Chapter Fifteen
“Your gardeners are to be commended, Your Grace. The hedges are kept very fine.”
“I will tell them you said so.”
It was, Cedric reflected, the fourth such observation Lady Honoria had made since they left the house, and every one of them had been correct.
The hedges were fine. The fountain was charming.
The prospect down to the lake was very pretty, and the day uncommonly warm for the season, and Yorkshire possessed, she had been gracious enough to allow, a certain wild appeal.
She said all the right things, in the right order, in a voice trained to please; and he walked beside her down his own gravel paths with her lady’s maid trailing at a discreet distance behind, and felt, for the whole of it, nothing.
Not the smallest stir of interest. Not a spark of the thing a man was meant to feel walking in the sun beside a beautiful woman his mother had chosen for him with such care.
His mind was on a bandaged hand and a pair of shadowed eyes and the way their owner had flinched when his mother’s voice sharpened.
What happened to her hand?
He had asked himself the question a dozen times since and would not let it alone. She had been whole the night of the library; she had been whole on the moor. Something had hurt her since, in his house, and he did not know what, and the not-knowing sat in him like a splinter.
He became aware that Lady Honoria had stopped speaking and was looking at him with polite expectancy, and that he had no notion what she had last said.
“Forgive me. You were saying?”
“Only that the sun is unseasonably warm today.” She raised her fan and moved it slowly, and beneath the smooth courtesy of her voice, he caught, unmistakably, a thread of something that was very nearly relief.
“I wonder, Your Grace, whether we might turn back. I should not like to tire you with my company in such heat.”
She was quiet a moment then, looking away down the slope toward the bright water, and when she spoke again it was in a different voice altogether, lower, and stripped of its polish.
“It is very peaceful here, though. One could think, in a place like this. There is so little quiet where I come from.” Then, as if she had caught herself saying more than she ought, the practised composure slid back into place. “Forgive me. I am running on.”
“You need not apologise for liking quiet.” He had not expected to feel anything toward her at all, and was mildly surprised to discover, just then, an unlooked-for sympathy. “It is the chief virtue of the country.”
“Is it?” Something moved behind her eyes that he could not read.
“Then perhaps the country and I should suit one another better than anyone supposes.” There was a weight beneath the light words that he marked, and wondered at, before she gathered herself and it was gone.
“But we should go in. My father will be wondering where we have got to.”
“Then by all means, let us go in.”
He turned her toward the house, and as they came up the slope toward the rear terrace, he caught sight of a figure at one of the upper windows, watching them: the Earl of Hartwick, motionless behind the glass, his silver head bent forward, and even at that distance, Cedric could make out the cool, satisfied curve of the man’s mouth.
He was counting his winnings already. Cedric inclined his head a fraction, civilly, the way one acknowledged a creditor one had no intention of paying, and felt Lady Honoria stiffen on his arm at the sight of her father.
They had nearly gained the terrace door when Cedric heard it.
It came from his left, from beyond the yew hedge that screened the old part of the gardens, a sound so soft that the maid did not catch it and Lady Honoria gave no sign, but that stopped him on the path as surely as a hand laid on his chest. Weeping.
A woman weeping, low and broken and trying not to be heard, from the one direction in all his grounds toward which his feet had not carried him in four years.
Eleanor’s garden.
He had not gone there since she died. In the first black months, he had given orders that it was to be let alone: neither tended nor torn out, simply left, and the gardeners had obeyed him.
Ever since, he had walked the long way round rather than pass beneath the archway where the roses she had planted grew wild.
He had not looked towards the bench on which she used to sit, nor set foot upon the paths they had paced together in the early days, while he laboured so uselessly to become a man who could love her as she wished.
It was the most haunted acre he owned.
And someone was weeping in it.
“Your Grace?” Lady Honoria had paused, regarding him with mild inquiry.
“Forgive me.” He withdrew his arm with a bow. “I find I have just recalled a matter that wants my attention directly. Pray go in. Your maid will see you to the drawing room, and I shall join the party presently.”
He waited only long enough to see her safely through the terrace door, the maid behind her, before he turned and went toward the sound.
***
The archway was half choked with briar, and the thorns dragged at his coat as he pushed through, as though the garden itself were reluctant to let him in.
It had run wild in four years. The roses had thrown themselves everywhere, unpruned and rampant, climbing the broken trellises in great arching sprays and spilling across the paths, beautiful in their long neglect; and there in the heart of it, on the weathered stone bench where another woman had once sat in the sun, was Clara.
Her face was wet and ruined with weeping, her composure, that careful, hard-won composure he had never once seen her lose, gone to pieces.
She heard his step and looked up, and the mortification that swept across her face was so complete that she was on her feet at once, swiping at her cheeks, fighting to compose features that would not be composed.
“Your Grace… Forgive me. I did not… I had no notion anyone—”
“Sit down.” It came out far rougher than he meant it, harsh in the quiet garden, and he saw her flinch and tried again, more gently than he had spoken to anyone in years.
“Sit down, Miss Ellsworth. Please. You need not get up for me.” She sank back onto the bench, trembling, and he stood a little apart from her, hat in hand, and asked the only question that mattered. “What has happened? What is wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong, Your Grace. It is a foolishness, no more. I shall be quite recovered directly, and then I shall go back to my—”
“You are weeping alone in the most forgotten corner of the grounds. Whatever else that is, it is not nothing.” He kept his voice low. “Tell me.”
