Chapter Three
“Ah,” said Edward, coming up off the wall with his whole pleasant face opening into delight. “Now there is a piece of luck. That, Miss Ellsworth, is the very man we were speaking of.”
Clara had already understood it, in the way one understood a thing in the body before the mind consented to it.
The dark shape on the dark horse came on across the heather, and as it neared it resolved itself into a gentleman of perhaps two-and-thirty, of no more than middling height yet built so that the eye did not think to call him anything but large, with shoulders that strained the good cloth of his riding coat and a seat upon the great black animal so easy and so absolute that horse and man seemed to share a single will between them.
His hair was dark and worn longer than fashion allowed, and the wind had thrown a lock of it across his brow.
His face, sharp-planed and severe in the clear afternoon light, was the face that had ordered her out of his observatory not twelve hours before.
It was, she thought with a kind of helpless dismay, an extraordinary face. Severe and cold and proud, and beautiful in a way that had nothing whatever to do with kindness.
Why, she demanded of herself, should the sight of a man who dismissed me without a particle of courtesy set my heart hammering against my stays like a thing trying to escape?
She had no answer that did her any credit, and so she straightened her spine, and folded her hands, and prepared to be introduced to a stranger she had already met.
He drew rein a few paces off. His grey eyes went first to Edward, with something in them that was nearly ease, and then they found her, and the ease went out of them and was replaced by a flat, guarded wariness that told her plainly he had recognised her too.
“Hale.” His voice was as she remembered it, low and level and without warmth.
“Cedric.” Edward’s grin was undimmed by the chill of the greeting; he had clearly weathered a great many such greetings and intended to weather a great many more.
“You find me playing the gallant. I have just had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Miss Ellsworth here, your mother’s new companion.
We have been putting the world to rights over this wall for a little while, and I find her excellent company.
Miss Ellsworth, allow me to present the Duke of Farenwoode. ”
Clara curtsied. “Your Grace.”
For the length of two full breaths the Duke said nothing at all, and Clara stood beneath the weight of his regard and waited, with her pulse loud in her ears, for him to remark that he and Miss Ellsworth were not, in fact, strangers, that he had found this same young woman with her hand upon his telescope at midnight and turned her out into the dark.
One word would do it. One word, and she would be, in Lord Hale’s kind eyes, a trespasser caught where she had no right to be.
He did not say the word.
“Miss Ellsworth,” was all he said, with the smallest inclination of his head, and the relief that went through her was so sharp and so disproportionate that she had to look down at the heather to hide it.
“You ought to show her the observatory. I have a suspicion Miss Ellsworth may appreciate it more than most. She strikes me as the sort of lady who looks up, not down.”
The Duke’s gaze had not left Clara’s face. She felt it as one felt the sun through a window, a pressure with warmth somewhere inside it, and she made herself lift her chin and meet it rather than shrink from it, because shrinking was a habit she had sworn never to fall into however poor she became.
“My observatory is private,” he said at last, and his eyes did not move from her while he said it. “I do not give tours.”
“No,” Edward agreed cheerfully, as though the Duke had said something quite charming, “you never do. One lives in hope.” He tipped his head, considering his friend with an affection so plain and so unembarrassed that Clara felt almost an intruder upon it.
“Do you know, there was a time this man would have had the dome open and the lamps lit and half the county dragged up that hill by the coat-collar before you could say Saturn, only to make them look at a ring of light through a glass and own it the finest thing they had ever seen. He was insufferable about it. I have stood shivering on that hilltop at three in the morning more times than I can number, Miss Ellsworth, purely because he could not bear that anyone should sleep while there was a comet to be admired.”
Something crossed the Duke’s face at that, not a softening but the memory of one, the ghost of an expression a younger man might have worn, and was gone before Clara was sure she had seen it.
“That man,” he said, “was a fool, and is dead. You will excuse the lecture, Hale. You have heard it before.”
But there was no true edge to it, and Edward only laughed, as a man laughed who had decided long ago not to be wounded.
He turned the talk away, with the practised grace of long friendship, to some matter of a boundary ditch and a tenant’s complaint, and the two men spoke of it for a few minutes while Clara stood by, grateful to be, for that little space, beneath no one’s notice at all.
She watched them as they talked, the warm open man and the cold closed one, and thought that she had seldom seen friendship asked to do such heavy labour, nor seen it shoulder the work so willingly.
Presently Edward recollected an engagement.
“I am promised at the vicarage. I told Miss Bradley I would look over her father’s accounts; the dear man cannot add two figures without arriving at a third by some private arithmetic of his own.
Miss Ellsworth, it has been a genuine pleasure.
I hope very much that it is the first of many. ”
He swept her another bow, clapped his friend once upon the boot in farewell, and rode off whistling towards the village.
