Page 102 of Lord Hartwell’s Refuge

Oh dear. What had he said? Incentive? She hazarded uncertainly, “Fear of your wife?”

“Among other things.” His head bent, his nose brushed hers. “But also a healthy respect for her, and a desire for her happiness.”

His lips met hers at last, and she forgot entirely about whatever it was in his hand and put her own around his shoulders.

His arms went around her and he pulled her close, her body flush against his, as he kissed her with a thoroughness she had not at all expected in the middle of the day in a room where anyone might walk through the door. Indeed, as he held her in his embrace, she leaned into him fully and enjoyed the thoroughness of his attentions.

Finally he moved away but not far, his forehead touching hers with his eyes closed. “My wife. There is little I would not do to see you happy.”

The declaration startled as much as it pleased. Tamsin tilted her chin up to brush her lips over his one more time, lightly. Heat had blossomed across her cheeks and she ought to step away. A lady surely would worry about composing herself in such a moment.

Yet she stayed. “I could have luncheon brought to your study. If you are not watched while you eat, I am not certain you will. And you must keep up your strength.”

He moved back and stared down at her, eyebrows raised. “You want me to go to my study?”

Surprisingly, she did not resent the idea in the slightest. “Go. I will join you for the meal shortly, and then you have work to do.”

His lips twisted, somewhat skeptically.

“I mean it. Go save your barbican.”

“Preserve.”

She blinked at him. “Pardon?”

“I am attempting to preserve the barbican. Saving it sounds melodramatic.”

Tamsin stared. Roman kissed her cheek before she could answer and she watched him leave with the smallest of smiles on her lips.

Chapter Twenty-Four

November 11th, 1822

The council chamber smelled of old wax and damp stone. Roman had learned, over the course of six weeks of attending meetings from a seat near the back wall—the only place open to a baron who held no seat among the aldermen and no vote to cast—that this was the smell of a council that had already decided what it meant to do and was merely observing the correct forms on its way there.

He sat between Kettlewell and Holly, neither of whom spoke, which he appreciated more than he could say. Phineas and Thaddeus had come too, crowded along the same bench, present in the way friends were present at a funeral—not because there was anything useful to be done, but because a man oughtn’t to sit alone through the burying of a thing he loved.

None of them could speak, not properly. That privilege belonged to men who held the floor by right of office. Roman’s title, however old, had never once bought him a place or voice among them.

That was the entirety behind his campaign: swaying popular opinion was the only way for him to make a difference. If he wrote enough letters and made enough noise in the right papers, the aldermen would have to listen to the people around them.

The clerk read the first motion for the vote. “That the barbican at Micklegate Bar be preserved in its present state, pending further survey.”

Roman had drafted half the language himself, weeks before, in letters to every alderman he could reasonably claim acquaintance with, and his associates to those he could not. He had written to the York Herald under his own name. He had stood in the street outside the printer’s on Coney Street and watched his own pamphlets reach the hands of men he did not know, hoping some fraction of them would care about a thing they had walked past their whole lives without seeing.

The second motion followed on its heels. “That the bar itself be retained, the barbican removed as impractical to the city’s improvement, the matter of restoration to be revisited as expertise and funds allow.”

Patchett rose to speak to it. He did not look at Roman directly; that would have been too plain a thing for a man of his skill. He did not need to.

“I have great respect,” he declared, in the mild, reasonable voice of a man who had never once raised it in his life and had no need to, “for those among us who feel strongly on matters of history. Sentiment does the city credit. But sentiment does not repair a crumbling barbican, nor does it widen a road too narrow for modern trade. Some among us,” and here his gaze drifted, briefly, unmistakably, to the back wall where Roman sat, “have lectured this body at some length on its civic duty. Yet duty cannot be considered apart from expense, however passionately one may wish it. I would ask this body to consider which duty is owed first. Do we owe it to crumbling stone, or to the citizens who must pass through the hazard daily, and to the ratepayers who must fund its keeping?”

No one asked Roman to respond, obviously. He had no standing here, not like in the Lords. Here he had no choice but to sit with his hands on his knees and his jaw set in the steady shape he had long ago trained it to hold. He knew, with clarity which did him no good whatsoever, that Patchett was not entirely wrong. That was somehow worse than if he had been.

But the argument, when made by the man against the barbican’s preservation, was still much more than the simple case Patchett presented.

The vote was called. Hands rose. Roman counted without meaning to, the way he counted most things, and knew the outcome before the clerk had finished tallying it aloud.

The barbican would be removed, when funds and expertise allowed, and the bar itself would remain. There was no date attached. There was no date because there was no intention of hurrying one way or the other to empty the city’s meager coffers; Roman understood that as clearly as he understood anything, sitting in that chamber with his face arranged to give nothing away.