The Suitor
Seven, Florinda thought, watching the morning light shift across her bedroom ceiling. Seven weeks since the fall.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood—carefully, testing the strength of the limb that had betrayed her. The carpet was cool beneath her bare feet. Her leg held. It ached, as it always ached now when the weather turned damp, but it held.
Progress. That was what Margot called it.
She could manage the stairs without assistance now.
Could cross a room without clutching at furniture.
Could receive callers in the drawing room like a proper lady rather than holding court from a wheeled chair in the garden like some ancient invalid empress.
She could pretend, at least, to be the woman she had been before.
Before strong arms and fourteen stairs and a letter she should never have read.
She crossed to the window. The gardens below were brown and bare—November had stripped the roses to their bones, left the hedgerows skeletal and stark. From here, if she craned her neck at just the right angle, she could see the edge of Carthedge land.
She did not crane her neck. She was trying to be sensible.
* * *
"The hornbeam," Lord Camberton was saying, "is tragically underappreciated."
Four. He had visited four times this week. Florinda had begun counting without meaning to—the visits, the cups of tea, the minutes spent discussing hedge varieties. Her mind seemed incapable of not counting things now, as though she had caught the habit like an illness.
Margot's drawing room held the warmth of a well-tended fire and the faint sweetness of the hothouse flowers she kept on the mantel even in winter.
Lord Camberton sat in the chair nearest the hearth—the good chair, the one with the embroidered cushion—and Florinda could not help noticing how naturally he fit there.
How comfortable he looked, with his teacup balanced on his knee and his soft hands gesturing enthusiastically about shrubbery.
He did not look like a man in turmoil. He did not look like a man who had spent sleepless nights writing letters he would never send.
"Everyone plants hawthorn because it is traditional," he continued, leaning forward with the earnestness of a true believer, "but hornbeam offers superior density and a much finer leaf. The autumn colour alone—"
"How thorough of you."
The words came out dryer than she intended. Across the room, Margot looked up from her embroidery, needle suspended mid-stitch. Her eyes held warning.
Florinda reached for her own teacup—cold now, she had forgotten to drink it—and arranged her features into pleasantness.
Lord Camberton beamed, oblivious to the dryness. His face was open, unguarded, utterly free of subtext. It was, she supposed, a kind face. The face of a man who said what he meant and meant what he said and had probably never in his life hidden a confession in his boot.
"I have made quite a study of it," he said.
"Thornbury's hedgerows are the finest in three counties, if I may say so.
I should very much like to show them to you, Miss Ashbourne.
" He set down his teacup, brushed an invisible crumb from his waistcoat.
"Perhaps a drive tomorrow, if the weather holds? "
"I should like that," Florinda heard herself say.
And the strange thing was—she almost believed it.
* * *
The problem was the measuring.
She did not mean to do it. Did not want to hold every gesture, every word, every glance against a standard she had no right to remember.
And yet her traitor mind catalogued the differences with the precision of a naturalist pinning butterflies—this one here, that one there, neither quite matching the specimen she could not forget.
Lord Camberton's laugh: pleasant. Light and easy, offered freely at the smallest provocation. It did not catch in his throat as though dragged unwillingly from a defended place. It did not make her feel she had won a prize.
Lord Camberton's hands: soft. The hands of a gentleman who supervised his estate from a comfortable study rather than riding its borders himself. They had never lifted her. They had never trembled.
Lord Camberton's eyes: brown. Warm and earnest and uncomplicated. When he looked at her, she saw admiration. Interest. Perhaps the beginnings of genuine affection.
What she did not see was counting.
Frederick's eyes had counted her. Every time they met hers—over the rim of a teacup, across the length of the garden, in the suspended moment before he set her down at the top of the stairs—she had felt herself being catalogued.
Gold threads. Freckles. The particular shade of grey her irises became in afternoon light.
She had felt seen in a way that was almost unbearable, as though he were memorising her against some future when memory would be all he had.
Lord Camberton looked at her the way one looked at a pleasant prospect.
Frederick had looked at her the way one looked at the sun—knowing it would blind him, unable to look away.
