William said nothing.
“Because you are afraid?” James asked.
“Because I am careful,” William corrected.
“They are the same thing. In this case, they are exactly the same thing.” James looked at him with the unflinching attention of fifteen years of friendship. “You are going to go home and tell a woman you love that you have decided not to, and you are going to watch her receive that, and you are going to call it caution.” A pause. “I want you to understand what you are doing.”
“I understand what I am doing.”
“Do you understand what it will cost her?”
The question landed with the precision of something aimed carefully.
William looked back at the fire. He thought of Cecily’s face in the garden, the warmth of her breath, the way she had closed the last inch between them.
He thought of the nursery, the breakfast table, the library at night, the waltz, and the sense ofnot yetin the dark, and he thought of what it would feel like to walk into the study and say what he had decided to say, and what it would do to her face.
“Yes,” he mumbled. “I understand what it will cost her.”
James looked at him. He said nothing further, which was its own kind of answer.
He picked up his glass, finished his whisky, and set it down. Then he looked at the rain and let William sit with what he had said.
“You are not your father,” he insisted. “I know you have heard me say that, and I know it has not moved you, so I will say it differently.” James clasped him on the shoulder. “Your father never once, in all the years I observed him, sat in a solicitor’s office at nineteen and put everyone else first. He never braided anyone’s hair. He never checked a baby’s breathing in the night or extended a paddock or sent coal to an orphanage in November.” He paused. “The man you are afraid of being does not do those things. You have been doing those things your entire adult life.”
The room fell quiet.
William stood. Put on his coat. Straightened his cuffs with the automatic movement of a man restoring order to himself.
“Thank you,” he said. And meant it.
James raised his glass slightly.
William knew he did not say,You’re welcome, because he understood that some things didn’t require it.
He left.
* * *
Cecily had told herself on the way downstairs that this was going to be a simple conversation.
When Mr. Prentiss informed her that William had come home and was already in his study, she felt a thrill run through her and couldn’t help the little skip to her steps.
She was going to knock on the study door. She was going to say,I have found something you need to see.William would look at the pages and would understand, and that would be that.
She had also, somewhere between the third-floor landing and the second, decided she was going to say something about the garden, or about his warm, deep voice in the dark, or about thefact that she had not seen him since then. Not dramatically. She was not going to make a speech or demand a love declaration or do any of the things that the heroines in Letitia’s novels did with such frequency and conviction.
She knocked on the study door.
“Come.”
He was sitting at his desk with his coat still on, fully composed. The posture of a man who had returned from somewhere and had been at work for long enough that the work had become his expression.
He looked up with the expression of someone who didn’t want to be bothered.
He must be swamped by work.
It hit her like cold water.
