The Reluctant Countess

Chapter Seven: Whispers in London

The gossip reached London before Calloway’s countersuit did, which told James, more than anything else could have, exactly how his uncle intended to fight this. Charles had not waited for the courts. He had gone first to the drawing rooms — the same drawing rooms that had once whispered about Aniya as a curiosity, and now, with a little encouragement, were only too willing to whisper again.

Margaret brought the worst of it back from a week in town, arriving at Wentmoor with her jaw set and a folded newssheet she clearly wished she didn’t have to hand over. It was a gossip column, unsigned, hinting broadly that the young Earl of Wentmoor’s marriage had been arranged with suspicious haste, to a merchant’s daughter of foreign extraction, mere months before certain questions arose about the legitimacy of his inheritance — as though, the piece suggested, a clever man might have secured a fortune first and worried about legal niceties after.

Aniya read it standing in the front hall, still in her riding clothes, and James watched her face do something he hadn’t seen it do in a year — go carefully, deliberately blank, the same composure she’d worn the day he met her, back when the room itself had been an adversary she couldn’t afford to show weakness in front of. It undid something in him to see her put that armor back on. He’d thought, foolishly perhaps, that Wentmoor had let her set it down for good.

He told her, once Margaret had tactfully found some errand elsewhere, that none of it was true and none of it mattered — that anyone who knew them, who’d spent even an hour in their company, would see through it in a moment. Aniya said, quietly, that it wasn’t the people who knew them she was worried about. It was the ones who didn’t, the ones who’d use any excuse handed to them to decide she’d never belonged in this world at all, marriage or no marriage.

He didn’t have a clever answer for that, so he didn’t try for one. He simply pulled her into him, there in the front hall, and held on until some of the rigidness went out of her shoulders. She let him. That, he thought, was its own kind of answer — that even now, even armored, she still let him close enough to matter.

Calloway, when consulted, was characteristically unbothered by the gossip itself and considerably more interested in what it revealed about Charles’s strategy. A man confident in his legal claim didn’t need to poison London’s opinion beforehand, he pointed out — which meant Charles suspected, correctly, that the codicil wouldn’t survive close examination on its own merits, and needed public sympathy to carry it the rest of the way.

That, at least, gave them something to work with. Calloway proposed they meet the gossip directly rather than retreat from it — a public appearance, the Ashworths attending the same events Charles meant to poison against them, giving the very people currently whispering behind fans the chance to see for themselves that there was no scandal here, only a marriage Charles Ashworth was jealous enough to attack.

It was Margaret who pointed out, a little too quickly, that she’d be glad to accompany Mr. Calloway to make the necessary introductions in town, since she still knew half the hostesses worth knowing. Aniya caught James’s eye across the room, the ghost of her old sharpness returning for just a moment, silently promising him she’d have quite a lot to say about that particular offer once they were alone. James, for his part, found he was fighting down a smile he had no business wearing in the middle of a family crisis.

The town house they took for the season was smaller and shabbier than the one James had grown up visiting as a boy, but it suited them well enough, and it gave them, in its own strange way, something they hadn’t had much of at Wentmoor — reason to be seen together constantly, arm in arm, presenting a united front to a city that wanted very badly to believe there were cracks to find.

There weren’t, and Aniya made certain of it in every room she entered. She met every pointed question about her “foreign extraction” with the same flat, unbothered composure she’d once used purely as armor, except now James stood beside her through every one of them, and more than once she caught his hand finding the small of her back in exactly the gesture that had first told Margaret, months ago, that her brother was in love — a small, steady claim, not of ownership, but of solidarity.

It was at the third such evening, in a card room grown thick with the particular kind of silence that meant everyone was listening and pretending not to, that a baroness James barely knew asked Aniya, with poisonous sweetness, whether she didn’t find it exhausting, having married into a family currently tearing itself apart over whether she belonged in it at all.

Aniya’s answer came without a flicker of hesitation. She said that she found nothing about her marriage exhausting in the slightest — only illuminating, since it had shown her, with perfect clarity, exactly which families in this city valued a person’s character and which valued only their bloodline, and she was grateful, genuinely, to know the difference before she’d wasted any more of her evenings on the latter.

The room went very quiet. James, fighting down something fiercely proud, leaned down and murmured, for her ears only, that he loved her rather a great deal, and that the baroness could go hang.

Aniya’s answering smile, small and satisfied, was worth every whispered word the gossip columns had cost them.