It was, in the end, not so simple as a single conversation.
Julian's mother, the Dowager Duchess, received the news in her private sitting room with a stillness that was somehow more alarming than shouting would have been. Her teacup held motionless halfway to her lips for so long that Julian thought she might simply set it down and pretend she had not heard him at all. Outside the tall windows, the morning was gray and unremarkable, and Julian found himself grateful distantly that at least the weather had not chosen to underscore the moment with any particular drama of its own.
"Do you understand," she said finally, in the low, measured voice she used only when she was truly furious, "what this match secures? The Vane lands border ours on three sides. Your grandfather spent thirty years trying to settle that boundary dispute, and this marriage was to end it for good, quietly, without another decade in the courts."
"I understand it perfectly well, Mother. I have understood it since I was eleven years old and first told whom I would eventually marry."
"Then you understand what you are giving up."
"I understand what I very nearly gave up instead," Julian said.
And something in his voice must have carried more weight than she expected, because she set the teacup down at last and studied him properly, the way she had not studied him in years.
"Cordelia doesn't want this any more than I do, Mother. She loves someone else, has for two years. Would you truly have me spend the rest of my life married to a woman pining for another man simply so the boundary dispute resolves itself a decade sooner?"
"I would have you understand that duty rarely asks whether we want it."
"Then perhaps it is past time someone asked anyway."
The Dowager Duchess did not relent easily. There were letters exchanged between the two households for the better part of a fortnight, each more clipped than the last, and a week of dinners so frosted that even the footmen seemed to serve the courses more quickly than usual, eager to be out of the room.