Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
“You’ve been staring at that egg for three minutes.”
Cressida blinked.
The egg in question sat in its porcelain cup, entirely unmolested, perfectly intact.
She had not, in fact, noticed it at all.
Her attention had been occupied by the fact that Theodore sat across from her at the breakfast table, which was a novelty sufficient to derail most ordinary cognitive function.
After the ball, they’d promptly returned to Ashmere Castle and went to sleep.
“I was considering it,” she said.
“Considering it, hm?” he repeated, his tone dry, though the corner of his mouth moved in a way she had learned to interpret as humor he didn’t quite want her to see. “Is this a customary ritual in the Whitaker household, or a peculiarity you’ve developed independently?”
“Deliberation before action is a virtue.” She reached for the egg. “You might try it sometime.”
He picked up his coffee. “I’ve been told I’m maddeningly deliberate.”
“By whom?”
“Whitebrook. Though it was less flattering in his phrasing.”
She laughed before she could think better of it, and the sound seemed to catch him off guard. His eyes lifted from his cup to her face, and she saw the warmth moving through brown pools before he looked away again, taking a measured sip of his coffee.
She had seen that look before—last night, in the darkened parlor, in the moment just before he had stopped pretending he didn’t want her.
She had felt his mouth on her throat, his hands learning her with a thoroughness that had left her incapable of rational thought, and he had looked at her precisely as he was looking at her now, before the mask slipped back into place.
The memory arrived with inconvenient physical specificity, and she occupied herself firmly with her egg.
Outside, Ashmere’s grounds lay bathed in the gold of the morning.
Light that slanted through the tall windows and caught the silver of the breakfast service, the ivory of the tablecloth, the scattered pages of the newspaper Theodore had abandoned when she had taken her seat.
That small detail hadn’t escaped her. He had set the paper down when she arrived. He had not picked it up again.
It was a morning of small mercies, and Cressida was determined to be grateful for each one.
The journey back from London last night had been its own particular torment.
Theodore had handed her into the carriage, his gloved fingers lingering beneath hers a beat longer than the gesture required, and she had spent the better part of two hours in the dark opposite him, acutely aware of every inch of distance between them.
Her body had still been humming. She could still feel the touch of his hands, the devastation of his mouth, the rough command of give it to me spoken against her lips as though her compliance were the only thing in the world that mattered to him.
She had sat very straight and looked out the window at nothing and told herself to behave.
He had not touched her again. But once, when the carriage hit a rough stretch of road last night, and her hand slid from her lap, his boot had found hers in the dark—a brief, deliberate pressure—and he had not moved it away.
Now, in the ordinary light of breakfast, she found it easier to breathe.
“Do you add milk to your tea?”
She glanced up. He had moved the milk jug closer to her side of the table, setting it within reach.
“Yes. Thank you.”
A pause followed, during which he buttered his toast with the unhurried attention of a man who apparently had opinions about the even distribution of butter.
“I imagine the gardens will be passable this morning,” he said, without looking up. “If you wanted air.”
“Are you suggesting a walk?”
He did look up then, and there was something almost cautious in his eyes, as if he wasn’t entirely certain she would accept. “I’m suggesting the possibility of one.”
Cressida considered this.
Theodore Yeats, the Duke of Ashmere, who guarded his solitude as though it were an estate boundary, was proposing they spend the morning together. Voluntarily. Over breakfast.
“I would like that,” she said.
He nodded, as though this were nothing of consequence, and returned to his toast.
The gardens at Ashmere were extraordinary in May.
The formal parterre near the castle gave way to a longer walk along the south-facing wall, where the roses had begun to bloom.
Pale peach and cream and one deep crimson climber that had been there, the gardener once told her, for fifty years.
Beyond that was a kitchen garden, and past the kitchen garden was an orchard where the last of the blossoms clung to the apple trees in ragged white clusters.
