Neither of us says anything after that. It’s over an hour that we’re made to sit—I hear a clock several rooms over strike twice. Finally, the blue-coated constable comes into the hallway and says we’re free to go, but when we both stand, he holds up a hand to Louisa.
“Just Mr. Montague.”
“My brother—” she starts, but he interrupts her.
“Constable Derrick has gone to fetch your brother, Miss Davies. For now, I’m only authorized to release Mr. Montague.” I suspect there was no formal authorization involved, only coins changing hands.
Louisa frowns. “Are you sure you’ve understood—”
“I’ve understood everything fine, Miss Davies, but thank you for your concern,” the constable replies before she can finish. “You’ll be released when your brother comes for you.” He steps back, gesturing toward the door. “Mr. Montague.”
I don’t want to go if Louisa can’t as well. And I certainly don’t want to go with anyone who isn’t Edward. He is the only man on earth I’d trust to bail me out of the Bow Street office without succumbing to the temptation to pass the story down the table at his next club dinner. Maybe it’s Peele, paying for my freedom in exchange for something he can lord over me for years. Or perhaps so he can walk me home and give me a stern and not-at-all-informed talking-to about respect and charity and how to spell other words that don’t contain double letters. Maybe it’s Mortimer come to challenge me to a duel for Peele’s honor. Or the news reached one of our house servants and they’ve taken pity on me, or they’re hoping for compensation for a favor I didn’t ask for.
Then, from the front office, someone calls, “Adrian. Quickly, please. You’ve wasted enough of my time already.”
And this day could not be worse. How did I wake this morning, thinking myself an anxious but bold warrior for reformation in my country, and now I’m a cowering puppy called to the feet of its master with its tail tucked? I am not strong or brave in the way I hoped I’d be. I’m no one near who I hoped I’d be.
I duck my head and step into the office. I don’t have to look up to know who’s come to fetch me from prison.
It’s my father.
In his study at the townhouse, my father settles into his chair, an act that requires more production than it used to, as his knees are gout-riddled. He sucks his teeth as he surveys me across the desk, a habit he’s developed since having them all pulled and replaced with ivory dentures. I look down at my lap without thinking. “Meet my eyes, Adrian,” he snaps.
I force myself to obey. My father hates nothing so much as men who do not look others in the eyes, whereas I find eye contact excruciating. It makes me feel examined, pinned down and spread out like an anatomical drawing.
My father has aged a century since my mother died. I had begun to think time couldn’t touch him, but now suddenly his eyebrows are white, what hair he has left likely the same, though he never wears it unwigged. He’s soft around the edges like a half-melted candle, his skin dripping down his face and flabbing along his neck. His eyelids droop, and the bones of his age-spotted hands jut sharply at the knuckles.
His mind is still sharper than those of most men his age, though he forgets things with increasing frequency. Names, mostly, though that had already begun before my mother died. She was always leaning over to prompt him as to what lord and lady were crossing a concert hall toward them the moment before they opened their mouths in greeting. I had not often had reason to think of my parents as a single entity, but suddenly, seeing him now without her after several months apart, my father seems only a fraction of himself, a man standing half in shadow.
“Adrian,” he starts, and I have no clue what he’s going to say, so I preemptively blurt, “I’m sorry.”
He pauses. I sit on my hands and resist the urge to apologize again, this time for apologizing before he’d had a chance to speak. Some men can cut another down with their words, but my father has a particular way of making me feel like an idiot with nothing but silence.
“For what,” he prompts after a protracted moment, “are you apologizing?”
“I didn’t know you were coming to London,” I say, then immediately regret it, for the unspoken conclusion to that thought blossoms between us like dust motes from a shaken rug—or I wouldn’t have been sneaking around.
“It was not my intention to leave Cheshire for several months,” he replies. “But a rather pressing matter arose, and I needed to speak with you.”
“Me?” I repeat, but he continues to speechify.
“So imagine my surprise upon arriving last night to find my son absent from my home without explanation—”
Why had I stayed the night at Louisa’s? Edward isn’t bothered, but the fear that someone who was would notice and report back to my father has always dogged me.
“—where I have graciously allowed him to stay unchaperoned in hopes it will broaden his mind after a lifetime in his countryside cell.”
It’s such a struggle not to look down that the muscles in my neck shudder. This has always been a source of hefty contention between us—he wanted me to go to Eton. He wanted me to go abroad. He wanted me to go a mile down the road to a Christmas ball at the Brammers’. I had, again and again, declined in favor of staying home, where I had a schedule and the house had a routine and I knew what lay behind every door and where every hallway led. Like a fragile tropical flower kept in a hothouse, I thrive only in extremely specific conditions. He finally prodded me to London after my mother died—his success in part because she was no longer there to come to my defense—and I went because, as a general rule, I would rather give in to anyone’s wants rather than argue with them, and also because Edward finally allowed Louisa to stay with him in London, her private education that they both felt so passionately about put on temporary hold so she could join his political cause. And wherever Louisa was was where I wanted to be.
“I was told,” my father continues, “that his absence is not unusual. He has been spending a great deal of time with his fiancée lately. And I thought to myself, as little as I think of her brother and guardian, Edward Davies must have the good sense not to allow them to be alone together. Whether or not they are to be married, a young lady and a gentleman unaccompanied and given free rein of all of London is unthinkable. Little did I know that not only were you unsupervised, but you and Miss Davies have been gallivanting around the city together, assaulting members of the peerage.”
Gallivanting hardly seems the word. Louisa and I spend most of our time together reading in the side-by-side armchairs in Edward’s library, our fingers chastely linked between us. We make tea and play cards and talk and sit quietly, and I listen to her play the piano and she reads my essays, and yes, we’ve shagged, but that started long before leaving Cheshire. The only difference is that French letters are so much easier to come by in London, and even if they weren’t, fornicating responsibly hardly counts as gallivanting.
Neither does my accidentally boxing Richard Peele in the nose seem to count as assault, though protest shrivels in my throat as my father pulls a sheaf of paper from his pocket. I realize what it is as he places it on the table between us.