"Miss Ashbourne?" Lord Camberton's voice pulled her back. He had set down his teacup and was regarding her with mild concern. "You seem distant. I hope my discourse on hedgerows has not bored you."
"Not at all." She forced her spine straighter, her smile brighter. "I was merely thinking of... hornbeams."
His face lit up like a child offered sweets. "You were? I am delighted to hear it. So few people appreciate the finer points of—"
He continued. Florinda nodded at intervals she hoped were appropriate and tried not to think about letters hidden beneath mattresses.
She was not successful.
* * *
After Lord Camberton had gone—after he had bowed over her hand and promised to call tomorrow and walked to his carriage with the buoyant step of a man who believed himself making progress—Margot set down her embroidery.
"Well," she said.
"Well." Florinda remained by the window, watching his carriage disappear down the drive. Her tea sat abandoned on the side table, stone cold.
"He seems quite taken with you."
"He seems quite taken with hedgerows. I merely happen to be present."
"Florinda." Margot's voice held that particular quality—part exasperation, part worry—that Florinda had come to dread. "He has called four times this week. He looks at you as though you have hung the moon. These are not the actions of a man who is merely tolerating your company."
"I know." Florinda turned from the window. The fire had burned low; the room was growing cold. She crossed to the hearth, held her hands toward the fading warmth. "Lord Camberton has very strong opinions about hedgerows."
"Does he."
"He believes the hornbeam is underappreciated."
"How... thorough of him." Margot rose, joining her by the fire. Their shoulders nearly touched. "I am not asking you to love him, Florinda. I am asking you to consider him. There is a difference."
"I am trying, Margot." The words came out hoarse, scraped from somewhere deeper than she had intended to go. "He is everything I should want. Everything I ought to want. Safe and respectable and uncomplicated."
"But?"
But he does not count my gold threads. But he does not look at me as though seeing me might destroy him. But his letters—if he ever wrote me letters—would probably contain very detailed descriptions of hornbeam leaves.
"There is no but," Florinda said. "I am merely... adjusting my expectations."
Margot's hand found hers—a brief squeeze, there and gone. "Time." Her voice was soft. "Give yourself time."
But time was precisely what they did not have. The engagement ball was in fourteen days. Fourteen days until she would stand in a crowded room and watch Frederick pledge himself to another woman. Fourteen days to learn how to want what was possible instead of grieving what was not.
Fourteen. She was counting again.
She could not seem to stop.
* * *
The letter arrived at dusk, delivered by a rider in Carthedge livery.
Florinda recognised the handwriting through the drawing room window—the elegant loops, the careful spacing—and her stomach clenched before she had even broken the seal. Penelope. Writing to her. Penelope, who was engaged to the man Florinda could not stop thinking about, wanted to tell her things.
She waited until she was alone in her room—the door closed, the candle lit, the evening sounds of the household muted through the walls—before she unfolded the pages.
Dearest Florinda,
I hope this letter finds you well recovered. I have thought of you often since your departure from Carthedge—your kindness during my illness meant more than you know.
The ball is in a fortnight. The announcement ball. I am told I should be excited. I have a beautiful gown. My mother has opinions about the flower arrangements. Everything is proceeding exactly as it should.
Frederick has been distant since returning from London. He shuts himself in his study for hours. He does not speak of what business took him there. I do not ask. There is a great deal we do not ask each other.
I am writing to ask if you will come. I know it is a great deal to ask—the journey, the crowds, the dancing you will not be able to do.
But I find I cannot face this ball without a friend.
A real friend, not the society acquaintances who will smile at my gown and whisper about my prospects the moment I turn away.
Please come. I need you there.
Your friend always,
Penelope
Florinda read the letter twice. Her hands were steady. Her heart was not.
Frederick has been distant. The words caught like thorns. He shuts himself in his study for hours.
Writing letters, perhaps. Letters he would never send, to a woman he could not have.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps he was merely attending to estate business. Perhaps the distance had nothing to do with her at all.
She should not hope. She had no right to hope.
She would go to the ball. She would watch him announce his engagement. She would prove to herself—and to him, if he cared to notice—that she could stand in the same room without shattering.