The reverend looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded once with the dignity of someone receiving a gift they had not been certain they would be given and intended to be worthy of.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
James began to close the box.
“Your Grace.”
He looked up.
The reverend was eyeing him with the expression of a man who had been thinking about something for a long time and had decided that this was the right moment to address it.
“Blood may make a father,” he said. “I have learned that late, and at a huge cost, but I have learned it.” He paused. “Love is what makes a family.”
The room was very quiet around them. The fire had burned down to embers.
“Yes,” James agreed. “It is.”
He said it with the ease of a man who had just understood something he had been approaching for a very long time. Not as a revelation exactly, more like the arrival at the end of a road and understanding what had led there.
A family.
He had inherited a duchy and a ward and a household, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, he had acquired something he had not known he was missing and could not now imagine living without.
He wanted to go home.
He wanted to go home and find Isadora and say everything he had been carrying for days, and he wanted to say it without the management or the careful distance or the years of habit that had kept him from saying it for far longer than made any sense.
He stood and shook the reverend’s hand. He walked to the carriage with the box of letters under his arm.
“Ashbourne,” he told the driver.
He climbed in, and the carriage lurched into motion.
He looked out at the passing countryside and thought about how love was what made a family, and thought about how much he wanted to see Isadora, and thought about everything he intended to say and the many ways he might say it badly and the fact that he was going to say it regardless.
I am coming home.Both homes. But first, he needed to do something.
CHAPTER 31
“He has written again,” Letitia said, appearing in the breakfast room doorway.
Isadora did not look up from her tea. “I know.”
“That’s three letters in four days.”
“I know, Letitia.”
“The second one was longer than the first.” Letitia stepped further into the room and sat down, nervous energy rolling off her. “I know because it was thicker. I did not open it.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I considered it.”
“I know that too.”
Letitia looked at her. “Are you going to read any of them?”
“No.”
