Chapter 10
Linthorpe Library
Acklan Castle
The spine read Shakespeare's Sonnets. The little book was so worn it fell open naturally in Cori's hands.
She pulled her wrapper more tightly against the cold and tilted the volume toward the candle.
The pages were soft with use, the margins of several sonnets marked in a small, careful hand as though the passages had held a special interest for the reader.
The ink was faded but still visible. Whoever had held this book, once upon a time, had held it often.
The library was dark beyond the small circle of her candle.
The castle settled around her the way old stone settles, not silence exactly, but something older and steadier than silence, walls that had absorbed centuries of weather and were entirely unmoved by yet another cold August night.
A draft moved through from somewhere she couldn't identify and she shivered, tucking the book against her chest with one arm and pulling her wrapper closed with the other.
Cori should go back to her chambers and try to get some sleep, but her mind was not at rest and it hadn’t been all day. She crossed to the nearest chair, claimed it and read by candlelight in the darkness.
She’d been absorbed enough in the page that the first she knew of him was a creak somewhere in the corridor, and then a voice in the doorway.
"Cori?"
She startled, nearly dropping the book, and looked up. Linthorpe stood in the open doorway, candle in hand, still dressed. He was looking at her with an expression she couldn't read in the uncertain light.
"Forgive me," he said, at once. "I didn’t mean to startle you. I didn’t know anyone was here."
Her heart was still pounding when she found her voice. "Nor I," she managed. "I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d find something to read."
He came further into the room, his candle adding its small circle of light to hers, and his gaze dropped to the book in her lap.
"That was my wife's," he said quietly. There was no accusation in his voice, just something old and carefully maintained.
Cori looked down at the volume, seeing it differently now. The worn spine. The soft pages. The small careful marks in the margins. "I’m so sorry," she said. "I didn’t know. I’ll put it back."
"No." He said it quickly, and then seemed to consider the quickness of it. "No, please. She would’ve..." He paused. "Alice loved the sonnets. She’d read them aloud sometimes in the evenings. She had a good voice for it."
Cori didn’t say anything. She had learned, over the past days, that there were moments when James Westham needed the space to finish a thought without being helped along, and this seemed like one of those times.
"She would’ve liked you," he said, and it seemed to cost him something to say it, the way certain true things did.
The draft moved through the room again and Cori shivered before she could stop herself.
He noticed, then crossed to the hearth without a word and crouched to coax the banked embers back to something useful.
Cori set the book on the side table and rose, not quite knowing what to do with herself while he worked, but unwilling to remain sitting while he did so.
Within a few minutes, a small fire had caught and the room was fractionally warmer and considerably less dark than it had been before he’d arrived.
James straightened and turned back to her, and she realized he was closer than she had quite appreciated, the library smaller with the two of them in it and the firelight rearranging the shadows.
"Better?" he said.
She nodded. “Thank you."
He didn’t move away. She didn’t move away either, and she was keenly aware of both of those things.
"I’ve been thinking about today," she said.
He looked at her. "Have you?"
"This morning at breakfast, you came to me and started to say something, and then everything intervened, and then this afternoon in the billiard room, you were..." She looked for the word. "Well, you did not seem yourself. And I don’t know what to make of any of it."
He said nothing.
"I kept thinking I must have done something," she said. "Without meaning to, of course. But I don’t know what it was. And I—”
"You did nothing," he said very softly. "Nothing at all."
"Then what was it?" she asked.
He was very still.
"I care," she said simply. "Whatever it is that’s bothered you, whatever is sitting with you, I care about it."
For a long moment he said nothing. The fire shifted behind them.
The draft moved through again, but this time Cori did not shiver.
James had closed the short distance between them without her quite noticing, and the warmth of him was there, real and immediate, along with the faint scent of sandalwood that she had first noticed in his corridor and had not quite forgotten.
She tipped her chin up to look at him and found him already looking at her with something in his grey eyes she had not seen there before.
Cori reached up and brushed her fingers against his jaw.
She felt him go very still beneath her touch. And then he kissed her.
It was not tentative. His hand came up to her hair and her breath caught, warmth rushing through her all at once. She forgot the cold entirely, forgot the day, forgot every careful thought she’d been carrying since that morning. In that moment, there was only this.
Cori kissed him back. He tasted of tea and brandy and every hope she’d been too careful not to name.
She wasn’t sure how long the kiss lasted. But long enough that she’d stopped thinking about anything else entirely. She leaned into him and sighed against his mouth when he held her close. If he would only—
"Papa?" Hannah’s voice came from the doorway.
They broke apart.
The little girl stood in the threshold in her nightrail, her light hair loose around her shoulders and her expression one of deep, practical focus rather than any particular surprise. "I can’t find Marmalade," she said.
James looked at his daughter. Then he looked at Cori. She watched him pull his composure back around himself, almost before she had fully seen what was there.
"How did you get out of the nursery?" he asked Hannah.
