Chapter 11
“If we go left past the elm,” Letitia said, gesturing with the confidence of presenting a well-researched proposal, “there’s a path that runs all the way to the ridge. The ground is perfectly flat for at least the first half mile, and the view from the top is–”
“The answer is no, Letitia.”
All three of them turned.
William had come from the direction of the house, still in his riding coat, which meant he had either been out already or had been intending to go and had found them first. He fell into step beside Cecily without particular ceremony, his eyes fixed on the path ahead.
Letitia, who had the instinct of someone accustomed to identifying exactly when an argument had closed, looked at her sister instead.
“I wasn’t asking you, Brother,” she said, rallying. “I was telling Cecily.”
“And now I’m telling you.” He glanced at her briefly. “The ridge path past the elm has a drainage ditch that isn’t visible until you’re on top of it. The ground on the far side has been soft since the rain last week.”
“I’ve ridden that path before.”
“Not since the rain.”
Letitia opened her mouth, which earned her a nudge from Isadora, and promptly closed it. Her expression did the full inventory of its objection in silence, which was, Cecily had noticed, what her expressions did when she knew the argument was over and hadn’t quite accepted it yet.
“It isn’t fair,” she complained, which was different from a proper argument and they all knew it.
“No,” William agreed, without irony. “It isn’t.”
Letitia looked momentarily thrown by this, as though she had aimed at a target that had moved. William had already turned his attention back to the path.
Cecily watched the whole exchange with the quiet attention she had been giving him since breakfast three days ago—the way his refusals were never careless, the way he always had a reason, the way the reason was always, underneath the firmness of it, about keeping them safe.
“If the concern is the ground, and you know the path, why not come with us?” she suggested.
He looked at her.
“You know where the ditch is,” she said simply. “You know the soft ground. It seems like the problem is solved if you’re there.”
A pause. Not a long one. He looked ahead at the path, then at Letitia, who had gone very still in the way of someone trying not to appear to want something too much, and then back at Cecily.
“Very well,” he relented.
Letitia made a sound that was not quite a word.
“At a sensible pace,” he added.
“Obviously,” Letitia said, already turning toward the stables.
The horses were brought out, and they mounted them.
Within ten minutes, they were past the formal gardens and on the open path, the estate falling away behind them and the sky opening up in that particular way it did when one cleared the tree line and suddenly had more of it than one remembered existed.
It was a cool morning, bright without being harsh, the year briefly admitting that it could still be pleasant before it committed to something worse.
William rode slightly ahead, which Cecily had initially taken for indifference and had since revised.
He was watching the ground. His gaze moved in a constant, unhurried sweep—the path, his sisters, the verge, back to the path.
When Letitia’s mare drifted toward the soft edge of the track, he said her name once, quietly, and she corrected her path without being told twice.
“Shoulders back,” he instructed, a few minutes later.
“They are back.”
“Further.”
“William, if my shoulders go any further back, I will be looking at the sky.”
“You’d see more that way than you do looking at your horse’s ears.”
Letitia straightened mutinously, and Cecily caught the slight twitch at the corner of William’s mouth that came and went before it became anything.
They rode on. The elm came into view, and William took the lead past it, guiding them along the firmer ground to the left of the drainage ditch—invisible in the long grass exactly as he’d said.
Riding past it, Cecily understood why he had been firm.
To the right, the ground looked perfectly navigable.
Without knowing, you would ride directly into it.
He knows every inch of this land. He has ridden it enough times to know where the ground is soft and where it holds.
She was still thinking about this when her mare faltered.
It was nothing—a bird from the hedgerow, the sudden noise of wings—but her mare sharply stepped sideways. Cecily, caught off-balance, grabbed the reins on instinct and pulled.
The mare tossed her head and backed up.
And then William was there.
She hadn’t heard him move towards her. One moment, he was two feet ahead; the next, he was beside her, his horse steady as furniture, his hand closing over hers on the reins before she had fully processed that she needed help.
“Easy,” he soothed.
