Page 71

William stared at him. Anthony stared back, and the silence went on so long that William realized what he was trying to say without him completing it.

“You are saying…” William said carefully. “…that you would like to tell her something you’ve been keeping in?”

“I am saying that if I do not tell someone, I shall go mad.” He dropped onto the bench and set his elbows on his knees. “You know what my father was like. He could not hold a feeling for a quarter of an hour. Everything he felt, he shouted at the walls. I spent my whole life determined never to do that. I have kept everything tidy and shut away, and I thought that made me wiser than he was.”

“Now?”

“Now there is something inside me that is not small, and I cannot make it fit.” He rubbed his jaw with the heel of his hand. “I begin to wonder whether that is how it was for him. Whether the shouting was only what came of holding it in too long.”

“Ah.” William lowered himself onto the bench beside him. “That is a rather alarming thought.”

“It is.”

“I should like to say I am sorry for you, but I find that I am enjoying this a great deal.”

“William.”

“Forgive me. It has been a long and arduous friendship, and I am savoring the moment.” William’s mouth twitched, then gentled. “You want to shout it from the roof of the club.”

“I want to shout it from the roof of every house in Mayfair.” Anthony gave a short, unwilling laugh. “I do not, of course. I would never. It would be unspeakably vulgar.”

“Terribly.”

“But I want her to know, is what I’m saying. I want everyone else to know that she knows, and I cannot stand that I do not even have the right to tell her that I feel this strongly for her.” He pressed his palms together between his knees. “It is not the time. She has just been told. I cannot walk into her house and lay my feelings on top of everything she has been through. It would be monstrous. It would make her grief about me.”

“It would not make it about you.”

“It would. She would be too polite to say so.”

“Leonora? Polite?” William shook his head. “I have met the woman.”

Anthony almost smiled. It faded before it reached his mouth. “Now is not the time, William. I keep telling myself that. When I have given her the answers she wants, when I know how her mother died and who is to blame, then I shall tell her every word.”

“When you have given her the answers?”

“Yes.”

“What if the answers take a year?”

Anthony did not reply. He had not thought of that.

“Let me ask you something,” William said, unusually soft. “When I first knew I loved Seraphina, I did not tell her either. I was certain she would think it ill-timed. We were in the middle of something dreadful, you recall. Do you know what I realized during all of that?”

“That you were an idiot?”

“That I was in love with her, and that I was making a great production of being noble so that I did not have to be afraid.” William looked at him.

The words dropped into Anthony like a stone into deep water. He sat and listened to them go down.

In love.

He had used a dozen other words, and each one had been a locked door. Care for. Concern. Fondness, even, on his worst days of denial. All that time the right word had been waiting at the end of the corridor, plain as daylight.

He loved her. He loved the sharp edge of her wit and the tilt of her chin when she meant to argue. He loved the way she held her hands still when she was frightened. He loved that she had no use for his title and that she could hold a proper conversation with him without agreeing to his every word. He loved her, and it was no passing thing, and he had been going about the world for weeks with it sitting in his chest like a coal.

“Oh,” he said, very quietly. “I love her.”

William grinned like a man who had won a wager. “You love her. You are in love with my sister-in-law.”