Page 88 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

He sat down, rested his head against the back of the chair, and looked at the ceiling, where a hairline crack ran from the cornice to the center medallion.

Sebastian drew a breath.

“Oliver. Look at me.”

He did.

“Your father hit your mother because she expressed an opinion about a drainage ditch. Because she spoke to a guest. Because she smiled at the wrong moment or failed to smile at the right one. He hit her in the privacy of his study, behind a closed door, where a nine-year-old boy sat in the corridor listening because he could not make it stop.” Sebastian’s voice was steady, stripped bare, carrying nothing but the plain weight of truth. “You hit a man who was holding a woman against a wall in a dark corridor. You did it in front of witnesses. You did not hide it. You did not justify it. You have been punishing yourself every day since.”

“The satisfaction, Sebastian. The enjoyment. That is his.”

Sebastian shook his head. “One punch to protect a woman does not make you your father. And the satisfaction you felt was not his satisfaction. His pleasure came from dominance. From watching a person he was supposed to love cower. What you felt in that corridor was relief. You saw the woman you love being hurt, and you stopped it, and for one instant your body told you that stopping it was the right thing to do. That is not his legacy.”

Oliver stared at him. The club settled around the silence. Lord Barrington’s newspaper slid to the floor with a whisper. The billiards argument had ended. Through the window, the crossing boy had collected his broom and moved on.

“What if it is too late?” he asked at last. “Too late to tell her.”

“It may be.”

“That is not reassuring.”

“I am not trying to reassure you. I am trying to keep you from making the worst decision of your life and calling it virtue.” Sebastian set the glass on the table between them. “You spent nine years becoming a better man than your father. You succeeded. But you have confused the absence of cruelty for the presence of courage, and they are not the same thing. Courage is not standing aside while the woman you love marries a man who will slowly, politely, armed by the very best of intentions, teach her that her voice does not matter. Courage is admitting that you are terrified, and going to her anyway.”

Oliver sat still. The clock struck four. He thought of Louisa at the Royal Academy, standing in front of a painting, turning to find him already watching her. He thought of her voice in a walled garden: I am nobody important. He thought of her wrist, the white marks fading, and the sound she had made when he rounded the corner.

He thought of his mother lifting her chin in a lamplit study. And he thought of Louisa at the Davenport ball, smiling, and smiling, and smiling.

“I need to think,” he said.

Sebastian stood. He straightened his coat and looked down at Oliver with an expression that held no mockery at all.

“Do not think too long,” he said. “Fear dressed as honor is still fear. And it makes a cold bed.”

He left. Oliver sat alone in the quiet of White’s, surrounded by drainage figures and half-written letters.

He opened the ledger. Fourteen pounds, six shillings.

He closed it. He pressed his palms flat against the cover, and he let himself feel the full weight of what Sebastian had said.

He loved her. He loved Louisa Fairchild, and fear, not honor, had been making his choices, and if he did not stop hiding behind the ghost of his father, he was going to lose her to a man who would spend forty years without truly seeing how magnificent she was.

CHAPTER 28

“Ihave been speaking with my steward.”

Frederick announced this between the second and third courses at Lord and Lady Cresswell’s dinner. He spoke as though resuming a conversation they had already been having. He had spent the fish course discussing the merits of a new carriage spring with Lord Barrett, and Louisa had spent it cutting her turbot into progressively smaller pieces and wondering how long a woman could survive on silence.

“About what?” she asked politely.

“About the autumn. And the years that follow.” He accepted the lamb cutlet the footman set before him and inspected it briefly. “We shall retire to Langley Park after the wedding, as we discussed. But the question of how long we remain there each year deserves a more permanent answer.”

Louisa opened her mouth to respond.

“I believe,” he continued, “that we should plan on spending the greater part of the year in Kent. London is useful during the Season, naturally, but the Season lasts only three months, and the remainder of the year is better spent at the estate, where one’s energies can be directed toward the household and the tenants.”

Louisa set down her fork. “The greater part of the year?”

“Ten months, perhaps. Returning to town in March for the Season, departing again by July. The pattern is well established among the best families. My parents followed it for thirty years.”