CHAPTER ONE #2
"I've taken the liberty of ordering supper," Sebastian said, moving past her into the room.
He kept a careful distance as he did so, she noticed, skirting wide around her as though she were a piece of furniture to be avoided.
"The innkeeper's wife is apparently an acceptable cook, and I presumed you would prefer to dine here rather than in the common room. "
"You presumed correctly." Harriet moved to the fire, holding her hands out to the warmth. Her travelling dress was still damp despite her cloak, and she could feel the chill settling into her bones. "Thank you."
The words emerged stiffly, reluctantly. Sebastian paused in his inspection of the room and turned to look at her.
"Was that gratitude, Lady Harriet? I hardly know how to respond. I believe the last time you thanked me for anything, we were both in leading strings."
"I was attempting civility. Clearly, I should not have bothered."
"On the contrary, I found it rather charming. Like watching a particularly fierce cat attempt to purr, the effort was visible, if ultimately unconvincing."
Harriet turned to face him, her retort already forming on her lips, but something in his expression gave her pause. He was watching her with that inscrutable look he so often wore, but there was something else beneath it, something that might have been weariness, or wariness, or both.
"You look tired," she said, and immediately wished she hadn't. It was too personal an observation, too close to concern.
Sebastian's lips quirked in what might have been a smile. "The roads were not kind. I left London at dawn, hoping to outrun the storm. As you can see, I failed spectacularly."
"Why the urgency?"
The question slipped out before she could stop it. Sebastian's expression flickered, there and gone, too quick to identify before settling back into careful neutrality.
"Business matters," he said. "Your father's solicitor contacted me regarding some of Richard's affairs that were apparently left unresolved."
Richard. The name sent its familiar pang through Harriet's chest. Her brother had been deceased for three years now due to a singularly ill-judged misfortune involving a horse and a stone wall and a morning that had been perfectly ordinary until it suddenly, devastatingly, wasn't.
"What sort of affairs?" she asked, her voice sharper than she intended.
"I'm afraid I cannot say. Mr. Thornton was rather vague in his correspondence, and I suspect he wishes to explain the matter in person." Sebastian moved to the window, his back to her. "I imagine you are travelling to Fordshire Park for similar reasons."
"My mother is unwell."
"Ah." He turned, and his expression had softened slightly, or perhaps it was merely a trick of the firelight. "I'm sorry to hear that. Lady Fordshire has always been remarkably resilient. I'm certain she will recover."
"You don't know that."
"No. But I have observed that the women of your family possess a certain... tenacity. I should be very surprised if a mere illness could defeat her."
It was, Harriet supposed, meant to be comforting. And perhaps, from anyone else, it would have been. But from Sebastian Vane, every word felt like a potential trap, every kindness suspect.
"How long has it been?" she asked abruptly.
Sebastian blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Since we last spoke. Properly spoke, I mean. Not these little barbs we exchange at parties."
He was quiet for a moment, seeming to consider the question. "Three years…at your brother's funeral."
"You tried to say something to me. After, but I don't remember what."
"Neither do I." His voice was flat, carefully emptied of emotion. "It was a difficult day for everyone."
Harriet remembered that day in fragments: the grey sky, the black clothes, the endless parade of mourners offering condolences she couldn't hear through the roaring in her ears.
She remembered Sebastian approaching her in the garden, his face pale and drawn, and his mouth forming words she had refused to let herself understand.
She remembered telling him to leave as his presence was unwelcome, and the way he had flinched…
actually flinched, before nodding once and walking away.
She had not felt guilty about it. Not then, not in the months that followed. He had laughed at her poetry. He had laughed at her heart. Whatever he had wanted to say that day, she had not owed him the chance to say it.
But now, standing in this room with the storm howling outside and the fire crackling between them, she found herself wondering. What had he been trying to tell her? What words had she refused to hear?
"I was not kind to you," she said. "That day."
Sebastian's expression didn't change. "You were grieving. I did not expect kindness."
"Even so. I might have…" She stopped, unsure how to finish the sentence. Might have what? Listened? Forgiven? It seemed presumptuous to suggest either, given that she still wasn't certain he deserved forgiveness at all.
"It was a long time ago," Sebastian said. "We were different people."
"Were we? I feel rather the same, all things considered."
"Then perhaps you should look more closely." He said it quietly, without malice, but something in his tone made Harriet's breath catch. Before she could respond, a knock at the door announced the arrival of supper.
***
They ate in awkward silence, seated on opposite sides of the small writing desk.
The meal was simple but well-prepared: roasted chicken with herbs, crusty bread still warm from the oven, a wedge of sharp cheese, and a bottle of surprisingly decent wine.
Under other circumstances, Harriet might have enjoyed it.
As it was, she found herself merely pushing food around her plate, too aware of Sebastian's presence across from her to summon any real appetite.
"You're not eating," he observed.
"Neither are you."
"I'm pacing myself. The wine is better than expected, and I should hate to squander it by filling up on bread."
"How very aristocratic of you."
"I do try." He poured himself another glass, then, after a moment's hesitation, topped up hers as well. "You might as well drink. It will help you sleep."
