Chapter 12
Inever asked him about the library this afternoon.
The thought came as she was changing for the evening, somewhere between her maid setting down the hairbrush and picking up the pins, and it came with mild exasperation.
She had gone to the study with two purposes—the library for the girls, and the question of the orphanage—and Mr. Harwood’s careful answers had displaced everything else so thoroughly that she had left without mentioning the books at all.
Well, the study was closed now, the evening well advanced, and William was presumably occupied with whatever occupied him at this hour. The library, however, was not closed. And she knew roughly where it was.
She dismissed her maid, kept her evening dress on, and went to find it.
She found it at the end of the east corridor, a heavy door that opened onto the particular smell of a room that had been full of books for a very long time—paper and leather and old bindings and the faint sweetness of a fire recently lit.
She stood in the doorway for a moment and simply breathed it in.
Then she went to work.
The library was genuinely good. Not arranged for show—the spines were worn in the places they had been touched most, and the shelves had the slight irregularity of a collection that had been added to over time, rather than installed all at once.
She moved along them slowly, tilting her head to read the titles, letting the inventory in her head take shape.
History, for Isadora—a substantial section, military particularly, organized with a precision that felt personal.
Poetry, thinner than she’d have liked but workable.
The novels were pushed to the far end of the middle shelf, as though they had been permitted rather than welcomed.
Essays, a full shelf she hadn’t expected and was pleased to find.
She pulled three volumes and set them on the reading table by the fire, along with a history book she thought Isadora would find more honest than popular accounts.
She found Cowper and set it on the reading table. Found the less popular essays—serious, honest, the kind Isadora would read twice and argue with on principle. A volume of published letters, well-observed and wryly written.
That was Isadora. Letitia remained unsolved.
Letitia needed pace. A heroine who moved through the world, made decisions, and was funny without trying to be. Cecily ran her finger slowly along the novel section and found it not quite right.
She pushed the rolling ladder to the far end of the shelves and climbed, checking the upper reaches where books went when they were no longer fashionable enough to display but too good to be thrown away.
That was where she found the gap.
It was two volumes wide, between a collection of sermons and a manual of Latin grammar. The books on either side were nudged together in a careful, unconvincing way, as though someone had noticed the gap and tried to address it without quite closing it.
She moved the collection of sermons aside. The book behind them was slim. Dark red cloth this time, gilt lettering on the cover, the kind of binding that had been chosen to be beautiful and had succeeded.
She opened the first page.
She read the first paragraph.
She read the second.
She stood on the third rung of the library ladder for a long moment, and then she climbed down carefully, because it seemed unwise to read this particular book at height.
The fire had burned considerably lower by the time she surfaced.
She had drawn her feet beneath her at some point without noticing, her hair was somewhat looser than it had been, and she was…
well. The French, she had always maintained, understood certain things about human nature that the English considered impolite to examine directly.
Now Cecily was revising this assessment significantly upward and telling herself she would find something for Letitia in just a moment.
The book was not merely scandalous. It was specifically, technically, enthusiastically scandalous in ways that she was fairly certain would have caused Miss Tully to need medical attention.
She had read forty pages of it without once thinking about Letitia or Isadora or the respectable volumes sitting untouched on the reading table.
She turned the page.
“Have you found something entertaining?”
The book left her hands.
It did not slip. It left with the full conviction of an object that had decided the situation called for independent action.
She caught it against her knee by pure reflex before it could reach the floor, which was the only dignified thing about the subsequent five seconds, and turned it face-down in the same movement, which was absolutely not the gesture of someone with a clear conscience.
William was standing in the doorway. Shirtsleeves, cravat loosened, the look of a man who had finished his evening and followed some old habit in the direction of books.
His gaze went to her face first, then to her hands, then to the book pressed flat and face-down against her knee with both her palms over it. His expression was not helping matters at all.
He said nothing.
“I was looking for books for the girls,” Cecily explained.
“Were you?”
“That is what I came for.” She reached toward the side table with the intention of setting the book down casually and standing up all in one smooth movement.
The book slipped. She caught it. The cover flashed upward for a full second before she set it face down on the table.
“I found several good options. On the table. The other table.”
He looked at the reading table. Cowper, the essays, the letters—all present and correct. Then he looked at the book on the side table, face down, with both her hands still on it.
“I see them.” He moved further into the room. Not toward her, simply further in, and stopped at the nearest shelf, running his eyes along the spines. “What are you reading?”
“Nothing. A book I found on the shelf. I was just–”
She picked it up with the intention of returning it to the shelf before he could read the title, which required crossing the room, which required moving toward him, which she had already begun to do before she noticed that he had also moved further into the room and they were now closer together than her plan had accounted for.
“It was already there, behind the sermons. I was simply curious, and I–”
“What are you reading?”
She stopped.
He tilted his head, waiting.
She held out the book. It seemed simpler than evading his questions.
