Chapter Nine
Cedric was on the moor by first light, having slept little and finding no purpose in lying abed to prove it.
The moor took him as it always did, grey and enormous and uncaring, and he gave Hector his head along the high ground and tried to outdistance the single thought that had kept him from sleeping, which was, of course, the one thought a man could not outrun on any horse ever foaled.
What am I doing?
She was his mother’s companion. She was dependent upon the charity of his house for the very bread she ate, and a woman in such a position had nothing, nothing at all, with which to defend herself against the regard of the man who held her livelihood in his hand.
Any attachment was not merely improper. For her, it was perilous.
He knew this perfectly well, and it altered nothing, for he had spent the better part of the night reckoning the hour at which the sky would next be clear enough for her to come to the observatory, and he had not been able to make himself sorry for it.
Hoofbeats came up behind him along the ridge, easy and unhurried, and he did not need to turn to know them.
Edward fell in at his side without a word, and for a time the two of them rode through the heather in the silence of men who had been friends so long that speech was a thing they might take up or lay down as they pleased. It was Edward who took it up.
“You have the look this morning,” he observed, to the air in general, “of a man carrying something a deal too heavy for the hour.”
“I have an estate to carry. It is generally heavy by breakfast.”
“Mm.” Edward let a decent interval pass. “Accounts, I suppose. Tenants. The eternal question of what to do about the south meadow.”
“Crop rotation,” Cedric agreed gravely, “is a savage taskmaster.”
“It is, it is.” And then Edward turned in his saddle and looked at him, and the lightness went out of his voice, though the warmth did not.
“Cedric. I have known you since we were eighteen and insufferable, and I know the shape of your lies as well as I know my own hand. That was one of them, and not your best. So I will ask you plainly, as a friend who has earned the right: what has happened to you?”
“Nothing has happened to me.”
“Something has. A fortnight ago, you looked like a man attending his own funeral by very slow degrees. There was no colour in you. One spoke to you and waited an age for the words to travel down from wherever you had gone, and half the time they never arrived at all.” Edward’s gaze did not waver.
“And now there is colour in your face, and something behind your eyes that I have not seen since before… well. Since before. A man does not change so in a matter of days without a reason, and I find I should very much like to know the reason’s name. ”
Cedric kept his eyes on the line of the hills. “You are imagining it.”
“Is it, perhaps, Miss Ellsworth?”
Hector sidestepped beneath him, catching the sudden tension in his hands before he had known it was there, and Cedric mastered the horse and then, with more difficulty, himself.
“Miss Ellsworth,” he said, and heard how stiff it came out, “is my mother’s companion. There is nothing in it. Any attachment would be entirely inappropriate… and impossible, the difference in our stations being what it is. The notion is absurd.”
“Is it?” Edward drew his horse to a halt, and because he did, Cedric was obliged to halt as well or ride on alone; and he found he could not bring himself to ride on.
“Then let me say one thing, and you may do with it what you like. I have not said it before because I had no wish to force an old wound open, but perhaps I have been too careful.”
His voice roughened.
“I have watched you punish yourself these four years for more than any man had a right to carry. I have wondered whether you had begun to believe that, because you could not make Eleanor happy in the way she wished to be made happy, you were therefore incapable of making any woman happy at all. If that is what you have been telling yourself, Cedric, then I do not believe it. I never have.”
Cedric said nothing.
“You did not fail her because you have no heart. You were ill-suited, and neither of you could become what the other most needed. That is a hard thing. It is a sad thing. But it is not proof that there is something cold or dangerous in you.”
Something cracked in Cedric’s chest, quiet and deep, like ice giving somewhere out on a pond in the thaw.
For it was not the first time he had heard it.
That was the thing that undid him. Not twelve hours since, in the dark of the observatory, a young woman with no reason to flatter him had said very nearly this same thing, in altogether different words to the same purpose, and he had told himself afterward that it was only the kindness of a near-stranger who did not truly know what he was.
He could not tell himself any such thing of Edward.
Edward knew exactly what he was, had known him green and grieving and at his very worst, and Edward said the same.
To hear it twice within a single turning of the earth, from two mouths so unlike that they could not possibly have conspired, was a different matter altogether from hearing it once.
It began, against every defence he had so painstakingly raised, to sound less like comfort and more like fact.
“I remember the winter after she died,” he said, more quietly.
“You would not let anyone near you, but you still sent down coal to every cottage before the first snow. You still knew which tenant’s boy needed the physician, and which roof would not last another storm.
You answered no letters, received no calls, and frightened half the county into silence, but the estate did not suffer one neglected soul because you were grieving. ”
Cedric’s hands tightened on the reins.
“That is not nothing,” Edward said. “It may not be warmth of the easy, charming sort. It may not be the sort that announces itself prettily across a drawing room. But it is care. A cold man would not have troubled himself. He would have let things go.”
Cedric did not answer. He was not certain he could.
It was Edward who let him off the hook, as Edward always did, gathering his reins and casting a glance at the climbing sun.
“Well. I have said my piece, and I shall leave you to dislike me for it in peace. I am expected at the vicarage later, and I had better not arrive with the look of a man who has been lecturing dukes before breakfast.”
