Chapter 10 #2
She thought it might be the sisters, who occupied formal spaces with the cheerful disregard of people who had grown up in them and had long since stopped being impressed.
“You told Mrs. Eldridge,” Isadora said, with careful emphasis as though reconstructing an incident she had not witnessed but had clearly heard about extensively, “that the cat’s aesthetic preferences reflected poorly on the household linen.”
“I told her the cat had opinions,” Letitia emphasized, with dignity. “There is a difference.”
“The difference being–”
“Good morning.”
Both girls straightened.
Cecily looked up.
William stood in the doorway. He was dressed for the day, coat settled with the ease of a man who wore good clothes the way other men wore their own skin.
His gaze moved across the table in a single sweep that took in the slightly tilted cream dish, the scattered toast crumbs around Letitia’s plate, and the general atmospheric evidence of a conversation that had been considerably louder than the room strictly required.
“Good morning,” Cecily greeted.
He inclined his head and moved to his chair at the head of the table.
A footman materialized with coffee. William accepted it without looking and opened the first of the letters beside his plate with practised efficiency.
Cecily suspected he treated breakfast as a continuation of work rather than a pause from it.
For approximately thirty seconds, the room conducted itself with perfect propriety.
Then Letitia, who had been holding the remainder of her cat story in visible tension, leaned toward Cecily and said, at a volume that was perhaps sixty percent of the one she had been using before, “She made the cat sleep in the stables, which I thought was excessive–”
“Letitia.” William did not look up from the letter.
Letitia closed her mouth.
“You are not in Brighton,” he scolded, turning a page with the same calm attention, “and you are not in the nursery. You are at the breakfast table, and you will conduct yourself accordingly.”
The silence that followed was heavy.
Cecily set down her teacup. “I believe,” she said pleasantly, “that we were discussing a cat.”
William looked up and pinned her with a look akin to a question. “We were,” he agreed.
“Yes. Which is, I would argue, an entirely appropriate breakfast topic.” She reached for the toast. “Laughter at breakfast can hardly endanger the estate.”
“Discipline has never ruined anyone.” His voice held the mild certainty of someone quoting a principle he has never had cause to question.
“Neither has warmth,” she argued evenly, meeting his gaze over the butter dish. “And one of them makes for considerably better company at eight in the morning.”
Isadora made a small sound that she covered with a cough.
William held Cecily’s gaze for a moment with the expression of a man who was deciding something. Then he returned to his letter with composed finality, as if he had decided to let it go for now, which was in itself a kind of answer.
Letitia, reading the room, gave Cecily a look of undisguised admiration across the table. Cecily refrained from acknowledging it because encouraging Letitia seemed like the kind of decision that gathered momentum quickly.
Instead, she looked at Isadora, who was eating her toast with the careful attention of someone who was very much listening to everything and visibly calculating whether it was safe to participate.
“What are you reading at the moment?” she asked her.
Isadora’s eyes flicked, briefly and almost imperceptibly, to her brother. The movement was small enough that it might have been nothing, but Cecily had been watching, and she saw it.
Something quiet settled in her chest, like a stone dropping into still water.
She is asking permission. Not out loud. Not even consciously, perhaps. But she is checking first.
“Poetry,” Isadora answered, after the briefest pause. “And history. I’ve been reading about the campaigns in the Peninsula. The strategy interests me more than I expected.”
“The strategy?” Cecily said, with genuine interest. “Not the romance?”
“The romance of military history,” Isadora said, with the dry precision of a girl who had clearly thought about this, “tends to be written by people who were not present for the actual conditions. I find the logistics more honest.”
Cecily nodded. “That is an excellent observation.”
Isadora looked faintly startled. Not by the subject, but by the directness of the approval. She recovered quickly, but Cecily had seen it.
“I want to read romances,” Letitia announced with energy. “Proper ones. With heroines who do things and heroes who are—you know…” She gestured with her hands. “Heroic. And not interminably sensible.”
“There is considerable overlap between heroic and sensible, if the author is doing their job,” Cecily opined.
“There isn’t in the good ones,” Letitia said, with absolute conviction.
“No, I–” Isadora began.
“And I want to ride the lower fields,” Letitia continued, gathering speed now that she had started. “The whole lower field, not just the paddock. Mrs. Eldridge says the paddock is sufficient, but the paddock is the size of a very large carpet, and a very large carpet is not–”
“Letitia.” William set down his coffee cup. The sound was not loud—it barely carried—but it was final.
Letitia stopped as though a door had closed. He looked at her. His expression was not unkind—that was the thing Cecily was already learning to watch for, the thing that made him complicated. There was no cruelty in it. Only a certainty so complete it had never thought to question itself.
“Too many novels fill a young lady’s head with expectations that the world is not arranged to meet.
