Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Agnes appeared in the doorway of Cressida’s sitting room with her customary composure, hands folded, expression giving away precisely nothing. “Lady Seymore’s carriage has arrived. She is asking for you.”
“Please show her in.” Cressida set down the letter she had not been reading. “And tell Cook we shall want dinner for three this evening.”
A pause, brief and deliberate. “Shall I inform His Grace that he has a guest?”
“Yes.” Cressida smoothed her skirt. “Although I doubt we can consider Lady Seymore a guest,” she added with a small smile. “Tell him she has come to stay for dinner, and that I would be grateful if he would join us.”
For a moment, Mrs. Agnes’s expression faltered as a smile, brief and unguarded, broke through decades of professional dignity before she could marshal it back into order.
“Indeed, Your Grace.” She recovered with admirable speed. “I shall inform His Grace immediately.”
She was gone before Cressida could decide whether to be amused or heartened by that.
A moment later, Lady Seymore’s voice carried up the staircase, greeting the footman with the brisk warmth of a woman who had long since decided ceremony was an inefficiency she could not afford.
Cressida stood and moved to the window. Below, the afternoon light lay long across the gravel, and the grounds stretched pale gold and unhurried in the May warmth, entirely indifferent to the fact that this morning had begun so well and ended so badly.
She had been mulling it over for hours. The servants’ voices through the open window, and the words that had carried with such unfortunate clarity through the warm air.
About the damned scandal sheets. She was certain that was the reason Theodore had gone rigid at her side before leaving her standing alone in the rose walk.
What troubled her was not the servants’ gossip; she had long since accepted that her marriage had come about under circumstances the household would discuss, that whispers were an inevitable feature of her new life and not one she could do anything to prevent.
What troubled her was Theodore’s response—a withdrawal so swift and total that it had the quality of a door slamming shut on a room he had not intended to open.
The ease of the morning, his dry wit, the genuine smile she had worked to earn, the warmth threading through every ordinary exchange—all of it had been erased by a handful of words overheard through an open window.
As though he had been waiting for the confirmation that it was all too good to be trusted.
She understood what the scandal sheets represented to him. Not the indiscretion itself, but the betrayal implied by it—the idea that someone with access to his household had decided their own interests mattered more than any obligation to him.
She had no proof of this, only the accumulated intelligence of weeks: the way trust with him was not a disposition but a concession, offered in increments and revocable without warning.
What she could not resolve was this: he had held her in a darkened corridor at Lady Seymore’s ball and told her that she drove him mad, that his control crumbled with her.
He had said she was his. And yet the servants’ casual mention of the gossip sheets had been sufficient to return him within a heartbeat to the man who passed her in corridors as though she were a stranger.
The words overheard this morning had not triggered his suspicion. They had only sharpened it. It had been there all along, she realized. Banked and waiting, as patient and reliable as a cold hearth.
She did not yet know how to reach the part of him that persisted in doubting her. She only knew that she intended to.
Below, the front door opened.
Lady Seymore swept into the sitting room in a gown of plum silk, her silver-streaked hair arranged with the settled authority of a woman who had stopped consulting fashion some years ago and was now simply right.
She kissed Cressida on both cheeks, held her at arm’s length, and subjected her to a frank and unhurried assessment.
“You look as though you’ve been thinking very hard about something you can’t resolve.” She released her and settled into the chair nearest the fire with an ease that suggested she had decided, somewhere on the drive over, to make herself entirely at home. “I blame my nephew.”
“I’m perfectly well, My Lady.”
Lady Seymore accepted that with the equanimity of a woman who had heard a great many reassurances and found them uniformly unconvincing.
“Now, about the other evening. The pair of you left with all the subtlety of conspirators fleeing the scene. I have spent two days constructing theories.”
“It was a lovely ball.” Cressida sat opposite her. “You were most gracious.”
