Chapter Twenty
“Do you have the smallest conception of what you did in that room?”
His mother had been waiting for him in the corridor outside the drawing room, and she fell into step beside him the moment he emerged, her voice pitched low and shaking with a fury she had been holding in check before the guests and could hold no longer.
“You stood up before the Earl of Hartwick, before half the county’s gossip in one chair, and you defended a lady’s companion as though she were your own sister.
As though her dignity were a thing worth a duke’s quarrel.
Do you know what they are saying already, below stairs?
Do you know what they will be saying in every drawing room from here to York by Thursday? ”
“I find I do not greatly care, Mother.”
“You do not care.” She caught his sleeve, halting him, and her face in the candlelight was white and stricken with something fiercer than anger.
“It is appalling judgment, Cedric, appalling, and from a man who has spent four years convincing the world he has no warmth left in him to spend. And now you spend it all at once, in public, on a nobody, with the Earl of Hartwick watching every flicker of your face. Have you any idea what you have laid bare?”
That she was right, in this at least, did nothing to soften him.
“I will tell you what I laid bare,” he said, very quietly.
“I am tired, Mother. I am tired of standing in my own house and watching helpless people used as though their feelings were beneath notice, because it is convenient, or because it is the custom, or because no one with the power to stop it can be troubled to care. I have done my share of that watching. I find I have reached the end of it.”
He gently removed her hand from his sleeve. “This conversation is over. Goodnight.”
He left her standing in the corridor and went, as he always went, up the hill to the only room in the world that asked nothing of him.
But that night, the observatory would not do its work.
He lit the lamp and uncovered the telescope and swung it to where Jupiter rode low and bright above the trees, and he set his eye to the glass and tried to lose himself in the old clean comfort of it, the measuring, the recording, the vast indifferent order of things that had always before been able to quiet whatever stormed in him.
He noted the planet’s position. He noted the moons. He wrote the figures in his steady hand and found, when he had done, that he had not the least idea what he had written, because his mind was elsewhere, and would not come back.
Clara. Her face in Eleanor’s garden, wet and undone and trying so hard to be brave.
The way she had looked at him when he set himself between her and the room, not grateful only, not frightened only, but astonished, as though she had not expected anyone in the world to stand there for her.
The way she spoke of the stars, as though she heard the same music in them that he did, as if she had understood, without being told, the one true thing about him that no living soul had ever troubled to learn.
He put down his pen, went to the window, and looked out at the sky he could no longer attend to.
I am in love with her.
He let himself think it plainly at last, the thing he had been holding off with both hands for a fortnight.
Not a folly to be mastered. Not a passing weakness.
He was in love, wholly, and for the first time in his life, and with a penniless companion in his mother’s pay whom he could not court, could not protect without ruining, could not have without destroying.
I have fallen in love with a woman I cannot have.
And the worst of it, the thing that made him press his brow to the cold glass, was that knowing its hopelessness changed nothing whatever.
He did not want it to stop. He only wanted her to be there.
***
Clara lay in the dark a long while, and listened to the great house settle, and did not sleep.
She had told herself, walking back from the vicarage earlier that day, that she would leave the door of hope on the latch, and she had not understood, then, how much harder an unlatched door was to keep from opening than a locked one.
For hours she lay and argued with herself, marshalling every sensible thing, every danger, every reason: that she would be ruined, that she had no people, that Hartwick was watching, that a duke and a companion meeting alone in the dark could end in nothing but disaster.
She knew every word of it. She had recited it to herself a hundred times.
And then she thought of his face when he had said enough: of a man who had spent four years giving the world nothing, spending himself in an instant to shield her, and very likely paying for it soon after.
And she thought: he is up there now, alone, having defended me, and there is no one in the whole of that cold house who will go to him.
She rose, and dressed in the dark, and did not let herself stop to think any further.
She knew that if she thought, she would not go.
She went down the back stairs and out across the dark grass, and up the hill towards the small warm light that had glowed there, unanswered, on so many nights she had stood at her window and refused it.
This time, she did not refuse it.
