Chapter 15
The garden at Rathbourne House was not large, but it was formal in London fashion.
Frederick liked knowing exactly where the boundaries were. The garden boasted a paved terrace and stone urns, steps down to a narrow lawn, and a neat hedge along the back wall. He could cross it in exactly a dozen paces with his eyes closed.
Only the ancient pear tree in the corner, Frederick supposed, defied the arrangement. It was gnarled, untrimmed for years, its branches jutting out over the wall in a way that would have offended him anywhere else. Here, for reasons he had never quite examined, he let it be.
He had planned to sit out there for a few quiet moments before going to sleep, hoping the cool night air would steady him. He came through the rear passage and saw her from the terrace door.
She was at the bottom of the steps, standing with her shawl pulled close, and her face tipped upward.
Her long blonde hair cascaded in curls down her back, the wind catching the edges.
The night was cold and quite clear. The sky above London was doing its best against the gas lamps, and he could see bright stars in the gaps between the clouds.
Percy was on the third step from the bottom.
I suppose I am not the only one drawn to our lodger…
He was not beside her. He was not performing any kind of companionship. He was simply on the step, perhaps four feet away, oriented in her general direction. For Percy, this was a considerable statement of interest.
Frederick stopped in the terrace doorway and did not announce himself.
Anna looked at Percy. Percy looked at the lawn. Then something passed between them. She shifted her weight slightly toward him, and Percy’s ears moved up and forward. She did not approach. She let the distance stay as it was. After a moment, she smiled.
If that is not the most beautiful smile I have ever seen…
It was a small smile, private and uncomplicated. This only made Frederick stare more, and gaining good sense, he stepped back. Unfortunately, he made rather more noise in doing this. Anna turned at the sound of his footstep on the stone.
“Your Grace.” She recovered the smile. “I did not know you were back.”
“Just.” He came to the top of the steps and looked down at the garden, at Percy still on his step. “I didn’t know you came out here.”
“I find I cannot always sleep easily.” She had turned back to face the sky, tilting her chin up again.
It was a very natural gesture, entirely without pretense.
Yet, she looked elegant, her face as delicate as any statue in the Louvre.
“Rachel says I think too loudly. The garden helps. The stars too.”
Frederick sat on the step above Percy and looked out at the lawn.
“He was on the third step when I came in,” Frederick said.
“He was on the fourth when I arrived.” Anna was looking at him. “He moved down one while I was standing here.”
“That is, in fact,” Frederick said as he looked at Percy, “extraordinary.”
“I thought so too.” Her voice was warm with it, just at the edge. He almost smiled. She looked up again at the scattered stars between the clouds. “Do you know any of them? The constellations. My governess taught me the winter ones, but I was always better with the summer sky.”
He looked up. “Perseus is there, if you follow the line east of that cluster.” He pointed, which she followed. “And Andromeda to the west. This time of year, they are clearest just past midnight.”
“My governess would have liked you for that,” she said. “She read everything. Natural philosophy, astronomy, all of it. My father had a library that took up most of the east wing, my most treasured memory of him. He died when I was very young.” A pause. “It was sold shortly after.”
“I know.” He had not meant to say it. She looked at him. “Rachel mentioned it.”
“I don’t mind.” She said it without self-pity. “I minded then. Now I mind that I never memorized more of it.” She looked back at the sky. “He would have liked to know his books were being read, wherever they ended up.”
“‘I think he’d be proud that you think about them anyway.”
“Thank you, Your Grace… that is kind. I do not often have the opportunity to speak of my late father.”
He nodded, then paused before speaking again. “Well, for what it is worth, I think he would be proud of you. For how strong you are, and for all you have faced with such strength and fortitude.
A small, comfortable silence grew between them as he watched her cheeks grow slightly pink. A smile crossed her face. He liked the image.
“What else did you learn as a young girl?” Frederick asked after a short silence.
She considered this. “My father taught me to ride when I was a toddler, believe it or not. To think clearly when I was frightened, which he said was the most useful thing anyone could learn, and that the trick was to have practiced it before you needed it.” She paused.
“He was right about that, as it turned out.”
“Was your mother the same?”
“No. She was all warmth… until my father passed.” She smiled at the memory. “I think she decided to love him very quickly and then went about it with great determination. He took considerably longer to catch up.”
“But he did.”
“Oh, entirely. He was devoted to her.” She was quiet for a moment. “I would like that, I think. Or… at least, I had always dreamed of true love, and look at what’s become of me.” Silence swelled between them, and she stammered, “I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have—”
“Do not apologize. You haven’t said anything wrong, Miss Cartwell.”
