Page 86 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“We spent a fortnight in the county archive, cross-referencing the original deed against the tithe maps. The discrepancy traced back to a clerk’s transcription error. Once we had the original survey, the resolution was straightforward.”

“You examined the tithe maps yourself?”

She shrugged. “My father could not afford a solicitor that year, so I learned to read the documents in his place.” She allowed herself a small smile. “I developed quite a fondness for boundary law, though I suspect that is not a talent many young ladies boast of.”

Lord Cresswell’s face opened into genuine pleasure. His wife glanced over from her end of the table and smiled. Two ladies further down turned to see who had drawn their host into such visible engagement.

Frederick touched her elbow. “Darling, you need not bore Lord Cresswell with household anecdotes.”

The table went on eating. Lord Cresswell glanced at Frederick, then at Louisa, and returned to his wine without pursuing the conversation further. A footman cleared the soup. Mrs. Fenton asked Lady Cresswell about her plans for the autumn, and the moment passed as moments do in polite company, swallowed by the machinery of courtesy that kept fourteen people smiling and pretending that nothing of consequence had occurred.

Louisa picked up her water glass and drank. Her hand was steady. She had years of practice at this.

She could feel the place inside her chest where the warmth had been, the brief, bright flare of being listened to, already cooling. Lord Cresswell had looked at her as though her words carried weight. As though she were a person in the room and not an ornament placed beside the window for the light.

After luncheon, the ladies withdrew to Lady Cresswell’s drawing room. Eleanor appeared beside her near the tall windows, two glasses of cordial in her hands and a look on her face that Louisa recognized from a decade of friendship as the expression Eleanor wore when she was containing a fury too large for polite company.

“Lord Cresswell thinks you are magnificent,” Eleanor said, handing her a glass.

“Lord Cresswell thinks I am a curiosity.”

Eleanor took a measured sip. “Frederick told him you were boring him.”

“He said I was boring him with household anecdotes.”

“Yes.” Eleanor set her glass on the windowsill and turned to face her fully. “He corrected you. At the table. In front of fourteen people. You offered Lord Cresswell a genuinely intelligent contribution to a conversation Frederick had been monopolizing all afternoon, and he dismissed you as though you had interrupted the adults.”

Louisa drank the cordial. It was too sweet and left a film on her tongue. Through the window, she could see the garden wall, the climbing roses heavy and full in the afternoon heat, the gravel path where two sparrows fought over a crust.

“Oliver never corrected me.” The words left her mouth before she recognized them, quiet, almost inaudible beneath the hum of conversation filling the drawing room.

Eleanor went still beside her.

“At the Royal Academy, he put me in front of six strangers and asked me what I thought about a painting,” Louisa said. “He did not tell me what to say. He did not smooth it over afterward. He did not lean across and say that I was boring him with observations about Carthage. He stood beside me and let me be right, and when I was finished, he walked me through the gallery as though he had spent the afternoon in the company of someone whose opinions had value.” She turned the cordial glass between her fingers. “At Hartfield, I spoke to a botanist about ferns for ten minutes, and Oliver sat on a bench twelve feet away holding my parasol, and when I came back he told me he was proud of me.”

She pressed her thumb against the rim of the glass. The cut crystal left a faint impression on her skin.

“Frederick tells me I am capable,” she continued, her voice low enough that only Eleanor could hear above the drawing room’s chatter. “He tells me I am restful. He tells me I will make a fine wife and a sensible mother. He recites these qualities as though reading from a list of specifications for a piece of furniture he intends to install in his dining room.” She looked at Eleanor. “Oliver told me to stop hiding. He told me the room was ready to hear me. He never once suggested I was too much or not enough. He looked at me as though I were already exactly right.”

Eleanor’s expression held no triumph. No vindication, none of the satisfaction Louisa had braced herself against. She looked sad, and somehow this was more frightening than anger would have been.

“Louisa…”

Louisa shook her head and forced a smile onto her face. “All will be well,” she muttered. “Frederick will make a fine husband. I know he will.”

She looked down at her hand. The sapphire sat on her fourth finger, small and blue and chosen by a man who had never asked what stone she preferred, who had never asked whether she wanted a ring at all, who had produced it from his waistcoat pocket and placed it on her finger as though the question of her preference had simply not occurred to him. She turned it once. The gold was warm from her skin.

“Louisa… do you love Frederick?”

Eleanor spoke softly, and Louisa looked at her friend—careful not to show anything. “I have loved him for a long time,” she said simply.

She did not say that she had loved the idea of the man before getting to know that man. She did not mention Oliver.

It was too late.

CHAPTER 27

For the life of him, he couldn’t balance the ledger column.