Julia. Then he looked at his wife. Then back to Julia.
"Well," he said. "Engaged to the Duke of Pridewell."
"Yes. I am," Julia said, for the second time that afternoon.
"Extraordinary business." He cleared his throat. His mustache bristled, and Julia could tell he was working up to say something in a magnanimous manner. "I want you to know, Julia, that I have always had the highest confidence in you. From the very beginning."
Julia set down her cup.
She said nothing for a moment. Across the room, Aunt Violet studied the middle distance with the careful attention of a woman watching something that required no contribution from her.
"I remember your confidence very clearly, Uncle," Julia said. Her voice was even, warm, and entirely controlled. "I believe the phrase you used was that it would mean nothing to you to throw us into the streets."
Lord Bendon's mustache moved again, this time in a different direction. "I may have been perhaps forthright in my opinion, but the point is, now that things have resolved themselves so satisfactorily, I think we can agree to let the past remain in the past.”
"I love my aunt very much," Julia said. "She and Georgia are the reason I will always welcome you in my home." She met his eyes with the same directness she had been practicing since she was fourteen years old in rooms that required it. "But I would not expect any particular benefit from my husband, Uncle. "
Lord Bendon looked at her.
