Chapter 5 #3
"Marmalade." Hannah leapt from her spot on the settee and started toward her kitten.
"He shouldn’t be in here, Hannah," Miss Roseberry said, from a chair near the door
"He knows that," Hannah said, nearing the little creature. "He doesn’t care."
Marmalade yawned. Hannah crouched to collect the kitten, but he let out a horrible sound that made clear he had other ideas.
"That kitten is not supposed to be in the drawing room," Daniel announced from across the room. "I believe that has been well established."
"I don’t believe Marmalade was asked his opinion on the matter,” Reese said, not helping matters in the least.
"The boy has a point," Hythe remarked, without looking up from his gazette.
Mrs. Fairleigh laughed, warm and unguarded, and it changed her face completely.
At the moment, however, Hannah was losing the negotiation with Marmalade. The kitten squirmed against her and he expressed opinions loudly.
"Here." Cori crossed the room and held out her hands toward Hannah.
The little girl frowned as though she was trying to decide whether or not to accept expert assistance. "He likes you," she said finally, and passed the kitten to Cori.
Marmalade submitted to the transfer with reservations. Cori got her hand under the little ball of fluff and settled him against her. He made one last sound of protest before subsiding into a grudging purr.
"How did you do that?" Hannah asked, her blue eyes rounded in awe.
"Practice," Cori told her. "And he knows I mean it."
"You mean what?"
"That I won't drop him. That I'm not frightened of him. That I'll put him down if he wants it."
Hannah seemed to consider this with the seriousness she brought to everything. "I will try that.”
"You have to actually mean it,” Cori said. "He knows the difference."
"Animals always know," Hannah agreed solemnly.
Cori looked up.
Mrs. Fairleigh was watching her. Not the warm social attention she had been giving the room.
Something quieter and more considered, her blue eyes steady on Cori's face in a way that lasted a beat longer than conversation required.
Then the lady turned her attention to Linthorpe and said something under her breath.
Cori would love to know what Mrs. Fairleigh had said. She crossed the rug to the settee with Marmalade in her arms, who was purring contentedly. Then Hannah settled in beside her.
The room moved around them. Someone refilled glasses. Mr. Atherton said something that made Cara laugh across the room. The fire settled in the hearth.
Cori was aware, without quite deciding to be aware of it, that Linthorpe had crossed the room and was standing beside the settee.
"Miss Corinna." His voice was low enough that it belonged to no one else in the room. "The north field. I had a thought, after Hythe raised the drainage question at dinner last night." He paused. "The section above the field, where the land is uneven. I have never walked it after the rain."
"No?" Cori said, and was rather pleased with how level it came out.
"I wondered if you might walk the boundary with me tomorrow morning. After breakfast." He looked at her with that direct grey gaze of his. "You seemed to have a view on it."
Cori's belly flipped. The same flip she’d felt the first time she’d spotted him at the Plumstead ball.
"I would be glad to,” she said softly.
"Good," he said. Then he moved away to speak with Reese, unhurried, as though he had merely asked a practical question and received a practical answer, which was precisely what had happened, but it felt like so much more.
Like something monumental. Something she would think about when she climbed into bed that evening.
Marmalade still purred in her arms and Hannah stroked the kitten’s belly.
Across the room, Mrs. Fairleigh had said something to her husband and was smiling at his reply, perfectly at ease, and gave no indication that she had been watching Cori at all.
And, yet, Cori was fairly certain she’d noticed everything.
By the time the drawing room had emptied and the castle had settled into its nighttime quiet, Cori had two things she could not stop thinking about.
First was the way Mrs. Fairleigh watched her all evening, and then turned to Linthorpe to whisper something in his ear. Cori would give her share of Beckett Salt to know what the lady had said.
The second was Linthorpe himself. Standing beside the settee with his voice pitched low, asking her to walk the north boundary. After breakfast. As though it were a perfectly ordinary request that meant nothing in particular, which it was, but it also seemed extraordinary at the same time.
So, Cori did what she always did when something was turning over in her mind and would not stop. She went in search of her sisters.
She knocked on Cait's door and found Cara was already there, which was not terribly surprising. They had always done this. The three of them gravitated toward the same room at the end of the day without any pre-arrangement being made. They’d started when they were small enough to share a bed in a cabin aboard one of their father’s ships, crossing from Bermuda.
