Chapter 18 #2
A servant knocked and entered the morning room before she had recovered sufficient command of her countenance. He bowed. “Sir Percival requests your presence in the library, miss.”
There were moments in which one’s whole future appeared to hang upon the arrangement of one’s features during the walk from one room to another. Francesca rose with what dignity she could collect, smoothed a hand over the front of her gown, and crossed to the library doors.
Her uncle stood near the desk with his spectacles in one hand and Colonel Renforth’s note in the other.
Major Manners was by the fire. When she entered, his gaze met hers at once, and whatever she had expected to see there—embarrassment, formality, reluctance—she found instead a seriousness so immediate that all her prepared defiance deserted her.
“Uncle,” she said, then, because one could hardly begin by admitting one had heard everything, “Major Manners.”
“Come here, my dear Franny,” said Sir Percival, with unusual gentleness.
That gentleness alarmed her more than sternness would have done.
She obeyed, though not without glancing again at Major Manners, who had not looked away.
He seemed tired, she thought suddenly—not physically, perhaps, but burdened.
There was a gravity in him she had noticed before, but never so strongly as now.
Sir Percival indicated a chair, but she remained standing.
“I would rather stand, sir,” she said.
He studied her for a moment. He was too discerning, she knew, to miss the colour in her face or the tension of her hands.
“As you please. There is no advantage in softening a thing by postponement. Major Manners has brought me a note from Colonel Renforth. It appears your late transactions with Kendall may have exposed you to some attention of a very undesirable nature.”
“I gathered as much,” said Francesca, feeling her cheeks heat further at the implication of knowledge.
Sir Percival’s brows rose a fraction. Major Manners, she thought, almost smiled, though the expression vanished before she could be certain.
“Did I hear you correctly? I thought you said you gathered?” queried her uncle.
“I meant only that I conjectured something was wrong, Uncle.”
To Francesca’s relief, Sir Percival, who understood evasions because he employed them himself when convenient, said no more.
“Very well. I will come to the point: if Kendall suspects that your sanction of his schemes was not given in ignorance, but rather with design, you may be in some personal danger.”
The words, though anticipated, landed with a force that made her feel, briefly, cold to the marrow.
“You believe I am in danger,” she repeated, “from Thomas?”
Major Manners spoke then, for the first time since she had entered the room. “It is conceivable. We do not mean to alarm you needlessly, but neither should you be left in ignorance.”
She looked at him. “What. May I ask, is your warning is to consist of? Have you the intention of locking me in the house until Parliament has risen and villains grow honest?”
“No,” he said, and there was something almost like patience in his tone. “My warning is to consist of plain measures. You must not go out alone and without protection.”
There was that phrase again.
She turned a little towards her uncle. “Have you agreed to this, Uncle?”
“I have agreed that I value my niece’s safety more than her temporary displeasure,” said Sir Percival.
“I hardly think such extreme measures are warranted by the plan we have enacted,” she countered.
“If that were all, I would agree. However, there is new information come to light about Mr. Kendall. It seems he is involved in some potentially treasonous plots.”
Francesca drew breath to argue, but the effort failed.
She could hardly believe that what they were saying of Thomas could be true, yet they would not make up such things without cause.
It was difficult to make a spirited defence of liberty when one’s uncle looked at one as though one had come close to an abyss and did not yet understand how near.
“In addition,” said Sir Percival, with the directness of a man who had resolved to say the most disagreeable thing without adornment, “for a time, it may be prudent for Major Manners’ attentions to appear somewhat particular.”
Without her conscious intent, Francesca’s gaze flew back to said major.
He stood quite still beneath it, which was unfair. The least he could have done, she thought, was to look uncomfortable. Instead, he bore the matter with such calm that she felt all the more acutely the tumult within herself.
“My attentions would be intended only to shield you from censure while allowing me to accompany you with less remark than might otherwise attend it.”
“‘Intended only’,” she repeated. The words were civil; the manner in which she uttered them was not.
Sir Percival made a sound of warning. “Francesca…”
She could not keep herself in check. Some proud and foolish part of her recoiled from being offered an imitation of what every young woman is taught to prize. To be escorted because danger required it was one thing; to be thought worthy of a counterfeit tenderness for convenience was another.
“I understand the expediency perfectly,” she said. “It is the elegance of the arrangement which overwhelms me.”
Major Manners’ expression changed then, just enough to betray that he felt distaste. She immediately regretted having inflicted it, which did not improve her temper in the least.
Sir Percival, with the practical wisdom of uncles who know when ladies must be left to exhaust themselves upon less yielding material, said, “Perhaps you had better settle the particulars between yourselves. I have no desire to stand between youth and stratagems—” He looked from one to the other. “—and it is, I trust, a stratagem?”
Francesca nearly laughed despite herself. “You may trust that no one is in danger of forgetting it, sir.”
Her uncle kissed her brow and turned back to his desk with studied unconcern. The interview was dismissed.
The hall felt cooler after the firelit library, and by the time they reached the glass doors opening on to the terrace, Francesca had recovered enough to be conscious of the absurdity of her situation.
She was about to walk in the winter garden with a gentleman who must pretend to court her in order to protect her from her childhood friend.
If such a circumstance had occurred in one of the novels she had secretly borrowed in schoolroom days, she would have condemned it at once as too extravagant for belief.
