The Reluctant Countess

Chapter Sixteen: A Different Targe

Sedgwick’s next move landed somewhere none of them had thought to guard, and it took James several furious minutes, upon hearing of it, to fully understand the cleverness of the strike. It wasn’t aimed at the Rao company at all, or at Wentmoor’s finances, or even at James’s title. It was aimed at Henry Calloway.

A letter had gone round to several of the barrister’s existing clients — unsigned, carefully worded to avoid outright libel, suggesting only that Mr. Calloway’s judgment had grown compromised of late, given his rather too personal involvement with the family of a client he’d successfully represented, and questioning whether a man so entangled with one family’s private affairs could truly be trusted with the impartial handling of anyone else’s. It named no names. It didn’t need to. Anyone in legal circles who’d heard the barest whisper of Calloway’s courtship of Margaret Ashworth would understand exactly what was being implied.

Calloway arrived at the town house that afternoon, uncharacteristically shaken, three separate clients’ notes of “reconsideration” in hand. He explained the situation to James and Aniya with the particular flatness of a man trying very hard not to let panic show, and admitted, when James asked directly, that Sedgwick’s fingerprints were all over the timing of it — a warning shot, aimed not at the Rao company’s finances but at the one relationship close enough to James’s household to be used as leverage.

It was Margaret who arrived at the tail end of that conversation and, hearing the shape of it, went very still in a way James recognized as considerably more dangerous than any outburst would have been. She asked Calloway, directly, what he intended to do about it.

Calloway’s answer, when it came, was not the one any of them wanted to hear. He said, carefully, that perhaps it would be wisest — for both their sakes, and for the sake of his career, which he’d built from nothing and couldn’t easily rebuild if it collapsed under him now — if he stepped back from courting her, at least until the Sedgwick matter had resolved one way or another. He didn’t want her caught in the crossfire of a fight that wasn’t hers, or to watch his professional ruin become the price of loving her.

The room went very quiet. James, watching his sister’s face, saw something in it he recognized immediately — the particular flash of fury that meant she was about to say something considerably sharper than the careful diplomacy her upbringing had trained into her.

She told Calloway, without any softness at all, that she would decide for herself what fights were hers to be caught in, and that she’d spent the entirety of her adult life watching men decide, on her behalf, what she was and wasn’t capable of weathering — and she was, frankly, exhausted by it. If he genuinely didn’t want her, that was his right, and she’d accept it with whatever grace she could manage. But if he was stepping back purely to protect her from a choice she was entirely capable of making herself, then he was insulting her considerably more than Sedgwick’s anonymous letter ever could.

Calloway, visibly startled by the force of it, admitted, after a long moment, that he did want her — wanted her more than he had any right to, given his circumstances, which was rather the entire problem. Margaret told him, flatly, that wanting her and being brave enough to keep wanting her publicly, in the face of exactly this kind of pressure, were two very different things, and she’d rather he decided honestly which one he was capable of before either of them said another word on the matter.

She left the room without waiting for his answer. James, watching his sister go, found himself thinking, with no small amount of pride, that she’d learned rather a lot from his own wife over the past two years.

Aniya, once Calloway had gone, sat with James in the quiet of the study and admitted that she recognized entirely too much of her own old fear in what had just happened — the instinct to protect someone you loved by stepping back before they could be hurt on your account, mistaking retreat for kindness. She’d nearly made the same mistake herself, once, in the early days at Wentmoor, before she’d understood that love worth having didn’t ask you to disappear from the fight to protect the person you loved from it.

James asked whether she thought Calloway would come around. Aniya considered it, then said she rather thought he would — he loved Margaret plainly enough that fear, not indifference, was driving the retreat, and fear, given enough honest confrontation, tended to lose eventually to love that was genuinely felt.

She was right, as it turned out, within the week. Calloway returned to the town house, found Margaret in the garden where she’d taken to walking off her temper, and told her — plainly, without hedging — that he’d spent several sleepless nights deciding he’d rather weather Sedgwick’s worst than lose her out of cowardice dressed up as protection. He asked, formally this time, whether she’d have him, whatever the cost to either of their reputations.

Margaret’s answer, relayed to James later with considerable satisfaction by a household staff who’d apparently witnessed the whole thing through the garden windows, had involved rather less formal language than Calloway’s question, and considerably more enthusiasm.

James, hearing the account that evening, pulled Aniya close and told her that between his sister and his wife, Sedgwick had picked an entirely wrong family to underestimate. Aniya, laughing against his shoulder, agreed completely — and added that Sedgwick, whatever else he’d accomplished, had apparently succeeded only in giving Margaret and Calloway the push they’d needed to stop being sensible and simply be happy instead.