Chapter 10 #2
When Clara paused to speak with the gardener about late tulips and the Dowager Countess settled onto a bench in the shade, Lydia found herself standing alone beside the fountain.
Water rose and fell with indifferent grace.
Sunlight flashed on its surface. She looked into the basin and saw only a wavering version of herself, flushed and grave and recognizably altered.
She thought about him constantly.
His absence had become the most conspicuous feature of every room. She found herself glancing at doorways each time she entered or exited, and each time they stood empty, something in her sank. She had wanted distance. Now that he was giving it to her, it felt less like relief than punishment.
The fountain's spray cooled the air just enough to raise a shiver across her skin. Lydia pressed her fingertips to the stone rim and stared into the moving water until her own reflection broke and reformed itself again and again.
What she had wanted, she realized with a fresh, humbling clarity, was not his absence. It was his restraint. Some noble impossibility by which he would remain near enough to steady her and far enough not to change her life.
That arrangement, she saw now, had never truly existed.
By dinner, amber candlelight reflected in crystal and silver, and Lydia entered the dining room with the composed stride required for the evening.
His chair was empty.
She saw it immediately: the vacancy to Crispin's left, the undisturbed place setting, the unfilled crystal glass.
She sat. Clara was speaking, something about the evening's entertainments, and Lydia nodded and responded with automatic competence. Her fork found the fish course. She lifted a bite to her mouth. The flavour registered as texture rather than taste.
No servant needed to explain the absence. The untouched setting, the empty chair, and Clara's quick, knowing glance across the table told Lydia enough before courtesy smoothed the moment away.
Edward was avoiding her.
The realization tightened her throat so suddenly she had to lower her eyes to her plate before anyone could read it there. She completed the motion, chewed, and swallowed. The food seemed to grow larger in her mouth as she forced it down.
Something in her chest felt at once too tight and too hollow. Appetite vanished altogether. She set down her fork, lifted her wine, and discovered after the first sip that she could not remember having raised the glass.
The empty chair remained in the edge of her vision like an accusation.
Later that night, Lydia walked because the drawing room had become intolerable. The evening's entertainments required a vivacity she could no longer summon. She had pleaded a headache. The corridor offered what the drawing room could not: movement without scrutiny, solitude without conversation.
She might have taken the west passage back to her room. Instead she took the east corridor, the one that led past the study. The choice felt accidental only until she examined it, and so she did not examine it at all.
She saw him before she heard him, emerging from the study. Recognition was instantaneous, arriving before any conscious thought and registering first in her body, as it had from that first afternoon in Hyde Park.
They both stopped.
The cessation was simultaneous. Lydia felt the halt travel through her. She stood in her pool of amber light and watched him standing in his. The distance between them was neither safe nor easily crossed.
Edward bowed, the gesture formal. His spine held the vertical composure she recognized as his most defended state.
Neither advanced nor retreated.
Lydia spoke first.
“We cannot do that again.”
The sentence traveled the twenty feet between them with fragile clarity. She heard each word arrive and settle between them.
Edward's eyes held hers. Now, however, she saw that instability less as a feature of his eyes and more as a feature of the man himself, a man whose surfaces concealed depths that shifted with the light and refused the fixed clarity her analytical mind demanded.
“No,” he said.
One word conceded everything she had asked. It was the correct word, the responsible word, the word a gentleman offered when a lady drew a line.
He spoke it like a man forcing his hand to open over something sharp.
The silence that followed told Lydia the concession was not relief, but loss. Her gaze flicked, traitorously, to his mouth before she could stop it.
“We cannot pretend it did not happen, either,” he said.
The second sentence undid everything the first had accomplished.
He was right. The garden had happened. His mouth had been on hers. Her hands had unclenched against his chest. No amount of distance or silence could convert what had occurred into something that had not.
No resolution came, nor was one possible. They stood in a corridor at half past ten, portraits watching, lamplight pooling. But something shifted all the same. They both knew now that what had passed between them could not be denied.
They moved. Lydia stepped forward. Edward stepped forward. Twenty feet diminished to fifteen, ten, five, and they passed each other at the corridor's narrowest point.
Their sleeves brushed.
The contact sent a sharp tremor through her. Her hand tightened on the latch before she had even reached the door. She saw Edward's stride falter, a half-turn beginning in his shoulders before discipline caught and corrected it.
She did not stop.
She placed her hand on the door handle. The latch clicked.
She entered and closed the door behind her with a care that belied her urgency.
Instead of turning the lock, she stood with her back pressed against the solid oak and felt the tremor his sleeve had started continue through her, as if the brush of cloth had reached her skin by some less lawful route.
Finchley had been her fear for months. Finchley she could fight. Finchley she could resist.
This was something far more difficult to master: want.
She wanted him: the quiet intensity, the hazel eyes that shifted in lamplight, the dry wit that surfaced in moments of levity and disappeared beneath the careful surface he maintained.
The wanting terrified her most. She could fight Finchley from behind her walls, but Edward was already inside them, had been since his hand found the small of her back and her breathing reset to his touch.
In the dark of her borrowed chamber, Lydia stood against the door and admitted the danger she was in.
It was not ruin she feared most, but wanting something she could lose.
Sleep came in jagged fragments, if it came at all.
The chamber held its borrowed quiet, and somewhere in the house a man she could not stop wanting lay awake in his own chamber.
It was not merely the distance between their doors that felt fragile now, but the one between resistance and surrender, and she no longer trusted herself to know which side of it she wished to keep.
By dawn she knew at least this much: she could not endure many more days of pretending the kiss had been an accident of fear. She would have to claim what had happened or cut it away cleanly. Anything between those two choices would only leave Finchley more room to name her confusion for her.