Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
The meadow beyond Richmond was prettier than Amelia had expected.
That was the first thought that occurred to her as the carriage rolled to a stop beneath the shade of an enormous oak. The second was that she had spent the entire journey reminding herself that this was not an assignation. It was a discussion.
Her mother descended after her, accepting the footman's hand and immediately turning her attention toward the meadow with the pleased expression of a woman who had been promised fresh air and had been given considerably more of it than London could provide.
Sebastian was already there.
He stood several yards away beside a blanket spread beneath the oak, one hand resting on the back of a folding chair while he spoke with a groom.
He had dressed more simply than she had expected, though nothing about him could ever truly be called simple.
His dark coat fit his broad shoulders perfectly, his waistcoat was a muted shade of blue, and his dark chestnut hair had been brushed back from his forehead.
"Miss Hartwell."
"Your Grace."
His gaze moved to her mother.
"Lady Hartwell."
"Your Grace." Her mother smiled. "I hope we have not kept you waiting."
"Not at all."
His eyes returned to Amelia.
Her mother settled herself beneath the tree with a book and a small basket of embroidery, close enough to satisfy propriety and sufficiently occupied to make it clear that she had no intention of listening to every word.
Sebastian gestured toward the blanket. "Shall we?"
She settled onto the blanket Sebastian's footman had spread beneath a wide oak near the river's edge while arranging her skirts, aware, with every fiber of her attention, of precisely how close he chose to sit.
He was near enough for easy conversation, yet far enough that even her mother, watching from her own chair a discreet distance away with a book she had yet to open and an embroidery hoop that was used to receiving more attention than it was, could find nothing to object to.
"Your mother appears entirely absorbed in her needlework," he teased
"My mother has not moved that needle since we arrived. She has instead been watching us with the singular focus of a woman composing a very detailed account for my father's benefit later this evening. I would advise choosing your words with unusual care."
"I generally do." Something warm crossed his face, which he quickly restrained. "Though I confess I find myself less careful in your company than I am accustomed to being elsewhere, which I have not yet decided whether to consider a flaw or a virtue."
Do not let that land the way it wishes to land.
"You have brought your papers, I trust."
"I have. Along with rather extensive commentary I did not ask for and apparently received in full regardless.
" He produced the pages from a leather folio at his side, and she caught sight of her own handwriting crowding the margins.
"You have terrible handwriting when you are annoyed, Miss Hartwell.
It grows progressively smaller and more aggressive with each page. I found it rather illuminating."
He held them a moment before passing them over, studying her with an expression she could not read. "I confess I read your notes a third time last night. I found myself considerably more persuaded by your objection to my treatment of the Athenian sources than I expected to be."
"Only considerably more persuaded. Not completely."
"I am rarely entirely persuaded of anything on first challenge.
I find it wants testing before I trust it.
" He settled back against the oak's broad trunk, and the easy, unguarded posture of it, so different from the careful composure he wore in every ballroom, struck her more than she wished to admit.
"Test it with me, Miss Hartwell. Properly, this time, without an audience of scandalized onlookers to interrupt us. "
And so she did.
It began, as it always seemed to between them, as an argument, her objection to his treatment of the Athenian sources unfolding into a broader dispute over whether formal education could ever be separated from the biases of the institutions that delivered it, and from there into a genuine, sprawling conversation that ranged from Plato's Republic to the education of Roman daughters to a heated, entirely tangential disagreement over whether Herodotus could reasonably be trusted on any point where he had not witnessed the events himself.
At one point she reached across the blanket to take the paper at precisely the same moment he reached for them. Their fingers touched. Neither moved. It was nothing, a simple accident.
Yet Amelia became acutely aware of the warmth of his hand beneath hers. Sebastian's gaze dropped briefly to their hands. Then lifted to her face. Neither spoke.
Her mother cleared her throat softly and Amelia withdrew her hand.
They moved from education to philosophy, from philosophy to history, and somehow from history into a discussion about whether a historian could ever truly be impartial.
Amelia argued that every historian brought his own assumptions to the page.
Sebastian disagreed. "Then you believe objectivity is impossible?"
"I believe perfect objectivity is impossible."
"That is a very different claim."
"Yes."
"Which means you concede that objectivity is still worth pursuing."
"Certainly."
He nodded. "Then we agree."
"We do not."
"We do on that point."
"One point."
"I shall treasure it."
She laughed.
Over the course of the picnic, Amelia found herself leaning forward without meaning to, gesturing with her bread in a manner her governess would have found appalling, and did not notice the hour passing until the sun had shifted considerably lower through the branches above them.
"You are laughing at me," she said, catching the corner of his mouth twitching for perhaps the fourth time in as many minutes.
"I am not laughing at you. I am observing you argue with your entire body, which I find more entertaining than I anticipated when I invited you here.
" His eyes held real warmth now, none of the careful restraint from the bookshop.
"You gesture, Miss Hartwell, when you are certain you are correct.
Your hands move before your argument has fully finished forming itself. "
"That is a very ungracious observation to make of a woman you invited to spend the afternoon with you."
"I thought you preferred honesty."
"I prefer flattering honesty."
"Ah. Then I have failed you."
"Quite."
He smiled.
She tried not to smile in return and failed.
"I suppose I ought to warn you," he said, "that I have begun making observations of my own."
"Have you?"
"Several."
"That sounds dangerous."
"For whom?"
"For me, presumably."
"Why?"
"Because you seem to have developed the unfortunate habit of noticing things."
His smile deepened. "Only about you."
The answer was so quietly delivered that Amelia forgot her next retort.
She looked away first.
Sebastian, evidently pleased with himself, leaned back. She glanced toward her mother, still stubbornly occupied with her untouched embroidery, and lowered her voice slightly, though there was no genuine need to. "I confess I did not expect this."
"Expect what?"
"This." She gestured, somewhat helplessly, at the whole of the afternoon, the scattered papers, the empty basket, the sun sinking toward the river in a manner that suggested hours had passed rather than the single one she'd braced herself for.
"It grows late."
"It does. We have been here for hours." He did not move to rise, and neither, she noticed, did she. "I ought to see you and your mother home before the light goes entirely."
"You ought to, yes."
Amelia found herself unwilling to be the one who ended it first, some reckless, unfamiliar part of her wishing the argument might simply continue, endlessly, rather than surrender to the ordinary business of carriages and goodbyes.
"There is a great deal more to say on the matter of Herodotus," she said finally, reaching for the excuse the way she might reach for a rope.
"There is a very great deal more," Sebastian agreed, gathering the papers with far more care than the task required, clearly in no greater hurry than she was to conclude it. "I do not believe an afternoon has settled it satisfactorily."
"No. I do not believe it has either."
"Perhaps another occasion, then, better suited to a proper conclusion."
"Perhaps," she said, and felt her mother's attention sharpen even more before she'd finished the word.For once, Amelia did not entirely mind being watched, so long as it meant she might have this again—whatever this was, however careful they were both pretending to be about naming it.