And then there was only the moor, and the wind, and the Duke of Farenwoode looking down at her from the back of his great black horse; and Clara left alone with the silence he had left between them the night before.
***
Cedric knew that he should ride on.
There was nothing simpler in all the world than to give the woman a curt good-day and put his heels to Hector and be gone, and he had spent four years perfecting that economy of withdrawal, the art of removing himself from a conversation before it could become a connexion.
He had driven off better men than ever stood in his path today with no more than a cold word and a turned shoulder.
Edward alone had proved too stubborn to take the hint, and Edward was the exception that he permitted himself, the one thread he had not been able to cut.
He did not ride on. He sat his horse and looked down at her, and found himself oddly reluctant to do the easy thing.
She was a small figure from where he sat, slight against the great emptiness of the moor, and the wind was busy in her hair, pulling loose the strands her pins had failed to hold, so that a soft brown coil of it lay against her cheek and another lifted and fell at her temple.
He noticed it, with an attention that irritated him, and could not for the life of him have said why the sight of a woman’s windblown hair should be a thing his eye returned to.
“Does my mother know you are out walking alone?” he asked, and heard how the question came out, less cutting than last night, which displeased him, for he had not given it leave to soften.
Up came the chin. He had begun, he realised, to expect it.
“Mrs Hutchins gave me leave to walk when my duties were done, Your Grace.” Her voice was composed, and there was something at the back of it, some glint of dry awareness, that was very nearly the beginning of impertinence. “I have done nothing wrong. Not, at any rate, this time.”
It was a hit, and a clean one, and he was so unaccustomed to being needled that for a moment he scarcely knew what to do with the sensation. It was not unpleasant. That was the worrying part of it.
“The moor is not as safe as it looks to a stranger’s eye,” he said, retreating into instruction, which was solid ground.
“There are bogs out past the standing stones that will take a sheep down whole, and they do not announce themselves. Until you have learned the safe ground, you would do well to keep nearer the house.”
“You need not trouble yourself on my account, Your Grace.” She said it gently enough, but she said it without an instant’s hesitation, and she did not lower her eyes.
“I am quite capable of looking to my own safety. I have managed a good many things harder than learning where the ground will hold me.”
A good many things harder.
He turned the phrase over against his will, the way he turned over a column of figures that would not balance.
It had been said without the smallest bid for pity.
Indeed, she had seemed to regret it the moment it was out, as though she had let him see further into her life than she had intended, and that very absence of self-pity told him more than a flood of confidences could have done.
He knew something of what it cost to carry hard things and say nothing of them.
He had not supposed that a woman of three-and-twenty in a plain grey gown might know the same.
Is that concern in you, then? he asked himself, with a sort of inward incredulity. Concern for a hired companion you met by trespass and meant never to think of again? Or are you merely safeguarding your mother’s household against the inconvenience of having one of its members disappear into a bog?
He could not honestly answer it, and the not-knowing was itself a kind of alarm, for Cedric Fairfax was a man who prided himself on knowing the precise shape and cause of everything that moved within him.
The wind gusted between them and loosened her hair completely at one side.
She lifted a hand to it without looking away from him, and the low light slid across her face and caught in the steady hazel of her eyes, and he found—he, who had not wanted anything in four years—that he did not want the moment to end, and could not have said what he wished to put in its place.
The silence held a beat too long for two strangers upon a public path. He was aware of it, and aware that she was aware of it, and aware that neither of them moved to break it, which was the most disquieting thing of all.
“You should go in,” he said abruptly, “before you take cold.”
He gave her no chance to answer. He touched his heel to Hector and brought the horse forward, passing her closely as he went, closer than he need have done, perhaps closer than was wholly proper.
The great warm bulk of the animal stirred the air about her and set her skirts moving against her ankles, and he caught again, even from the saddle, that faint trace of lavender that had followed her out of his observatory the night before.
For one suspended instant, as he drew level, her upturned eyes met his and held, and whatever passed between them he refused to name. It struck somewhere deep within him, like a single low note left to tremble in the air.
Then he was beyond her, and the moor opened before him, and he rode.
He did not look back, because looking back was the sort of thing he no longer permitted himself. But the trouble rode with him all the same, three plain facts laid out in his orderly mind like figures in a column that would not, however he added them, come to the sum he wished.
He had said nothing to Edward of the trespass, when a single word would have rid him of her.
He had warned her of the bogs as though her safety were a thing that touched him.
And even now, with the wind in his face and the house falling away behind, he was unable to stop seeing the colour the light had made of her eyes, and asking himself, with a coldness that for once gave him no comfort at all, what manner of woman could unsettle, in a day and a half, the silence it had taken him four years to build.