CHAPTER TWO #2
Ellen’s fingers stilled.
“Watercolours,” he said. “Badly, you told me, which I took to mean rather well, since the people who truly do a thing badly are usually the last to admit it.”
He had remembered.
It came back to her whole, the way a scent does. May, and the Davenport ball, and the small breathless heat of too many candles, and the alcove behind the long blue curtain where she had gone to be unlooked at for the length of one cotillion. She had not heard him follow.
“You have the look of a woman hiding from someone in particular,” he had said, “and I should like to know whether it is me, so that I can be wounded properly.”
“It is everyone,” she had told him, which was nearer the truth than she meant to give a stranger. “I find I do better with rooms than with the people in them. Rooms at least do not ask what one’s accomplishments are.”
“Then I shall not ask. I shall guess.” He had tipped his head, considering her with a frankness that ought to have been rude and somehow was not. “You paint.”
She had been so startled into honesty that the sentence was out before she could dress it. “Watercolours. Badly.”
“I doubt that entirely. The ones who say badly are the ones who lie awake over it.” And then, more quietly, as though it were a thing of consequence and not a girl’s small confession behind a curtain, “That is the first true thing anyone has said to me all evening. I had begun to think nobody in this room owned one.”
She had regretted it the instant it left her, because to speak of oneself so plainly was to hand a man something he had not earned.
She had forgotten it on purpose, or tried to.
And he had carried it through a whole summer of silence and laid it before her now as though it were a ribbon saved from a dance.
Her face warmed. “You have a dangerous memory.”
“Only for important matters.”
“My watercolours are not important.”
“I disagree.”
“That is because you have not seen them.”
“Then I must.”
She looked down at the rose stems. “They are not fit for military inspection.”
“I shall come unarmed.”
Mrs. Dalton’s quill stopped entirely.
Ellen heard it.
Her cousin blotted the sheet, set it upon the small stack at her elbow, and rose with a hand at the small of her back. “I must consult the address book.”
Ellen turned. “Now?”
“The Frobishers have moved, and I will not have my condolences sent to a house they have quit.”
“The address book is in the back parlor.”
“Then I shall go to the back parlor.”
Vance stood at once. “May I be of assistance, Mrs. Dalton?”
“You may remain where you are and refrain from making Ellen laugh herself into impropriety.”
“Cousin.”
Mrs. Dalton looked at Ellen over her spectacles, and for a moment the dry humor in her face gentled. “Five minutes, Ellen.”
The words were ordinary. The permission inside them was not.
She went out, and the door stayed open behind her.
That was the whole of the arrangement. The footman was somewhere below on an errand of his own, the house had its usual small sounds, and the morning room held only the two of them and the faint, disappointing smell of roses that smelled of nothing.
Vance remained standing until Mrs. Dalton’s steps had faded. Then he turned his shoulders toward Ellen.
It was its own kind of nearness.
“I have been thinking of you, Ellen.”
Her hands folded around themselves at her waist. “You should not call me that.”
“I am well aware, indeed.”
“Then why do you?”
His smile changed. The ease left it. “Because since September I have been thinking of nothing else, and a title feels like a locked door.”
Ellen’s breath caught.
He took a single step nearer, though still not near enough to alarm anyone who might look in. “Will you make me stop?”
She should have said yes. A sensible young lady would have said yes, and perhaps smiled, and perhaps restored the world to its proper arrangement before it became too sweet to bear.
She did not make him stop.
“I have thought of you also,” she said, and the words left her so softly that she scarcely recognised her own voice. “More than I ought.”
“There is no ought between us.”
“There is always an ought.”
“Then let there be a little less of it for five minutes.”
She looked at him, and the smile she had meant to resist came anyway. “You are very persuasive.”
“I am trying to be honest.”
“That is worse.”
“Worse?”
“Persuasion may be resisted. Honesty makes a coward of one.”
His expression warmed, and Ellen had the terrible sensation that he was seeing her, truly seeing her, beyond the worn gown and the careful housekeeping and the girl everyone had begun speaking around instead of to.
“I have something I wish to say to you,” he said.
The room seemed to become very still.
“Then say it,” Ellen whispered.
“I have not yet the standing to say it as it ought to be said.”
The words pricked, though gently. “I see.”
“No, do not look like that.” He reached as if he meant to take her hand, stopped himself, and then lowered his arm with visible care. “I do not mean that I am uncertain. I mean that I am not yet in a position to come to you properly.”
