He sat beside her at the card table for 3 hours. He was attentive, amusing, interested in her opinions, and notably unafraid of saying directly what he meant. Ada liked him, genuinely.
He was easy in a way that Maximilian was not. He offered warmth that didn’t have to be excavated from beneath years of carefully constructed distance.
Maximilian arrived late to the card party and registered the situation in approximately 30 seconds. He had never been a jealous man. This was his considered view of himself, based on 40 years of not having felt it.
He discovered, standing in the doorway of the Greystone card room, watching Lord Hereford lean toward Ada to say something that made her laugh, that his considered view had simply been waiting for the appropriate stimulus.
What moved through him was not comfortable. It was not something he could address with composure or deflect with a well-constructed sentence. It sat in the center of him like something struck by flint.
He played cards on the other side of the room and spoke to people and smiled when it was required. And every 10 minutes, he looked across and Lord Hereford was still there.
And Ada was still laughing. And the thing in his chest did not improve. He left at 11:00 without speaking to her.
He walked home through the June dark and arrived at Ashvale House in a temper he was too proud to acknowledge and too intelligent not to understand. And went to his study and sat in the chair behind his desk and thought, for the first time without flinching, about what he was actually doing.
He was 40 years old. He had told his mother, told himself, told anyone who asked, that the time had passed. He had built a very comfortable architecture of resignation around himself and lived in it for years and had been, if not happy, at least insulated from the particular kind of unhappiness that wanting something you cannot have produces.
And now, there was Ada Pemberton, 20 years old, with a 10-year-old’s declaration still somewhere in the room between them. And a young viscount who was not complicated and not guarded and would give her a straightforward life with straightforward warmth.
He wanted her, not as an abstraction, not as a pleasant diversion in an otherwise predictable season. He wanted her specifically, precisely, the way she tilted her head at books and chose her words and looked at wisteria and refused to give him anything he hadn’t earned.
He had been circling that truth for 6 weeks. He was done circling. The question was what he was going to do about it.
And whether he had, in his decade of careful inaction, already run out of time. The Pemberton household received the news on the morning of June the 15th.