Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
“You are going to fall behind,” Theodore warned, without looking at her.
Cressida’s mare had stopped to investigate a patch of verge with considerably more enthusiasm than the situation warranted.
Cressida clicked her tongue and drew the animal’s head up. “I assure you, I am not going to fall behind.” She brought the mare level with his grey and found him watching the road ahead with the expression of a man who had not been truly looking at the road. “There. You see?”
“Mm.”
They rode on through a morning of clear light and cool air. Theodore’s hands on the reins were loose and easy. She caught herself watching them and found she did not care about being caught staring.
The village appeared in stages: the church spire above a copse of oaks, the smoke from the mill, the lane widening into the high street. A woman with a basket looked up as they came in, and Theodore’s name was on her lips before they had fully drawn to a halt.
But her eyes went first to Cressida.
“Your Grace!” Mrs. Fletcher’s curtsy was quick and warm, her face alight. “What a lovely surprise. And you’ve brought His Grace at last.”
Cressida smiled with the ease of someone returning to familiar ground. “Mrs. Fletcher.”
“We’ve all been hoping you’d come again.
The little ones have been asking after you since you read to them at the schoolroom.
” Mrs. Fletcher’s attention shifted briefly to Theodore, properly deferential but with the settled confidence of a woman who had already formed her opinion of his wife and found it satisfactory.
“Your Grace. We’re very glad to see you together. ”
Theodore said nothing, but Cressida felt his stillness beside her and did not look at him.
At the mill, the miller pulled his hat off before Theodore had finished speaking. Mr. Harker was a broad, ruddy man who had been watching their approach for some time.
“Your Grace. Didn’t know you’d be coming today.”
“My wife has not yet made a formal introduction with me present,” Theodore said. “The Duchess of Ashmere.”
“Oh, we know Her Grace,” Mr. Harker said, with the ease of a man who had already been charmed and knew it. He bowed to Cressida. “Your Grace came to visit old Mr. Webb not three weeks past. Had the whole village talking.”
Theodore inclined his head with perfect composure.
Cressida kept her gaze ahead and said nothing, having learned by now when silence served better than speech.
“I hear the north wheel has been causing trouble,” Theodore said.
The miller’s expression shifted into the relief of a man who had been waiting to discuss a problem with someone capable of addressing it. Theodore listened, asked three questions, and suggested a remedy.
The deference folded by degrees into something more like conversation, and the business of the estate proceeded as though it required no ceremony at all.
Theodore had dismounted over the rough stretch past the smithy and steadied her mare’s bridle through the worst of the ruts. His other hand found her knee briefly as her mare stepped awkwardly, and he removed it with the same efficiency he brought to everything.
The smith’s boy called out to him by title and was acknowledged by name.
A farmer’s wife asked after the eastern road, and he noted a sunken section in the small leather book he drew from his coat pocket—Cressida had not known about the book—and made a brief remark to suggest it would be attended to.
When they passed the schoolroom, the elderly woman sitting inside looked up, recognized Cressida, and raised a hand in greeting. Cressida raised hers in return. Theodore’s pace slowed, almost imperceptibly, to take it in.
It was near the end of the high street that she saw the widow.
Perhaps thirty, her gown neat but showing its age at the hem, three children arranged about her with the tidiness of children taught young to present well.
She was leaving the baker’s when she met Theodore’s eyes.
Acknowledgment on her part, formal but grateful. A brief nod on his. She moved to leave.
Theodore called, “Mrs. Lowe,” and she stopped.
The conversation was brief and conducted quietly. Cressida heard enough: firewood before the hard weather came, a line of credit at the baker’s settled through the estate accounts.
Mrs. Lowe’s chin lifted with the care of a woman preserving her dignity and thanked him in a voice of great steadiness. He received it by changing the subject, a question about the eldest boy, who answered at length about a dog. Theodore listened.
When they returned to their horses, Cressida asked, “Does she have family nearby?”
“A sister in Thornhurst. Useless.”
He held her stirrup while she remounted, and when she looked down at him, his expression was shuttered.
She’d learned to read that expression, probably more thoroughly than he liked. This was the shuttered look that meant he had done something he considered unremarkable and wished it to be treated accordingly.
“It is very generous,” she offered.
“It is practical.” He was already moving to his horse.
She let him redirect, following behind.
The draper’s shop occupied a narrow frontage at the top of the market cross. Theodore had gone across to speak with the steward, who had materialized with papers requiring his signature, and Cressida had drifted inside.