They had been walking for a quarter of an hour, and Theodore had already identified three separate points where the drainage required attention and had opined, at some length, on the failure of his head gardener to adequately trim the yew hedges last autumn.
“You’re cataloguing grievances,” Cressida observed.
“I’m assessing the estate.”
She glanced around at the immaculate parterre, the neatly graveled paths, the rose walk stretching ahead in full, fragrant bloom. Then she looked back at him. “Did you bring me out here as an excuse to show me all the work I am apparently meant to be supervising? How very romantic of you, Duke.”
Theodore stopped walking.
It was only for a half-second, and his expression did not precisely change. But something shifted at the corner of his mouth, a brief internal battle between dignity and the thing that was threatening to become a smile.
Dignity made a creditable effort. It lost.
“The drainage in the east quadrant,” he said with great composure, “is entirely your responsibility as the lady of the castle.”
“I see. And the yew hedges?”
“Also yours.”
“The kitchen garden?”
“Unquestionably.”
“Then I shall add them to my existing list,” Cressida said pleasantly, “which currently reads: redecorate the blue sitting room, write to the housekeeper in London, and now, apparently, personally redirect an entire drainage system. One does wonder when I might find time to eat breakfast.”
“You were staring at your egg for three minutes,” he pointed out. “I suspect the mornings have some availability.”
She laughed, and he turned to look at her with that same expression she had caught at the breakfast table, that same unguarded warmth he hadn’t yet learned to conceal quickly enough, before he looked ahead again and resumed walking as though nothing had happened.
His mouth curved. It was not the controlled, minimal movement she had catalogued over weeks of careful observation. It was a genuine smile, briefly and completely present, before he reined it in. Cressida felt it like a small triumph.
“What do you read?” she asked, more to extend the moment than out of curiosity, though her curiosity was genuine enough.
“History, primarily. Agriculture, when the need arises.” He paused. “Greek, when I want to remind myself that human folly is not a modern invention.”
She laughed. “Is that meant to be comforting?”
“I find it clarifying. Whatever particular catastrophe the present day has produced, some Greek general managed worse, and his biographer described it with more rhetorical flourish than it deserved.” He glanced at her.
“And you? I know you read. The library here has been visited more frequently since your arrival than in the past decade.”
“How do you know that?”
“The cataloguing system I imposed involves a discreet notation on each volume. The disarrangement of the Ws is considerable.”
Cressida felt heat touch her cheeks, which she judged deeply unfair. She had not been covert about her use of the library; she had simply not expected him to track it.
“I was working through your poetry section. It needed reorganizing.”
“It was perfectly organized.”
“Chronologically, yes. Alphabetically within periods, no. The current arrangement required one to know the date of publication before one could locate anything, which rather defeats—”
“You reorganized my library.”
“I restored a rational order to it.” She pressed on before he could gather an objection. “Besides, you said yourself the Ws had been disturbed. That suggests only that I’ve been reading them, which I was entirely entitled to do.”
“The Ws,” he said with measured emphasis, “which are the Romantic poets.”
“A coincidence.”
“Wordsworth. Wollstonecraft. And, I suspect, a volume of Mrs. Radcliffe that found its way onto the shelves without my knowledge.”
“It was misfiled,” Cressida said primly. “Under R for Radcliffe, which placed it among the reference volumes. I merely corrected the error.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Did you enjoy it?”
She looked at him, surprised by the question—by the absence of mockery in it. “Very much. I’m rather partial to a gothic castle.”
“I trust Ashmere did not disappoint on that score.”
“The north tower is a particular credit to the tradition. Though it wants a ghost.”
“There is one, as a matter of fact. A former housekeeper who apparently disapproves of changes to the household routine. Mrs. Agnes blames her for the disappearance of the good silver polish.”
Cressida stared at him. “Are you inventing this?”
“I categorically am not. The ghost predates Mrs. Agnes by two centuries.”
“And does she—the ghost, I mean—have a name?”
“Agnes, I believe. Though I’ve never been introduced.” He paused. “I’ll arrange it, if you like.”
