“Good.” William started back toward the carriage, then stopped and looked back at James with something that had softened considerably from the formality of a few minutes ago. “For what it’s worth, I have not seen you like this. Not ever. Whatever it is you’re not saying yet, I hope you’ll say it eventually. To her, not to me.”
James inclined his head and walked toward him. “We’ll see.”
William huffed something that was almost a laugh, shook his head, and clapped him once on the shoulder.
“Come on,” he said. “Cecily will leave without me if I make her wait in the cold much longer, and she has done it before.”
They walked back toward the carriage.
James looked up at the steps where Isadora stood smiling, her shawl pulled tight. She looked up and spotted him. Something in her face eased slightly, the way it always did now when she located him in a room or a drive or a morning.
He did not look away from it.
I am deciding now.
He didn’t know yet what he was deciding. But it was, he understood with a clarity that startled him slightly in the cold morning air, no longer nothing.
CHAPTER 21
“You’re simply flipping pages, Duchess.”
Isadora jumped and looked up. James was leaning in the library doorway with his arms folded, the late afternoon light behind him catching the dust that always seemed to hang in the room due to the old books and even older furniture.
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Holt inclined her head and excused herself.
“I am not,” Isadora said.
“I doubt you’re reading it, which is strange for you.”
She looked down. The book was open to page thirty-four. She had just picked it, she realized, and she could not remember anything she had read.
James came further into the room, glancing at the new south shelving with the proprietary satisfaction he still hadn’t quite outgrown. He looked at her for a moment in the unhurried way he had taken to looking at her lately—not the assessing look from the early days of their marriage, but something slower, more deliberate, as though he were in no particular rush to finish looking.
“You look like you have read the same page eleven times,” he said.
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’re holding your book closed with your thumb still inside it, which means you stopped reading some time ago. Do not fret, I do that myself.”
“I was thinking,” she said.
“About the book?”
“About the house.” She closed the book, her thumb slipping free of the spot it had been marking.
He tilted his head slightly. “The house is quiet.”
“It is.”
“You miss them.”
“Three days is hardly enough time to spend with them. It never feels enough,” she sighed. “Of course I miss them.”
Something in his expression softened.
A maid passed in the corridor with an armful of fresh linens and another behind her, both wearing carefully neutral expressions.
James seemed to notice them noticing.