The door gave under her hand. And there he was: not bent to the telescope, as she had pictured him a hundred times, but standing at the window with his back half to her, staring out at the night as though it had failed to give him something.
He turned at the sound of the latch.
The look on his face when he saw that it was her, naked and unguarded before he could compose it into anything else, made the breath go out of her.
For a moment, neither of them said a word.
“I almost did not come,” she said at last, because the silence was more than she could bear.
Her voice did not come out as she meant it to.
“I lay awake for hours, telling myself every reason that I should not. That it is dangerous, and foolish, and that I have nothing in the world to lose but the little I have, and that this is exactly how a woman loses it. I knew every argument. I had gone over them so often I could almost have recited them in my sleep.”
She gave a small, helpless shake of her head.
“And then I found that if I thought one moment longer, I should never come at all. So I stopped thinking. I got up, and dressed in the dark, and came before I could find one more sensible reason to stay away.”
“What made you come?”
“You did.”
It was out before she could soften it, and once it was out, the rest came after it, unsteady and unstoppable.
“I tried, Your Grace. I have tried so hard to be sensible. To protect myself. To remember my place, and keep my eyes down, and want nothing. I am good at wanting nothing; I have had such practice. But when I am with you, none of it holds. I cannot make it hold. I do not know how to be sensible about you, and tonight I could not stay away. That is the whole of it. I could not stay away one more night.”
The words hung in the lamplight, and the enormity of having said them aloud caught up with her all at once.
“I should not have said that. Forgive me. You must forget that I—”
“No.”
He had gone still while she spoke, and the single quiet word stopped her.
“Do not take it back,” he said. “I have lived four years among people who will say anything at all to me except the true thing. Do not become one of them. Not you. Not now.”
He crossed the small room towards her, slowly, as a man crossed ground he was not certain would bear him.
“I have spent four years,” he said, and stopped.
She watched him reach for words that plainly cost him.
“Four years hiding. Behind grief, and duty, and the fear of doing harm where I meant only to do right. Telling myself I was unfit for anything gentler. That there was something in me that made a poor return for love, and that the kindest thing I could do for any living soul was to keep well away from it.”
He was close now. His voice had dropped almost to nothing.
“I believed that so long it became the only thing I was sure of. And then you walked into this room out of the dark, that first night, and looked at my telescope as though you understood it. As though you understood me, before I had said a word worth hearing.” He shook his head faintly.
“I have not known what to do with myself since.”
“I thought it was only me,” she whispered.
“I thought I had imagined it. Built it up out of loneliness, because you were kind to me once, when no one had been kind to me for a very long while. I told myself a hundred times that a man like you could not possibly… That I had read a great romance into a little common courtesy.”
She gave a small, broken sound that was nearly a laugh.
“It was easier to believe myself a fool than to believe it was true. A fool has only her pride to lose.”
“It is real.” He said it without ornament, the way he said the things he was surest of. “A great deal stands against us, I will not insult you by pretending otherwise, but this is real. I have never in my life been more certain of anything, and I have made rather a profession of certainty.”
She looked at him through the tears standing bright in her eyes.
“You are not what you think you are,” she said softly.
“You are not the man grief has persuaded you that you must be. I have seen you, Your Grace, I have seen the kindness you take such pains to hide, and the tenderness, and the man underneath all that careful cold. I do not think there is anything wrong with your heart. I think it has only been… lonely.”
His eyes closed for the space of a breath.
They stood a foot apart in the lamplight, two people who had each spent a long time becoming expert in solitude, and who had just, clumsily, and at no small risk, realised that they had wearied of it.
He lifted his hand, slowly, giving her every moment in the world to step back, and cupped her face in it, his palm warm against her wet cheek.
She did not step back. She turned her face the smallest fraction into his hand instead.
“Clara.”
It was the first time he had ever spoken her name, and it undid her more thoroughly than anything else could have.
“I want to kiss you,” he said. “More than I have wanted anything for a very long time.” His thumb moved once, gently, near the corner of her mouth. “May I?”
And Clara, who had spent months learning to want nothing, and an hour that very night reciting every reason to refuse him, looked up into the grey eyes that were not cold at all, and left the door wide open at last.
“Yes,” she said.