Cara had always been in the middle because she was the oldest while Cait and Cori pressed against either side of her.
The ritual had continued for many years afterward.
But now Cara had Darling, and Cait was about to have Lord Daniel, and the world was arranging itself differently.
But at this moment they were here, the three of them, like old times, in Cait's chamber at Acklan with the candles burning and the moors dark beyond the window.
And it felt, without anyone saying so, like something worth holding onto, something worth remembering.
Cait was at the dressing table in her nightrail, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders. Cara was on the bed with her feet tucked under her, looking like she had been waiting for this moment for some time and was ready to dispense with pleasantries.
"All right. Sit down," Cara said, patting the coverlet beside her. "And tell us everything."
"There’s nothing to tell." Cori sat down, obediently.
"Corinna Grace Beckett," Cara said pleasantly, "I have known you since the day you were born. And you are not leaving these chambers until you tell us all of it.”
Cori blinked at her oldest sister. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
Cara released an exasperated sigh. “Ever since the Plumstead ball, you’ve been in awe of Linthorpe.”
Well, that was hardly a secret between the three of them. It had taken a bit of doing, after all, for them to learn Linthorpe’s identity after the ball…
“And ever since we arrived you’ve been wearing that face.”
“What face?”
“It’s been even more so today,” Cait agreed, meeting Cori’s gaze through the reflection of her mirror.
“My face has been more so?”
“Do not play coy,” Cara told her. “You know exactly what we’re talking about.”
Cori looked between her sisters and decided that she was not going to manage this gracefully. "He invited me to walk the north boundary with him tomorrow," she said. "After breakfast."
"Did he?" Cara asked, her brow lifted in surprise.
“You don’t have to look at me like that.” Cori shook the question away. "He’s not courting me. It’s just because of the drainage conversation at dinner last night.”
“Ah, yes, drainage. How very romantic.” Cara frowned slightly.
"He wants to look at the land above the north field,” Cori explained with a shrug. “He thought I might have an opinion worth hearing. That’s all."
"Indeed. I am certain that is the only reason," Cara replied, and this time it was her turn to catch Cait’s gaze in the dressing mirror.
"Cara," Cait said slowly.
"I am being supportive." Cara turned her full attention to Cori. "I was at the table too, Cori. I saw the way he looked at you when you spoke last night. And now he wants you to walk the north boundary with him. That is promising, I suppose.”
“It’s very him,” Cait said. “He takes his duties as duke very seriously.”
“I daresay he takes everything very seriously,” Cara added thoughtfully.
She was quiet for a moment, the way she always was when she was thinking a problem through.
"Reese thinks very highly of him," she said at last. "He has said more than once that Linthorpe is one of the most deliberate men he has ever met. That he doesn’t do or say things without meaning them. "
"That is either very encouraging," Cori said, "or the most terrifying thing anyone has said to me in a sennight."
"Probably both," Cara agreed. Then she turned to Cait. "What is your impression of him? You’ve spent more time in his company than we have."
Cait set down her hairbrush and turned from the mirror to face them properly.
"He’s a good man," she said. "Genuinely. Not in the way people say it when they mean harmless, but in the way that means it’s cost him something.
" She paused, seeming to choose her words with more care than she usually did.
"He loved his wife very much. When she died, he put a great deal of himself away. Daniel says he’s not broken, but more like a man who decided the safest thing was to feel very little, and he became rather good at it. "
"That is not a very encouraging portrait," Cara said, her voice laced with cautious concern.
"No," Cait agreed. "But he almost laughed twice at the supper in London, apparently. Daniel was keeping count."
“How do you keep track of someone almost laughing?” Cara grimaced just a bit.
But Cait was undeterred by the question. “You would have to ask Daniel. He is the one keeping track and I believe him.” Then she glanced at Cori. "By the way, Daniel says this is a rare feat.”
Cori’s cheeks warmed, and she was glad of the dim candlelight.
"Linthorpe also has Hannah," Cait continued. "She is everything to him. Anyone who matters to him will matter in relation to her first."
“Hannah clearly adores you," Cara said.
"As does her kitten," Cait added.