She wished for the millionth trillionth time she had family, someone to confide in. someone to advise her. She thought of Oliver’s grandmother, the Dowager Duchess what did she think?
Perhaps she should ask her. What would she advise?
She brushed the dirt from her hands and made her way inside the house to the apartments of a woman she’d come to think of as a friend and confidant.
* * *
She foundthe Dowager Duchess in the blue sitting room, which she had come to understand was Dorothea’s particular domain in the way that certain rooms in certain houses belong entirely to one person. Not by declaration but by accumulated presence. The chair by the window with its worn arm. The small table with its permanent arrangement of correspondence, spectacles, and a volume of Voltaire that appeared to have been read so many times it had given up trying to hold its spine together.
Dorothea looked up when Megan appeared in the doorway and said nothing, which Megan had also come to understand.The Dowager Duchess did not fill silences with noise. She let them be what they were and waited to see what you did with them.
“Forgive me,” Megan said. “I don’t wish to intrude.”
“Then come in and sit down, because you’re already intruding by hovering in the doorway and at least the chair is comfortable.”
Megan came in and sat down.
The fire was low and pleasant, the kind that existed for company rather than warmth, and the room had the quality of a place where difficult things had been said before and the walls had absorbed them and carried on. Megan folded her hands in her lap and looked at them for a moment, then looked at Dorothea, who was looking back at her with the composed patience of a woman who had long since stopped pretending she didn’t already know what was coming.
“He told you,” Megan said.
“He did.”
“And it was your idea.”
“The practical solution was mine, yes.” A pause. “The rest of it was entirely his own, and I want that understood.”
Megan absorbed this. “He said you’d been thinking about it longer than the conversation.”
“I had been thinking about the legal architecture, yes. The other matter I had been thinking about for considerably longer, but it wasn’t mine to act on.” Dorothea set down the Voltaire. “How are you?”
The question was so direct and so unadorned that it caught Megan slightly sideways. The staff at Saxton Houses had been careful with her in the way you were careful with something that might break, and she had managed it with the patience of someone who understood why but found it quietly exhausting. Dorothea asked questions the way she did everything else. Without performance.
“I don’t know,” Megan said. It was becoming a familiar answer. She was beginning to think it was the truest one she had. “I told him I needed time.”
“Sensible, but also stupid. You don’t have time.”
“He agreed immediately, which I found—” She stopped. “Disconcerting.”
Dorothea’s expression shifted slightly at the corners. “Because you expected to have to argue for it.”
“Because I’ve never been given time to decide anything without it being a trick.” Megan said it evenly, because it was simply true, but she saw Dorothea hear the weight of it, regardless. “I don’t know how to trust a straightforward thing. I keep looking for the mechanism. The place where it turns.”
“And have you found one?”
“No.” She paused. “That’s what’s disconcerting.”
Dorothea was quiet for a moment, the considered kind. Then she said, “May I tell you something that I am telling you not as Oliver’s grandmother, whose interest you might reasonably discount, but as a woman who has been alive for eight-one years and has had occasion to observe a great many men and their behavior?”
“Please.”
“Oliver has never done this before.” She said it simply, without the weight of a woman trying to make a case, and perhaps that was why it landed the way it did. “He has been to war and come back from it a changed man and managed an estate and followed Parliament so he’d be ready when the time came to take his seat, and done everything that was required of him, and in all of that time, through all the years I have watched him, he has never shown this kind of interest in a woman. Not one. I had begun to think, privately, that he might simply be one of those people for whom that particular door stays closed.” A pause. “And then he came home from Wales with you, and Iunderstood that the door had not been closed. He had simply not yet met the right person.”
Megan looked at the fire.
“I’m aware,” she said, carefully, “that you want him to be happy.”
“I want him to be happy. I also want him to be well-matched, which is a different thing and frequently a competing one. I am telling you he would be both.” Dorothea’s voice was dry but not unkind. “You are not a convenient solution to me, Megan. I have had many years of convenient solutions paraded through this house for Oliver’s consideration and I have found every last one of them wanting. You are not convenient at all. You are, in fact, the most complicated possible person he could have chosen.”