Cressida bit the inside of her cheek to maintain the pretense of gravity. “I think I’d like that very much.”
They had reached the end of the rose walk, where a stone bench sat in a small alcove between two yews—the yews that Theodore had been objecting to earlier, though they looked perfectly adequate to Cressida’s untrained eye.
He didn’t suggest they sit. They turned and began to make their way back toward the castle.
The morning had grown warmer while they walked. She had dressed practically for the garden, in a pale yellow muslin gown that was not her finest but was comfortable, and she was glad of it now.
Theodore walked at an easy pace beside her, with his arm close enough to hers that when she stepped on an uneven spot in the gravel and she stumbled slightly, his hand immediately found her elbow.
She steadied herself, and his hand almost reluctantly fell away again.
She was aware of him in a way that was entirely new and entirely his fault.
The breadth of his shoulders in the morning coat.
The unhurried cadence of his stride. The hands—those particular hands, currently clasped behind his back with ducal composure—that had undone her so thoroughly the night before that she had bitten her lip to stay quiet.
He had promised her silk sheets and candlelight. He had said she deserved to be worshipped properly, and the word properly had kept her awake until the small hours, her imagination supplying a great deal of unsolicited details about what properly might entail.
She was not going to think about that now. She thought about it entirely.
She thought of what he had said in the corridor at Lady Seymore’s house.
“I’ve spent seventeen years perfecting control… With you, all of it crumbles.”
She understood now that this morning was a kind of effort—the library comment, the offer of a walk, the steadying hand. Each of these things cost him something, and he offered them anyway.
“My favorite novel,” she said, returning to the thread of their earlier conversation as though it had never been dropped, “is Cecilia.”
He considered this. “Burney.”
“You know it?”
“I know of it. I haven’t read it.”
“You should. It’s about a woman whose inheritance is contingent upon whoever she marries adopting her surname, which creates a tremendous amount of difficulty.”
“I imagine it does.”
“And everyone around her is either incompetent or actively unhelpful, and she’s expected to navigate the whole thing gracefully without losing her composure.”
He paused for a beat. “I see.”
“I thought you might find it relatable,” she said, entirely straight-faced, “given that it’s essentially a study in estates and the difficulties of inheritance.”
He looked at her. She looked back with perfect innocence.
“I’ll add it to the catalogue,” he said, and there was something warm threading through the dryness of it.
The castle came into view beyond the parterre, the stone looking pale gold in the morning light, the long south-facing windows reflecting the sky.
Cressida had spent weeks learning to love this castle despite herself. Now, she felt it with an ease that didn’t require effort at all. Behind her, she could hear the very faint sound of the kitchen garden door—likely one of the under-gardeners moving between the beds.
Then, closer, through the open window of the servants’ hall, came voices. Ordinary voices, not raised, carrying with the particular clarity of warm air through an open casement.
“—only saying what everyone’s already read. The scandal sheets had it right, didn’t they? His Grace forcing her into it, and the whole business with Lord Emerton—”
“Keep your voice down!”
“I’m only saying. You can see it, can’t you? The way he keeps to himself and her trying to make the best of it. It’s not exactly the picture of a love match, is it?”
Cressida stopped walking, and Theodore had gone rigid at her side.
For one moment, they were both still, standing on the gravel path with everything the morning had built suspended between them, and then the voices dropped hurriedly as the speakers registered the silence outside.
She turned to look at him.
Whatever ease had settled into his expression over the course of the morning had vanished. The careful blankness was back: mouth set, eyes flat, the particular quality of stillness that wasn’t peace, but its absence.
He looked exactly as he had in the first weeks of their marriage, when he had passed her in corridors with the expression of a man who had decided long ago that proximity itself was the danger.
“Theodore—”
“We should go in.” His voice was entirely level and devoid of everything that had been in it an hour ago.
He turned toward the castle, leaving her to stare after him, the scent of climbers heavy in the warm air.