The shop was dim and smelled of clean cloth. She was turning to leave when her hand landed on a bolt, and she stopped.
Sapphire blue silk. Not a dull blue that could answer to various names, but the precise, saturated shade she considered her color. Mentioned once during her first weeks at Ashmere, offhandedly, in the middle of an argument about something else entirely.
She ran two fingers across the surface.
Feeling a prickle at her back, she turned. Theodore was standing in the doorway, his gaze fixed on the silk, before flicking to her face and then back.
She replaced the bolt. “The wool in the window is of very good quality. I thought Mrs. Agnes might want to know.”
“I will tell her.”
She had crossed to the door when she heard him turn back toward the counter and speak quietly to the shopkeeper. She did not look back.
Outside, he fell into step beside her. His arm was offered without comment, and she took it. She thought about a man who stood in a draper’s doorway and went very still over a length of blue silk, and what she felt in response was almost too much for the ordinary afternoon it was dressed in.
“Mr. Harker made the most extraordinary bow,” she said.
“He has always been excessive in that regard.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “His father before him. Four generations of the same mill.”
“Does the great-grandfather disapprove of you?”
“Unquestionably. He disapproves of the road I had resurfaced in 1819. The original rutted approach gave him a more dramatic appearance when receiving visitors on horseback.”
“A very reasonable objection.”
“I thought so.”
He had lifted her down from her mare at the mill—hands on her waist, a pause between lift and set-down that was neither brief nor explained—and she had looked at the middle of his cravat because looking at his face at that proximity had seemed inadvisable.
He had set her down without commentary, as though the pause had not occurred, which had been the most wholly unconvincing thing he had ever attempted.
By the time they were back inside, the day had accumulated between them like warmth in stone: gradually, until it was simply present throughout.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to unfasten her boot, when he crossed the room and crouched before her.
“You will be at that until evening,” he said, and moved her hands aside.
“I am managing perfectly well.”
“You are managing it at the wrong angle.”
He worked the boot loose with some effort, the leather refusing to cooperate for a satisfying interval, and she felt laughter rising as it finally yielded. He sat back on his heels with an expression of moderate affront.
“A triumph,” she said gravely.
“Against considerable opposition.”
She laughed, and he looked up at her, close and entirely unguarded. The afternoon light crossed his face without his permission, and she thought, There. That.
He rose, and she reached for the pin at her collar.
His hands found her waist, and the rest of it unfolded with the particular warmth of something that had become its own kind of ordinary: unhurried, punctuated by her dry observation about the structural inadequacy of dress pins as a category, and his voice low at her ear, saying he had no investment in the dress pin as an institution.
It was different from before, less discovery and more fluency, a conversation between two people who had learned one another’s language and were still finding new things in it.
Cressida traced the old scar along his ribs, and his mouth found the curve of her shoulder, and when she pressed her lips to his temple, she felt the low sound he made against her skin.
Later, the room settled into the quiet of late afternoons. He lay beside her, his arm behind his head. The lake threw its faint ripple across the plasterwork above them, and neither of them spoke.
She had almost drifted off when he said, “Mr. Webb speaks very highly of you.”
She opened one eye. “Does he?”
“He mentioned that the new Duchess had visited and had the good sense to listen.” He paused. “I did not know you had visited.”
“You were in London,” she reminded him.
He exhaled through his nose. “They know you.”
“A little.” She turned her head, but he was still watching the ceiling. “I went because I wanted to understand the place. The people. It seemed important to know it myself, rather than be introduced to it.” A pause. “The way you know it.”
His hand moved to hers against his ribs and covered it briefly before returning to his side. She did not remark on it, but she lay very still in the fading light and thought, We are building something here. Neither of us is alone in knowing it.
A knock at the door, and Mrs. Agnes entered, carrying a silver salver. “Forgive the interruption, Your Grace. A letter has arrived by express messenger, marked urgent.”
Theodore took it, and she quickly withdrew.
The handwriting was Lady Bardwell’s. Cressida recognized it at ten paces, the extravagant loops, the ink pressed too hard. Her pulse quickened.
Theodore broke the seal and read. His face gave away nothing, but his stillness took on a different quality: the management of a reaction he had not yet decided how to share. He lowered the letter.
“Your father has requested a visit.”
“When?” Cressida asked.
Theodore’s eyes did not leave her face. “Next week.”