Page 52 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
"Don't thank me yet," Julia said. "I still have to ask the Duke."
Poppy smiled. It was a real one. "I have no doubt that he will acquiesce. For who could deny you, Sister?"
The note arrived the following morning.
Julia found it on the breakfast table beside her plate, which meant it had come through the front door in the ordinary way and that whoever had delivered it had either been trusted with the address or had known it already. She did not open it immediately. She finished her tea. She waited for Poppy to take her toast to the window seat while the light was good, which she had also done yesterday. She checked to see that Aunt Violet was engaged in conversation with the housekeeper in the hallway, then she opened it.
The handwriting was her father's. She would have known it anywhere. It was the looping, expansive cursive of a man who had once believed himself destined for better things and had never quite let go of the style that accompanied that belief.
My dearest Julia,
I cannot say how delighted I was to hear the news of your engagement. You have always been the most capable of my daughters, and I confess I always knew you would find away to elevate yourself. The Duke of Pridewell is a man of considerable standing. I am immensely proud.
Do not reply to this note. Wait for word from me. I shall arrange a meeting very soon once I have had time to make certain preparations. We have much to discuss, you and I, and I look forward to seeing your face.
Your loving father
She read it twice.
The first time she read it, she felt the old familiar weight of it; the weight of a man who had writtenI am immensely proudabout an outcome he had contributed nothing toward and intended to benefit from entirely. The second time she read it, she felt something cooler and more specific, something that had not been available to her in the past because in the past she had been without any power of her own.
She was not without power now.
She folded the note and held it. Outside the breakfast room window, the street was bright and busy, a vendor calling something from the corner, a pair of women in good hats moving quickly along the pavement. London in the morning was indifferent yet alive.
Her father was somewhere in this city. He had written the wordweas though they were partners in something, as though thedistance between what she had built in a week and what he had destroyed over twenty years was a matter of circumstance rather than choice. He had called itour arrangementbefore he had even made one.
She thought of Leander.
She thought of the watch in the sealed report Cuthbert had compiled, and of what Leander had said in the maze —then we are ready for him, both of us.
She had wondered, at the time, whatboth of usmeant in practice. She was beginning to understand that it meant exactly what he had implied.
She would tell Leander about this new note today.
She set it on the table beside her plate and poured a second cup of tea she did not particularly want. Then Julia sat with the morning and the question of what came next, and for the first time in an exceptionally long while, she found that the question did not entirely frighten her.
The wedding was at eleven.
It was half past eight when Anthony arrived in the billiard room, already dressed, his cravat tied with the cheerful precision of a man who had no ambivalence about the morning whatsoever.He found Leander at the table, coat off, cue in hand, in the middle of a break that had been going for some time, judging by the position of the balls.
Anthony poured two glasses from the decanter on the sideboard, set one on the edge of the table within reach, and picked up the second cue without asking.
They played in silence for a while.
The billiard room at Pridewell was on the north side of the house, which meant it caught none of the morning sun and stayed cool well into the afternoon. The light that came in was flat, even, and good for concentration. Leander had spent a huge portion of his twenties in this room, working through things that did not have solutions, because the geometry of the table gave the mind somewhere specific to go when it was otherwise inclined to wander.
He potted two and missed the third.
Anthony stepped up and studied the table. "How long have you been here?"
"A while."
"Did you sleep?"
Leander picked up his glass. "Some."
Anthony played his shot and made it, which he acknowledged with no expression beyond a slight adjustment of his grip on the cue. He walked the length of the table, assessed the next angle, and said, without looking up, "Are you certain about this?"