Cedric, schooled by long practice at watching his own face for any sign of feeling, saw the change come over his friend’s: the whole bearing softening, the eyes warming, the unmistakable look of a man contemplating not the vicarage, precisely, but someone within it.
“Miss Bradley will be there, I expect,” Cedric said.
The colour that rose in Edward’s ruddy face was answer enough, though he gave another beside it.
“She will. She generally is.” A pause, and then, with the rueful honesty that was the best thing in him, “You are not the only fool on this moor reaching above his proper sphere, Cedric. I have been telling myself for a year that a vicar’s daughter is no fit match for a baron, and that I had far better find fewer reasons to call there.
I have not found fewer reasons. I find I cannot. ”
He gave a short laugh at himself.
“So perhaps we are neither of us so sensible as we pretend. Come, give me breakfast, and we will both go on pretending over coffee, as gentlemen do.”
“Stay, then,” Cedric said, and was surprised to find that he meant it, and that the morning had grown, somewhere in the last quarter-hour, less heavy than it had been.
They turned the horses for home together.
***
Clara had not slept either, and the evidence of it was in the looking-glass that morning, but there was no remedy for shadowed eyes save powder she did not own and pride she did, and so she went down to her work with the second of these, and trusted it to serve.
She was seated at the side table in the small dining room, the morning’s correspondence spread before her and a cup of tea going cold at her elbow, when the Duke came in with Lord Hale, both of them flushed from riding and bringing the cold, clean smell of the moor in with them.
She had perhaps a half-second’s warning, the sound of their boots in the passage, and it was not enough.
When she looked up and found his eyes already upon her across the room, the whole air of the place seemed to draw tight, like a held breath, and her own caught somewhere beneath her stays before she could prevent it.
She looked down at once, fixing her gaze upon a tradesman’s account as though it were the most fascinating document in the county, and felt the heat climb into her face.
He had looked tired too. She had seen that much before she made herself stop seeing anything. As tired as she.
“Lord Hale, how delightful.” The Dowager’s voice was all warmth; she was genuinely fond of Edward, as everyone was. “You will stay to breakfast, I hope. Sit, sit. You find us all at sixes and sevens, I am afraid, with so much to do before this afternoon.”
“This afternoon?” said Edward, taking the offered chair.
“Lady Honoria Vane arrives this afternoon, with her father, the Earl of Hartwick.” The Dowager said the names as though they ought to settle every lesser matter in the room.
“And so you find me in a state of siege, Lord Hale: the blue chambers to be aired, the cook half out of her wits, and I have not yet decided whether the Hartwick party will want the long drive or the short one shown to them first. It must all be exactly as it ought. You cannot imagine what it is to me to have them come at last; I have hoped for it the better part of a year. Everything turns upon the visit going well. Everything. And I will not have it spoilt by a cold grate or a slack footman.”
“It is only a house party, Mother,” Cedric said. “Not the relief of a besieged city.”
“It is a great deal more than a house party, as you know perfectly well.” She gave him a look. “Do not pretend to me that you do not.”
It landed somewhere under Clara’s ribs all the same, soft and exact, like a stone dropped into still water.
Everything turns upon the visit going well.
She did not look up. She folded her hands in her lap and kept her countenance smooth while the talk of chambers and drives and the great matter behind them went on above her bent head.
There was a young woman coming this afternoon who was everything a duchess ought to be, and a whole household turning itself inside out to receive her, and a hope a year in the making riding upon her arrival.
Clara had no part in any of it, and no business minding that she had none.
She minded it all the same.
The Duke had taken his place at the head of the table.
He said almost nothing through the whole recitation; she heard him answer his mother once, briefly, on some point of the arrangements, and his voice was so carefully level that it told her more than any outburst could have done about what the level cost him.
Once, reaching for the coffee, she felt his glance touch her and move away.
She did not return it, and was proud of herself, and miserable.
The meal seemed to last a long time, and then, mercifully, it was over. Edward rose, made his graceful farewells, promised the Dowager he would return before the week was out, and was gone towards the vicarage with the air of a man whose afternoon held something worth riding towards.
“Now.” The Dowager set down her napkin and became, in an instant, all business.
“Miss Ellsworth, I shall want you this morning. There is the question of the menus and the chambers and a hundred things besides, and I cannot trust the half of it to the servants. Come to my sitting room directly you have finished here.”
She rose, turned to her son, and a new deliberateness in the movement made Clara go still over the letters without quite knowing why.
“Cedric. I should like a word with you. In private. Before I am taken up with the preparations.”
It was very smoothly said. But there was iron under the smoothness, the iron of a request that was not a request at all, and Clara saw the Duke understand it. She saw the brief stillness settle over him, a shutter coming quietly down behind his eyes before his face closed over.
“As you wish, Mother,” he said.
He rose, and Clara kept her eyes on the letter before her, though she was aware of every step as he followed the Dowager out. The door closed behind them with a quiet finality.
The charged calm of the morning was about to end. Clara knew it with a strange certainty she could not have explained.
Nothing in this house was ever going to be the same once that door had closed.