“What about Henrietta?” Montaigne said, looking confused but not a bit alarmed. “As someone with six younger siblings of my own, I don’t think it makes sense to get worked up about—”
“It’s Henrietta, Monty. Me and her.” He sighed in frustration. “Together.”
“I don’t take your meaning.”
Trem leveled his friend with a gaze. When Montaigne looked back at him in continued confusion, he raised his eyebrows in response. Understanding—quickly followed by horror—dawned on his friend’s face.
“No,” he said, rising out of his chair, literally recoiling. “You didn’t.”
“I did,” Trem said. “And I need your counsel!”
Montaigne paced the length of the breakfast room.
“Why in the bloody hell would you do that, Trem?”
“I—we got carried away.”
Montaigne whirled around from the window.
“WHEN?”
“Yesterday afternoon. In my study. Nothing fatal, if you catch my meaning. But enough. More than enough.”
“Christ,” Montaigne said, throwing himself down into the chair he had just vacated. Trem was glad to see that his friend seemed to have worked through his surprise. He had been right to consult Montaigne. For Montaigne, his reaction was practically overwrought, but if he had confessed to John or Leith, Trem was pretty sure he would now be bleeding.
“John doesn’t know?”
“No.”
“You don’t think Henrietta will tell him?”
“Definitely not.”
Montaigne nodded. “What are you going to do?”
“What I have to do. Marry her, Monty.”
Montaigne looked at him in stunned silence. “What about John?”
“I am terrified, honestly, about how he will react. But he isn’t my first worry. I’m—” Trem broke off and looked in Montaigne’s face. “I’m afraid she won’t have me.”
“Truly?” Montaigne asked, a smirk creeping onto his face.
“Yesterday,” Trem said, relieved to be getting to the heart of his concern. “It happened so quickly. I had known, of course—I mean, you’ve seen her the past few years. She has grown up. But I hadn’t thought of her that way, exactly. Or at least not—I hadn’t realized how much I had noticed her, I suppose. And when it happened, it happened so quickly. I couldn’t stop it.” He pressed his palms to his eyes for a minute—for a moment, the fear that she wouldn’t have him beat down on him. “But now that I have, I know that she must be my wife. It feels unbearable that she wouldn’t be.”
“Holy hell. You’ve finally been ensnared, haven’t you? I never thought I’d see it. You and me, we’ve always been more wild than the other two. I was sure Leith would leave us after John and it would be just the two of us. And you’ve been caught by little Henrietta, too! I have to say, I feel a bit proud.”
“Of me?”
“No, of course not. Of her. Come on, Trem. You know she has always had a tendre for you.”
“I certainly did not know that.”
Montaigne cast him a doubting look. “But it has always been so marked. Leith and I thought you knew. We thought it was why you were always so kind to her. We all love Henrietta, but you’ve always put in more effort. Escorting her to balls and…that little show you put on at the opera during her debut. Sitting with her in the box.”
Trem flashed back to that night. It had been her first trip to the opera and she was to sit in her brother’s prominent box. From that box, all of London society could see a person…even he had broken out in a sweat as a young man sitting in that box. You could feel a hundred lorgnettes on you. Henrietta had been alone in London—John and Catherine had been on a trip to the north for her research—and about to face that gauntlet alone. Trem had seen her the day before, in Hyde Park, and he had seen how nervous she had been about the prospect. She had only her two chaperones, Lady Trilling and Lady Wethersby, for armor. The ladies were perfectly respectable and besotted with their charge, but he could tell that Henrietta felt alone. And so he had offered to escort the ladies.
When he had felt Henrietta trembling as they seated themselves in the box, he had held her hand in the dark. With her slim fingers in his hand, he had been able to see her heartbeat against her throat. He could see it as if it were happening before him again. It hadn’t been erotic to him, at the time, at least not consciously. He had wanted to protect her.
