He didn’t leave the dining room for hours. Eventually he rose from his seat and paced to the window and back. He leaned on the back of the abandoned chair, the wall, the sideboard—anything in the room that was capable of holding his weight—but always, always his eyes strayed back to the stack of cards still sitting on the table. The servants were worried about him, finding any and every excuse to walk past the open dining room door. Even Mrs. Harris refused to take the opportunity to admonish his choices.
And his choices were definitely at fault here.
With the sun long gone and the single candle Fenton had left him threatening to gutter out, Trent finally left the room to meander toward the leather chair he’d already spent too much time in. He didn’t know what to do. Though they’d been little more than strangers before, somehow they had managed to grow even further apart. He was still adjusting to the fact that this marriage was real, that nothing was going to come and magically take it away—that this was his life now, and he couldn’t go back.
He’d finally accepted the truth, but how was he going to convince Adelaide of that fact? Would anything he did now be seen as genuine effort instead of simply a reaction to her cutting outburst?
As he passed through the hall on the way to the stairs, a collection of calling cards on the silver platter by the door caught his eye. When he had been a bachelor, people rarely felt the need to drop their cards by to let him know that they’d arrived back in Town. Word of his marriage must be spreading for people to start the formal observance with him now. That or they were hoping to be among the first to receive a visit from his wife.
His wife who hadn’t been able to do any calling of her own because he’d been so busy trying to pretend she didn’t need to.
And now that she was trying to pretend the same thing, he realized just how badly he’d handled the entire situation.
Longing for a distraction, and perhaps even a miracle, he flipped through the cards to see who had stopped by.
One familiar name caught his eye and made him groan and laugh at the same time. His Grace, the Duke of Riverton. With a handwritten note along the bottom that said he wanted to let Trent know he was back in town but didn’t want to disturb the newly married bliss.
If only he knew.
The fact that Griffith was now only a brief walk instead of a grueling daylong ride away started an itch under Trent’s skin. For as long as he could remember, when Trent hadn’t known what to do he’d asked Griffith. Trent knew his brother wasn’t God and that, despite his steadfast personality and rock-solid presence, the man had made a mistake or two in his life, but his advice was rarely wrong. Griffith had a way of cutting to the heart of the matter, simplifying an issue until a person knew exactly what he needed to do.
If ever an issue needed simplifying, it was this one. In a matter of days Trent had made one complicated mess of his life and marriage, and it needed to get sorted out. Tonight, if possible.
His hat still hung where he’d placed it on the hooks by the front door when entering. Someone, likely Fenton, had retrieved Trent’s greatcoat from the dining room and hung it beside his hat. A tall clock stood next to the hooks, the hands pointing to an hour somewhere between ridiculously late and insanely early, depending upon one’s perspective. Waiting until true morning wouldn’t hurt anything, but the restlessness and desperation that had driven him to pace the confines of the dining room for hours were now pushing him out the door. He’d reached the edges of Grosvenor Square before he even knew he’d made up his mind to go.
The imposing yet familiar front of Hawthorne House was unsurprisingly dark when Trent bounded his way up the steps. His knock was still answered promptly, though by a footman instead of Gibson, the butler—further proof that Trent had lost his grip on what was considered polite and appropriate at this hour.
“My lord?” The footman stepped back to allow Trent to enter, but he looked poised to run around waking the house for what he probably assumed was an emergency.
“My brother is back in Town, is he not?” Trent shucked his hat and coat and handed them to the anxious footman, whose name he couldn’t quite remember. Odd that he knew everyone on his own staff but not here. It really wasn’t home for him anymore.
“Yes, my lord, but I’m afraid he’s already retired for the evening. Shall I wake him for you?”
Trent rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the desperate tension. “Don’t bother. I believe I’ll stay here for the night. Please leave a message for Cook that there will be another for breakfast.” When only one Hawthorne was in residence, the staff didn’t lay out a spread on the sideboard, instead fixing a plentiful plate of the family member’s favorites. Trent had been beyond lucky to have avoided the notice of footpads on the way over here. He wasn’t chancing a walk back to his own house tonight. And since he had high hopes of finding the solution to his problem within the next hour, he wanted breakfast in the morning.
