Chapter 15
She was watching him more than the game.
He had his coat off. She had noticed this at the third hoop and had been managing the noticing ever since with mixed results.
He had handed it to the footman without looking, rolled his sleeves to the elbows with the absent efficiency of someone who had done it a thousand times and attached no significance to it, and returned to the game entirely unconcerned with the effect of any of this on anyone in the vicinity.
Which was, she was finding, considerably more difficult to manage than the deliberate version of him.
The deliberate version she had prepared for.
She had studied it, cataloged it, and built something sensible against it.
This version—the one that played Pall Mall without performing anything, that laughed at Edward’s remarks with full unguardedness,this version had arrived without warning, and she had no architecture for it at all.
She was aware of this and found it deeply inconvenient, but she could not seem to stop.
“Your shot, Edward said pointedly.
She looked at her ball. She had been looking at William while he played the previous shot and had entirely lost track of where things stood.
“I know,” she said.
She took her position and hit with more force than she had intended.
The ball went through and kept going. Edward said something she didn’t hear because William had glanced at her in the same moment with the look he’d been giving her all afternoon—the quiet, unhurried look that she could not yet read and that landed in her chest every time with the reliability of something practiced.
She walked to the next hoop.
Stop looking at him.
She looked at the ground instead, which was better, and thought about the angle of approach to the eighth hoop, which was more useful, and did not think about rolled sleeves or quiet laughs or the way he had said, I know, twenty minutes ago, with a simplicity that had made her forget what she was arguing about.
She was doing well.
Then he came to stand beside her to wait for his turn. She felt the warmth of him in the cool garden air and stopped doing well entirely.
Edward won the final hoop, and she disputed it on principle. Alas, she lost the dispute on principle and surrendered with the compressed, formal grace of someone who had decided to be a good sport about something and was finding it required genuine effort.
“Well played,” she told Edward when the game ended.
“You were formidable,” Edward offered, with the magnanimity of a man who knew he’d won and could afford to be generous about it.
“I was robbed,” she countered. “But thank you.”
The footman collected the mallets. Beatrice had already drifted back toward the house with an expression that said she had gotten everything she came to the garden for and was now ready for tea.
Edward fell into step with William behind them, resuming their discussion about the land reform bill, their voices settling into a low, unhurried register.
Cecily walked beside Beatrice and told herself she was not listening to the conversation behind her.
She could hear William’s voice. The cadence when he was talking about something he had actually thought about—not the easy charm of a dinner party, but the direct, undecorated version.
She had been hearing it all afternoon, and she was beginning to understand that this was the version he reserved for people he didn’t feel required managing.
“You’re quiet,” Beatrice noted.
“I’m cold,” Cecily corrected.
“You’re never cold. You complain about being cold. Those are different things. Besides, it is currently hot.”
Cecily said nothing.
Beatrice opened the door, and they went inside.
The drawing room was warm after the garden, the fire crackling, and the tea set laid out.
Edward and William came in behind them, and there were ten minutes of the comfortable, well-fed disorder of an afternoon concluding with coats retrieved, tea poured, and Edward making a remark about the Pall Mall score that Cecily refused to dignify with a response.
Then Edward said he had a letter to finish before the evening post, and William said he’d walk with him to discuss a matter they’d left unresolved at luncheon.
Within a few minutes, it was only Cecily and Beatrice in the drawing room, the fire between them, the sounds of the house settling into the late afternoon echoing around them.
Beatrice poured Cecily more tea without asking.
Cecily accepted it without a sound.
They sat for a moment in the particular silence of two sisters who had been amid company all day and were relieved to be without it.
“How is it? Truly?” Beatrice asked, eventually.
Cecily looked at the fire. “How is what?”
“Cecily.”
She turned the cup in her hands. “It is what it is. We agreed on the terms. He is—he has been perfectly civil. The house is comfortable. His sisters are wonderful.” She paused. “It is an arrangement, and it functions as one.”
“Mm.”
“Don’t mm me. You are the one who asked.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said mm, which in your language is an entire paragraph.”
Beatrice set down her cup and looked at Cecily with the direct, unhurried look she’d had since childhood.
“He was watching you all afternoon,” she noted.
“He was watching the game.”
“He was watching you play the game. Not the same thing, and you know it.” Beatrice tilted her head slightly. “At the fifth hoop, when you were arguing with Edward about the ball, he was standing behind you, and you couldn’t see his face. I could.”
“And?” Cecily prompted in the tone of someone who did not particularly want the answer.
“And men do not look at women that way out of a sense of duty.”
The fire shifted. Cecily looked at it.
