Chapter 8
The morning after the musicale, light slipped through the undrawn curtains and spread across the counterpane.
Lydia lay motionless beneath it. The light had crossed half the bed before she rose. Her spine ached from stillness, and when she blinked, her eyes felt dry rather than rested.
She replayed the corridor. Not as a sequence, but as a sensation: narrow walls, heated air, his voice inflecting her name in a way she had not heard before.
And then his gaze had dropped.
Her fingers rose to her mouth, tracing the curve of her lower lip. She felt the warmth of her own breath and the slight roughness where she had bitten the inside of her mouth.
She had looked at his mouth too. He had seen it; she knew because something in his expression had changed.
The servant had passed, the glasses had chimed, and she had smoothed her skirts and walked away without looking at him.
She lowered her hand from her mouth and pressed it flat against the counterpane.
The guest chamber spread around her in the morning light.
Beneath the window, the mahogany writing desk held a crystal inkwell and untouched paper.
Across the room, the vanity displayed a silver hairbrush, a hand mirror, and a small dish of hairpins.
The wardrobe door stood slightly ajar, revealing the blue silk and the ivory silk hanging side by side.
The desk, the brush, the gowns in the wardrobe, all of it belonged to another woman's world.
And yet she was in it now. Sleeping in borrowed comfort. Dressing beneath another family’s roof. Breathing more easily because one man had decided she ought not stand alone.
That was the most perilous part of all.
Footsteps in the corridor.
Her pulse leapt before her mind could identify the sound. Brisk and purposeful, the footsteps belonged to a servant. Not Edward.
She lay still, listening to the house awaken around her: doors opening and closing, servants' voices, the hum of a large estate shifting from dormancy to industry. Each sound registered against her nerves. Which footsteps, she wondered, would eventually be his?
The thought startled her enough that she sat up at once.
No.
That way of thinking could only lead to folly.
At last she pushed back the coverlet and stood. The cool floorboards met her stockinged feet. She dressed without hurry, fastening each button, smoothing each seam, giving her hands a task they could finish.
The vanity received her reflection without comment.
She sat, picked up the silver hairbrush, and drew it through her dark hair with strokes that were too firm, using the small pain to anchor herself in simple, explicable sensation.
She pinned her hair, though the strand at her temple resisted, and she pressed it into place with a hairpin that would surrender its position within the hour.
She pinched color into her cheeks until a flush appeared.
It was artificial and brief, a poor substitute for the warmth that had risen in the corridor when the space between his mouth and her gaze had collapsed into something she could not account for.
She met her own eyes in the glass and rehearsed.
"Good morning." The words emerged flat. She tried again. "Good morning, Lady Oakford. The weather looks..." She stopped.
She practiced a smile. It arrived on schedule and sat upon her face without life. It did not reach her eyes.
The woman in the mirror looked back at her, dressed in the plain grey muslin she had kept for private mornings while Clara’s fuller wardrobe was still being completed, pearl-pinned and armored in composure.
Smoothing her skirts, she lifted her chin, opened the door, and stepped into the corridor.
The portraits watched from their frames with the fixed, noncommittal attention of people who had resolved all their own questions centuries ago.
Breakfast, she knew, would require the most demanding performance she had yet attempted.
Lydia entered wearing a practiced smile too bright to be natural. She greeted Clara with earnest praise for the breakfast table, complimented the weather with a little too much enthusiasm, accepted tea as if it were a particular favor, and spoke at a pitch just high enough to betray strain.
"The pastries are exceptional," she told Clara, taking a seat with calculated care. "You must give my compliments to the cook. One so rarely finds them done properly outside of a first-rate house."
Clara's eyebrows rose almost imperceptibly. "I shall pass your praise along," she said. "She will be flattered."
Edward sat at the far end of the table.
Lydia didn't look at him at first, though she sensed his presence as distinctly as if heat moved from his side of the table to hers. He held his coffee cup with both hands, and his measured voice moved through her like a specific frequency.
She did not look. Instead, she spread preserves on toast with concentrated attention, smoothing them to the edge as though precision might quiet her nerves, offered an opinion on the latest London gossip, and embellished it just enough to sound engaged rather than desperate.
