Chapter Six
Cedric had resolved, somewhere between the small hours and dawn, that the whole thing had been a mistake, and he spent the better part of the day proving it to himself.
He rose early and rode out before the household stirred, because a man who could not master his own thoughts could at least try to outrun them, and the moor at first light asked nothing of him.
It was a clear, hard, beautiful morning, the heather silvered with dew and the larks going up out of the grass, and he put Hector to the longest gallop the ground allowed, only to arrive back at the stables no quieter in his mind than he had set out.
That was the trouble with thoughts. They kept the same pace as the horse.
He told himself, currying down the animal’s steaming flank with his own hands because he had no patience to stand idle, that the invitation had been a folly born of a late hour and a low fire.
He had been tired, and unguarded, and the woman had a way of speaking that disarmed a man before he knew his guard was down; and in such a state, one said things one did not mean.
Another trained eye. What had possessed him?
He did not want another eye upon his work, trained or otherwise.
He had built the observatory so that no eye should ever fall upon it but his own.
For four years, he had kept it as one keeps a wound private, and now, on the strength of a single evening’s conversation, he had opened the door of it to his mother’s companion as though it cost him nothing.
It would not do. He saw that clearly in the grey light of the stable yard.
He would be civil to her, distantly civil, and he would let the matter quietly drop.
Within a week, she would understand that the invitation had meant nothing, and they would both be spared the awkwardness of pretending otherwise.
He held to this resolution admirably until about half past nine, when he walked into his mother’s sitting room in search of the Thornby lease and found Miss Ellsworth at the side table with the morning sun on her bent head and a column of figures under her steady hand.
His resolution, which he had thought so solid, turned out to be made of something a good deal less durable.
He managed two words. “Miss Ellsworth.” He made his eyes pass over her as if she were a fixture of the room, which required a discipline disproportionate to the act, and took his paper and went.
He was rather pleased with the coldness of it for almost a quarter of an hour before it began to trouble him that he should have needed to be so cold at all.
One did not arm oneself against a chair. One did not ride out at dawn to escape the thought of a chair, nor lie awake the night before composing speeches to deliver to it.
The day did not improve. He shut himself in his study with the estate ledgers and discovered that the figures, which had behaved themselves faithfully for years, had developed a sudden tendency to arrange themselves into the shape of a conversation about Jupiter.
He went out and inspected a wall that did not need inspecting.
He answered two letters and retained no memory afterwards of to whom.
And somewhere in the long grey middle of the afternoon, standing at his study window watching the light begin to fail over the moor, he stopped lying to himself for long enough to understand the truth of it, which was not complicated at all.
He wanted her to come.
The wanting frightened him more than anything had frightened him in years.
He had been so careful. He had made of his life a thing with no soft places left in it, a fortress with the bridges burned and the wells stopped, and told himself that he preferred it so; that a man who wanted nothing could lose nothing, and that this was a kind of peace.
And then a young woman with more grief than caution had laid two fingertips upon his telescope and spoken of her dead mother in a voice that broke on the word, and something in him that he had believed safely buried had stirred.
Eleanor, he thought, because he made himself think it, because it was the surest cold water he knew to throw upon a fire. Remember Eleanor.
He had wanted to give her something once, too, in the early days, before he understood that he had nothing of the kind to give.
He had watched her grow thin and silent and bewildered under the discovery that her husband was a man of careful actions and few words, and he had watched her decide, slowly, over two unhappy years, that this meant he despised her.
Nothing he did—and he had done a great deal—could persuade her otherwise.
She had died believing herself unloved, and the fault of it, whatever the world chose to say, lay with him and his cold, miserly, broken heart.
To let himself want a woman again was to set the same harm in motion and pretend not to know where it led.
He knew all this. He had recited it to himself a thousand times, and it had never once failed to do its work.
It failed now.
He stood at the window with the dusk coming down, and found that the old grim arithmetic of guilt, which had always summed so neatly to therefore you will want nothing, would not balance against the simple animal fact of how much he wished to see Miss Ellsworth come up the hill in the dark.
And so, at last, with the disgust of a man surrendering a position he had sworn to hold, he went to dress, and went up to the observatory, and waited.
***
He behaved, while he waited, like a man he did not recognise.
He checked the alignment of the telescope, and then checked it again, and then a third time, knowing full well it had not moved. He set out three of his observation notebooks upon the work table, then judged it too many and put one away, then took it out again.
He had discarded his coat at some point and stood in his shirtsleeves, and it occurred to him, far too late, that this was hardly the dress in which a duke received a visitor, and that the whole arrangement, the lamplight, the dark, the absence of any living soul within a quarter-mile, the want of so much as a maid for propriety, was about as improper a thing as he had done in his sober, careful life.
He thought of putting the coat back on. He did not.
She will not come, he told himself, and was appalled to discover how much the thought cost him.
Why should she? You looked through her this morning as if she were glass.
You forbade her this very room not three nights ago.
A sensible woman would stay by her own fire and count herself well out of it.
The door opened.