“Properly,” she repeated, because the word seemed to hold all the dreams she had refused to name.
“My great-aunt has hinted at a kindness. The promotion will come. When it does, when I can come to you as a man with something in his hands instead of a list of things he hopes for, I will say it as it deserves to be said.”
Ellen tried to answer and found she had no answer prepared for happiness. Misery one could manage. Misery had rules. Happiness arrived with all the subtlety of a carriage through a garden wall and expected one to be graceful in the wreckage.
“Will you wait until then?” he asked.
She looked at him through the soft blur of a feeling she would have died before confessing to anyone else. “I have been waiting since May.”
Vance’s face changed.
All his brightness quieted. He looked younger for an instant, and more earnest, and so dear to her that she had to grip the edge of the table to remain as she was.
“Then wait a little longer,” he said.
“For what?”
“For me to deserve you.”
It was foolish, and romantic, and exactly the kind of sentence a sensible woman would distrust.
Ellen treasured it instantly.
“And, Ellen,” he said.
“Yes?”
He took her hand again, and this time he did not bow over it. He held it simply on his own knee, his fingers closed around hers with a warmth that made the room tilt around its own quiet center.
“Do not encourage anyone,” he said. “Anyone at all.”
She stared at their joined hands. “Whom should I encourage?”
“No one.”
“That is a broad command.”
“I know it.”
“And you issue it very seriously.”
“I feel it seriously.” His thumb pressed once against her glove. “I could not bear it. Tell me there is no one I need fear.”
The laugh that came from her then was not the colonel’s-grey laugh. It was smaller, breathless, and much more dangerous to her.
“Encourage whom?” she asked. “There has been no Season for me this year. There has not been a ball in three months that would have me. I have been hoarding my last good pair of gloves for the few evenings small enough to forget I am ruined.”
His expression darkened. “Do not say that.”
“It is true enough.”
“It is not true to me.”
She looked at him, and every foolish part of her believed him.
“There is no one, Lieutenant,” she said. “There has been no one since the night behind that curtain, and you know it, and you are very cruel to make me say it aloud.”
“I am cruel,” he agreed softly. “I am sorry for it.”
“You do not sound sorry.”
“I am sorry for the cruelty. I am not sorry to have heard it.”
“That is a wicked distinction.”
“It is an honest one.” His hand tightened around hers. “Say it again.”
Ellen’s heart beat so fiercely that she was certain he must hear it. “No.”
“No?”
“If you wish to be cruel, you may do it without my assistance.”
His smile returned, slower now, tender enough to be almost unbearable. “Then I shall remember it from the first time.”
“You remember too much.”
“Only important matters.”
The words from earlier returned between them changed, softened and made private.
He looked at her with an expression she had never been given by any other living person. Soft, fond, and entirely for her. Under it, Ellen felt herself go somewhere small and warm and impossible to retrieve.
A sound came from the passage.
Vance released her hand at once and rose. The loss of his fingers felt absurdly cold.
“I have a regimental matter at one,” he said, smoothing his cuff as if the motion could restore propriety to the whole room. “And I have already spent the best part of my month in this chair.”
“The best part?” Ellen asked, because if she did not speak lightly, she would speak far too plainly.
“Undoubtedly. The rest of the month must now prove itself worthy of comparison.”
“You flatter my morning room.”
“I flatter nothing in this house except its mistress.”
“Lieutenant.”
He bowed, and there was mischief in the bow, and something beneath the mischief that made her breath unsteady again. “I shall write.”
“You said that before.”
“And I was a fool before.”
“Are you improved now?”
“Immeasurably.”
“I shall reserve judgment.”
“Do. It gives me something to strive for.”
He reached the door, then turned back.
“Be upon your best behavior,” he murmured, with that quiet, teasing air she knew so well.
Ellen tilted her chin. “I am never otherwise than perfectly well-behaved.”
“Which is exactly what makes the matter so exceedingly dangerous.”
He bestowed his most dazzling smile yet again, the small private one she had never seen him spend on anyone else.
Then the red was gone from the doorway. His boot heels sounded down the hall. The street door opened, closed, and left the house quieter than it had any right to be.
Ellen stood in the ringing stillness of the room he had left.
Her hand remained warm where he had held it. She lifted her palm to her cheek and held it there, as if warmth could be preserved by tenderness alone.