Chapter Four #2
He crossed to the shelves, took down a book without much caring which, and seated himself in the chair opposite hers, with the fire between them throwing its small, uneven light across the hearthrug.
For a while, neither of them said anything at all.
It was not a comfortable silence. But neither was it the silence he was used to, the dead flat silence of solitude.
This one was full of unspoken things, taut as a wire drawn between two posts, and he found, to his surprise, that he was in no hurry to be quit of it.
It was she who broke it, and she broke it as she seemed to do everything: directly.
“May I ask you something, Your Grace?”
“You may ask. I make no promise to answer.”
“At dinner.” She had closed the folio over one finger to keep her place. “When you spoke of women’s minds. Did you mean it, truly, or were you simply contradicting your mother for the satisfaction of it?”
The directness of it took him aback. He was not accustomed to being questioned, and still less to being questioned as though the answer genuinely mattered to the asker.
He looked at her across the fire, at the steady eyes that did not flinch from the impertinence of what she had asked, and found that he wished, absurdly, to be believed.
“I meant it,” he said. “Every word.”
Her fingers rested lightly upon the edge of the folio. “Most gentlemen allow that a lady may know a little, provided she does not know enough to become troublesome.”
“Most gentlemen are very fond of comfort.”
“And you are not, Your Grace?”
“I have had my share of it.” He leaned back in his chair, the firelight catching one side of his face. “At Oxford, I knew men who were praised for minds their sisters would have put to shame. The men were given books. The sisters were given music masters.”
“There is no fault in music.”
“No. Only in supposing it must be the whole of a woman’s education.” He glanced towards the volume in her lap. “Your mother did not suppose so, I take it.”
“No.” Clara’s hand tightened a little upon the folio. “She thought ignorance a poor ornament in anyone.”
“A sensible woman.”
“She was.” The words came more softly than she intended.
For a moment, the room was quiet again, but the silence had altered. It was not easier, exactly, but it had become less empty.
“My mother used to say,” Clara continued, “that the stars did not much concern themselves with who observed them. One only had to be careful, and patient, and honest enough to set down what was there, not what one wished to see there. She thought most truths were rather like that.”
Cedric considered her for a moment.
“Your mother,” he said slowly, “sounds to have been a remarkable woman. What did she study?”
He had not expected what the question did to her.
The careful composure he had seen her hold all evening, through his mother’s slights and his own scrutiny, simply fell away, and what stood in its place was so alive, so lit from within, that he leaned forward in his chair without the smallest awareness of having done so.
“Almost everything,” she said, and laughed; and the laugh was wet at its edges, but joyful for all that.
“But the planets most of all. She liked following them, night after night, season after season, and setting the figures down, and then going back over the columns to find the pattern. We tracked Jupiter for a whole year once, the two of us, whenever the sky allowed it. When she laid the figures end to end and showed me the curve of it written out plain…”
She pressed her lips together, shook her head, and her eyes were shining.
“I was very happy on those nights. I did not know, then, that I should not always have them.”
Cedric sat still.
“I have kept such records,” he heard himself say.
“Four years of them. Planetary positions, occultations, the variable stars. Night after night, as you describe. Notebook after notebook.” He had never said it aloud to a living soul.
Edward thought it a melancholy way to bury himself, and his mother thought it a folly, and he had never troubled to correct either of them.
“It is the only work that has felt useful to me in a very long while.”
“Then you understand,” she said, and looked at him as though he had given her something. “Most people do not. They think it cold, all that counting and recording. They do not see that it is not cold at all.”
“No,” he agreed. “They do not.”
They talked, after that, for the better part of an hour, and Cedric could not afterwards have given a true account of how the time had gone, only that it had gone.
They spoke of mountings and lenses and the wretched English climate, of a comet she had seen as a girl and one he had missed, of whether the patterns her mother had chased were truly hidden in the sky or only in the longing of those who looked.
He argued with her, and was argued with, and enjoyed it more than he had enjoyed anything he could readily name.
And it was somewhere in the midst of this, with the fire burned low and the candles guttering, that he heard his own voice say a thing that astonished him even as he said it.
“You should see my notebooks. The observations would interest you, I think.” A pause, into which he should have stepped to recall the words, and did not. “Tomorrow evening, if the sky is clear. In the observatory.”
The silence that fell then was of a different quality.
What are you doing? said the cold voice within him, with something close to alarm. You have asked her into the one place you forbade her. The place you have let no one cross in four years. The place where you go precisely so that you may be alone.
Clara had gone still. “Are you certain, Your Grace?” she asked carefully, as though she suspected him of not knowing his own mind, which was no more than the truth. “You were rather plain, last night, on the subject of who might enter there.”
“I would not offer,” he said, more harshly than he intended, “if I were not certain. My observations would be the better for another trained eye upon them. That is all.”
It was not all, and some part of him knew it was not, but she let him have the lie, and only said, after a moment, very low, “Then I would be honoured. I have missed the work, desperately, since my mother…” The word would not come at first. She stopped, steadied herself, and finished simply, “Since she died.”
The catch in her voice on that unfinished word went through Cedric’s chest like something with an edge. Whatever rose in him then he had no name for, and no notion in the world what a man was meant to do with it.
Clara rose. “It is very late. Goodnight, Your Grace, and thank you. For dinner, and for…” she glanced at the fire “… for understanding. It is not a thing I had looked to find here.”
She came past his chair on her way to the door. The room was narrow, and her skirt brushed against his knee as she passed, the lightest possible contact, there and gone.
She paused.
He looked up, and she looked down, and for the space of several heartbeats neither of them moved, and neither of them spoke. The small distance between them held everything that had not been said and could not be.
Then she was gone, and the door closed softly, and Cedric was alone with the dying fire.
He did not move for a long while. He sat and watched the embers settle and collapse into themselves, one by one, and turned the evening over in his mind as if it belonged to some other man whose conduct he had been set to judge.
He tried, without the smallest success, to understand what in all reason he had just done.