“It would not be proper. You have guests. You have Lady Honoria. You ought not to be out here with me at all.”
“Miss Ellsworth.” Only her name, quietly, and it stopped her.
“I have spent four years perfecting the art of not asking after anybody. I am asking now. You may take that for the uncommon thing it is and answer me, or you may go on insisting that the blood coming through your bandage is a foolishness, but I will tell you plainly that I am a stubborn man, and that I have nowhere in the world I would rather be than precisely here, and that we may sit in this garden until nightfall if that is what it takes.”
A sound broke from her that was half a sob and half, nearly, a laugh. “You are exceedingly hard to refuse, Your Grace.”
“So I am given to understand. Chiefly by the people refusing me.” He waited. “Your hand. Begin there.”
She gave way at last, whether at the gentleness or only because she had wept herself past the strength to dissemble, he could not have said.
“I cut it. Yesterday.” She had to stop and master her breath before she could go on.
“Badly enough to want stitching. Miss Bradley did it for me, at the vicarage. And this morning Her Grace wanted the ball invitations written out, a great many of them, in a fair hand, and I…” Her throat worked.
“I could not. My fingers would not close on the pen, they would not do as I told them, and I blotted the cards, one after another, like a child of six, and she…” The words came faster now, and rougher, spilling past whatever had been holding them.
“She sent me from the room. She said a companion who cannot do the small things asked of her is no companion at all; only another mouth to feed. And the worst of it…” her voice thinned almost to nothing “… the worst of it, Your Grace, is that she is right. That is the whole of what I am. I have learned that by now. It is a very foolish thing to weep over, once one has made one’s peace with it. ”
“She is not right, and that is not what you are.” He heard the hardness come into his own voice and did not trouble to soften it; it was not aimed at her. “How did you come to cut it?”
She did not answer.
“How did you cut it, Miss Ellsworth?”
“On the vase,” she said, very low, to her lap. “I was set to gather up the pieces of it. One of them turned in my hand.”
The whole bitter shape of it stood plain before him then, as plain as a sum he would have given a great deal not to total.
The vase was his. The temper that broke it was his.
He had walked out of that room like a boy in a rage and left a woman to kneel on the marble and gather up the wreckage of it on her hands, and it had laid her open to the bone.
“I broke that vase,” he said.
“Your Grace—”
“I broke it. I lost my temper, and I shattered it, and I walked away and left it lying, and you were made to pay for my tantrum with your own blood.”
He turned from her a moment toward the wild roses, for the guilt of it was an old and familiar shape; everything I have ever touched I have damaged, one way or another.
He found he had not the heart to look at her while he carried it. Then he made himself turn back, because a man who could not look at the harm he had done had no business apologising for it.
“I am sorry,” he said. “For the vase, and for storming out and frightening you half to death, and for a mother who has used you with a cruelty you have done nothing to earn. You have my word, she will not dismiss you. I shall speak to her myself, today, and—”
“No. Please, you must not.” She was on the edge of the bench now, the tears forgotten, and what had come into her face was not gratitude at all but a kind of proud alarm.
“Do you not see that it would be the very worst thing you could do? If Her Grace once suspects you have taken any particular notice of me, I am finished, gone within the week, and not a character to my name. You would not be helping me, Your Grace. You would be destroying the one poor foothold I have left.”
“Then I will be careful how I—”
“And in any case, it is not your office to manage my troubles.” Her head came up, and her voice steadied into something quieter and harder to bear for its quietness.
“I am a lady’s companion. My difficulties are my own.
I have carried a great many of them by myself this past year, and I would far rather go on carrying them than learn to lean on a protection that can be taken from me the instant it grows inconvenient.
It is safer to depend on no one. I learned that lesson thoroughly, and I have no wish to unlearn it. ”
It silenced him utterly. He understood, standing there, that he had offered her the one gift she could not afford to accept; that the refusing of it had cost her more than she would ever show him; and that the proud, lonely self-sufficiency with which she refused it was the only armour a woman in her position was permitted to own.
So, he did not argue further. He drew his handkerchief from his breast and held it out to her instead.
“Then at least dry your eyes,” he said, “before you go in. You will not want them to see that you have wept.”
She hesitated, and then reached to take it, and her fingers brushed against his, the lightest possible contact, bare skin against bare skin in the warm, tangled quiet of the garden, and it went through him like a current, sudden and total and beyond his governing.
He heard the small catch of her breath. He saw her eyes lift to his and then drop away at once, and the colour come up beneath the tear-stains, and she took the handkerchief and pressed it to her face and would not look at him again.
Cedric stood among his dead wife’s roses with his hand still warm where Clara’s had touched it, and understood, with a clarity that frightened him more than anything had in four years, that he had passed some point he could not now walk back from.
He had told himself for days that he could master this, that it was a passing folly, and he would let it quietly die.
He knew now that he would not.
He could not seem to stay away from her. He could not stop wanting to shield her, to ease her, to sit beside her in the dark and watch her face fill up with wonder. And there was no version of that wanting, not one, that did not end in her ruin or his.