“I stood in the solicitor’s office at nineteen, and I understood two things simultaneously. The first was that my sisters were entirely mine to protect from that point forward. The second was that I had watched what love looked like when it soured, and I had decided, standing in that office, that I would not build it. Would not begin something that could become so toxic. Would not let anyone close enough be damaged by it or do the damage themselves.
“And then a woman knelt in wet sand at five in the morning and took my pulse without flinching. She looked at me with the most honest eyes I have ever seen, and I have been significantly less certain about most things since.”
William couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face.
“And now I have kissed her in a garden, and all I could think about was my father leaving in a carriage and my mother leavingan hour later, and neither of them speaking before they went. I thought about Isadora and Letty, and I thought…”
James waited.
“I thought I could not be the person who built that. I could not be the person who started something and let it become that. I will not do it to her, and I will not do it to my sisters, and I will not do it to–” William broke off.
James leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He was quiet for a moment, looking at William with the expression of a man who understood the ground was not stable.
“Your father was a man of tremendous charm and very little patience. Your mother was a woman of tremendous feeling and very little restraint. What they had was real, but it was also destructive, and I am not going to pretend otherwise because you were there and you know it better than I do.” He paused. “But William, you are not your father.”
“I am his son.”
“You are also your own person, which is a distinction worth making.You have spent years being the most deliberate man I know. You think before you speak. You consider the consequences. You are constitutionally incapable of the reckless, impulsive behavior that characterized your father’s worst moments.” He held William’s gaze. “And Cecily is not your mother.”
“No,” William agreed. “She isn’t.”
“She is measured, whereas your mother was volatile. She is honest, whereas your mother was theatrical. She is the kind of woman who goes to a garden at midnight and says not yet when you say her name, which is not the behavior of a woman who is going to love you carelessly.”
William looked at him.
“Your father,” James continued, “pursued without thinking. You have been thinking about this since approximately the second morning she was in your house, I’d wager, and you have been careful and deliberate about every single inch of distance between you and”—he gestured—“the garden. That is not your father’s character. That is not remotely his character.”
“It is not about character,” William said. “It is about what love does to a household when it turns sour. Character had nothing to do with it with my parents. They were not villains. They were simply two people who had too much feeling and too little…” He searched for the right word.
“Steadiness,” James offered.
“Yes.”
“And you are the steadiest man I have ever known. To the point where it is occasionally maddening, and I have told you so at least twice.”
“Steadiness is not a guarantee of anything.”
“No,” James said. “But it is not nothing either.” He sat back in his chair.
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“Then I’ll save my breath. What are you going to do?”
William said nothing.
He looked at the rain on the window. He had made a decision in his study at seven this morning, in the grey early light with his coffee gone cold and the ball still very much present in his mind.
He had made it with the same methodical efficiency he applied to decisions about drainage ditches and parliamentary positions and tenant cottages—looking at the full shape of the problem, assessing the risks, and then making a conclusion.
The conclusion was not comfortable. It was correct.
“I am going to tell her,” he declared, “that we should begin living separately. As we agreed in Brighton. The Season is over, the scandal has died, and it is time to honor the original terms.” He held James’s eyes. “It is what we agreed on.”
James looked at him for a long moment. “What you agreed on was made in a Brighton drawing room between two people who did not know each other. A great deal has happened since then.”
“The terms don’t change because the circumstances have become complicated.”
“The terms should change when the terms are no longer true,” James countered. “And they are no longer true, William. You know that, yet you are choosing this anyway.” He paused. “Why?”
