Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lady Seymore studied him with the unhurried directness that had always been her main quality, the genuine kind that saw past arrangement to whatever lay beneath his bluster and armor. He had never been able to manage her the way he managed other people.
“You look,” she noted, “like a man who has slept.”
“I have slept,” he confirmed.
“I know. It is what I said.”
The room was warm and smelled of dried lavender and old wood. Theodore had played on this floor as a child, received bad news here and good, and once a lecture on the proper conduct of a gentleman that he had drawn on at various occasions without ever acknowledging its source.
“I did not come to make this easy,” he said.
“I did not expect you to.” She reached for her tea. “Easy would suggest you had made no honest accounting of it.”
“The method was wrong,” he stated.
“Yes.” She put the cup down, no evasion in it.
“It was. I knew when I did it that I was choosing the outcome I judged best over the method you deserved a voice in. I made that calculation, and I stand behind the intention.” She met his gaze.
“I do not stand behind the breach of your confidence. That part I regret entirely.”
He looked at her for a long moment. She did not lower her eyes.
It would have been simpler if she had collapsed, offered remorse calibrated to his comfort, given him the satisfaction of a woman diminished. In the weeks following her confession, he had more than once imagined such a conversation.
She was giving him something harder: her reasons, standing upright without apology for having them while separating them cleanly from the harm her means had caused. It was the most she could offer, and, he recognized with some difficulty, the most he could reasonably ask for.
“You might have spoken to me directly,” he said.
“You would not have listened.” There was no reproach in it. “We both know what you were that season, Theodore. A direct approach would have resulted in your very finest composed dismissal.”
He could not dispute that.
“I wanted you to be happy,” she said, more quietly. “I know that counts for less than you would have wished, given the manner of it.”
“It counts.” He said it without warmth, and he watched something ease in her that he had not registered as held until it released.
They sat in the particular silence of two people who had known each other long enough that silence carried its own content.
“She is remarkable,” Lady Seymore murmured.
“Yes.”
“I expect she argued for leniency.”
He had not intended to tell her. He found, examining it, that he could not find a good reason to withhold it.
“In the immediate aftermath of the confession,” he confirmed. “Before I had said anything. She said that you had acted out of love.” He delivered it as a plain fact whose significance required no assistance.
Lady Seymore was still. The controlled set of her mouth softened.
“Generous,” she remarked.
“It surprised me,” he said honestly.
“Did it?” She looked at him with the expression she had worn since he was a boy: fond, sharp, slightly more understanding than was ever comfortable. “You have been expecting to be found wanting. For some considerable time.”
He looked at the fire. He did not confirm or deny it, and she did not press.
“She knows what you are, Theodore,” she said when he stood to leave. “Not what you present to the world, but what you actually are.”
He stood with his hat in his hands and the light at his back, and she did not require an answer.
He let himself out, and the thing he felt was not dread.
Cressida had read fourteen pages by the time she heard the front door open.
She had learned, over months, to distinguish his step from the footmen’s measured tread, and the quality of it now told her something had shifted. It was not the tight, controlled footfall of a man holding himself on a short lead, but something freer.
She did not look up when he came into the library. She knew he stood in the doorway a moment. She turned a page.
The chair opposite creaked as he settled into it. Then the small percussion of a book plucked off the side table. Then quiet.
She read a paragraph. He read whatever he had selected. The fire settled, and the May light held its thin, clear quality across the carpet, and there was no reason to say anything at all.
After some time, she looked up.
He was reading with the focus he brought to things he found worthy, his long legs stretched out before him, dark hair slightly disheveled from the cold. He had not changed out of his riding clothes. A pink hue lay along his cheekbones.
She thought about the conversation that had taken place that morning in her absence and felt a tenderness she had the sense to keep to herself.
She returned to her book, and he turned a page, his lips curving.
“Yours is upside down,” he noted, without looking up.
She looked down. It was not upside down. It was correctly oriented. She looked across at him, and the corner of his mouth quirked up ever wider, as if excited at the prospect of her taking the provocation.
“No,” she said, “it is not.”
“Are you certain?”
“I am reading it.”
“That,” he said, turning another page, “is not definitive evidence.”
She put her book down. “I have been reading since I was four years old.”
“A formative achievement.” He looked up then, his eyes dark and entirely amused. That expression, aimed at her across a library on a quiet morning, was something she was still not entirely accustomed to. “What is it?”
“A collection of correspondence. Letters between a naturalist and his colleagues.” She picked her book back up. “Very engaging.”
“Engaging enough that you failed to notice you had been reading the same page for approximately twenty minutes.”
She looked at him over the edge of the volume. He returned her gaze with the bland equanimity of a man making a wholly neutral observation.
“I was thinking,” she said.
“About the naturalist?”
“About various things.”
“Mm.” He returned to his own book.
A moment passed.
“It went,” he said, in the tone of a man taking up a thread from some considerable distance, “adequately.”
She did not ask what had happened. Telling her about it, even at that remove, must have cost him something. She would not strain him further by asking for more than he could give that day.
“I am glad,” she said, and meant it precisely as simply as she said it.
He looked at her. She felt the look without returning it, and let the moment stand without building architecture around it.
“She told me,” he added, after a moment, “that you argued on her behalf.”
“She is your family.” Cressida shrugged. “Her method was wrong. Her reasons were not.”
“You might have been considerably less generous.”
“I might have.” She glanced up at him. “But I thought it would embarrass you when you came around to my point of view, if I had been petty about it in the interim.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “That is entirely self-serving.”
“Almost entirely,” she agreed. “Though I should like the small element of genuine charity acknowledged.”
The twitch almost became a smile. “I acknowledge it.”
She returned to her book. He returned to his.
The afternoon light streamed through the tall windows and lay across the floor in long bars, and Cressida thought: this ordinary, quiet afternoon.
This man sitting in the chair across from her, reading with his hair disheveled and his boots still muddy, making unfounded accusations about the orientation of her book.
This.
She held the word privately.
“There is a second volume,” he said, with the idle authority of a man who knew this library as well as his own name, “on the second shelf from the left. Your naturalist.”
“How do you know which naturalist I am reading?”
“The spine is not illegible from this angle.”
She closed the volume. “You have been reading my book from across the room.”
“I have been noting the title.” A pause of considerable dignity. “There is a distinction.”
“There is absolutely no distinction.”
He rose, crossed to the second shelf, and pulled down the volume with the ease of a man who knew where everything lived. He placed it on the arm of her chair. Their eyes met at a proximity that was, she thought, entirely avoidable and clearly not avoided on either side.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
“The naturalist has considerable things to say about migratory patterns in the second volume.” He did not move. “In case that is of interest.”
“Given how absorbed I have been in the first,” she said, looking up at him, “I imagine it will be.”
He looked at her mouth in the way she had long since stopped pretending not to notice, and then returned to his chair and his book, and the fire continued its quiet work.