"I never have trouble sleeping."
"No?" Something flickered across his face, that same unreadable expression she had noticed earlier. "You are fortunate, then. I find sleep rather elusive, most nights."
It was more personal information than he had offered in years of acquaintance, and Harriet found herself momentarily wrong-footed.
The Sebastian Vane she knew, or thought she knew did not admit to weaknesses.
He did not confess to sleepless nights. He maintained his wall of sardonic indifference and let nothing through.
"Why?" The question emerged before she could consider whether she actually wanted the answer.
Sebastian shrugged, a gesture of studied carelessness that didn't quite reach his eyes. "The usual demons. Regrets. Mistakes. The endless catalogue of things one should have done differently." He took a long sip of wine. "I imagine you're familiar with the phenomenon."
"I try not to dwell on the past."
"Do you? I confess I find that difficult to believe, given…" He stopped abruptly.
"Given what?"
"Nothing. Forgive me. The wine is making me imprudent."
"You've had precisely one and a half glasses. I hardly think that qualifies as imprudent."
"You don't know my tolerance for wine."
"I know you once consumed an entire bottle of champagne at Lady Whitmore's ball and showed no effects whatsoever. Richard told me about it afterward. He seemed rather impressed."
Sebastian went very still. "You remember that?"
"I remember most things your brother told me. He was…" Harriet's voice caught unexpectedly. "He was very good at telling stories."
"Yes. He was."
The silence that followed was different from the awkward pauses that had preceded it. This was grief, raw and shared, hovering in the space between them like a ghost neither wanted to acknowledge.
"I miss him," Harriet said quietly. It felt like a confession.
"So do I." Sebastian's voice was rough. "Every day."
They sat with that for a moment, the fire crackling, with the storm raging outside, the weight of loss pressing down on them both.
It occurred to Harriet, not for the first time, that Sebastian had lost Richard too.
That he had lost his closest friend, his confidant, his brother in all but blood.
She had been so consumed by her own grief that she had never stopped to consider his.
"He spoke of you often," she found herself saying. "In his letters. He was always telling me about your adventures together. The time you got lost in the Scottish Highlands and had to shelter in a shepherd's hut. The wager you made about who could learn to waltz faster…"
"He won that wager, as I recall, by cheating."
"He said you were the one who cheated."
"He would." But Sebastian was almost smiling now, a real smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look, for just a moment, like someone Harriet didn't recognise.
"Your brother was constitutionally incapable of losing gracefully.
I once beat him at chess, and he refused to speak to me for three days. "
"That sounds like Richard."
"It does, doesn't it?" Sebastian's smile faded slowly, replaced by something more complicated. "I keep expecting to see him. Isn't that strange? Three years gone, and I still turn sometimes, thinking I've heard his voice."
"I do the same thing. Especially at Fordshire Park. Every corner holds some memory of him."
"Is that why you've been avoiding it?"
The question caught Harriet off guard. "I haven't been avoiding it."
"You haven't visited in over a year. Your mother mentioned it in her last letter to me."
"My mother writes to you?"
"Occasionally. She was... kind to me, after Richard died. When others weren't."
The implication hung in the air between them. When others weren't. When Harriet had sent him away and refused to let him grieve alongside the family he had loved.
"I didn't know," she said.
"Why would you? We've hardly been on speaking terms."
"No. We haven't."
Another silence, this one heavy with things unsaid.
Harriet found herself studying Sebastian's face, the sharp lines of his cheekbones, the stubborn set of his jaw, the way the firelight caught the silver strands she hadn't noticed before, threaded through his dark hair.
He looked older than she remembered. Worn, somehow, in a way that had nothing to do with physical exhaustion.
Perhaps you should look more closely, he had said. And now she was looking, and she wasn't entirely certain she liked what she saw.
Not because he was disagreeable. But because he wasn't entirely, not the way she had always believed. There were depths here she had refused to acknowledge, complexities she had dismissed. The villain of her imagination was proving rather more human than she had allowed.
It was deeply inconvenient.
"We should sleep," she said abruptly, pushing back from the table. "The hour grows late, and tomorrow will be difficult regardless of the roads."
Sebastian nodded, rising as well. "I had the innkeeper arrange for a screen. For your privacy."
He gestured toward the corner, where a folding dressing screen had been set up near her bed, providing a barrier between her sleeping area and the rest of the room. It was a thoughtful gesture, the sort of consideration she would not have expected from him.
"Thank you," she said, and this time the words came more easily.
"Of course." He moved toward his own bed, on the far side of the room. "I shall face the wall while you change. You need not worry about your modesty."
"I wasn't worried."
"No, I don't suppose you were. You've never struck me as the worrying type."
"What type have I struck you as?"
Sebastian paused, his back still to her. When he spoke, his voice was strange and quiet, almost thoughtful.
"The type who builds walls," he said. "Very high ones. And defends them fiercely."
Before Harriet could formulate a response, he had disappeared behind his own section of the room, and she was left standing alone with the fire and the uncomfortable feeling that he had seen rather more than she had intended.