She slipped in quietly, as though uncertain of her welcome, and stood just inside it with her shawl about her shoulders and her plain hair coming loose at the temple in the way it had, and the relief that went through him at the sight of her was so disproportionate, so undignified, that he was glad of the shadows for hiding it.
She had come. After the morning, after everything, she had climbed the dark hill and come.
“Your Grace.” Her voice was low, and a little wary, and entirely composed. “I was not perfectly certain you would still wish me to come. After this morning.”
So she had felt the cold of it. Of course she had; she missed very little. He found he could not pretend the morning away, and would not insult her by trying.
“This morning I was not fit company,” he said. “My mother was present. I find I am…” He stopped, and chose the truer word against his own inclination. “I am not always master of my manner, of late. It was not aimed at you.”
It was as near to an apology as he had made to anyone in four years, and he saw her register it. The wariness eased by some small degree, though not all of it, which he respected.
“You need not explain yourself to me, Your Grace.”
“No,” he agreed. “I need not.”
And yet I have, he thought, and did not say. He gestured instead towards the work table, retreating with relief into the only ground on which he had ever felt sure of his footing.
“I have set out the notebooks. You may look at whatever you like. The early volumes are the untidiest. I had not yet settled on a method, but you will see the way of it soon enough.”
She crossed to the table, and he watched her do it. He watched, too, the moment her eyes fell upon the open ledger of four years’ nights and the wariness went out of her face altogether, replaced by a brightness so unguarded that it stopped the breath in his chest.
She did not exclaim. She did not gush. She bent over the page instead, and turned it, and turned another; and he saw that she was reading, not as one admires a curiosity, but as one reads a language learned in childhood.
“These are beautiful,” she said at last.
“They are columns of figures, Miss Ellsworth.”
“They are not.” She glanced up, and there was the dry glint he was coming to know.
“I do not mean the hand, Your Grace, though the hand is very fine. I mean the order of them. The date, the hour, the instrument, the state of the air. Every night. Do you know how rare that is? My mother was forever scolding herself for skipping the dull particulars when she was cold or tired, and then regretting the gaps a season later, when the pattern would not come clear for want of them.” She touched the edge of the page. “You have left yourself very few gaps.”
He came nearer than he had meant to. “Four years,” he said. “Every clear night. Some that were hardly clear at all.”
He did not say what the first of those years had been, or what he had been escaping when he came up the hill into the cold. But she was looking at the dates at the head of the earliest volume, and he saw the small arrest in her, and knew that she had counted backward and understood.
She did not say she was sorry. He was grateful for it past expressing; he had had a surfeit of people being sorry.
“You track the planets chiefly,” she said instead, turning to the data itself.
“Here, where you have marked their motion against the fixed stars, night by night. Did your mother teach you that, or…” She stopped, correcting herself with a small private amusement.
“Forgive me. I forget that not everyone learns the sky at a parent’s knee.
I cannot remember a time when I did not know that some of the bright ones wander and the rest stand still. ”
“My tutor gave me the bones of it, and Oxford the rest. But the wandering ones were always the difficulty.” He found himself reaching past her to the page, near enough to catch again the lavender of her, and made himself indicate the column rather than retreat from it.
“A fixed star keeps its station. But the planets will not hold still to be measured. They creep along the ecliptic, and then… Here, you see, they appear to stop, and turn, and go backward against the field for a season before resuming their proper course.”
“Retrograde.” She said the word with quiet pleasure. “I have seen Mars do it. Mother and I argued for a whole winter over whether we might predict the turning, and never could agree on the method.”
She was leaning over the notebook in earnest now, the shawl slipping unregarded from one shoulder.
“Have you attempted it? The prediction?”
“I have attempted little else, these two years past. With indifferent success.”
And then, because the question had been put to him as one put a question to an equal, not to a duke, not to a tragedy, but to a man who might reasonably be expected to know the answer, he found himself telling her how he had gone about it: the tables he had built and discarded, the error that had crept into a whole season’s work before he ran it to ground.
She listened with her whole attention, then disagreed with him, courteously and completely, on a point of method; and he discovered, to his astonishment, that he was arguing with her about the orbit of Mars with more pleasure than he had taken in any conversation he could presently call to mind.
It went on so for some time. The awkwardness that had stood in the room when she first came through the door simply dissolved, unmissed, the way frost went off a window without one’s marking the moment.
Somewhere in the midst of it, the watchful voice that had ridden him all day made one last attempt to be heard: you are doing it again, you are flinging open every door at once, this is precisely how it begins.
And he found, with something between alarm and relief, that he no longer cared to listen to it.
It was Clara who slowed at last.
She had turned back to the very first volume, the untidy one, the one whose early pages were blotted in places as if the hand that made them had not always been steady. She looked at the date at its head for a long moment, and then she looked up at him, her face quiet and grave.
“You kept these alone,” she said. It was hardly a question. “All this while. Every night, all these years. And no one to show when the prediction came near, or to complain to when it went wrong.”
She shook her head slowly.
“I had my mother. Whatever else I have lost, I had that. I never had to wonder at the sky by myself. You have had no one at all.”
The plainness of it caught him somewhere he was not braced to be caught, somewhere beneath all the armour he had spent four years forging, and for a moment the answer would not come.