Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"Come. I want to show you something." Sebastian took her hand as they passed the drawing room the next day, leading her down a corridor she had not yet explored, and stopped before a set of double doors she had assumed, until now, belonged to some ordinary sitting room.
He produced a key. Amelia glanced at him.
"You have a locked mystery room?"
"Not just a room." He unlocked the door. "My library."
She smiled. "You have a private library?"
"You will understand when you see it."
He pushed the doors open.
They opened into something considerably more than that.
Shelves rose floor-to-ceiling on every wall, crowded with volumes bound in leather gone soft with handling, manuscripts stacked in careful towers on a long reading table, a single worn armchair angled toward the hearth its leather softened by years of use.
But it was not the size of the collection that caught her attention. It was the care. Every volume seemed to have been chosen deliberately.
She moved slowly toward the nearest shelf. Her fingers hovered over the spines without touching them.
"How long did this take?"
"Most of my life."
She looked back at him. He had gone very still.
"This room was the one place I could come when everything else became too loud," he said. "When I was younger, I would spend hours here. I suppose I never really stopped."
Amelia looked around again. "It feels like you."
"I had hoped you might say that." His mouth curved faintly.
She turned toward him.
He crossed the room. "Every volume in it. Every manuscript, every note in the margins. It is yours now, Amelia, as much as mine."
She blinked. "Sebastian..."
He gestured toward the shelves.
" Every ridiculous argument I have had with half the scholars in England. Every piece of this room that has mattered to me." He looked directly at her. "It belongs to you as much as it belongs to me."
Her throat tightened. "You would let me touch the books?"
He stared at her for a moment. Then he laughed.
"That is what moved you?"
"I thought you might have rules."
"I have rules."
She raised a brow.
"Naturally."
"None I expect you to obey."
She smiled.
"That sounds dangerous."
"It probably is."
She walked toward him.
"Thank you."
He reached for her hand.
"There is something else I would tell you, while we are here. Something no one outside the Circle knows. "
"That sounds considerably more serious than a bookshelf."
"It is." He drew her down onto the small settee near the hearth, keeping her hand in his, and for a moment simply looked at the fire rather than at her, as though gathering the courage to begin.
"You know what the Circle became, once the four of us had built it.
What you have not asked, because there was no reason to, is why four young men who claimed to prize scholarship above all else decided to build something so unscholarly instead. "
"I confess I had assumed simple boredom, or the general recklessness of young men left too much to their own devices at university."
"I wish it were that simple." He drew a slow breath.
"We were four boys when it began. Friends from Eton, then Cambridge. We read together, argued together, drank rather more than was sensible, and convinced ourselves we were engaged in something profound."
"How very scholarly."
"At first, it was precisely what people imagine. Philosophy. History. Politics. Literature. The nature of virtue. The nature of power."
"And then?"
"Then we grew older. And we had enough freedom to discover that there were rather a lot of things no one had ever taught us to discuss properly. Especially desire."
She smiled.
"We knew what society expected respectable men to believe about women, marriage, propriety and scandal." He paused. "What we did not know was whether any of it was true."
"And naturally, the four of you decided to investigate."
"Naturally. But there was more to it than youthful curiosity.
We had all grown up surrounded by people who spoke endlessley of propriety while behaving quite differently in private.
Men were expected to understand desire without ever admitting they had questions about it.
They were also permitted freedoms that women were condemned for even understanding.
Women were expected to marry with remarkably little knowledge of what marriage might require of them.
Everyone had opinions about love. Very few people seemed willing to examine it honestly. "
Amelia's expression softened.
"And you thought the four of you could do better?"
"We thought we could at least ask better questions.
Then it became more serious as the years passed.
" Sebastian glanced toward the shelves surrounding them.
"At first, we argued because we enjoyed arguing.
Then we began bringing what we had read into the discussions.
Philosophy. History. Poetry. Accounts of marriage.
Writings on desire. Eventually, we began bringing our own experiences. "
Amelia's brows lifted.
"Your own experiences."
"Yes, some of what you saw that night at Curzon Street grew out of those discussions."
"Thank you for telling me. All of it."
"Thank you for not looking at me the way I feared you might, once I'd said it. Though I confess I have never discussed this with anyone outside the Circle so plainly until this moment, and I am not entirely certain why tonight, in this room, felt like the night to finally do it."
"Because this room is the one place you have never had to perform anything for anyone." She squeezed his hand, feeling the weight of what he'd just handed her settle somewhere important. "And because you trust me with it."
"Yes," he said, quietly. "That is precisely why."
His arm came around her, drawing her closer, and for a long while neither of them said anything further, content simply to sit together before the fire.
She let the silence hold a moment, the crackling of the fire the only sound in the room, before she managed, gently, to lighten it. "Well. I confess this rather explains why four scholars overcomplicated love and intimacy so thoroughly. You made a philosophy of it."
A surprised laugh broke out of him, some of the weight visibly easing from his shoulders. "I begin to think you are correct."
