Chapter 40
Chapter
Forty
The Shape of Goodbye
The carriage ride from the castle to the station passed in a silence so complete that I became aware of the controlled rhythm of Steele’s even breathing. He had not looked at me since we left the Oak Drawing Room. His attention remained fixed on the view outside the window.
He did not speak as he handed me into a first-class compartment, nor when the train shuddered into motion, and Windsor began to draw away.
When Windsor had disappeared into the distance, I could no longer bear the silence. “She has only cautioned us. We can still keep company with each other.”
He turned from the window. Whatever I had hoped to find in his face, I did not find it.
“Can we? Without crossing the line that cannot be uncrossed?” His voice was quiet, almost gentle. That was worse than if he had been sharp. “You saw what happened at the lake.”
“Nothing happened.”
His voice held a rawness I did not expect. “I was within seconds of taking you on the dock, Rosalynd. And you would not have stopped me.” He passed a hand across his brow as though to wipe the memory away. “That cannot happen again.”
“We will never be private again? Must it come to that?”
He gave a small gesture—half-despairing—at the compartment around us.
“Are we to settle for making polite conversation about the weather while half a ballroom pretends not to watch us?” I asked.
“If that’s what it takes.” The words seemed dragged out of him. For a moment, he closed his eyes, as though the effort of restraint itself had become exhausting.
My heart ached. “I never thought you’d give up so easily, Steele.”
“She is the Queen. She can order us to get married. And we will have no recourse but to do so.”
A coldness spread through me. For the first time since leaving Windsor, I understood that this was no longer an argument between us, but the beginning of losing him.
“Surely, she cannot.”
“She has done it to others who’ve been caught. We’d be no different.”
“But we wouldn’t be. We have more control than that.”
He whirled toward me, a light of fury in his eyes. “Do we? Do we, Rosalynd?” As if further proof was needed, he added, “Not once have you said no to me.”
I hitched up my chin. “If that ever came to pass, I would refuse.”
“You know you wouldn’t.” He turned his gaze to the view outside the window. “Your family’s honor would suffer. Chrissie would suffer. No decent gentleman would offer for the sister of a fallen woman.”
“How very cruel you are.”
“One of us has to be.” His voice was pure ice.
“I despise you.”
He hitched in a breath, but said nothing more. Neither did I.
As the train rumbled steadily through a stretch of woodland, sunlight fell in moving stripes across the velvet seat between us. I watched the pattern shift across the empty space where, in any other version of our lives, I might have been sitting beside him.
“So.” The word came out smaller than I intended. “What do we do now?”
“A clean break.” He did not soften it. He had already decided. Having reached the judgment, he was simply announcing the verdict. “It is the only thing we can do.”
“We will not be seen together in society.”
“No.”
I made myself say it. Each item, named aloud, became a thing I had relinquished.
“Not at balls. Not at the opera. Not in the same box. Not riding in the park. Not walking out of Rosehaven House and walking into yours, because society has long since stopped imagining innocent reasons for it, and has every reason now to imagine the opposite.”
“No.”
“I shall need to be seen on someone else’s arm, on occasion. Not often—Chrissie is the one with the campaigns, not me—but occasionally. We will need to appear, to anyone watching, to have cooled toward one another.”
“Yes.”
“And the investigative work?”
He did not answer at once. The work, in some sense, was the heart of what we were. It had been the architecture of every conversation we had ever had. To strip it away was not a small adjustment.
“If the Crown commands further investigation, we serve. The Queen has not retired us; she has warned us. If she summons us together, we go together. But we do not seek work. We do not invent reasons to consult one another. We do not call. We do not write.”
“So be it.”
I had not known, until I said those words, how much they would cost me.
The conductor announced the pending arrival at Paddington. The train began the slow, familiar slackening of pace that always preceded a station. Too soon. Far too soon.
Steele turned to me before the brakes engaged.
“Before we leave this compartment, I want to be clear about what we are about to do. We are going to keep to this arrangement. We will maintain our distance. It will not be difficult.” A pause.
He did not look away. “In less than a month, the season ends and we return to our Yorkshire estates. And next year, when we see each other across a crowded ballroom, we shall greet each other as strangers. Is that clear?”
“Yes.” The word was steady. I was not sure how. “Crystal clear.”
He nodded once. The brakes engaged. We did not speak again.
Paddington was loud, indifferent, exactly as it always was.
Outside the station, he handed me into the carriage he summoned and took the seat opposite.
We travelled across London in a silence that had nothing left in it.
Whatever was going to happen between us in the months and years to come had now been spoken aloud.
The carriage turned into Grosvenor Square.
It stopped at Steele House first—because that was what he had asked the driver to do. He paused, his gloved hand resting on the carriage frame, and looked at me one final time. Whatever was on his face, he did not let it stay there long.
“Lady Rosalynd.”
“Your Grace.”
The titles struck me harder than I had been prepared for.
We had not used them—not like that, not as strangers used them—since the very first weeks of our acquaintance, before I had learned to call him Steele and he had earned the right to call me Rosalynd.
Hearing the address from his mouth now, formal and finished, was the moment I understood that the thing was actually done.
He stepped down. The door closed. The carriage moved on across the square.
Through the window, I watched him climb the steps of his house alone, his back very straight, his head not turning. He had always carried himself well. He carried himself well now.
He did not look back as he let himself in. The door closed behind him, and he disappeared from my view.
The carriage delivered me to my own door a moment later.
A footman opened it. I climbed the steps into Rosehaven House and—mercifully—met no one else in the front hall.
I went up to my room. I did not ring for Tilly.
I did not sit. I crossed to the window that faced Steele House and stood there and looked across the square at the lit panes of his study.
I imagined him standing alone with a glass in his hand and a fire he had not asked Milford to light. I imagined the silence inside that house—the silence of a man who had set down something he intende to keep.
The tears, when I reached for them, were not there.
They would come later, perhaps, in the dark, when I had no further use for composure.
For now there was only the window, and the lit panes across the square, and the knowledge that tomorrow we would begin to be the people we had agreed to be, and we would do it with the same competence we had brought to everything else.
And we would do it for the rest of our lives.
I drew the curtain, slowly, and turned away.