“He’s solid. He looks dependable. Good estate, good income, straightforward character.” Lewis moved toward the side table and poured himself coffee with the ease of a man in his own house. “A woman needs stability, Caroline. Not someone who spends half the year on a coastline looking at things in tidepools.”
“And the conversation? The interest? The simple fact of having something to say to one another?”
“Those things matter considerably less at forty than they appear to matter at twenty-one.”
She watched him wince at the sharpness in his words a half-second after they had left his mouth, and she watched him decide, in the same half-second, not to retract them.
Across the room, Esther set her pen down very quietly.
“That,” Caroline said, “is possibly the most depressing thing anyone has ever said to me, and I grew up in the same house as Uncle Timothy.”
“Caroline—” Esther rose from the desk, moving toward the center of the room carefully, as though she intended to stand between two things before they collided. “I think what Lewis means?—”
“I know what he means.” Caroline kept her eyes on her brother. “He has always meant it. He is simply saying it plainly now.”
“I am saying it plainly,” Lewis confirmed, “because plain is the only language that appears to penetrate.”
“Lewis.” There was a quiet firmness in the Duchess’s voice that she did not use often; that was why it carried weight when she did. “That is not the?—”
“I am not being unkind.” He looked at his wife, and his expression was not cold, but it was set. “I am trying to ensure that my sister is protected from making a decision that feels correct at one-and-twenty and becomes a source of regret at thirty.”
“And who determines what will become a regret?” Caroline asked. “You?”
“In the absence of anyone with better information, yes.”
She was silent for a moment, even as rage and disappointment warred in her bosom.
Lady Hayward had gone entirely motionless in her chair, which was a thing she did when she was listening with the whole of her attention and wished no one to know it. Esther stood between them, hands at her sides, carrying that particular strain Caroline knew too well—it was the look of someone who understood everyone present and could not make any of their turmoil easier.
“I understand that you want me safe,” Caroline said, and she kept her voice even because losing it would hand him a point sherefused to concede. “I know it comes from what you want for me. But you are choosing as though your judgment and mine are the same, and they are not. They simply are not!”
“My judgment has the benefit of experience,” Lewis replied, and in the set of his mouth was the quiet presumption that he would not be contradicted.
Caroline detested that, most of all. “Your experience of being a man who has never once been required to narrow his life to a set of rooms, a set of functions, and a set of people whose approval is necessary for his survival leaves room for improvement.” The sharpness was through the surface of her voice now, and she could hear it but couldn’t entirely stop it. “You were a rake for years, Lewis. You went where you pleased, did what you pleased. You had every liberty I’ve been told my entire life is simply not available to me. And now, you are standing here, telling me that you will make the final decision concerning who I will marry?”
Lewis flinched at first, then went very still.
“Yes,” he said this quietly, and entirely without cruelty, and somehow both of those things made it worse. “I will. Because I know what men are. I know what they’re capable of when no one is looking, and you do not, and it ismyresponsibility to protect you from that, whether you believe you require protection or not.” His gaze did not waver. “That is not a judgment on your intelligence, Caroline. It is simply the truth of the matter.”
Caroline fell silent.
Esther moved toward her with one measured step, her voice dropping to something private. “He is right about the dangers,” she said, and she said it looking directly at Caroline. “But you are right, too.” A pause, careful and honest. “Give him tonight to think. And give yourself tonight, too.”
It was the most Esther thing she could have said: not choosing sides, not dissolving the argument, only asking for the room and the night to let the sharp edges of it settle.
Under other circumstances, it might have worked.
Caroline looked at her sister-in-law, and her voice was gentler than it had been a moment ago.
“I know you’re trying to help. I love you for it. But I—” She stopped. Her fists trembled at her sides. “I need a moment.”
She did not wait for permission. She walked to the door, opened it, and closed it behind her with exactly the amount of care required to keep it from slamming—because she would not give him that either.
The corridor was empty and cool and blessedly quiet.
She stood in it for a moment with her back to the wall, eyes on the ceiling, counting her own breaths with the deliberate care that Lady Hayward had drilled into her for exactly these occasions…
She was fairly certain this was not the kind of occasion Lady Hayward had had in mind.