“You are standing in a nursery at midnight, asking your best friend’s sister to marry you.” She kept her voice low with someeffort. “That is not possession of one’s mind. That is the opposite of it.”
“I just met with the solicitor, and he raised a problem,” he said. “I identified a solution.”
“I am not a solution.”
“You are, actually. A remarkably good one.”
She stared at him.
Violet stirred slightly against her shoulder. Isadora adjusted her hold immediately, stroking a slow circle across the baby’s back, and felt her settle again. She used the moment to collect herself, which she desperately needed.
“Tell me what the solicitor said,” she said evenly.
Something dark crossed James’s expression. He moved to the window and stood with his back half-turned, looking out at the dark grounds.
“There is talk,” he began. “About Violet. About whether she ought to be connected to the Ashbourne family at all.”
Isadora looked down at the baby in her arms. At her small, sleeping face, entirely unaware. “On what grounds?”
“Her origins.” He said it calmly, but she heard what was underneath it. “Her mother was Miss Clara Bennett, a vicar’s daughter from Alderton.” He turned slightly, still not quite facing her. “She was hired as a companion to Lady Ellington, an old friend of the Ashbourne family.” A pause. “She and the Duke met, eventually. Their relationship continued for a year but was kept entirely private. He supported them both, acknowledged the child in his personal correspondence, and named me guardian in his will.”
“He loved her,” Isadora said it simply because the picture assembled itself clearly enough—a man making a quiet, careful provision for a woman and a child he could not publicly claim. That was not indifference. That was a man doing the most he could within the boundaries of what the world permitted.
James turned to look at her. “Yes. He loved them both, I think.”
“And then the accident happened.”
“A carriage. Three weeks ago. Both of them.” He said it without inflection, which was its own kind of inflection. “Violet was with the nurse at the time. She is the only one left.”
Isadora looked down at Violet’s sleeping face—the dark lashes against the chubby cheeks, the small mouth slightly open, the complete and devastating innocence of her—and felt something swell in her chest that had no tidy name.
This baby had lost everything in a single afternoon. Her mother, father, and the life she had been born into. She knew nolanguage to understand loss, but had enough feeling to know that the arms she trusted were gone and that the world had overnight become uncertain and loud and full of strangers.
“She looks like him,” James murmured. “My cousin. She has the same eyes.”
Isadora looked up. He was watching Violet with an expression she had not seen on him before. It wasn’t the careful blankness he defaulted to when something mattered too much, but something more unguarded than that. Raw at the edges.
“The family knows this,” he continued. “Which is why what they are doing is particularly—” He stopped, clenching his jaw. “The solicitor told me that several relatives are questioning whether the late Duke’s acknowledgment was legitimate. Whether Violet has any true connection to the Ashbourne family at all. Whether she should remain here.” The last word came out with a quiet, controlled fury that told her everything about how long he had been sitting with it. “As though she is an inconvenience to be resolved rather than a child who has just lost both her parents.”
“And they want her removed?” she asked.
“They want the inheritance questioned,” he said, turning away from the window. “She could be removed totally.”
The shape of it settled into clarity. Isadora thought of Violet’s small fist against her collarbone and felt something harden inside her.
“And an unmarried guardian with a… colorful history,” she concluded, “makes the challenge easier.”
“Considerably.” He looked at her steadily. “A guardian with a wife of good family and steady character makes it a great deal harder. The household appears stable. The child appears wanted. Society loses interest in reforming a situation that no longer looks like a scandal.”
“So, the child remains safe, the household appears stable, society stops interfering.” She paused. “And you get a solution to all your problems.”
“Yes,” he confirmed, without apology.
“You do realize,” she said carefully, “that you are speaking about marriage as though it were another estate matter to settle before dinner.”
“In some respects?—”
“James.” The name came out more sharply than she had intended. She softened her voice. “Marriage is not an estate matter.”
