“You are satisfied?” she asked.
“Provisionally,” he said. He didn’t let go immediately.
Clara forced herself to swallow, clearing her throat to break the silence. “I believe I can manage the rest of my breakfast without further incident.”
Julian looked at her a moment longer. Then he released her hand, stepped back, and picked up his fallen chair with complete calm, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
“I shall hold you to that,” he said and sat back down.
Clara looked at her bread roll. She picked up the butter knife again, thought better of it, and set it back down.
Across the table, Julian said nothing, but she was almost certain, from the corner of her eye, that he was smiling.
CHAPTER 8
Clara and Julian met the wet nurse properly later that afternoon. He’d spoken to the woman for the briefest of moments that morning but hadn’t had a chance to devote much time to the matter. Mrs. Holt took one look at David and declared him a fine, healthy boy with excellent lungs and a very sensible face for his age.
Julian stood slightly to one side while the two women talked, watching Clara more than he watched Mrs. Holt. The nurse had a habit of asking the sort of questions that only a mother would know how to answer such as whether the baby had shown any preference for being held on the left or the right, whether he had had any trouble with wind, whether he had seemed bothered by bright light in the early days. Julian had braced himself each time, expecting Clara to falter.
She did not falter once.
She answered with an easy confidence, occasionally glancing down at David with an expression that looked, to any observer,precisely like that of a mother who had spent months learning every preference and peculiarity of her child. By the time Mrs. Holt declared herself satisfied with the arrangement and took David off for his morning feed, Julian was staring at Clara with something close to open admiration.
She caught him looking.
“I had younger cousins,” she said and picked up her gloves from the table.
He cleared his throat. “Shall we go?”
She nodded, but as they made their way toward the carriage, she stopped him with a hand briefly on his arm.
“Before we leave this evening,” she said, “I must make one other call. I need to see Helena.”
“Clara—”
“Before you say anything,” she said, “I assume you were planning to tell Nathaniel the truth?”
He did not deny it. “Nathaniel has been my closest friend for nearly the whole of my life.”
“And Helena has been mine for nearly the whole of mine.” She met his gaze. “She does not keep secrets from me, and I do not keep them from her. That is not a negotiation.”
He looked at her for a moment then he nodded once. “Very well. But be careful about what you say and where you say it.”
“I am always careful,” she said and walked to the carriage.
He followed, thinking that this was almost certainly not true, but he was not going to say so.
They returned to town mostly in silence. The morning was gray, the streets already busy with carriages. Julian watched the faces they passed and thought about what those people knew, or thought they knew, and what the papers would say before the week was out.
Clara sat across from him with her hands folded in her lap and looked out of the window. She had gone somewhere inside herself. He recognized it because he did the same thing. The interior gathering that happened before a difficult conversation, the ordering of thoughts into something that could be presented without trembling.
Lady Chatham was in the drawing room when they arrived, and she was upon Clara the moment the door opened.
“How could you simply leave in the middle of a ball?” she said, her voice pitched high enough to rattle the delicate teacups onthe sideboard. “You left poor Mrs. Wainscott entirely on her own. The woman was absolutely beside herself. I have never been so mortified in all of my life.”
“She was beside herself for approximately four minutes,” Lord Chatham said from his armchair without looking up from his newspaper, “until the note arrived.”
“The note,” Lady Chatham said, turning to Julian with an expression that made it very clear she had not forgotten about the note, “which said almost nothing of any use whatsoever, except that my daughter had been taken off to the Duke of Lynden’s home.