The disappointment that follows is not the world’s fault.
” He looked at Isadora as well, briefly, including her in the observation without accusing her.
“And riding without defined boundaries invites accidents. The lower fields are uneven past the second gate. You know this.”
“I know the paddock better than I know my own shoes,” Letitia said, with the careful dignity of making a last argument rather than a first one.
“Then you will continue to know it well.”
Letitia fell silent. Not happily—her expression communicated the full inventory of her feelings on the matter with considerable eloquence—but with the resignation of someone who had been here before and knew the terrain.
Cecily looked at her plate for a moment.
She is not afraid of him. Neither of them is. But they are afraid of his disappointment, which is a different and more complicated country to live in.
She looked up.
“Books,” she spoke up, addressing no one in particular, “teach discernment as much as they teach dreaming. I would argue they teach it more, when they are well chosen, because they offer the reader the experience of a hundred different lives and the judgment to navigate one’s own.
” She picked up her teacup. “A girl who has read widely is harder to deceive and better equipped to understand the people she will encounter. That seems rather useful.”
“It seems romantic,” William remarked.
“It seems practical,” Cecily countered. “The two are not as opposed as you seem to believe.”
He looked at her with the expression she was beginning to recognize—the one that was not quite challenge and not quite interest, but occupied the territory between them.
“And riding the lower fields?”
“Confidence in the saddle is not built through restrictions. It is built through graduated experience and the opportunity to test one’s own judgment in conditions that are not entirely controlled.
” She set her teacup down. “A rider who has only ever ridden in a paddock does not know how she will respond to uneven ground. That seems like a more significant safety concern than the lower fields themselves.”
“Fear of accidents prevents them.”
“Fear of accidents,” she said, “produces exactly the kind of tense, hesitant riding most likely to cause one.” She met his gaze.
“Discipline keeps a household ordered, Duke. I do not dispute that. But discipline alone—without trust in the person being governed, without kindness in the governing—does not produce capable, confident young women. It produces young women who are very good at waiting to be told what to do.” A pause.
“And at hiding what they actually think.”
The room went very still. It was a different kind of stillness from the ones that had preceded it.
Across the table, Isadora had put down her toast. Letitia was looking at her plate with the focused attention of someone who was not looking at two people across the table.
William looked at Cecily. She looked back.
The distance between them was perhaps four feet.
At that moment, it felt considerably less—the compressed distance between two people who had said something real to each other and had not yet decided what came next.
His expression was not angry. It was not dismissive. It was a careful, contained expression.
She did not look away. Neither did he.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked through several seconds in which neither of them moved. Then William set his napkin on the table.
He rose with the unhurried composure of a man concluding a meeting rather than retreating from one—the distinction was deliberate, and she knew it—and looked at his sisters with an expression that was, in its own way, genuinely fond beneath the scolding.
“Your lessons begin at nine,” he said. “Miss Aldwell will not wait.” He glanced at Isadora.
“If you mean to read on the Peninsular campaign, avoid the circulating accounts. They improve the story at the expense of the truth.” A pause—brief, almost imperceptible.
“I’ll have something more reliable sent up. ”
Isadora looked up at him, her face lighting up. “Thank you, William.”
He nodded once. Then he looked at Letitia, who was still studying her plate with great philosophical attention. “The east paddock has been extended to include the lower path as far as the second gate. Mrs. Eldridge is mistaken about the boundaries. You may ride there this afternoon.”
Letitia’s head snapped up. She opened her mouth.
“With a groom present,” he added, before she could speak. “And at a pace I would not be embarrassed to hear described.”
Letitia’s expression completed the full journey from surprise to delight to particular calculation, deciding whether to press her advantage, and wisely settled on simple gratitude. “Yes. Thank you.”
William left without another glance at Cecily.
The door closed behind him with quiet finality.
For a moment, the three of them sat in the particular silence of a room that had just been vacated by a significant presence.
It was Letitia who broke it first, because of course it was.
“He extended the paddock,” she said to no one in particular, in the tone of someone reporting a geological event.
“He extended the paddock,” Isadora echoed, in the same tone.
Cecily looked at the door, then at her teacup, then back at the door.
He loves them. Every rule he has set is a wall he has built, and inside the wall he has put everything he cares about. He does not know how to let them out without also letting in what he is afraid of.
She poured herself more tea.
“Letitia,” she requested, “finish the story about the cat.”
Letitia needed no further encouragement.
By the time Miss Aldwell arrived at five minutes to nine, the cream had been knocked over once—by Letitia, inevitably—Isadora had smiled three times in a way that reached her eyes, and Cecily had decided, quietly and without ceremony, that she was going to do something about the atmosphere of this house.
She did not yet know how, but she was going to.