The Reluctant Countess

Chapter Twelve: The Summons

The summons arrived on a grey morning in early spring, nearly a year to the day since Charles’s first letter had disrupted what should have been an ordinary breakfast — a formal notice that the matter of the codicil, and the accompanying charges Calloway had assembled around the hired intruder and the burnt barn, would be heard before the King’s Bench in a fortnight’s time.

James read it at the same desk where he’d first read the marriage contract, in the same study that still, faintly, carried the memory of his father’s tobacco, and felt the particular vertigo of a man arriving at the end of something he’d stopped quite believing would ever actually end. Aniya, reading over his shoulder, said only that it was time, then — and there was a steadiness in her voice that steadied him in turn, the way it so often did now, after two years of learning to lean on her exactly as she’d learned to lean on him.

Calloway, when they rode to meet him in the village that afternoon, was cautiously confident — a phrase James had learned, by now, to interpret correctly as considerably more confident than Calloway would ever admit aloud, for fear of tempting fate. The financial trail was solid. Dr. Whitfield’s statement was sworn and unshakeable. The hired intruder, facing his own charges, had agreed to testify to what little he knew of his employer’s intermediary in exchange for leniency. It was, Calloway said, about as strong a case as either side of a family dispute like this one was ever likely to have.

What worried him, he admitted, wasn’t the evidence. It was Charles himself — a man who had shown, repeatedly, that he’d rather burn the whole estate down than lose gracefully, and who had two weeks left, now, in which to attempt exactly that.

They spent those two weeks in a strange, suspended kind of vigilance — watchmen doubled again, the household quietly braced for some final desperate move, though none came, at least not in the form any of them expected. Instead, three days before the hearing, Charles himself arrived at Wentmoor’s door, unannounced, alone, and asking — with none of his solicitor’s careful formality — to speak with James privately.

Aniya’s instinct was to refuse him entry outright, and James understood the impulse, felt the same wariness himself. But something in his uncle’s bearing — diminished, somehow, in a way the confident letters had never suggested — made James agree, on the condition that Calloway sit in as witness to whatever was said.

Charles, seated in the same study where his brother had once run the estate into ruin, looked older than James remembered, and considerably less certain of himself than any correspondence over the past year had suggested. He said, without much preamble, that he knew the case was lost — Calloway’s evidence had reached him through his own solicitors’ growing reluctance to continue representing what was plainly becoming an indefensible position — and that he’d come to say, before the courts made it official and humiliating, that none of it had ever really been about the title.

James asked, carefully, what it had been about, then.

Charles’s answer, when it came, was uncomfortable in its honesty. He’d spent his whole life the overlooked younger son — watching James’s father inherit everything by simple accident of birth order, watching him then mismanage that inheritance into near ruin without consequence, while Charles himself, for all his own competence, had been left with nothing but a modest income and a lifetime of being reminded, at every family gathering, exactly how little he mattered by comparison. When James’s father died and left Wentmoor drowning in debt, Charles had told himself, for one bitter season, that perhaps there was a kind of justice in finally taking what his brother had never deserved to hold.

Then James had gone and actually saved the estate — married well, worked hard, done everything Charles’s own brother never had — and the unfairness of it, seeing James succeed at the very thing he himself had never been given the chance to attempt, had curdled into something he wasn’t proud of.

It didn’t excuse the fire, Charles admitted. It didn’t excuse the fear he’d put into a household that had done nothing to him personally. He said he understood James had no reason to forgive any of it, and didn’t expect him to. He’d simply wanted him to understand, before the courts settled the matter formally, that it had never really been greed, in the end — only a lifetime of feeling unseen, poured into the one place it could finally do some damage.

James sat with that for a long moment, turning it over. He didn’t forgive his uncle — not fully, not that day, with the memory of the burnt barn still sharp and the fear in Aniya’s face from the night of the break-in still fresh enough to sting. But he found, unexpectedly, that he understood him, in the specific and uncomfortable way one only understands a person by recognizing some small, unflattering piece of oneself in them — his own fear, once, of becoming exactly the kind of man his father had been. Charles’s bitterness and James’s fear had grown from the same soil, in the end; they’d simply borne different fruit.

He told his uncle, finally, that he wouldn’t withdraw the charges — the barn, the intruder, those had cost real people real harm, and accountability for that wasn’t his to forgive on Charles’s behalf. But he would speak to the magistrate about leniency where he could, provided Charles left Wentmoor, and the family, in peace from this day forward.

Charles nodded, something like relief crossing his tired face, and left without further argument.

That night, Aniya asked James how he felt, now that it was nearly over. He considered the question honestly before answering — told her he felt strange. Not triumphant, the way he’d expected to. Mostly just tired, and grateful, and profoundly aware of how much of the last year he’d only survived because she’d been standing beside him through every part of it.

Aniya curled into his side and told him that was, as far as she was concerned, precisely what marriage was supposed to be — not a shield against hardship, since nothing could promise that, but a guarantee that whatever hardship came, it came to two people instead of one.

James thought that was, without question, the truest thing anyone had said to him in the whole long year, and told her so, and she fell asleep in his arms with the hearing still three days off and, for the first time in a very long while, no real fear left in the house at all.