“Of course.”
He pressed his lips together. “Might you be willing to join me for that conversation?”
Emotion surged up her throat, stealing her words from her.
“I think it would be best if you were present, so she can understand our connection from the beginning, the reason why I have found the engagement so very difficult. I have never spoken to her of it — of you — and I do not know if her father ever did. I think it would bring her comfort to have you present.” With a gentle press of her hands, he released her. “You are always so very considerate, Nora. You will be able to encourage her also in this, I am sure.”
“If you wish me to be with you, then I will be glad to attend,” she answered, her happiness pushing against her own concern as to what Frederica might say to all of this. “Might I ask you something, Hampshire?”
He nodded, his hazel eyes no longer as dark with anguish as they had been before. “Of course.”
“If she begs you to keep your engagement, if she asks you to honour your duty and your agreement with her father, then what will you say?”
Lord Hampshire said nothing for a long moment, gazing into her eyes with a steadiness that gave her the answer long before he spoke. Then, he took her hand in his again and settled his free hand over their joined ones, clasping hers between his own. “My darling Nora,” he said, making her heart lift with the tenderness with which he spoke her name, “I will tell her with the greatest gentleness and compassion that my heart belongs solely to you and that I must honour the love we share over any sense of duty. I will not abandon her, I will assure her that my duty to find her a suitable husband still remains, but I will not linger on as her betrothed.”
A gentle curve of his lips sent warmth into his eyes. She looked up at him, the open, unguarded want that she had held behind walls for a year undoing something in his chest that he had not known was fastened. Her lips were slightly parted, her breathing uneven, and the green light through the leaves threw soft shadows across her face that moved and shifted like living things.
He lifted his free hand. His fingers found her chin, tilting her face upward — gently, slowly, as if she were made of something that might break. She did not pull away. Her eyes held his, and in them he saw permission — tentative, uncertain, but real.
He leaned toward her. The distance between them narrowed to inches. He could feel the warmth of her breath against his mouth, could see the slight flutter of her lashes as her eyes began to close —
“Hampshire! I say, Hampshire!”
The voice shattered the silence like a stone through glass. They sprang apart — her hand falling from his, his arm dropping to his side — with the speed and guilt of two people who hadbeen caught at something they could not yet claim as their right. David turned, his pulse hammering, to see a round-faced gentleman approaching along the path with the oblivious enthusiasm of someone entirely unaware that he had just destroyed something fragile and irreplaceable.
“Petersham,” David said, and the name came out on a hard exhale. He forced a smile that cost him more than it should have. Lord Petersham beamed at them both, evidently delighted by the coincidence. “Wonderful to see you out! Did you hear about Chelmsford’s new horse? The most magnificent creature I have ever seen, sixteen hands if she’s an inch —”
David listened. Or rather, he stood in the approximate posture of a man listening while every nerve in his body strained toward the woman standing three paces to his left, who had turned her face away to compose herself, one hand pressed to her cheek.
When Petersham finally took his leave — his monologue on horseback riding completed to his satisfaction — David turned to Nora. She was looking at the chestnut tree, her hand still at her face, and when she felt his gaze, she lowered it.
“A kiss most certainly worth waiting for,” she murmured, and despite everything — despite the frustration and the ache — he laughed. The sound surprised them both.
The coffee houseon Threadneedle Street was the kind of establishment that had once been respectable and was now merely surviving — its windows fogged with grease, its benches scarred by a decade of elbows and spilled porter. David had not intended to stop there. He had been walking from Bolton’soffices, his thoughts still churning over the missing codicil, when a voice from within had arrested him mid-stride.
He knew that voice.
Through the clouded glass, he could just make out the stocky figure of Rathbone seated at a corner table, a sheaf of papers spread before him and a tankard at his elbow. Opposite him sat a thin man David did not recognize — a clerk or associate of some kind, perched at the edge of his seat as if he would have preferred to be sitting elsewhere entirely.
David stepped into the doorway of the neighbouring shop and listened. The fog of conversation and clinking crockery made it difficult, but Rathbone’s voice carried — it had the quality of a man who had spent a lifetime making certain he would be heard.
“...twelve years I gave him. Twelve years of work no solicitor with half a conscience would have touched, and he knew that. He knew what he was asking, and he promised — he promised —” Rathbone’s fist came down on the table, making the tankard jump. The thin man flinched. “Land. Coin. A fair settlement. Nothing extravagant, nothing more than what any man would expect for services rendered.”
The thin man murmured something David could not hear.
“He changed his mind.” Rathbone’s voice went quiet — not calm, but compressed, as if the anger had been forced into a smaller and more dangerous shape. “The moment the coughing started, the moment he saw his own death coming for him, he decided I was an inconvenience. Dismissed me through Bolton without even the courtesy of a conversation. Twelve years, Marsh. A man does not give twelve years of his life and walk away with nothing.”
He picked up his tankard and drank, and when he set it down, his hand was trembling. Not with weakness — with fury.
“I will have what I am owed,” he said, and the certainty in his voice was absolute. “Every last penny of it. If the nephew will not honour his uncle’s word, then I will find other means. I have always found other means.”
David pressed his back against the shopfront, his pulse thick in his ears. There had been something in Rathbone’s voice that unsettled him more than the threats, more than the barely contained violence of his fist on the table. It was conviction. The man believed — truly, unshakeably believed — that he had been wronged. That what he was doing was not villainy but justice.
It made him more dangerous than David had imagined.
13
That same afternoon, Frederica was twisting her handkerchief to ruin between her fingers. David watched her work at the delicate fabric, pulling threads from the embroidered edge with a methodical violence that seemed at odds with the rest of her posture — upright, controlled, the chin raised to its angle of formal defiance. But the handkerchief told the truth her face would not, and by the time she had spoken her first full reply, a small pile of linen threads had accumulated on the arm of the settee like fallen snow.
