Edward requested a private audience on a Wednesday, which I received via Mr. Holt with the composed neutrality of a woman who had been expecting something of this sort and had simply been uncertain of the day.
I granted it because I was curious. This is a different thing from being willing, and the distinction mattered to me even if it would not have been visible to anyone else.
He arrived without his customary ease.
I noticed this immediately. Edward with his social architecture in place was a man one could predict. Edward without it was something more interesting — one could see what everything had been built to conceal.
He sat across from my desk with his hands on his knees, wearing the expression of a man who has done arithmetic he did not wish to do and has come, nonetheless, to report his findings.
It was, unfortunately, approximately six months past the point of being useful.
"I have been doing some arithmetic," he said, without his customary approach of building toward a point through several layers of social scaffolding. "Regarding the dates."
"Which dates," I said. I suspected I knew, but I had found that allowing people to arrive at their own disclosures produced more complete ones.
"Victoria announced the pregnancy in late October." He held my gaze, which also cost him something. I noted the cost. "I have been calculating backward from the dates the physician provided at the time. They do not—" He stopped. Collected himself with the visible effort of a man who has rehearsed this sentence and finds it no easier for the rehearsal. "They do not resolve credibly, Your Highness. The announcement was made before it was medically possible for the announcement to be accurate."
The room held this for a moment.
"You have been considering this for some weeks," I said. Not a question.
"Several," he admitted. "I was not certain of the arithmetic initially. I reviewed it a number of times." A pause. "I reviewed it rather more times than I should perhaps have required, given that the conclusion was—" He stopped again. "It becomes rather clear, eventually."
"Yes," I said. "I imagine it does."
He looked at me with the expression of a man who had expected hostility and received something else and is proceeding with visible uncertainty about the new terrain. "I believe the urgency was manufactured. The announcement made before it existed, in order to — compress the timeline." A pause. "To force the matter before it could be reconsidered."
Before he could reconsider, he meant. Before the corridor, the closed door, the silence where following ought to have been.
I looked at him — at this honest, belated, costly version of Edward Beaumont — watching me with something that was neither love nor apology but adjacent to both and considerably less convenient than either.
"I am glad you came," I said.
The warmth in my voice surprised him. His expression adjusted — not relief, exactly, but the specific recalibration of a man who had prepared for a hostile terrain and found it otherwise.
The warmth was genuine. It was also the warmth of a woman who has just received a piece of information she needed, rather than the warmth of a woman who has received an apology and found it adequate. I was reasonably confident he knew the difference.
"I thought you should know," he said.
"I think so too," I said. "Thank you for telling me."
He left shortly after.
The door closed with the settled quality of a chapter concluding — not dramatically, not with any particular grief, simply finished, the way a sentence finishes when it has said what it needed to say.
I sat with it for a moment.
There is a particular sensation in looking at an object one once considered indispensable and finding it, without drama, merely an object. Not loss. Not relief. Simply clarity — the floor visible beneath where the furniture used to stand, serviceable and unremarkable, requiring no particular response.
Edward had come, and told me a true thing, at some cost to himself. This was, I reflected, the first genuinely useful thing he had done in my direct experience of him.
I was grateful for it. I was also aware that gratitude and forgiveness were different ledgers entirely, and I had not confused the two.
There was, I should be honest, a third ledger.
It had been operating, with the quiet persistence of a well-managed account, since approximately the morning I had walked out of a corridor and heard a door not follow me.
The ledger contained a fairly comprehensive record of what had been taken — my trust, my confidence in my own judgment, the first and only night I had given anyone and the promises I had received in exchange for it — and it had been accruing interest at the specific rate applicable to debts incurred by people who sorted women into categories and selected accordingly.
I was now, by the authority of a dead king's sealed document, the person who held the dukedom he had chosen over me.
I found that I was not, entirely, above finding this satisfying.
Not in any elaborate sense. I had no particular interest in dismantling Edward Beaumont. He had managed rather a considerable portion of that himself, and Victoria had assisted admirably with the remainder.
But the specific quiet satisfaction of knowing that the title he had deemed worth more than every promise he made me — worth more than my trust, my confidence, the one night I had given him in good faith — now existed entirely at my discretion was something I examined with the honest curiosity one ought to bring to one's less admirable impulses.
It was, I concluded, rather pleasant.
He had chosen a countess. He had chosen the rank, the family, the social standing, the category of woman for whom different standards applied. And now the woman he had put into the lesser category held the greater one, and his dukedom sat in the crown's hands and would remain there until I decided otherwise.
I had not yet decided otherwise.
I did not think I would be deciding otherwise particularly soon.
I poured myself a cup of tea that had gone entirely cold, because that was the variety available, and returned to the correspondence.
Damian arrived for the afternoon briefing at four o'clock.
"Edward Beaumont came this morning," I said, without looking up.
He set down his papers. "I know."
"You know because you were informed, or because you anticipated it?"
"The latter," he said, without detectable guilt. "The former merely confirmed it."
I looked up. He was watching me with the quality of attention I had catalogued at some length and still found, consistently, rather difficult to sustain for extended periods. "He believes the pregnancy dates were fabricated," I said. "The announcement made before it was possible to make it accurately."
Damian was quiet — not surprise, but the quiet of a man fitting a piece into a pattern he has been assembling for some time. "What will you do with it?"
I set down my pen. "I have several ideas."
"Would you like to tell me what they are," he said, with the particular dry quality he employed when he was making a point he considered self-evident, "or shall I simply be informed afterward in the manner to which you have recently been accustoming me?"
I regarded him with the mild interest of a woman who had detected a note of dry reproach and was deciding whether to acknowledge it. "I would like to hear your thoughts first. Then I shall tell you mine. Then we shall determine whether the ideas are compatible."
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. "That," he said, "is a marked improvement on previous arrangements."
"I am adaptable," I said, "when the situation warrants."
He sat down.
I noted, privately, that the situation appeared to warrant it rather frequently these days, and that this was a form of progress I had not specifically designed but found I did not object to at all.