Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
They spent another forty minutes in the museum.
Felicity had stopped pretending that she was not listening roughly halfway through the Roman gallery.
By the time they reached the case of surgical instruments, she had positioned herself directly at William’s elbow.
She was asking her own questions with the concentrated precision she usually reserved for chess.
William answered them. She asked more. He found, to his moderate surprise, that this was not unpleasant.
“That is horribly gruesome, Papa,” she said as she looked at a particularly crude scalpel. “Did they really use such a thing?”
“Indeed,” he answered as they walked on.
She is engaged. Genuinely.
He had watched her during lessons, watched her in drawing rooms, watched her navigate the careful choreography of being a duke’s daughter in a world that had opinions about that.
She was composed in those settings, performed in them well, but there was a superficiality to it that he recognized because he had it himself.
This was different. This was the girl behind the composure, the girl who looked at a small bronze horse and did not say what she was thinking.
He filed the observation away, as he filed most things—in a place he intended to return to and generally did not.
By the exit, Celia stopped to read a placard about the Elgin Marbles controversy, which was going to take several minutes.
William stood at a slight distance and looked at the doorway absently when the scent of jasmine and lavender drifted to his nose. He inhaled deeply, knowing Anne was approaching.
“She has been talking about this for three days,” she said, stopping at his side. “I cannot believe there is such a thing here.”
“The marbles?”
“The Romans. The Greeks. All of it. It is her favorite study.” She was watching her sister with her usual fondness. “She slept with a book about Hadrian’s Wall under her pillow just last Tuesday. I only know because it fell out and hit the floor at two in the morning. I had to run to check on her.”
“Was she all right?”
“The book survived without injury. Celia was undisturbed.” She paused. “She sleeps like the dead.”
He looked at her briefly and had to bite back a smile. She was looking at her sister with those brilliant green eyes.
There was something about her profile in the museum light, the high angle of her cheekbones, her full pink lips, and the way her hair was pinned at the back of her neck, that he was not going to think about.
He looked back at the doorway.
“Felicity asked good questions,” she remarked.
“She did. Celia as well.”
“You were…”
“I was what?”
“Patient with them.” She said it simply, without inflection, the way she said things that she meant. “It was a good excursion, Duke.”
William. He almost said it.
“Yes,” he uttered. “It was.”
An ice cream vendor was stationed at the bottom of the museum steps, a painted wooden blue-and-white cart with a striped awning, doing a moderate trade in the late-June warmth. Celia saw it at approximately the same moment Felicity did.
To their credit, the girls did not run. They did, however, quicken their pace and arrive at the cart with a speed that suggested they had both been monitoring its position since they had first emerged from the building.
William reached them before they could negotiate on their own behalf. The vendor, a stout man with a kind face, looked up with the brightness of someone who had learned to identify a duke by the coat rather than the face.
“Your Grace,” he greeted with a bow. “What will it be?”
“Strawberry, please,” Felicity replied before William could.
Celia studied the offerings with the thoroughness she brought to every decision that mattered. She looked at the vessels, then at the vendor, then at the vessels again.
“What is that one?” she asked, pointing her finger.
“Vanilla bean and honey, miss. Made just this morning.”
“What does it taste like?”
“Like vanilla bean and honey,” Felicity said plainly.
“But how?” Celia pressed. “Is it more vanilla or more honey? Is the honey floral or—”
“Celia,” Anne, who had just caught up to them, chided.
“Lemon,” Celia said decisively. “The lemon one, please.”
“I will have the lemon as well, please,” Anne requested.
The vendor started preparing their orders.
William looked at the board of offerings. Strawberry. Lemon. Vanilla. Chocolate. Burnt sugar and cream. Vanilla bean and honey. He looked at a sixth, written at the bottom in chalk. Raspberry and rose, it said. Very sweet.
He thought about it for perhaps a second longer than was necessary for a person who knew his own preferences in the matter of ice cream.
He was a man who took his coffee black, his brandy neat, and his opinions without softening.
He had never particularly had a sweet tooth.
He had not, to his recollection, eaten anything described as very sweet with deliberate intent since approximately 1802.
“The raspberry one,” he decided before he could change his mind.
He collected the cup from the vendor and turned.
Anne was looking at him. Not in the cautious way she had since this morning, but intently. Something in her face had shifted, small and unguarded. It was almost the expression she wore when she was pleased by something she had not expected.
“What?” he asked. “Is there something on my face? Aside from the scar, of course.”
“Nothing,” she replied, before looking at her lemon ice cream with great interest.
“Anne.”
“I only…” She stopped. The corner of her mouth quirked in a way that made him think about licking it. “The raspberry,” she said, very mildly.
“It was listed.”
“It was.”
“I am permitted to eat raspberry ice cream, you know.”
“You are absolutely permitted,” she agreed, in the tone of a woman who found something very funny and was conducting herself with admirable restraint. “Just unexpected. It suits you.”
“It does not suit me in any particular way,” he countered. “It is ice cream.”
“Mhm,” she murmured.
He ate his raspberry ice cream, and it was indeed very sweet.
She did not comment further on the matter. She did not have to. He was aware, as they moved a few paces away from the cart and stood under the shade of the plane trees at the foot of the museum steps, that she was aware of him eating it.
After a few moments, he finished off the last of it. He handed the small cup back to the vendor’s waiting boy and handed him a coin. Then he quickly wiped the corner of his mouth with the tip of his thumb.
“Have I got it?” he asked, afraid that a stained face would only draw more attention to his gruesome scar.
“You have.”
“You are certain,” he said, though it was more a question than a statement.
“I would tell you.”
“Very well.”
She was still not looking at him directly. And she was smiling. Not at him, but at the air in front of her. It was a very small smile. She seemed to be trying to suppress it and failing miserably.
William wiped his face once more, just to be safe.
He watched Celia and Felicity, who stood a few feet away, comparing their progress on their ice creams. Felicity was eating hers with the studied neatness of a young lady who had been told at some point how a young lady ate an ice cream.
Celia was eating hers in a manner that could most charitably be described as enthusiastic.
A small dollop of ice had made its way to the tip of her nose. Neither of them had noticed.
“Celia,” Anne said. “Your nose, my darling.”
“What about it?”
“I fear it is yellow.”
“Oh.” Celia vigorously rubbed her nose with the back of her glove.
The glove, William noted, was also going to require attention.
Anne was laughing softly beside him. Not at Celia, but at all of it. He thought of the whole of the afternoon, the bronze horse and the gruesome scalpel and the raspberry ice. He savored the warm sunlight on the steps, the four of them standing under the plane trees as though they were—
He did not finish the thought. Not here. Not yet.
Instead, he looked out at the square, at the carriages drawing up, at the ordinary afternoon continuing around them as though nothing of consequence had happened.
A good excursion, Anne had said inside.
Yes. Yes, it has been.