Chapter 25 #2
Lady Bardwell turned to him with the expression of a woman who had been waiting three days for someone to ask. “The hedgehog escaped in the inn. It took four chambermaids and a stable boy.” A pause. “My husband offered a shilling in reward and caused a small riot.”
“We don’t talk about Marlborough,” Lord Bardwell said from the wall.
“You don’t talk about Marlborough,” Lady Bardwell pointed out. “The rest of us talk about it frequently.”
Peter had resumed reading. Mary was attempting to introduce Gerald to a disinterested spaniel that had wandered over from the adjacent field.
Cressida was laughing, and the sound was music to Theodore’s ears.
Not the practiced laugh she offered in crowded drawing rooms, bright and measured and perfectly timed, but something freer.
Warm enough to loosen something tight in his chest before he could guard against it.
It rang softly through the air, unrestrained and utterly genuine, and he found himself listening for it even after it had faded.
God help him, he would have done nearly anything to hear it again.
A moment later, Theodore kept pace beside Cressida as the path widened. The garden opened around them in gentle sweeps of green and silver, but his attention remained fixed on her.
The curve of her smile, the brightness in her eyes, the faint amusement at her brother’s antics from earlier—it all transformed her face into something dangerously lovely.
Theodore could not remember when he had begun measuring days by her moods. When her laughter had become a thing he hoarded quietly, turning it over afterward like a miser counting coins.
It was absurd. More than absurd. It was reckless.
He had spent years cultivating restraint, mastering every inconvenient impulse before it could master him in turn.
Men like him did not lose themselves over a woman’s laugh.
They certainly did not begin anticipating it, seeking it out, or arranging entire conversations merely to coax the sound from her lips.
And yet here he was, walking beside her with the ridiculous sensation that the entire world had sharpened at the edges simply because she was smiling.
“You should have warned me,” he said.
“I did warn you.”
“You said they were a great deal. You did not say—” He glanced at Mary, who was now in active negotiation with the spaniel. “You did not say this.”
“Would it have changed anything?”
He considered it honestly. “No.”
She looked at him. He kept his gaze ahead, but he was aware of her reading his face, looking for the thing he hadn’t said directly. He let her find it.
Ahead, Peter walked into a low branch. He lowered his pamphlet, looked at the branch with dignity, and walked on.
Theodore felt it move through him before he could stop it—not a laugh exactly, but more the structural damage that preceded one.
Cressida noticed. Of course, she noticed.
“There it is,” she said quietly.
“There what is?”
“You’re enjoying yourself.”
“I am observing a family in its natural state,” Theodore countered.
“That’s the same thing.”
It was. He didn’t say so.
Mary released the toad near the hedgerow—apparently a voluntary decision, which surprised everyone—and ran to catch up with Peter, seizing his arm and pulling him into whatever argument she had been building toward for the last ten minutes.
Lord Bardwell rejoined his wife. Lady Bardwell took his arm without looking at him, an automatic gesture worn smooth by decades.
Theodore watched Cressida watch them. He understood, without needing to examine it too carefully, that he had been wrong about something. Not wrong in a way that required admission, just wrong in the quiet private way that sometimes preceded a correction.
He had spent weeks learning to see her clearly. He had not thought to ask where she had come from.
Now, he was starting to understand.
Three days later, the farewell was conducted with the brisk efficiency that attached itself to the end of visits once carriages had been called and luggage loaded.
The morning was cold and flat, the oaks along the east drive stripped to their bones, and the whole scene had the quality of something ending cleanly.
Lady Bardwell embraced Cressida with the faint surprise of a woman who had been reminded, over several days’ proximity, that she was genuinely fond of her daughter and had perhaps not been expressing this with adequate frequency.
“You look well,” she said, drawing back to study Cressida’s face. “Very well.”
Peter kissed her cheek, clapped on his hat, and descended the steps half-turned toward them. “She has always been the cleverest of us, you know. We just didn’t say it enough.”
He got into the carriage before either of them could answer.
Mary threw her arms around Cressida last, with the full and unselfconscious force of a child who had not yet learned to calibrate her embraces for dignity.
She pulled back and looked at Theodore with frank, unhurried assessment. “Take care of her.”
“I intend to,” he said.
She nodded once, apparently satisfied with whatever she had found, and ran down the steps.
The door closed, and soon the sound of hooves began to grow distant. The entrance hall settled into the quiet of a castle returned to itself.
Cressida stood at the top of the steps until the carriage had disappeared through the oaks and the sound of it had dissolved into the cold air. Theodore stood beside her. Neither spoke for a moment.
“It is true,” he said, eventually. “What Peter said about you.”
The footman informed Cressida that His Grace had gone out with the carefully composed expression of a man delivering news he had been anticipating would be noted.
“To Lady Seymore’s, Your Grace. He did not leave a time of return.”
She stood in the doorway of the morning room and nodded. “Thank you.”
Then she went to the library.
It was consideration, she told herself while settling into the chair nearest the window. Theodore had not invited her along, and the reasons needed no explanation. Whatever was to pass between him and his aunt required space she had no business occupying.
She opened her book and read three sentences before she found she was reading them again.
Lady Seymore received him in her sitting room.
She was already seated when he was shown in—not the posture of a woman taken off guard, but that of one who had decided in advance on the terms of the engagement. Her hands were folded in her lap. There was tea on the table between them, two cups, which told him everything about her expectations.
“Theodore,” she greeted.
“Auntie.” He sat but did not reach for his tea.