Page 78 of The Luckiest Lady in London

She returned to her room without another glance at him.

Chapter 17

Felix returned to Huntington alone.

Louisa had left London the day after she ran into Miss Edwards, but he had several appointments to keep—and she’d made it all too plain that she wished to be left alone.

The last time he had traveled by himself in the private rail coach had been before the wedding. He’d had Messier’s Catalogue on his person, and a smile on his face, thinking of the laugh she’d get from the dress dummies on the belvedere.

Now all he had were her words burning in his ears.

Hideous. Cheater. Common cardsharp. When have you ever thought about me, except so that you may better gratify yourself?

There was a part of him that squirmed at the reiteration of these accusations. It wanted to defend him by pointing out that she was far better off than she had ever been—or would have ever been had she married anyone else. Now she possessed a fortune of her own, never needed to worry about the welfare of her family again, and could deploy the finest private telescope in all of England anytime she wanted.

But he could not deny the truth of the charges she’d leveled at him. Until now, whatever he had done for her, he had done for himself, whether it was to give her five thousand pounds a year—for his vanity—or to allow her access to his telescope—for his heart, in the hope that she would reciprocate his sentiments.

The entire aim of his adult life had been getting what he wanted, exactly the way he wanted it; so it was hardly surprising that his character would be marked by a keen attentiveness to himself. But what made his soul recoil was a dawning understanding that his love, so important and fearsome for him, was actually a remarkably shallow thing, little more than a will to possess.

Or at least so it would seem, viewed through her eyes, through the prism of all his lies and distortions.

He fought against successive waves of despair. He would not give up. He would make her understand. He would use every advantage at his disposal and he would—

It was only as the train approached its next stop that he realized what he was doing. He was still trying to turn the situation to his benefit, when what he ought to do was first become the kind of man who deserved her.

In his prior transformation from a young, orphaned boy to The Ideal Gentleman, his entire aim had been strength—strength enough to bend the will of others and strength enough to always hold the upper hand.

But now he would need to acquire humility. Or, if not that, at least the ability to truly put her needs above his own.

This brought a new surge of uncertainty. What if he became that better man, but she could not see it? What if she would only ever perceive him through the prism of his prior lies and distortions?

He pressed his fingers into his temples. He would simply have to accept failure as a possibility, that whatever he did might be futile. That her heart might always remain closed to him.

Now, given all that—or perhaps despite that—what could he do for her?

* * *

The day after his return to Huntington, Louisa received a note from her husband, informing her that the schoolroom was completely ready and he awaited only her pleasure to begin the lessons.

She tossed the note into an empty drawer.

At dinner that night—the only time they were in the same room, and with so many epergnes and vases between them that she was in little danger of actually seeing him—he asked whether she’d received his note.

“Yes, I have,” she answered.

Iterations of the same note, however, kept arriving. She kept shoving each day’s rendition into the drawer.

But after a week or so, she found herself going up to the renovated schoolroom. She could not recognize the place. The walls were now a pale celery green, the curtains a daffodil yellow. The ceiling, which had seemed so oppressively low before, had been repainted into a trompe l’oeil image of library shelves going up and up, reaching toward an oculus from which pink-cheeked cherubs peered down, as if they, too, were interested in quadratic equations.

Now there were two sets of a desk and chair, one set the same as before, except repainted and refinished. The other set—larger, more ornate, a professor’s perch—she recognized as having been moved from the library. On this desk there were a stack of notebooks with dark blue covers and a rectangle of white space in the middle—like all his other notebooks.

The one on top was labeled, Lecture Notes: Fundamentals of Algebra. She opened it to his familiar, handsome penmanship. His lecture plan was lucid and easy to follow, illustrated with plenty of examples. The notes were already halfway through lecture twenty-three.

The next notebook was Homework. For each lecture, there would be two full pages of homework. She would need to copy the problems into a notebook of her own, as he had not left room for her to work on the page.

She did not look into a third notebook, Tests and Examinations, but only rubbed her fingers along its spine and corners.

She remembered what it was like to be covered in his notebooks, notebooks still neat and clean, but with the pages having been ever so slightly warped by dried ink. Such a luxurious sensation to be surrounded by all that learning, all that data, all that him.