6. In Which a Gentleman Discovers That Rescue Has a Price – Various locations throughout London #2
I like music. I have always liked music.
The Geneva salons had some of the finest chamber performances I have ever heard, and one of the few things I had genuinely loved about the Continent was the freedom to attend concerts as an anonymous audience member, without the social machinery that London attaches to every pleasure.
I attended Marguerite's musicale. I heard almost none of the music.
Because Dunmore stationed himself next to Charlotte for the entire performance.
Because I could see, from across the room, the slight stiffness in her shoulders that meant she was listening to running commentary rather than the soprano.
Because her left hand was in her lap, doing the thing it did when she was trying very hard not to do anything with it.
I sat on the other side of the room and watched. This was what I had been reduced to: attending musical performances to observe a woman across a crowded room while pretending to listen to a soprano.
My old friends from Oxford would not have recognised me. I barely recognised myself.
The worst of it was not the watching. The worst of it was the accompanying narration in my own head — the one that kept cataloguing Charlotte.
The way she held herself through Dunmore's whispered commentary.
The micro-expressions I had not known I had learned to read until I found myself reading them constantly.
The tiny exhale when the first piece ended, and she thought she might be briefly reprieved.
She wasn't reprieved. Dunmore had thoughts about the accompanist's wrist angle.
When the musicale ended, I was across the room in seconds, deploying Juliet as a pretext with a fluency that would have impressed me if it hadn't been so thoroughly compromised by its purpose.
We made it to the corridor. Charlotte turned to face me, and I was struck again — as I am struck regularly now, as though it were new each time, which is its own particular species of torment — by how completely she has become someone I hadn't prepared for.
She said my name. Just Edward. And I thought: this is the problem. This is exactly the problem.
Because the word uncle used to be a shape that fit.
A comfortable category. Someone who rescues you from trees and hides in libraries and occupies the useful function of interesting-adult-who-is-not-a-parent.
And now she says Edward without the prefix, and the category no longer has an edge, and I don't know what to do with something that has no category.
"People are going to notice," she said.
"People are already noticing. The question is whether you care."
She looked at me. And I looked back. And we were standing in the corridor of my father’s home with twenty people fifteen feet away, and neither of us moved.
She stepped back first. Said she knew. Left.
I stood in the corridor and counted to sixty before I could trust myself to return to the room.
Dunmore was telling Charlotte about a German snuffbox with remarkable hinges.
I stood against the wall and watched her perform interest, and thought: this is what I am offering her. Moments in corridors. The occasional lie about carriages. Four minutes of relief, and then back to the snuffboxes.
She deserves better than moments in corridors.
The thought was not new. But it arrived differently that night. Not as guilt — the guilt I had long practice managing — but as something sharper. Something that required an answer rather than endurance.
I left early. Nobody noticed.
Sunday: Ashford House
Sunday I stayed home.
This was the right decision. I had been telling myself all week that I needed to stop.
That what I was doing — inventing pretexts, positioning myself, lying about carriages and Plutarch and tomorrow's breakfast arrangements — was not helping Charlotte navigate her Season.
It was helping me. It was giving me reasons to be near her, and I was dressing those reasons in the language of family loyalty so I could live with myself.
I stayed home. I read. I answered correspondence. I did the estate paperwork that had been sitting unopened for a fortnight.
I was on the same page of my book for an hour and a half.
The trouble with Sunday was that I knew the pattern. Monday's tea. Wednesday's park. Friday's Hatchard's. Saturday's musicale. And Sunday, always Sunday, was when the week's accumulated weight arrived all at once, with no event to attend and no role to play and nothing to do but sit with it.
I thought about Charlotte's notebook. I had not seen it, but I had heard about it from Eleanor with a level of detail that suggested Eleanor had opinions about its contents.
A ranked list of suitable gentlemen. Colour-coded by some criterion I could not determine.
Charlotte managing her Season the way she managed everything — as a campaign with objectives and contingencies.
I wondered where Dunmore ranked.
I wondered if there was any scenario in which a twenty-three-year-old earl with a neglected estate, eighteen months of self-imposed exile, and a relationship to Charlotte that was technically defined by family law appeared anywhere in such a notebook.
I knew the answer.
Father found me in the library, staring at the ceiling.
I had been expecting this. Father has a particular instinct for finding people in rooms they are using for purposes other than the room's stated function.
He had found me in the library at twelve, crying over a book I didn't understand.
At sixteen, hiding from a conversation I didn't want to have.
At twenty, before I left for Oxford, trying to write a letter to a girl who did not love me and knowing it.
He found people in libraries. It was one of his gifts.
"You're brooding," he said.
"I'm reading."
"The same page for an hour doesn't count as reading. That's brooding with a prop."
I put the book down.
We were quiet for a moment. Father settled into the chair across from me with the patience of a man who has sat with difficult silences before. He had, of course. He had sat with worse silences than this, in rooms heavier than this, and waited.
"How did you do it?" I asked. "With Marguerite. When the circumstances were what they were."
Father was quiet for a moment. I could hear him deciding how much I was actually asking.
"I decided she was worth it," he said. "The complication of it. The opinions. The difference in our ages, and what people would say, and all the reasons it was inadvisable. I decided those things were smaller than she was."
"And if she hadn't felt the same?"
"Then I would have spent the rest of my life knowing I'd been honest about what I wanted. Which seemed preferable to spending it wondering."
I looked at the ceiling. Father looked at me.
"I'm not going to ask," he said, after a moment. "But I want you to know that if you wanted to tell me something, I would listen. And I would not tell you that you were wrong for feeling it."
The thing is, he didn't need to ask. I suspect he had known since the dinner at Ashbourne House, when I had sat across from Charlotte and spent the better part of two hours trying not to look at her, which is not a thing you do with someone you regard as uncomplicated.
Father notices the things people try not to do.
It is his most effective parental quality, and also the most infuriating.
"There's nothing to tell," I said.
He stood. Put a hand briefly on my shoulder.
"When there is," he said, "I'll be here."
He left me with my book and my ceiling.
I thought about what he had said. About deciding someone was worth it. About the arithmetic of inadvisable things.
And then I thought about Charlotte, somewhere across London, probably enduring whatever Sunday brought. The aunts' scheming. Dunmore's snuffboxes. The performative cheerfulness of a girl who has arranged every happy ending except her own.
I thought about her notebook. About the ranked list. About whatever she had written, in her careful hand, in the margins where no one was supposed to look.
I had told her always.
I sat alone in the library until the fire burned low, and I tried to decide whether I was the sort of man who meant what he said.
I didn't have an answer.
But Monday had another of Marguerite's invitations on the hall table.
And on Tuesday morning, I went.