“He probably looks at me,” she said carefully, “because I am his wife and I am present, and he is an observant man. That is all it is.”
“Cecily–”
“We agreed, Bea. Before the wedding, strictly, essentially—we agreed it was an arrangement. He said so himself. A few months of appearances, and then we lead separate lives.” She paused. “He has been consistent about that.”
“What people agree to and what people feel are not always the same thing.”
“In this case, they are.”
“I watched him at the eighth hoop,” Beatrice said, with the patient persistence of a woman who had decided where this conversation was going.
“You were laughing at something Edward said and you’d forgotten to be careful, you were just laughing and he stopped mid-shot and looked at you.
Just looked. And then he looked back at his mallet and smiled.
It wasn’t the smile he uses in company.” She paused to let that sink in.
“It was the other one. The one I suspect not many people see.”
Cecily said nothing. She was thinking about the garden, about the rolled sleeves and the quiet laugh. She was thinking about the library, the firelight, the warmth of him close in a small room, and his voice lower than usual, saying, You are more than welcome.
She was thinking about all the moments she had been collecting without meaning to, filing carefully in a part of herself.
“It doesn’t matter how he looks,” she insisted. “A look is not a feeling, and a feeling is not a choice. Even if he…it doesn’t matter. The arrangement is what it is. I am not going to–” She stopped.
“Going to what?” Beatrice asked gently.
“I am not going to make the mistake,” Cecily said carefully, “of deciding that kindness is something more than what it is. Or that a man who is honorable by nature has developed feelings simply because he has been honorable.” She met her sister’s eyes.
“I know the difference between a man who is decent to you and a man who loves you, and I am not going to confuse them simply because–” She stopped again.
“Simply because?”
Saying the truth was hard.
Cecily looked at the fire. “Simply because it would be very easy to,” she said quietly.
Beatrice was still for a moment. Then she reached out, put her hand briefly over Cecily’s, and said nothing, which was exactly the right thing.
The fire popped. Cecily straightened. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Of course.”
“The orphanage fund—the charitable account for the orphanage on the Blackmoor estate.” She kept her voice even, practical, the voice of a woman asking an administrative question rather than a woman who had been thinking about this since a drawing room in London three days ago.
Beatrice looked at her. The change in subject had not gone unnoticed—nothing ever went unnoticed with Beatrice—but she followed it because she understood, as she always had, when Cecily needed a door and when she needed a wall.
“I’ve been wanting to see it since I arrived.
I asked Mr. Harwood about it when I met him—how many children, how the funding works, that sort of thing.
He simply said it was in order and well managed, and that it need not concern me, and I realized I know almost nothing about how these things actually operate. ”
Cecily looked at her sister. “You know these funds, Bea. You’ve managed them in your estate for years.
You know how they should work. How closely are they usually managed?
Is it possible—if someone wanted to, is it possible to redirect money from a charitable account without it being immediately visible in the main estate accounts? ”
Beatrice looked at her steadily. “Yes,” she replied. “If the steward is the one presenting the accounts and the family is trusting rather than verifying, then yes. It would take some time to become apparent, if it became apparent at all.”
The words hung heavily in the air.
“Some estates manage it directly through the household accounts, some through a separate endowment. The matron or the superintendent usually handles the day-to-day transactions, but the money flows from the estate, and someone has to ensure it arrives where it’s meant to.”
“And oversight? Does the family usually stay involved?”
“The good ones do,” Beatrice said. “Others leave it entirely to the steward, which is fine when the steward is thorough and less fine when he isn’t.” She paused. “Why the sudden interest?”
“It isn’t sudden,” Cecily sighed. “I’ve always cared about this sort of work.
I just never had a household of my own to do anything useful with.
” She looked at the window. “I want to be involved. Actually involved, not simply lending my name to it. I want to see it, understand how it runs, and get to know the children.” A pause.
“William has agreed to stop there on the way home this evening.”
Beatrice looked at her with the warm, quiet expression she wore when something had pleased her more than she intended to show. “Good,” she said simply.
“You think it’s a good idea.”
“I think that a household with someone in it who pays attention to where the money goes is a healthier household than one without.” She picked up her cup. “And I think you have always been better at paying attention than you give yourself credit for.”
Cecily looked at the window again. The light was thinning above the garden wall, the afternoon almost gone.
She thought about children she had not yet met, in a building she had not yet seen, supported by funds she did not yet understand.
She thought about the kind of duchess she wanted to be—not decorative, not convenient, not the polished surface of a household that ran without her—and felt the quiet, solid purpose of it settle in her chest like something that had been waiting for a place to land.
She stood up.
“We should say our goodbyes,” she declared, “before the light fades entirely.”