He took it. Read the cover. Read it again, in the specific way of someone making sure they have read correctly.
Then looked up at her. His expression was not what she had prepared herself for, which had been something between amusement and the composed archness he wore when he was about to be effortlessly superior about something.
It wasn’t that.
It was simply amused. Genuinely, warmly amused, without any performance.
“The sermons,” he said.
“Behind them, yes.”
“I see.” He turned the book once in his hand. “And how far did you get?”
“I was looking for books for Isadora and Letitia,” she replied, with great dignity.
“You mentioned that.” He glanced at the reading table. “Those three are for the girls?”
“Yes.”
“And this one?”
“I found it by accident.”
“On page–” He glanced at the spine. “–forty-three.”
The heat in her face announced itself with considerable conviction. She said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would improve the situation, and she had recently learned that silence was occasionally more useful than speech.
He stepped closer. Not far—a foot, perhaps, the distance between a person consulting a book and a person returning it to a shelf—but the space where she stood was already not large, and he was already not far, and the combined effect of it was that he was standing quite close to her and showing no particular inclination to address this.
She took one step back. Her shoulders found the bookcase.
Not again.
He was close enough now that she could see the faint crease in his collar where his cravat had been, the slight disorder of his dark hair, the firelight doing something warm and unfair to the line of his jaw, and his eyes, which were looking at her with the kind of attention that made heat climb the sides of her face.
Her pulse made itself known. Not just with the quick heat of embarrassment—that had already come and gone—but something slower and more inconvenient, a warmth that started in her chest and worked outward with the unhurried persistence of something that had decided to happen regardless of her feelings on the matter.
He reached past her.
His arm came level with her shoulder as he held the book up to the shelf beside her head, reading the gap where it had come from, and for one breath, she was entirely enclosed by him.
Not touched, not quite, but near enough that the warmth of him was real and present, and the smell of his shirt was clean and close, and the shelf at her back was solid in the way that stationary objects were reassuringly solid when everything else was slightly unsteady.
She did not breathe.
He did not put the book back.
He lowered it, looked at the cover once more, and then at her face, and whatever he saw there made something shift in his expression—something that was not the amusement from before and was not the composure he wore in daylight. But something quieter and more unguarded, there and then not there.
“You have no reason to be embarrassed,” he murmured.
“I’m not embarrassed.”
“You are pressed against a bookshelf.”
“I was making room.”
“For what?”
She had no answer for that.
“You have absolutely no reason to be embarrassed,” he said more quietly. “It is your house. Your library. Every book in it is yours.”
“I wasn’t—I didn’t bring it. It was already hidden there.”
“I know where it was.” The corner of his mouth curved. “I know this library rather well.”
“Then you know I wasn’t–”
“Looking for it on purpose.” He held her gaze. “I know.” He glanced at the cover one last time. “It was my mother’s. She kept certain books behind the sermons. I found them when I reorganized the collection.” A pause. “I left them where they were.”
She looked at the book in his hand and thought about that. About what it meant to find something hidden and choose to leave it hidden, to preserve the privacy of a person who was no longer there to keep it themselves.
“You are a married woman, and I am…” The slight wryness returned, settled at the corner of his mouth. “…genuinely the last man in England who would judge someone’s reading. Whatever is in this library, you are welcome to all of it.”
He set the book on the shelf beside her. Not in her hands, but simply within reach. Then he looked at her with the directness that she could not yet decide whether it was comfortable or not.
“I ask only one thing.”
She waited.
“Certain books,” he said, with the precision of a man identifying a specific concern, “should remain well beyond the reach of my sisters.” He glanced at the spine beside her shoulder. “This one in particular. And the two others on the shelf above the manual of Latin grammar.”
Despite everything—his proximity, the warmth in her face, the pulse that was still conducting itself with excessive enthusiasm—she felt laughter bubble up in her chest, unexpected and entirely genuine.
“I had no intention of giving this to Letitia.”
“I know, but I thought it worth saying.” He tilted his head slightly toward the reading table. “Cowper. The collected letters. The essays on the Peninsular campaigns.” He looked back at her. “Those are good choices. Isadora will read the essays twice.”
“I thought so.”
“She’ll have opinions about the third chapter.”
“I’m counting on it.”
He looked at her for one more moment. Then he straightened and stepped back. The space between them resumed its proper dimensions, the air between them resumed its normal temperature—or perhaps she simply stopped noticing it—and he moved toward the door.
“Goodnight, Duchess,” he said.
“Goodnight, Duke.”
He left.
The fire crackled. The house fell into silence. Cecily stood with her back against the shelf and the book beside her shoulder and no audience at all for whatever was currently happening in her chest, which was considerable and unresolved.
She was still flushed, and she knew it, and there was no one left to see it, which was the only mercy the evening had to offer.
She reached up and took the book from the shelf. Then she tucked it under her arm with the others and went to bed.