A good breakfast to welcome the promise of a new day.
“Very good, sir. Can I get you anything?” The footman looked confused. Griffith liked to have someone manning the door at all hours of the night in case urgent news arrived, but whatever footman drew the duty rarely had to do more than polish a few extra pieces of silver.
“No. I can see to myself.” Trent ran up the stairs before the servant could respond. He walked right past the door to his old room and down the passage to his brother’s. The elegance and grandeur of the corridor caught his attention like it never had before. Growing up this had simply been home. The gilded frames, spotlessly polished wall sconces, and gleaming floors were things to walk past, not be admired at length.
But Trent now stopped in front of a tall vase on a narrow table. The artful arrangement of flowers and branches nearly reached the ceiling. Why hadn’t he put such beautiful things in his own home? Trent had made an effort in a few rooms because his mother and sisters had insisted, but by and large he’d left the place in its semi-neglected state of genteel poverty. Hawthorne House might not feel like home anymore, but he wasn’t all that certain his place in Mount Street felt like home either. If he’d been waiting until he found the person to share his future before he made his home, where did that leave him? Sitting on threadbare sofas until he settled things with Adelaide? Sipping from mismatched teacups for the rest of his life because she would never forgive him for ignoring her the week after they were married?
Trent pushed open the door at the end of the corridor. He needed to talk to Griffith, and it wasn’t going to wait the seven hours until proper morning visits commenced.
A large lump lay under the simple blue bed coverings. It looked like a mountain in the middle of the room. A light snore reached Trent’s ears, proving that Griffith had more than gone to his room for the night. He’d actually gone to bed.
The kind thing to do would be to slip quietly back out of the room and let the man sleep. Fortunately, loving brothers didn’t always have to be kind to each other.
Trent took two quick steps and launched himself into the air, landing on the mattress and sending the slumbering mountain bouncing across the bed while the bindings holding the mattress up creaked in protest.
Snuffles and snorts accompanied muttered half words as Griffith grappled with sudden wakefulness. Trent turned on his side and propped his head in his hand, taking care to plaster an enormous grin on his face.
Griffith pushed the covers down and ran his large hands over his face, blinking in the dim light coming through the not-quite-closed curtains. His voice was rough and thick, and it took two attempts to get a single word out. “Trent?”
“Last time I looked in a mirror, yes.”
The deliberate blinks Griffith used to focus himself and complete the waking-up process reminded Trent of Adelaide’s blinks. Those infernal, distracting blinks that did strange things to his insides that he was going to have to live with for the rest of his life. He flopped down onto his back and covered his own face with his hands.
Griffith’s groan as he sat up in the bed sounded like rocks tumbling over each other. “What are you doing in my bed?”
Trent uncovered his face and turned to look at his brother. “I need to talk to you.”
“And it couldn’t wait until morning?”
“I’m afraid not.” Trent sat up as well until he was shoulder to shoulder with his brother, a man who’d stepped in to fill the role of father, though he couldn’t even grow whiskers at the time. “I’ve created a bit of a tragedy, Griffith.”
Griffith’s face lost all signs of sleepiness as he snapped his head around to frown in Trent’s direction. “Are you well? Mother? Georgina? Miranda?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I’m well.” Trent raised his hands to calm Griffith’s sudden worry. “Last I heard our family is all healthy as well.”
A grunt that bordered on a sigh was Griffith’s only response as he turned to drop his feet over the side of the bed. “Well, if we are going to have a conversation, let’s have it elsewhere. I find having you in my bed rather awkward.”
Trent bounced up from the mattress. “Agreed. Would you like me to wait in the upstairs parlor?”
Griffith shrugged into his dressing gown and shook his head. “The study. I prefer to surround myself with manliness when I converse in my dressing gown.”
