Page 56 of The Lion Duke's Proposal
However, the look he had given her when she came through the door was still sitting with her. She had composed herself before she entered, had spent ten minutes in the small room off the vestibule doing what she always did when the thing ahead of her was larger than what she felt prepared for — taking stock, ordering her breathing, deciding the precise shape of the face she intended to wear. And then she had come through the door and looked at him standing at the front of the chapel, and the composed face had nearly failed her.
With Leander, she found herself returning again and again to the same question. Was she safe here?
Not in the immediate sense. She did not fear him in the way she had feared certain rooms and certain evenings and certain iterations of her father's particular moods. It was a different question, a longer one. Safe in the sense that mattered over years, not hours. Safe in the sense that the life she was walking into would not require a different kind of endurance from the one she was walking out of.
She did not know the answer yet.
The vicar closed his book.
Leander turned to her, and she turned to him, and for a moment there was only the plain chapel light and the twelve people behind them. He looked at her steadily, and then he leaned forward and kissed her, briefly and properly. The question she had been sitting with went entirely quiet.
Just for a moment. Just long enough to be notable.
Then Lord Thynne began to applaud, which he did with the wholehearted enthusiasm of a man who had been waiting to do so for some time, and Lady Bendon burst into tears, and Poppy laughed.
The ten miles from St. Edmund's passed mostly in silence. When Pridewell Manor announced itself through the carriage window as they came around the last curve of the drive, Julia looked at it with the particular attention she gave to things she intended to understand.
It was large. Not aggressively so, not the kind of house that made a point of its own size, but comfortably, thoroughly large, the way something was when it had been built by people who expected to fill it and had done so across several generations. The stone was pale, warmed by the afternoon light. The grounds stretched away on both sides without fuss, the gardens well-kept and the parkland beyond them deep and green.
This was not the London estate where the party had been held. That house, for all its grandeur, sat within reach of the city's noise and smoke. This was something older and quieter entirely, the kind of place that did not need London to justify itself.
She thought of Shropshire.
She looked at her hands in her lap, at the garnet ring that now sat below the band Leander had placed on her finger that morning, and she decided that she would simply be grateful for what was in front of her and not require it to be anything more.
She had always been good at that. It was one of her most useful qualities.
A housekeeper met them at the door, a brisk woman of fifty with good posture and the efficient warmth of someone who ran a large house and had no patience for theatrics in either direction. She welcomed Julia with a correctness that was also, underneath it, genuine, which Julia was grateful for. She was shown to her rooms by a young maid who told her unnecessarily many things about the house's layout. Julia listened with full attention, filing away every relevant piece of information for future use.
The rooms were on the east side, overlooking the gardens. They were beautiful in a quiet way, furnished in pale colors that held the afternoon light well, with a writing desk beneath the window and a fire already laid. Someone had put fresh flowers on the mantelpiece. She stood in the middle of the room for a moment before she changed her dress and went down to dinner.
Leander was already at the table when she entered the room.
He rose when she joined him, which she had not entirely expected, and held her chair with the automatic courtesy of a man for whom manners required no conscious effort. The table was set for two at one end, a sensible arrangement rather than the absurdity of placing two people at opposite ends of a surface designed for twenty.
Julia unfolded her napkin and looked at her husband across the table.
He was watching her with the familiar attentiveness, and underneath it, something that she might have called guardedness if she had been asked to name it. The openness she had seen briefly in the chapel was closed again.
She sipped the wine slowly, taking time to savor the taste on her tongue before she spoke.
"The house is very beautiful," she said.
"I'm glad it suits you."
"The housekeeper, Mrs. — "
"Hartley."
"Mrs. Hartley was very kind."
"She is capable." He reached for his glass. "You will find she manages the house without requiring much direction. If anything needs adjusting to your preference, you need only tell her."
Julia looked at him. He was looking at the table with the particular focus of a man eating his dinner rather than the particular focus of a man who was present in a conversation, and she made a decision.
"I wanted to speak with you about Poppy," she said.
He looked up. He had been expecting this. She could see that he had been expecting it, which meant he had been preparing for it, which was not a comfortable thing to observe.
