He closed it.
“You came here this morning believing you would find a man sufficiently concerned about reputation and inheritance to be manageable. I want you to understand that you have miscalculated. The inheritance my cousin left his child does not interest me. What interests me is that she has it, that it exists to protect her as he intended, and that no one with a competing financial interest is permitted to redirect it.”
He paused. “I would rather lose every penny of it than remove her from this house. I want that to be understood so there is no ambiguity going forward.”
Calder blinked.
Mortimer looked at James, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “You understand,” he said carefully, “that pursuing this course will place you in direct legal opposition to the family. The Ashbourne name?—”
“Is her name,” James pointed out. “Whatever her parentage, my cousin gave it to her. I will not take it back.”
“The inheritance?—”
“Is hers.”
“The reputation of the family?—”
“Is not your concern,” James cut him off. “It is mine.Iam the Duke of Ashbourne. The family’s reputation is precisely mine to manage, and I will manage it by protecting a child who has no one else to protect her.” He paused to let that sink in. “That is the end of this conversation.”
Mortimer sat in stillness for a moment.
“This will go to court,” he warned.
“Then it will go to court,” James said. “You have delivered your papers, and you have said what you came to say. I have an excellent solicitor and a forty-three-page will drawn by a manwho anticipated exactly this. I am not afraid of your petition, and I will respond through the appropriate legal channels.” He stood, and Isadora followed suit. “Briggs will see you out.”
He moved toward the door and opened it, a gesture that required Mortimer either to leave or to remain seated while standing was expected of him, which was the kind of social physics that men like Mortimer could not easily ignore.
“I trust you can find accommodations in the village. I’m afraid Ashbourne cannot offer you rooms at present.”
Mortimer rose with a grunt. At the door, he turned.
“I hope,” he said, looking between James and Isadora, “that sentiment does not cost you more than you expect and that you will consider the child’s interests above your own attachment to the current arrangement.”
James’s lips thinned. “The child’s interests are the only thing I have considered since the day she arrived. I would not expect you to understand the distinction, but I want you to know that I see exactly what you are doing, and I want you to know that I will not be taken lightly.” He paused. “Good day, Lord Mortimer.”
Mortimer grunted again and left. Calder followed.
The door closed behind him, and the room fell quiet.
James stood at the window, his back partly turned to her, looking out at the drive where Mortimer’s carriage was already moving. His hands were clenched at his sides. Isadora could see the tension in them from across the room.
She sat very still.
She thought about what he had said. It had landed in the moment with the weight of something important. But now, in the quiet after the door had closed, she heard it differently.
She thought about him in the nursery on the first night, rocking Violet with the rigid uncertainty of a man who did not know how to do what he was trying to do. She thought about him learning Violet’s sounds, her rhythms, the difference between her hungry cries and frightened ones.
She thought about the carved fox named Sebastian and the daisy he had kept in his hand at the lake and the way he had stood in the center of the nursery at midnight, unable to leave, because the thought of something happening to a child he had known for three weeks was sufficient to override every other consideration.
“James,” she called.
He turned.
“They are not taking her,” she said firmly.
“No,” he agreed. “They are not.”
She studied him. The line of his jaw. His hands, which had relaxed now. The hands that had held Violet and moved chairs and reached for hers without deciding to.
