The Reluctant Countess

Chapter Eleven: Building the Case

The weeks that followed had a strange, taut quality to them — not quite peace, since the danger hadn’t fully lifted, but not the raw fear of the fire or the break-in either. Calloway worked methodically through the financial trail from the hired intruder’s payment, building a case document by document, and James found himself, more than once, grateful all over again that he’d thought to bring in a man hungry enough to fight this properly rather than one who’d simply expected the title to speak for itself.

It was slow work, and it kept Calloway at Wentmoor far longer than his original brief had called for, which suited Margaret rather better than she was willing to admit outright. She’d taken, James noticed, to finding reasons to sit in on the evening reviews of the case — reasons that grew steadily thinner as the weeks went on, until one evening she abandoned the pretense entirely and simply asked, over dinner, whether Mr. Calloway intended to leave the moment the case concluded, or whether he might be persuaded to stay on a little longer, purely in an advisory capacity.

Calloway, to his credit, did not pretend not to understand what was actually being asked. He said, carefully, that he’d be glad to stay as long as he was useful — and then, after a pause that told James rather a lot, added that he suspected his usefulness had very little to do with the reason he wanted to stay.

The table went quiet in the particular way tables go quiet when everyone present understands exactly what’s happened and no one is quite ready to say so aloud. Aniya, catching James’s eye, pressed her lips together to keep from smiling outright.

It was Aniya, in the end, who cornered Margaret about it properly — not out of nosiness, she insisted, when James teased her for it later, but out of genuine concern, since she recognized in Margaret’s careful deflections a version of her own old instinct to protect herself from wanting something she wasn’t certain she was allowed to have.

Margaret admitted it plainly, once pressed. She liked him. She liked him rather a great deal, in fact, more than she’d liked any of the eligible young lords London kept parading in front of her, none of whom had ever once made her laugh the way Henry did over something as unglamorous as a flawed witnessing clause. But he had no estate, no title, nothing but his own considerable talent and a modest income built entirely from his own work — and she knew precisely what her mother would have said about that, had her mother lived to say it, and suspected plenty of London would say something similar in her absence.

Aniya listened to all of this with the particular patience of a woman who had heard a version of this argument turned against herself, in a hundred different drawing rooms, by people who’d decided her worth before they’d ever spoken a word to her. She told Margaret, simply, that she understood the fear better than almost anyone in England could — but that she’d learned, in the year since her own marriage, that the families and drawing rooms worth keeping were the ones who valued character over inheritance, and the ones who didn’t weren’t worth grieving the loss of.

She told Margaret one thing more, gently: that James had married her against every expectation his own world had set for him, and it had been, without question or close competition, the best decision either of them had made. If Henry Calloway made her laugh over witnessing clauses and looked at her the way James suspected he did — James had, in fact, mentioned it more than once — then perhaps Margaret owed it to herself to stop deciding, in advance, that the world wouldn’t allow her to be happy.

Margaret didn’t answer right away. But the following afternoon, James came upon his sister and Calloway in the garden, heads bent close together over a legal document that both of them had, by the look of things, entirely stopped reading several minutes prior, and decided, with some satisfaction, that his wife’s advice had landed exactly where it was meant to.

That evening, lying together after the household had gone quiet, Aniya told James she thought Margaret and Calloway would manage it, in the end — the class of it, the money, all of it — the same way she and James had managed their own version of the same problem. James, tracing idle patterns against her shoulder, said he rather thought so too, and added that it gave him no small satisfaction to watch his little sister fall for a man exactly as stubborn and unimpressed by titles as his own wife had been, the day she’d first walked into that drawing room and looked him over like livestock.

Aniya laughed — a real, unguarded laugh, the kind she’d learned to give freely only in the last year — and told him she was never going to be permitted to forget that particular first impression, was she.

Never, James promised, kissing her temple. Not as long as he lived.