“Don’t be diplomatic. It doesn’t suit you.” Lady Seymore tilted her head. “Theodore is here? He hasn’t barricaded himself in the study and declared himself unavailable to all human congress?”
“He has been…” Cressida considered her words. “Present.”
“That is the most guardedly encouraging thing anyone has said to me all week.” Lady Seymore’s mouth curved. “Come, then. Let us have dinner, and see if we can’t coax him out of himself for an evening.”
They sat down to dinner at eight, Cressida at one end of the long mahogany table, Theodore at the other, and Lady Seymore between them with the casual precision of a woman who had decided exactly where she wished to be and had arranged matters accordingly.
The first quarter-hour was stiff enough to be architectural.
Theodore spoke to his aunt with perfect correctness and no particular warmth.
Lady Seymore responded at twice the volume and three times the animation, compensating cheerfully for whatever his composure withheld.
Cressida said several things about the soup that were accurate, if not especially illuminating.
Then Lady Seymore set down her spoon and announced, to no one in particular, that she had recently discovered her late husband’s private library contained an entire shelf of novels behind his collected Parliamentary speeches—three volumes of precisely the sort he had publicly decried as a corrupting influence on the English mind.
“He had opinions,” she said, with great serenity. “He simply exercised them in private, which I consider more honest than people who pretend to have no opinions at all.”
“Are you referring to anyone specific?” Theodore asked.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Lady Seymore turned to Cressida. “Your color is better. The south light suits you.”
“I’ve been spending more time in the gardens.” Cressida accepted the bread the footman offered. “We took the rose walk this morning.”
“We.” Lady Seymore did not make a production of the word. She simply placed it with care and let it sit. “Excellent. Theodore, the roses are extraordinary this year.”
“I said as much this morning,” Theodore said.
“Good. That is exactly what I thought.” A brief pause, immaculate in its timing. “Now, I was going to ask about your plans for the summer, and I imagine we shall get to it. But I find myself thinking of the long term. You’ve been married for what, eight weeks?”
“Eight weeks,” Cressida confirmed.
“Eight weeks.” Lady Seymore set down her wine. “The nursery here is very fine, you know. The east-facing windows get the morning light beautifully. I always thought it a great pity it sat empty.”
Theodore’s hand, which had been reaching for his wine glass, stilled, and Cressida noticed. She also noticed the particular quality of his stillness.
“The nursery,” he said, his voice neutral.
“Indeed. I imagine you’ve both given it thought.”
“I haven’t,” he said flatly.
Cressida looked at him across the candlelight. “Surely it’s a conversation worth having.”
He looked back. “It’s not a subject for the dinner table.”
“All right,” she said pleasantly. “We’ll discuss it afterwards.”
A hint of irritation flashed across his face at having his dismissal so cleanly redirected. “Don’t get your hopes up.”
The table held its breath.
“I beg your pardon?” Cressida said.
“I mean exactly what I said.” He reached for his wine, unhurried. “Do not get your hopes up.”
Her eyebrows lowered over her eyes. “Why not?”
Lady Seymore had gone very still, obviously paying extremely close attention but pretending as though she was not.
Theodore set his glass down. The ease that had been present in him this morning, however cautiously, had receded entirely. In its place was the careful, level distance Cressida recognized from the first weeks of their marriage—the look of a man who had retreated to ground he trusted.
“The scandal sheets.”
Those words arrived without ceremony, abrupt and cold.
Cressida felt the injury move through her chest, followed immediately by something steadier and older: the refusal to absorb a charge she had not earned.
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“No, I did not leak anything to the scandal sheets.” Her voice was level.
“Miss Oakley wished to marry Lord Emerton. My engagement stood between her and that ambition. She possessed the means, the motive, and the opportunity. She was present at my parents’ house when my grandmother and I spoke in the garden, and she had heard enough. ”
“That is a theory.”
Her eyes flashed. “It is the only theory that accounts for every fact in evidence.”
“Then it is a false theory!”