"I generally am." She leaned into him, resting her head against his shoulder, feeling him relax by degrees beneath her.
She tilted her head, curiosity getting the better of her. "What did you learn from the Circle, Sebastian, that you actually enjoyed most?"
Something shifted behind his eyes, warm and considering, and his gaze dropped briefly to her mouth before returning to meet hers directly. "It is rather too early to tell you that."
"Too early?"
"Considerably too early."
"That is an infuriating answer."
"I know."
"When will it no longer be too early?"
His smile deepened.
"Perhaps one day."
She studied him suspiciously.
In the weeks that followed, they had slowly begun learning one another’s habits and preferences.
Sebastian had left before breakfast that morning, called away to some estate matter in Kent that could not, apparently, wait for luncheon, and so when Lady Henswick’s carriage arrived that afternoon to collect Amelia for the opera, she gave her husband's absence no further thought at all.
He had mentioned nothing of his evening plans before he'd gone, and she had assumed, reasonably enough, that he intended a quiet night at his club, or perhaps an early return to Ravensmere House to bury himself in whatever correspondence Kent had generated.
He did not think to mention it either way, she thought, settling into the box beside Lady Henswick, which I suppose is rather the natural way of two people still learning each other's habits.
They had been married scarcely a month. There was, she told herself, no reason either of them ought to account for every evening's whereabouts to the other, not when so much of the marriage itself still felt new enough to require careful navigating.
"Mrs. Casterton has worn that same puce velvet to every performance this Season," Lady Henswick murmured, fan lifted to hide her mouth, nodding toward a box across the house. "I begin to wonder whether she owns a second gown at all."
"Perhaps she simply prefers consistency."
"Perhaps she simply cannot afford a second gown, and consistency is the more flattering explanation.
" Lady Henswick's eyes glittered with the delight of a woman who considered gossip a civic duty.
During the interval, unable to bear another act accompanied by the whispered dissection of Mrs. Casterton's velvet, Amelia excused herself toward the corridors behind the boxes, ostensibly in search of lemonade, actually in search of a little peace.
She found neither lemonade nor peace. Rounding a narrow corner near the stage door, she found, instead, the very last person she expected to encounter.
"You," she said, startled into a laugh. "I thought Kent had claimed you for the day, or at the very least that you would be safely at your club by now."
"I returned from Kent rather earlier than expected, and found myself with an evening unaccounted for.
" Sebastian's mouth curved, equally caught off guard. "Nathaniel had a spare ticket and no interest in using it himself, having some prior engagement he declined to specify. And you, dear Wife, were nowhere to be found. How could I imagine where you’d got to!” "
"It would not have been a leap of the imagination, dear Husband,” Amelia tipped her head amused.
“As dear Lady Henswick has held the same box for the Season and I have attended every performance with her since the wedding.
" Amelia laughed. "We might have spared ourselves considerable astonishment had either of us simply mentioned our plans over breakfast this morning. "
"You were still abed when I left for Kent."
"And you were still in Kent when Lady Henswick's carriage collected me.
There, you see. A perfectly reasonable explanation for two people who somehow ended up at the same opera without either intending the coincidence.
" She said it lightly, though something warm settled beneath the words, a small, private pleasure at finding him here regardless of how it had happened. "What did you make of the first act?"
"I found the tenor's interpretation of the second aria regrettably thin. All volume, no genuine feeling behind it."
"I disagree entirely. I thought the volume rather effective, given the character's grief in that scene."
"Grief does not require quite so much shouting, Amelia."
"Says the man who once argued for a full quarter hour with Tristan over the correct pronunciation of a Latin word neither of you could actually prove."
"That was an entirely different matter."
"It was precisely the same matter. You simply enjoy being right regardless of the subject." She laughed, and he laughed with her, low and easy, both forgetting, for just a moment the constraints of propriety tied to the title they both carried..
"You cannot simply enjoy a performance, can you," he said. "You must analyze the architecture of it first and decide whether it has earned your feeling."
"I might say precisely the same of you, Your Grace, given how thoroughly you were frowning most likely at that tenor just now."
"I was not frowning."
"You were frowning magnificently."
He laughed again, the sound echoing pleasantly off the narrow walls, and his expression, unguarded and genuinely delighted, caught her off guard. "I confess I do not know when arguing with you became one of my favorite occupations."
"Somewhere around the third time I proved you wrong, I imagine."
"Somewhere around the first, if I am honest." His gaze dropped to her mouth, and the careful distance they usually maintained in public simply dissolved, and before any conscious decision was made, he kissed her softly, in a shadowed corner of a building full of people who might have discovered them at any moment.
She kissed him back without a single thought of caution, and when he finally drew away, a little breathless, something in his expression looked genuinely, helplessly surprised by his own happiness.
"We ought to return to our boxes," she managed in between kisses, "before the second act begins and Lady Henswick begins to wonder if I’ve run off."
"We ought," he agreed, and neither of them moved for a long moment more, reluctant to let the small, stolen quiet of that corridor end.