Chapter Two
Cedric Fairfax climbed the hill to his observatory as he did on every clear night, which was to say like a man going to the one place in the world where the dead did not follow him quite so closely.
It was a strange thing to have learned about grief, that it kept to certain rooms. Eleanor was everywhere in the manor below: in the morning parlour where she had liked to sit, in the long gallery where her portrait hung beside his own, in the very silences of the place, which seemed always to be the silence of a question she had asked him once and he had failed to answer.
But she had never cared for the stars. She had thought his observatory a cold and tedious folly; and so she did not come here.
Here, beneath the open seam of the dome, with the whole indifferent universe wheeling overhead, the band about his chest would loosen by a notch, and he could draw a breath that did not taste of guilt.
The sky asked nothing of him. It did not require love. A man might give it his whole attention and never once be found wanting, and that, to Cedric, was very near to peace.
So he came to the door expecting darkness, quiet, and the cold, familiar comfort of being alone. Instead, he found the door ajar and a figure standing at his telescope, one hand laid upon the brass.
The anger came up in him fast and complete, as it always did now: a thing he had stopped troubling to govern because there was so little left in his life worth governing it for.
This was his. This one place, this single acre of his existence that he had not surrendered to duty or to ghosts.
And someone had walked into it as though it were a public garden.
He opened his mouth to say something that would send the intruder fleeing into the night, and then he saw how she was touching it.
She was not handling the instrument; not turning it, or peering through it, or pawing at the fine adjustments as some curious fool might have done.
She had laid only the tips of her fingers against the casing, the lightest possible contact: the touch a person gave to a thing revered, and dared not presume upon.
And her face, in profile against the starlight, stopped the words in his throat.
There was longing in it, naked and unguarded, grief and wonder together; and for one disordered instant, he felt as though he had walked in upon something far more private than a trespass.
She is looking at it, he thought, against his will, the way I look at it.
He did not want to have thought it. So he made his voice as cold as he could make it, which was cold indeed, for he had had four years’ practice.
“And who,” he said, “gave you leave to be in my observatory?”
She spun towards him with a small cry, one hand flying to her chest, and the colour went out of her face. He had that effect on people now, and had long since ceased to regret it.
She was not beautiful. He registered that much in the dimness: pleasant enough features, brown hair coming loose from its pins, nothing a man would write a sonnet to.
But her eyes, when they found his, were wide and dark and remarkably steady for a woman who had plainly been frightened half out of her wits.
She did not look away from him, and that he had not expected.
“Forgive me.” Her voice trembled, but she did not let it break. “I am Miss Ellsworth, the Dowager’s new companion. I… I saw the dome from the garden, and I could not…” She stopped, gathered herself, and began again more plainly. “There is no excuse. I trespassed. I am sorry for it.”
“This is private ground.” He came no farther into the room, only stood in the doorway and let the cold of him fill it. “No one enters here. Not my mother, not my servants, not my oldest friend. You will leave, and you will not come here again.” A beat. “I trust I make myself understood.”
“Perfectly, Your Grace.”
He had expected tears, or pleading, or the oily contrition of a servant terrified for her place.
He got none of it. She lifted her chin, a small, deliberate motion, pride pulled up out of fear like a flag run up a pole, and inclined her head to him with a dignity that ought to have been absurd in a companion caught where she had no business to be, and was not absurd at all.
Then she walked towards the door, towards him, for he had not moved out of it.
She had to pass close to do it. Close enough that he caught the scent of lavender, and beneath the lavender something warmer, something living; close enough that he saw, as she drew level with him, the flecks of gold scattered through the dark hazel of her eyes.
He thought she would go by him without another word.
She paused instead, and looked up at him.
“Your telescope is magnificent,” she said quietly.
“I have never seen its equal. My mother would have wept to use such an instrument.” Something moved across her face when she said mother, there and gone, a grief held under such firm command that it was worse to witness than open weeping. “Goodnight, Your Grace.”