It wasn’t clear whether he meant her or the mare, and it didn’t entirely matter because the effect was the same. His other hand briefly touched the bridle, settling the mare with calm certainty.
The mare steadied.
Cecily breathed.
His hand was still over hers.
She became aware of this gradually and then all at once—the warmth of it, the slight weight. His grip shifted, adjusting her fingers on the leather with a precision that was entirely practical and felt, for no reason she could adequately defend, like something else entirely.
“You’re holding it too tightly,” he remarked. His voice was level, instructional. He was looking at the reins.
“I’m aware.”
“A tight grip tells the mare that something is wrong. She responds to it.” He didn’t release her hand, but adjusted it again—index finger, then the curl of her palm, repositioning with the patient exactness of someone correcting a small thing that matters.
“The tighter you hold, the less control you have. The instinct is to grip harder, but it works against you.”
“Counterintuitive,” Cecily said.
“Most useful things are.” He glanced up then, and their eyes met from a distance of perhaps eighteen inches. “It’s the same in most other matters. Hold too hard, and whatever you’re holding will fight you. Give a little, and it settles.”
She held his gaze. “You’re not talking about horses.”
Nothing moved across his face. “I’m talking about horses.”
“Of course,” she said.
But warmth had risen to her cheeks regardless, and she could feel it.
From the fractional stillness that crossed his expression before he looked back at the path, she suspected he could see it.
“I would rather risk a fall,” she added, “than make a habit of holding on too tightly.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then something happened to his face—a softening, brief and unguarded. It lasted perhaps two seconds.
Then it was gone.
He straightened in the saddle. His gaze returned to the path with the finality of a door closing, and when he spoke again, his voice had the measured, practical edge of someone who had moved on.
“There is a dinner next Thursday. Lord and Lady Ashford. They are expecting us, and it will be your first formal appearance in London since the wedding.” He glanced at her briefly. “I’ll have the details sent to your rooms. Mrs. Eldridge will know who the Ashfords are if you need context.”
“Thank you,” Cecily said.
“The Ashfords are dull,” Letitia chimed in , without turning around. “Lady Ashford once spoke for twenty minutes about her conservatory. I timed it.”
“You were not at the Ashford dinner,” William pointed out.
“I was listening from the landing.”
A pause. “We will discuss the appropriate use of the landing later.”
“I look forward to it,” Letitia said, in a tone that suggested she did not.
Cecily looked at the path. At the open ground ahead, and the sky above it, and the late morning light moving through the grass on either side. Her hand still felt warm where his had been.
She did not think about that. She rode on.
* * *
The afternoon had turned soft by the time they came in from picking flowers in the gardens.
Isadora had asked, somewhere between the rose beds and the side door, whether Cecily had read Cowper, and from there the conversation had opened in the easy, unhurried way which led to them discovering they had more common ground than they’d expected.
Isadora’s reading, it emerged, was both broader and more unconventional than her careful, considered manner suggested. She had opinions about Pope that she delivered with the precision of a scholar and the slight self-consciousness of someone who had not often been invited to share them.
She had read most of the library’s history section and had quietly, methodically, filled the gaps with whatever she could borrow from the neighbors.
“Miss Aldwell doesn’t object?” Cecily asked.
“Miss Aldwell,” Isadora replied, with the diplomatic tact of a girl who had learned to be careful with her words, “has a preference for improving literature.”
“She gave me a book about a girl who learns to be modest,” Letitia said from behind them, where she had been examining everything growing along the path. “The girl in the book is modest from the first page. She doesn’t seem to need the lesson.”
“The lesson is for the reader,” Isadora said.
“Then I especially don’t need it.”
Cecily looked at Letitia. “What would you read, if you could read anything?”
Letitia considered this with the seriousness the question deserved. “Something that happens. I don’t mind if it’s sad, as long as things actually happen in it. I read a novel last spring that was three hundred pages of a woman deciding whether to accept an invitation, and I nearly lost my mind.”
“Did she accept it?”
“She did. And then the book ended.”
“Good God.”
Letitia pointed at her. “Exactly.”