Chapter Seventeen #2
“There is nothing to tell.” She said it a shade too quickly, and heard the haste in her own voice, and saw that Anne heard it too.
“Truly. My situation does not admit of feelings, Anne. They are a luxury, like a carriage, or an easy conscience, and I can afford none of the three. Let us talk of you instead.”
Anne held her gaze a moment longer, with great gentleness, and then let it go, though not, Clara thought, because she had been deceived in the smallest degree.
“Very well,” she said softly. “Then tell me only this, and I shall never press you again. Are you happy, Clara, in that great cold house of his?”
And Clara, who had fully meant to answer yes, perfectly well, found that the words would not come. She looked down at the bandaged hand resting in her lap and said nothing at all, which was an answer of a kind, and they both knew it.
The talk at the head of the table had turned, meanwhile, to the great comet that had hung over the parish a season past, and Lord Hale, who forgot nothing that might draw a silent guest into the warmth, looked down the table towards Clara.
“Miss Ellsworth, I am reliably informed that your late mother was a considerable astronomer, which makes you the only soul at this table fit to settle the question. Was the thing a true comet, or merely the parish in want of a portent?”
It was kindly meant and kindly timed, and Clara felt the small unfamiliar warmth of being asked a thing as though her answer might be worth the hearing.
“A comet, my lord, and a fine one. Though I should not undertake to promise it was not also a portent. The two are not always at odds. My mother used to say the skies were perfectly indifferent to whatever meanings we chose to read in them, and went about their business regardless of us, which she found a great comfort rather than otherwise.”
“A great comfort.” The vicar’s eyes creased. “I shall steal that for a sermon. Under the quarter-hour, Lord Hale, you have my word.”
A ripple of easy laughter went round the table, and Clara, who could not recall the last time she had been laughed with rather than merely tolerated, felt something in her unbend by a degree.
It was then, lifting her eyes from her plate, that she found the Duke looking at her from across the table.
She had not meant to look at him; she had been careful all through the meal not to.
But Lord Hale was saying, down the table, in the carrying voice of a man enjoying himself, “… Oh, you must not appeal to Farenwoode on the question of early hours. The man would sooner sit up the whole night through staring at Jupiter than take himself decently to his bed, and then has the brass to call the rest of us idle.”
And at the word Jupiter her eyes went to him without her leave, and his came to hers in the very same instant, and for the space of a single breath, the two of them shared the whole of that cold bright night between them: the eyepiece, the four small moons, the little oh she had not been able to help.
It was not a long look. It was barely a look at all. But it was warm, and it was theirs, and it held a secret that no one else at that comfortable table could have guessed at, and Clara felt it pass through her like sunlight through water, quick and bright and gone.
Gone, because the Earl of Hartwick chose that moment to lean towards the Duke and say something low, with his cold smile, one hand making a small, idle gesture towards his daughter farther down the table.
Clara watched the warmth go out of Cedric’s face as though a shutter had been drawn across a window.
She watched the grey eyes cool and the mouth set, watched him become once more the closed and distant man the world believed him to be.
He did not look at her again.
She understood why.
It did not make the loss of that small borrowed brightness any easier to bear.
***
She did not sleep that night.
When the house had gone quiet, she rose and went to the window, telling herself she wanted only air, the handkerchief she had still not returned folded small in her sound hand.
The light was burning in the observatory.
She had somehow known it would be, warm and small against the black shoulder of the hill, and the longing that rose in her at the sight of it was so much stronger than it had been even a week ago that it frightened her.
There was so much more in the balance now: a garden, an apology, the memory of his face warming at the word Jupiter.
It was not the stars she wanted any longer.
She wanted him.
And before she had decided anything at all, she found that she had reached for her shawl.
She got as far as the door, with it about her shoulders and her hand on the cold latch, before the other thought rose and stopped her.
Not, this time, the plain fear of dismissal, but something colder and more particular: the memory of the Earl of Hartwick’s pale eyes travelling the length of the dinner table and pausing, just perceptibly, on her.
A man like that gathered up other people’s secrets and kept them against the day they might be wanted. To be seen now would not only ruin her; it might hand a dangerous man the very weapon he was hunting for, and she did not think she was the one he meant to wound with it.
She took her hand from the latch.
She was still standing there when the light on the hill went out, quenched all at once, as a lamp is put out by a man who has given up waiting. The glass gave her back nothing but the dark and her own dim shape.
She had not gone. She had nearly gone, which was worse.
And as she returned at last to her cold bed, she understood, with a quiet that was almost despair, that her refusals were wearing thinner with every night that passed, and that something in this house was drawing steadily, silently tighter about them all.