Then she was past him and gone, out into the dark, her shawl pale for a moment against the night and then swallowed by it.
Cedric stood where she had left him, acutely and ridiculously aware of the patch of air she had occupied, which seemed still to hold the warmth of her.
She knows telescopes.
The thought arrived uninvited and would not be dismissed.
She had not said it as a polite compliment.
She had said, I have never seen its equal, noting its quality with the eye of someone who understood what she was looking at.
And when she had said that her mother would have wept to use it, he had heard no flattery in the words.
Only the plain speech of someone who had stood at an eyepiece on a cold night and felt the universe open over her head, and had loved it, and had lost it.
He told himself, very firmly, that she was nothing to him. A trespasser. His mother’s hireling. A young woman of no consequence to him, whom he would do well to forget, and would.
But when he climbed at last to the eyepiece and bent to his night’s work, the figures would not order themselves, and the careful columns of his observations swam before him, and what rose instead in the dark behind his eyes was the steadiness of a frightened woman’s gaze that would not drop from his, and the way her voice had warmed and broken upon a single word.
He gave it up before midnight, which he had not done in four years, and went back down the hill to the house with the dead in it, unsettled in a way he had no name for and no wish to find one.
***
Clara woke before the light, as she always did, and for the length of one merciful breath, she did not remember anything at all.
Then it came back, the whole weight of it landing at once: her mother gone, the house sold, and a stranger’s grey eyes in a doorway, and a voice that could have frosted glass telling her she would not come again. A man whose presence filled the room until there seemed no air left for anyone else.
She pressed her palms over her eyes as though she might press the memory out, and found that she could not.
Her skin prickled all over again at the recollection of standing so near to him that she had seen the pulse beat in his throat.
She had insulted his solitude and complimented his telescope in the same breath, and she could not, for the life of her, decide which had been the greater folly.
She rose, washed, dressed, and went down to do her work, because work was the one reliable cure she knew for thinking about things she had no business thinking about.
The Dowager was already at her writing-desk when Mrs Hutchins brought Clara to the sitting room, a handsome chamber that caught the morning sun and was, Clara noted, a good deal warmer in its furnishings than the drawing room in which she had been received.
A drift of correspondence lay across the desk in untidy heaps, and the Dowager regarded it with the expression of a general surveying a field she had no intention of crossing herself.
“You may begin with these,” she said, without preamble. “Invitations to be declined go in that pile. Tradesmen’s accounts in that one. Anything from my sister Augusta you may give directly to me, that I may have the pleasure of not answering it. Can you write a fair hand, Miss Ellsworth?”
“I believe so, ma’am. I kept my mother’s accounts and her correspondence both, these six years.”
“Did you?” The Dowager’s pen paused. “A gentlewoman keeping her mother’s accounts.”
“We had no one else to keep them, ma’am.”
It was said simply, with no bid for sympathy, and the Dowager looked at her for a moment with something that was not warmth but was at least attention.
“Hm,” she said, and returned to her letter, and Clara settled to the heaps of paper and found, within the half-hour, that her hands knew the work even when her mind insisted on wandering up a dark hillside where it had no business to go.
“You will dine with us this evening,” the Dowager said presently, not looking up.
“My son joins the table tonight. He does so but seldom, and you had as well be presented to him properly, since you are to be a fixture in the house. You will wear whatever is your best. And, Miss Ellsworth,” now she did look up, her grey eyes level, “you will not chatter. My son has no patience for it, and neither, I confess, have I.”
“I shall be as silent as the furniture, ma’am,” Clara said, and had the small private satisfaction of seeing one corner of the Dowager’s mouth twitch before it was sternly recalled to order.
Properly, she thought, bending again to the letters. As opposed to last night, when I was a trespasser at his telescope, and he ordered me out of his life.
How very properly we shall be introduced, the Duke and I, as though I had not already been turned out of his observatory in disgrace.