He was aware that he had stopped looking at the sky some time ago as he turned closer to her, entranced by the sound of her clear voice.
“Do you think about it?” she asked. “…Getting married?”
“Not often,” he answered honestly. “I think about Rachel getting married more often.”
“Rachel?”
“Rachel first, yes. Always.” He said it without hesitation, because it was the plain truth and had been for long enough that he no longer thought about it as a choice.
“She needs to be well settled. She needs someone steady, who would understand what she is and not try to diminish her. That has been the work. I will not force her into a match that is not all she deserves.” He paused. “Beyond that…”
He turned the question over and found the honest answer in it, which he had not looked at clearly in some time.
“Yes?” She asked, showing genuine interest in what he had to say.
“I am not certain marriage is something I have ever considered as a possibility for myself. Particularly.”
She turned to look at him then, not sharply. Simply curious.
“I am aware that sounds peculiar,” he said, looking at the old pear tree, at the square of London sky above the garden wall. “My father’s line,” he continued, eventually. “He was not a good man. Or a good father. For that reason, I have thought it best for his line to end with me.”
The silence that followed was very quiet, and he was shocked at his honesty with her.
“Why?” she asked, not pressing, only attending, as though the answer mattered and she had no intention of taking any other answer in its place.
He became aware, somewhere in the middle of the following moment, that he had said more than he had intended.
He could not help himself. She had a way of asking things plainly, without architecture, and he found himself answering with a similar plainness before he had decided to.
She was remarkable, unlike the other women he had allowed himself dalliances with.
“Rachel has mentioned,” she said, carefully, “that your father was not easy.” She was looking at her hands now. “She said it once, not a great deal, and I did not want to press her.”
“Rachel was kept away from him,” Frederick said. “For a long time. Deliberately.” A pause. “She knows little about him, and that’s for the best.”
Anna was very still. “What does that mean?” she asked quietly.
He hesitated; he had already said so much more than he said to most people, by considerable margin, and was aware of it. And yet, her very existence pulled at his tongue in ways he had never imagined.
“Frederick.” Her voice was very quiet. She did not use his name often, and every time she did, it arrived differently than expected. “Did he… hurt you?”
He did not answer. He did not look at her. He was aware, in the silence that expanded between them, that this was itself an answer.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“He has been dead,” Frederick said, “for six years. That is that. It went with him, whatever he did to my mother, to…”
“That doesn’t mean it was nothing,” she said.
“It only means it is over.” Her voice was not pitying.
He could not have borne pity. It was something else, quieter, more serious, and kind.
“I am sorry that you had to carry it,” she said.
“And that you still do. You bear so much, and yet you still remain so strong…”
“I get the feeling that you are no stranger to remaining strong in the loss of parents, or what you may have hoped they would be.”
“I suppose you are right. I have mourned my father’s loss my whole life, carrying it with me like a birthmark. I think that is the hardest part…”
“What is?”
“That he was so smart, so kind, so vivacious. If he had been a lesser man, it would not sting as much. My mother, while a good woman, was never the same after he passed. I think I lost her then too, even though she has only been gone two years now.”
“I am sorry for that,” he paused for a moment. “I often think of what my mother could have been, if not for my father.”
He looked at her then. The London sky had shifted its clouds, and several more stars had appeared in the gap above the pear tree, and she was sitting in the dark in her shawl, looking at him with an expression that was not careful or composed.
It was simply present.
As if she had heard him and was staying anyway.
“Thank you for sharing that with me,” she said with a small smile.
“The gratitude is mutual.”
Percy stepped off the third step, crossed the two feet of paving between himself and Anna’s ankle, and sat down beside her.
Not against her. Anna looked down at him and then back up at Frederick.
The distance between them had somehow grown smaller the more they spoke, though he couldn’t remember either of them moving.
She was looking at him, and he was looking at her. The thing that had been accumulating in all the ordinary spaces between them, all the meals and hallway encounters and cold gardens, was very close to the surface.
He was the one who moved. He rose from the step, and it was not graceful for someone who had been fencing his whole life.
“It is growing cold,” he said, then cleared his throat. “You ought to go inside.”
She did not argue, her hazel eyes glowing in the looming moonlight.
She looked at him for one moment more, with an expression he was not going to be able to stop thinking about, perhaps for the rest of his life.
Then, she gathered her shawl, stood, and went up the steps and across the terrace and in through the door.
Frederick stood in the garden with his hands at his sides and did not watch her go.
Percy remained on the paving. He had not moved. He looked up at Frederick.
“I know,” Frederick sighed.