"The door doesn’t latch properly," she said as though the fact was longstanding and well-documented. "I’ve told Pritchard."
"We will discuss that tomorrow." He crossed to her and crouched down to her level. "Marmalade will be wherever he has decided to be. He’ll come back when he is ready."
"But what if he's cold?"
"Marmalade," James began very patiently, "has never been cold a day in his life. He is a very resourceful cat."
"Cook doesn't like him in the kitchens," Hannah said.
"No," James agreed. "She doesn’t."
"She doesn't mind the others."
"The others do what they’re supposed to do."
Hannah considered this with the seriousness she brought to everything. Then she looked past her father at Cori, her expression shifting into something warmer and more curious. "You have pretty hair," she said.
"Thank you," Cori replied, completely aware that her voice was not steady but was doing her best to sound as composed as possible.
"It’s very long."
"It is."
"Mine is long too." Hannah seemed satisfied by this common ground. "Papa, may I say goodnight to Cori?"
"You may," he said.
Hannah crossed the room, deliberate and dignified. A five-year-old on a formal errand. She held out her hand and Cori took it. Hannah shook it once, with great seriousness. "Goodnight, Cori."
"Goodnight, Hannah." Cori squeezed the girl’s fingers gently. "Marmalade will be all right."
"I know," Hannah said, in a tone that suggested she had always known this. Then she turned and went back to her father and took his hand. James looked at Cori across the length of the room.
Whatever he might have said, he did not say it. Perhaps because Hannah was there. Perhaps because whatever had just happened between them was not something that could be addressed in a library doorway at midnight with a five-year-old holding his hand.
"Good evening, my dear," he said.
And then he turned and walked Hannah back down the corridor toward the nursery, and Cori was alone in the library with the fire and the candle and the book of sonnets and the feeling of his hand in her hair, and the memory of his lips on hers, and the last thing he had said to her still warm in her ears.
My dear.
Not Miss Corinna. Not Miss Beckett. Not even Cori.
My dear.
She sat back in the chair and held the book of sonnets in her lap and did not even try to read it.
The endearment had left James’ lips before he’d even realized what he’d said.
The corridor was dark and Hannah's hand was warm in his, her footsteps small and certain beside him. And all he could think was that he had just called Corinna Beckett my dear in the same tone he might have used if she’d already been his, as though his mouth had simply decided to say what was true and hadn’t consulted him on the matter.
He was a fool.
He was worse than a fool. He’d spent the entire day in careful reconstruction, from the moment he’d walked out of the great hall after the wedding breakfast to the last of the evening.
He’d put everything back in its proper place and reinforced it.
He'd been exactly what the day required of him, all day, until he wasn't.
And then he had gone to the library because he couldn’t sleep and because Hawkesworth's letter was sitting in his desk drawer like a coal in his chest, and she had been there, in the chair he thought of as Alice's chair, and she’d told him she cared, and he’d kissed her.
He had kissed her.
He hadn’t planned it. He hadn’t decided to do so.
He’d simply run out of every reason not to at exactly the same moment she had put her hand against his face, and the result was that he’d kissed the youngest Beckett sister in his own library at midnight and called her ‘my dear’ on the way out, like a man with no more sense than—
"Papa?" Hannah said.
"Yes."
"Do you think Marmalade is in the kitchens?"
"Very possibly."
"Even though Cook doesn't like him there?"
"Marmalade," James said, "has never allowed Cook's feelings on the matter to inconvenience him in the slightest."
Hannah seemed to find this satisfying. She swung his hand slightly as they walked.
He thought about Doctor Wells. About what the man had said, and not said.
The seizure had been weeks ago, but the weight of it sat in the back of every decision he had made since like a stone in a boot.
He had no right to kiss Cori. He had no right to call her his dear in that tone or to let his hand into her hair or to be in any way the thing she might come to rely on, when he couldn’t tell her with any certainty what he could or could not offer.
It wasn’t fair to her.
Besides, she was going home. She had a life across the Atlantic, a business, sisters, a house full of her father's things and her father's memory.
But he’d kissed her anyway.
He was, without question, a fool.
"Here we are," he said, at the nursery door.
Hannah went in without protest, which was either genuine tiredness or strategic compliance. He suspected the latter.
He tucked her in. He waited until she was settled.
"Papa?" she said, from the pillow.
"Yes."
"I like Cori."
James looked at his daughter in the dark. "I know you do."
"Do you like her?"
More than he should allow himself. But he wouldn’t say that to his daughter. "Go to sleep, Hannah," he said instead.
She did, with the swift totality of the very young, and James sat in the chair beside her bed for a while longer than was strictly necessary, looking at nothing in particular, thinking about a woman sitting alone in his library with a book of sonnets that had once belonged to his wife and the words ‘my dear’ still hanging somewhere in the air between them.
He had no idea what he was going to do.
That was not, in his experience, a comfortable place to be.