Page 56 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

A silence.

“Free,” Anna said, as if testing the word’s weight.

“There is also the matter of inheritance,” Barnes continued. “Birchall’s estate will be handled by his own solicitors, but as his widow, you are entitled to a portion. I would expect his attorney to make contact within the fortnight. I would strongly advise,” he looked at Frederick, “that you have representation when that conversation takes place.”

“You’ll contact Barnes immediately on Miss Cartwell’s behalf,” Frederick said. “He will negotiate on her behalf, and I will cover his fee.”

“Your Grace. I cannot allow you—” Anna began.

“It is not a discussion,” Frederick said. He looked at Barnes. “Whatever she is owed by his estate, she will have it in full. Make that plain.”

Barnes nodded. He rose. “I will be in contact when I have more from the Birchall solicitors. In the meantime,” he looked at Anna, and something in his expression, usually so spare, made the smallest concession to warmth, “I am glad to bring you a piece of news that requires no action on your part other than to receive it.” He gave a brief bow. “Good day.”

Frederick walked him out. When he came back to the study, Rachel was on her feet, and Anna was in her arms. He stood in the doorway and watched them.

“It’s over,” Rachel said, into Anna’s hair. Her voice was not its usual composed self. It was the voice of someone who had been frightened for a long time and had just been given permission to stop. “It isover, Anna. He is gone. It is done!”

Anna’s hands had come up to Rachel’s back. She was holding on. Her face was not visible. He could see only the line of her shoulders, which were doing something complicated, neither entirely still nor entirely giving way, the specific posture of someone navigating the distance between enormous relief and an emotion that didn’t have a clean name yet.

“He got what he deserved,” Rachel said.

He thought this was probably true, and said nothing.

After a moment, Anna pulled back and looked at Rachel’s face and then looked, briefly, at Frederick, and the look she gave him was something he could not take. Too many things in it at once. He held it for a moment and looked away.

“I’ll have Mrs. Hale bring tea,” he said.

She did not sleep well, which was strange. She had expected to sleep very well. The weight had lifted. The thing that had been sitting at the base of every day for months. The petition, the waiting, Barnes’s letters, Birchall’s name recurring in every conversation… it was simply gone.

She was free. She was a widow, with a widow’s legal standing and whatever provisions Birchall’s estate extended to her, and the annulment was no longer needed, and the deposition was moot, and she would never have to walk into a room where the door might open and let him in.

She lay in the dark and felt all of this, and found that beneath it was something else entirely.

You are going to have to leave.

She had known this. Of course she had known this. The arrangement had been predicated on resolution, and resolutionhad come, and now she would go. She would go to wherever she was going—the country manor, Barnes had indicated, came with the inheritance, which was more than she had any right to expect, a substantial gift from a man who had not meant it as one.

She would be independent. She would have a house of her own and an allowance and no one directing her movements. She would be free, just as she had been asking to be free since that damned wedding day.

She thought about breakfast tables. The sound of a door in the east wing. The study light on, late into the evening. Percy on the third step, then the second, then beside her. A cold garden and a man who had saidshe went home, people go homewith the certainty of someone who rearranged the world into sense when he decided it ought to be.

She thought about a corridor and two arms coming around her without hesitation. She turned over in the bed and put her face against the pillow and did not sleep. It was past midnight when she heard the scratching at the door.

She lay still for a moment, not certain she had heard it. It came again, brief, deliberate, the specific quality of something small with opinions. She sat up, found her robe in the dark by memory, and went to the door.

Percy looked up at her.

“Come in, then,” she said.

He came in.

He crossed the room at his usual unhurried pace and jumped onto the foot of the bed, turned once, and settled. She sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at him. He looked back. She picked him up, put her face against the top of his head, and breathed.

“You are a very good cat,” she said, which was not a sentence she had ever expected to utter but was what she meant.

Percy purred. A sound in the corridor. A footstep, unhurried. She looked up. Frederick had stopped in the doorway.

He was in shirtsleeves, no coat, no cravat, the shirt open at the collar. Anna could tell he also had not been sleeping and had not yet decided what to do about it. He looked at Percy in her arms. He looked at her face.