“You do this frequently?” Trent’s eyes widened. He knew he hadn’t kept up with all the demands on his brother after their father died, but did dukes truly have many middle-of-the-night conversations in their dressing gowns?
“No,” Griffith muttered, “but I have decided that manly surroundings will be a rule for any future occasions.”
Trent grinned—a real grin born of a spark of good humor. Coming to Griffith had been the right thing to do. “Very well. I shall meet you in the study.”
Griffith’s study was almost as familiar to Trent as his own. More so, in some ways. Griffith had inherited the room at ten years old. Since then the brothers had spent many a day sitting in the old leather chairs, mulling over the important things in life like frogs and puddings while pretending to be adults. Then they’d actually become adults and the mullings over life had gotten more serious.
Theological debates aside, though, Trent didn’t think they’d ever discussed something as personal as this.
Griffith tightened the sash on his dressing gown as he entered the study and collapsed into a chair. With one hand he rubbed the last of the sleep from his green eyes and with the other pushed his dark blond hair back off his forehead. “Talk.”
The urge to pace was tough to quell, but Trent made himself sit in the matching chair and face his failure like a man. “I’ve ruined my marriage.”
“I couldn’t have even traveled to Scotland and back in the amount of time you’ve been married. What on earth happened?”
“Well, if you had taken the mail coach and turned right back at the border you could probably have gone to Scotland and back. It would be close.” Trent plucked at a piece of grass that had gotten stuck to his trouser leg when he cut across Grosvenor Square.
“Trent.”
There was no sigh, no rolling of the eyes, nothing to mark Griffith’s frustration over Trent’s delay. The simple utterance of his name was all it took to convey the sentiment that had become something of a mantra for their family. Their mother had said it first after quietly telling them their father had died, his heart simply stopping while he slept. Griffith had repeated it before getting in their uncle’s carriage to hie off to Eton. He’d said it again when Trent took the same ride to join him. It had been Trent’s turn to remind Griffith the first time he took his seat in the House of Lords. The admonishment had always been the same—that they would face reality with God at their side and England beneath their feet and do what they could to make the world better.
Right now Trent didn’t find it very comforting. He dug his fingers into the arms of the chair, watching the skin around his fingernails whiten as he pressed the wooden trim. “I don’t know what I did. I think it’s more what I didn’t do.”
“Which is?” Griffith rubbed his forefinger up and down along the edge of his thumb, the only sign that Trent’s slow answers were perturbing his older brother.
“Nothing. I’ve done nothing.” Trent gave in to the desire to pace and strolled over to the desk and picked up a large, round paperweight. The black marble ball was cold and heavy, grounding Trent in the moment. “I’ve ignored her.”
Griffith cleared his throat. “Completely?”
“Yes.” Trent rolled the ball from hand to hand and leaned one hip against the desk. “I didn’t want to believe I was married. Still don’t, for that matter.”
One thick blond eyebrow climbed, and Trent knew he was about to be handed the Word of God in such a way that he was going to feel ridiculous for not having turned to it himself. “‘The lip of truth shall be established for ever: but a lying tongue is but for a moment.’”
Griffith had always liked the book of Proverbs. Trent placed the weight back on the desk, knowing the time for lying was over, even if he’d only been lying to himself. “Well, when you put it like that.”
Trent crossed back to the chairs. He placed his forearms on the back of the old upholstered wingback and stared into the cold fireplace. “I suppose my moment caught up with me today, then. The thing is, this isn’t what I thought my marriage would be. I always pictured myself taking my time, courting my wife through the Season, maybe even longer.”
Griffith sighed and leaned his head against the back of the chair. “What’s stopping you?”
Trent really should have let Griffith sleep, because apparently his mind was addled by the middle-of-the-night interruption despite his ability to quote Scripture. “I’ve already got a wife, Griffith.”
The raising of a single eyebrow called Trent’s intelligence into question and made him want to plop down in the chair and sulk. The words that followed knocked the breath from his lungs. “I guess you can take your time courting her, then, can’t you.”