Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“You mentioned once,” Theodore said, not looking at her, “that your aunt kept no library.”
The carriage had been moving for nearly an hour. The last of Ashmere’s familiar country had given way to flatter ground, the hedgerows thinning, London’s grey beginning at the horizon.
Cressida looked at him. He was staring out the window, one hand resting on his knee.
“She kept no books at all,” she said. “She considered reading an indulgence that encouraged discontent in women of uncertain prospects.” A brief pause. “She was not entirely wrong, as it happened. I was considerably discontented.”
He turned his head and gave her the expression she had come to know best: the sharp attention reserved for things he found genuinely interesting.
“I memorized what I could from whatever she permitted in the house,” Cressida continued.
“Agricultural almanacs, mainly. And a volume of sermons kept on the mantelpiece for decorative purposes that I do not believe she had ever opened.” She held his gaze for a moment.
“I have since formed some fairly detailed opinions about crop rotation.”
The corner of his mouth twitched.
“What of you?” she asked, because this was how they had learned to do it. She offered something, he received it, she asked the same in return, and he answered. “Ashmere’s library is extensive. Were you always a reader, or was it circumstance?”
“My father did not encourage it. He thought it produced men who thought too much and acted too little. I read by firelight when the castle was quiet.”
She thought about him at seventeen, the dukedom suddenly thrust upon his shoulders, both men he had looked up to gone. She did not say this. She let it sit between them.
“An agricultural almanac sounds considerably worse than what I had,” he said.
“I now know the optimal planting season for winter wheat.”
“A practical education.”
“I have found most of my education practical, in one way or another.”
Neither of them had said anything more of consequence. But Cressida was well aware that something had been said nonetheless.
The Fairmonts’ musical evening occupied three principal rooms of Stanton House and was attended by a particular category of London society: those wealthy enough that display was no longer necessary, and those ambitious enough that it still was. Both groups had come in full complement.
They entered together—a statement in itself.
Cressida was conscious of it the way one was conscious of the tide changing: not a single wave, but the whole room’s attention redirecting.
She had attended enough gatherings to read this specific texture of interest—the appetite beneath the pleasantry, the hunger to see whether she would crack under the weight of what everyone knew or believed they knew.
She kept her chin level and her expression neutral. Theodore’s hand rested on the small of her back, light, deliberate, a silent statement to all who cared to look. And many cared.
“There is a cluster of ladies near the fireplace,” he said, close enough that it reached only her, “who have been staring since we arrived. The one in yellow has now looked across three times.”
“I noticed,” she said pleasantly. “I have decided she is simply admiring your coat.”
Cressida hadn’t realized how easily jealousy could catch flame in a person’s heart until this evening and a few feminine glances at her husband.
“Naturally.”
“It is a very good coat.”
Elinor Stanton, the Duchess of Fairmont, crossed the room toward her with unhurried purpose. She was younger than Cressida had expected, with dark eyes, a composed face, and a directness in her bearing that had nothing to do with performance.
She drew Cressida slightly apart, and what followed was not social pleasantry.
“I do not require you to pretend you cannot hear them,” Elinor said without preamble. “I stood in nearly this same position, in nearly this same kind of room, not so long ago.”
Cressida blinked at her, a knot loosening in her chest that she had not realized she had been carrying.
“They are not interested in the truth of you,” Elinor added. “They are interested in the story. You cannot argue a room out of its story. What you can do is refuse to perform the ending they have written for you.”
It was not consolation. Consolation would have been considerably less useful. It was the frank intelligence of a woman who had come out the other side intact, and Cressida received it as it was given: squarely and without sentiment.
“Thank you,” she said, and she meant it.
Elinor held her gaze a beat longer. “The second violinist is particularly good tonight,” she said, returning to a register suitable for the room. “The acoustics near the east window are considerably better.”
Then she moved on.
Cressida stood where she was for a moment, then went to find the east window.
Lucien Stanton intercepted Theodore with the measured ease of a man who had no need to establish his standing and therefore spent no energy doing so.
“Ashmere.”
“Fairmont.”
They watched the room in the companionable silence of men who had arrived separately at the conclusion that most of what happened in these gatherings did not require narration.
Lucien did not remark on the whispers because he understood, without being told, that Theodore already knew and required neither commentary nor sympathy.
John materialized at Theodore’s elbow approximately twenty minutes later, wearing the expression of a man who had been constructing a pleasantry since he arrived.
“You look,” he said with great care, “considerably less like a man attending his own reckoning than you did the last time I saw you in a room like this.”
“Mind your own affairs,” Theodore warned mildly.
“That is three full syllables more than you gave me at the Wentworths’ dinner party.” John arranged his expression into studied innocence. “I am calling it an improvement.”
He took a sip of wine, letting the silence breathe.
“She is doing very well,” he added, more quietly. His attention drifted briefly to the far side of the room, where Cressida was managing a trio of ladies with remarkable composure. “In case you had not observed.”
“I had observed.”
“I thought so.” He smiled. “The coat is excellent, by the way. I have it on good authority.”
The intelligence about Miss Oakley and Lord Emerton’s engagement arrived with the particular relish of those delivering it to someone they expected to be affected.
Cressida heard it from a cluster of ladies near the center of the room, their faces arranged in subtle eagerness.
They were here to observe a reaction rather than transmit information.
“I had not heard.” She smiled. “How very pleasing for them both.”
She was aware of nothing but mild relief, as if the last unfinished piece of a tedious correspondence had been settled.
Near the end of the evening, she turned away from a conversation and found Miss Oakley directly in her path.
The young woman was composed, bright-eyed, and smiling with the precision of someone who had chosen this moment with considerable care. Behind her, at half a distance, Lord Emerton stood with the easy posture of a man expecting entertainment.
“Your Grace,” Miss Oakley greeted, in a voice pitched to carry precisely as far as intended. “Lord Emerton and I were only just remarking how unexpectedly well your marriage appears to have turned out.”
The nearby conversations faltered. The room, in its practiced collective way, listened without appearing to listen.
Cressida met her gaze. “How kind of you both,” she said warmly, with a small tilt of her head.
“I imagine it must be a comfort, in the early days of an engagement, to observe that the institution is not beyond the reach of general happiness.” She smiled.
“I do hope yours offers the same discovery. You must allow me to wish you every joy of it.”
Miss Oakley’s smile remained in place. Her eyes, however, were doing the rapid calculation of a woman who had been handed something she could not quite determine the shape of—a compliment or its opposite, deployed with such pleasantness that there was no seam to grip.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she said, after a beat too long.
“A pleasure,” Cressida returned, and moved past her toward the next room.
She had taken perhaps four steps when she heard Theodore’s footfalls behind her, and then he was beside her, his hand finding the small of her back with the unmistakable purpose of a man who had crossed a room and intended everyone present to notice it.
“You handled this evening with extraordinary skill,” he murmured into her ear.
She suppressed a shudder at his closeness and the thick timbre of his voice so close.
“I merely told the truth in a useful order,” she somehow found the sense to say, and he hummed.
Harriet found her near the end of the evening in the quieter stretch of the card room, where the music reached only as an undertone. She took Cressida’s aside in a quiet corner without ceremony and looked at her with the frank, attentive expression she had worn since they were girls.
“How do things actually stand?” she asked.
Cressida looked at their joined hands. She considered answering with the precision she had applied all evening and found she did not want to.
“I think I am very much in love with him,” she admitted. “And it frightens me rather more than I expected.”