Page 54 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
Outside, somewhere in the upper floors of the house, there were sounds of the morning beginning — footsteps, a door, themuffled voice of someone in the household giving an instruction. The wedding was at eleven. It was now approaching nine.
Leander looked at the table.
He thought of the maze. He thought of her expression when the wordlonelyhad landed, the way she had received it, and tried to press it back and failed, and the way that failure had looked nothing like weakness and everything like a person who had been honest past the point where honesty was comfortable. He thought of her hand, steady on the pencil, writing a solution she had already written.
He thought of what Anthony had just said.
He set down the cue.
"I have already made it clear to her," he said carefully, "what this marriage is. She is not walking into this without understanding the terms." He crossed to the sideboard and picked up his glass.
"She has gained protection for herself and her sister, the security of a name that her father cannot touch, and the end of her uncle's ultimatum. I have gained a direct line to Lord Norish. He will not be able to stay hidden once this wedding is announced in every paper in London." He paused. "There is no pretense between us about it being otherwise."
Anthony watched him.
Leander set down his glass. He had told her, in that room the evening before, that he was not yet certain what he was capable of giving her. He had meant it as a warning, and she had received it as one and agreed anyway, with the steady, unsentimental clarity that he had come to understand was simply how she moved through the world. What he had not said was that somewhere between Aldgate Street and a hedge maze in the middle of his own estate, the terms of the arrangement had quietly shifted for him in ways he had not accounted for and was not finished examining.
"That is what this is," he said.
He drank.
The brandy was good and the morning was cool, and the taste of what he had just said sat underneath it in a way he chose not to examine.
Anthony picked up his own glass. He did not press further. He had said what he had come to say, and he was not a man who repeated himself unnecessarily. Instead, he looked at the billiard table and then at Leander before he raised his glass with the expression of a man who had reservations and intended to set them aside for the morning at least.
"To Henry," he said.
Leander raised his glass.
"To Henry," he said.
They drank, and the room held it, and outside the house, the morning continued its arrangements, indifferent to what had been decided inside.
Chapter Sixteen
The church was full.
Leander had chosen St. Edmund's deliberately. It was the largest parish church within ten miles of the Pridewell estate, its nave long enough to hold two hundred people comfortably and a further fifty less so, its windows dressed with the kind of late summer flowers that took three days and an entire kitchen staff's worth of opinion to arrange. The bells had been ringing since seven. The carriages had been arriving since eight. By the time the morning had properly settled into itself, the pews were lined with the finest names in three counties, every one of them with an opinion and nowhere better to put it.
He had said they would give the ton something worth talking about. He had meant it. Lord Norish could read a newspaper from the Tavistock Inn as easily as any man, and every paper in London would carry this before the week was out. Let him read it. Let him understand exactly what had been built in his absence and what was now entirely beyond his reach to dismantle.
Whatever came next, it would begin here, in full view of everyone, with no ambiguity about its size or its intention.
Anthony stood beside him at the front. The vicar, a composed man of middle years who had performed this office often enough to be neither hurried nor ceremonious about it, stood with his book open, his hands folded, and his eyes on the door.
Leander stood with his hands behind his back and watched the door.
Lady Bendon was in the front pew opposite, already pressing a handkerchief to the corner of one eye in anticipation of an emotion that had not yet arrived, which was consistent with everything he had observed about her. Georgia sat beside her mother with the upright posture of a young woman attending to everything. Lord Bendon occupied the far end of the pew with the air of a man who had decided to consider this a triumph and was finding the reframing somewhat effortful.
Cuthbert was in the second row with his document case, because Cuthbert went nowhere without his document case, and Leander had stopped remarking on it years ago.
The door opened.
Poppy came first, in the sapphires and a dress the color of the sky just before dark. She walked with the careful brightness of someone who was trying hard not to cry and succeeding by approximately the same margin as her aunt. She took her place and looked at the front of the church and then, briefly,at Leander. What she put into that look was a question and a warning and a plea all at once, which he received and acknowledged with the smallest inclination of his head.
Then Julia came through the door.
He had seen her dressed well before. He had watched her in ballrooms and drawing rooms and across dining tables. There was a particular elegance she brought to every room she entered, which was not the elegance of a woman who had been given beautiful things and learned to wear them, but of a woman who carried herself as though she had always known her own worth even when the evidence offered by the world around her was directly to the contrary.
