James looked at the will again. At Violet’s name. At the extraordinary figure beside it that his cousin had spent years accumulating for a daughter he would not watch grow up.
She will not grow up unwanted.She will not spend a single day of her life feeling like an inconvenience. Not while I am breathing.
The certainty of it surprised him.
He had spent most of his adult life being very careful about what he allowed himself to feel with that kind of absoluteness. It was, generally speaking, safer.
Violet had apparently not received that particular memo.
He sat back down.
“There is one solution,” Henderson said carefully.
“I know what it is.”
“A duchess would?—”
“I know.” James picked up his pen, set it down. “I asked someone last night.”
Henderson’s eyebrows rose. “That is fantastic, Your Grace. That solves?—”
“She refused.”
A pause. “I see. May I ask on what grounds?”
“I told her how practical the arrangement would be. I was honest about what I could offer.” James looked at him. “She is a woman who reads in window seats and believes in love with the kind of certainty that does not require evidence. I told her I could not offer it.”
Henderson was quiet for a moment. He looked at his papers, then looked at James.
“Your Grace,” he began. “In thirty years of legal practice, I have sat across from a great many intelligent people who have made a great many avoidable errors.” He paused. “The error they make most consistently is believing that stating the full extent of their limitations before establishing a single point of value constitutes honesty.” Another pause. “It does not. It constitutes a poor opening position.”
“I was being honest,” James argued.
“You were telling her one truth,” Henderson said, with gentle precision. “The truth of what you cannot offer. Which is a very different thing from the whole of it. And she said no immediately, you said?”
“Before I finished the sentence.”
Henderson pressed his lips together. “Quite.”
“You think I was wrong.”
“I think,” Henderson said carefully, “that honesty, while admirable, benefits from sequencing.” He folded his papers with the precise movements of a man retreating to safer ground. “But that is outside my area of expertise, Your Grace. I concern myself with the legal situation.”
“The legal situation requires a duchess.”
“It does.”
James sat with that.
He thought about Violet asleep against Isadora’s shoulder in the dimly lit nursery. About the three hours of uninterrupted sleep that had followed. About the exhausted relief in the nurse’s expression the next morning.
He thought about Isadora saying no with the composed certainty of a woman who had made a decision and would not be swayed from it, and walking out of the nursery without looking back.
He thought about the remaining option.
He did not like it. But Violet’s name was on page nineteen of a forty-three-page will, and Lord Mortimer’s solicitor had visited twice already, and James had made himself a promise that he intended to keep.
He picked up his pen, returning to the estate papers with focused calm. He had made his decision.