When a spoon struck porcelain two seats away, her shoulders tightened before she mastered the reaction.
Then she looked.
A quick, stolen glance found him looking back. His hazel eyes met hers across the table, long enough for her to register the shadow beneath his eyes that matched the shadow beneath hers.
Something moved low in her chest at that—something disloyal and soft and dangerously akin to relief.
She wrenched her gaze away and addressed a remark about garden design to the Dowager Countess with a vivacity that was conspicuous at half past eight in the morning.
Crispin made a mild remark about his brother's reading habits, and Lydia laughed before he reached the end of it. She heard the falseness in it at once and could not call it back.
Her fingers trembled as she passed the teapot to Clara. The tremor shivered through the porcelain, and Lydia pressed her palm flat against the tablecloth the moment Clara received it.
Edward’s cup touched the saucer too carefully.
She did not look up, but she felt the awareness of him sharpen across the table. Not public attention. Not the generalized watchfulness he had shown in drawing rooms and gardens. This was smaller. Nearer. The attention of a man who knew exactly where her composure frayed.
That knowledge ought to have comforted her no more than exposure ever ought.
It comforted her all the same.
Breakfast concluded, and the group dispersed through the morning room.
Clara consulted with a servant about the afternoon's arrangements.
Crispin stood by the fireplace with Samuel, the rhythm of their conversation suggesting the specific exchange of information that passed between men who trusted one another with details.
Alice and Samuel had remained at Oakford Hall after the previous evening’s gathering at Clara’s invitation, their presence folded into the household with the ease of old friendship and useful timing.
Alice found her by the window seat.
The Viscountess Crewe arrived with the precise trajectory of a woman who had identified her object and closed the distance with patient efficiency. Her red hair caught the morning light against the cream silk of the curtains, and her blue-grey eyes fixed upon Lydia with unsentimental intelligence.
"Sit," Alice said, lowering herself onto the window seat with the graceful economy of a woman who had never waited to be asked.
Lydia sat. The window was at her back, the morning sun warming her shoulders. Alice's face was before her—vivid, direct, unencumbered by the diplomatic softness that characterized Clara's approach. Where Clara offered silk, Alice offered the steel of her manner.
"You are performing admirably," Alice said, her voice dropping.
"The pastry speech was convincing. The weather, less so—no one has ever been that interested in cloud formations before ten o'clock.
" Her mouth curved. "But you are flushed, your hands have not been still since you sat down, and you laughed at Crispin's joke before he reached the end of it, a courtesy no one extends him, least of all his wife. "
"I merely—"
"You look like a woman deciding whether to leap," Alice said, "or pretend she never approached the edge."
Lydia felt her smile falter.
"The gardens look beautiful," Lydia said. "I understand the roses are particularly fine this time of year."
Alice regarded her for a long moment, then smiled—not the bright, mischievous smile she wore as social armor, but something quieter, something that acknowledged the deflection and chose, for now, to permit it.
"They are," Alice said. "You should see them up close."
Her green silk whispering, Alice moved away, leaving Lydia alone on the window seat. Sunlight warmed her shoulders. At the garden doors, the rest of the party gathered.
A woman deciding whether to leap.
She rose, collected her bonnet, and walked toward the doors. The morning awaited: sunshine, gravel paths, and, somewhere among the roses, the man she could no longer avoid facing.
The gardens at Oakford Hall descended from the house in ordered terraces of hedge, bloom, and gravel.
The morning's warmth carried the thick fragrance of roses, and bees buzzed among the lavender borders.
Sunlight lay across the clipped hedges in bright sheets.
Somewhere farther off, water played in a fountain with the same composed insistence as drawing-room music.
Clara and Crispin walked ahead. Alice detached herself from the group and veered off with Samuel toward the eastern path. Lydia watched them go, recognizing the maneuver too late.
The path narrowed, hedges rising on either side until the garden began to resemble a corridor. Between them, their store of safe subjects ran out before they had left the first terrace.
"The weather has been remarkably fine," Edward observed.
"It has," Lydia agreed.