She paused at the threshold. “If it is not too cold for you,” she said, because some form of civility was still possible, “we might walk outside. I prefer to speak openly.”
They gathered their cloaks and put them on.
The morning air was brisk. The terrace stones were dry, but the lawns beyond bore a delicate silvering of frost where the sun had not yet dissolved it.
The winter garden of the house, never grand in the severe manner of the great estates, possessed instead a thoughtful, cultivated beauty that suited the season.
The borders, though stripped of summer prodigality, retained their structure in clipped yew and holly, the dark leaves gleaming wherever red berries persisted.
Bare rose canes were tied neatly against the south wall, promising future beauty but at present the foliage was all restraint.
A few hellebores nodded close to the gravel path, as pale as secret thoughts.
The air smelt of earth, cold stone, and the faint resin of evergreen.
“It is not too cold for me,” replied Major Manners.
He offered his arm. She took it, because refusing now would have been childish, and because the contact, slight though it was, sent an altogether unreasonable warmth through her that she would have been ridiculous to deny.
They descended the terrace steps and turned onto the principal path.
For a few moments, neither spoke. Gravel crunched beneath their feet with crisp precision.
Somewhere beyond the wall, a rook called harshly.
The stillness of the place, far from soothing her, only made her more conscious of her own agitation.
At last, she said, “You may speak openly now. There is no one here to overhear us but a frozen rosemary bush.”
He did not answer immediately. Then, bending slightly as though to observe a branch she had not noticed, he leaned nearer and said, in a very low voice beside her ear, “I think not. I have a strong suspicion we are being watched. Perhaps now is the time to practise courting.”
The warmth of his breath against the cold air caressing her cheek was so startling that she very nearly missed the words themselves.
She turned her head towards him in astonishment. “Here, in the garden?”
Before she could shape either protest or question, however, he had altered their course from the straight walk into the narrower path by the wall, where the espaliered pear trees made a kind of broken screen. He looked, to any observer, not secretive but intimate.
“Do not look about,” he murmured. “Continue exactly as you are.”
Her pulse began to race.
“Do you mean someone is watching from the street?”
“Perhaps, or from a neighbouring window; or a man has been paid to note who comes and goes. I do not know which. I know only that if you are under observation, we should give them something harmless to report.”
“Harmless?” she repeated faintly.
He glanced down at her then, and there was, to her confusion, the smallest shade of humour in his piercing blue eyes.
It was also impossible not to feel. Every nerve in her seemed newly alive to the fact of his closeness, the firm line of his sleeve beneath her gloved hand, the measured pace he had adopted to suit hers, the attention with which he appeared to regard her and which she now knew must be partly for display and partly—oh, she dared not guess how much he truly meant.
“How, precisely, is one to practise courting?” she asked, keeping her lips scarcely parted.
“Badly at first, I imagine.”
The answer was so unexpected that a laugh escaped her before she could stop it. The sound seemed strange in the winter air, being both bright and fragile.
“That,” he said, “is already better.”
“I am glad to know I satisfy the necessary requirements of mirth.”
“You satisfy more than you know.”
Had he meant to say it? Had she imagined it? She had no time to decide, for in the next instant he disengaged her hand from his arm and, still walking, took her gloved fingers into his own.
It should not have been remarkable. Gentlemen had led ladies in and out of assemblies since assemblies began. Yet this was no ballroom courtesy, and no crush of dancers shielded the act with convention. The touch was deliberate. It made a declaration to any eye upon them.
Francesca looked down helplessly as he turned her hand, his gloved thumb resting lightly at her wrist where the glove ended and the skin above it began.
“Major Manners—?”
“Hush,” he said gently, though not unkindly. “For once, let me lead.”
Then, before she understood that he intended anything further, he lifted her hand and bent over it.
His face lowered, not to the glove, which would have been ordinary enough; not even to the knuckles…
His lips touched the exposed skin at the inside of her wrist, just beyond the edge of her kid glove.
There was no sound in the garden; no frost, no rook, no gravel, no winter sky.
There was only the astonishing warmth of that brief contact and the shock that passed through her so completely that she forgot every principle of deportment she had ever possessed.
She had no notion of what she should do.
Withdraw? Laugh? Rebuke him? Ought she to continue walking as though gentlemen kissed ladies’ wrists in the shrubbery every day before luncheon?
She did none of these things. She merely stood still, while her heart seemed to strike against every rib at once.
He straightened very slowly.
For the first time since he had entered the house—that she was aware—he looked less composed than she. Not by much, she suspected—another observer might not have seen it at all—but she saw the restraint in him, and something beneath it that made restraint necessary.
“That ought to answer any watcher,” he said, scarcely above a whisper,
Francesca found, at last, enough breath to speak. “You might have warned me.”
“I feared you would forbid it.”
The simplicity of the admission restored both her wits and her vexation, though neither in their proper order.
“Is this your notion of protection, sir?”
“In part, yes.”
She drew her hand back then, but not with the indignation she had intended, because the truth had come upon her with terrible clarity.
The gesture had not only surprised her. It had also pleased her—not as a stratagem; not as theatre; not even as a clever expedient.
It had touched some unguarded place inside her which no counterfeit ought ever to reach.
How deucedly unfair it was that the first gentleman with whom she had ever felt entirely comfortable should offer her tenderness only in pretence.