Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
They moved in companionable silence for a time, following the path as it curved gradually inward. He tracked their position, counting the turns, building the layout in his mind the way his father had taught him.
Keep a map of where you are. A man who loses his bearings loses everything else shortly afterward.
He had been keeping his bearings where Julia Norish was concerned since the morning when she stepped out of a broken carriage on Aldgate Street and argued with him in front of half of London.
"I find myself curious," he said.
She glanced at him, waiting. She had the quality, which he had come to appreciate more than he expected, of not filling silences unnecessarily.
"When your carriage broke down on Aldgate Street." He kept his eyes on the path ahead. "What was your initial assessment of the situation?"
A brief pause. She knew exactly what he was doing. "I assessed that the wheel had given way and the carriage was no longer serviceable."
"And of your own position within that situation?"
"That it was inconvenient."
"Inconvenient." He let the word stand. "Not hopeless?"
"It might have felt so at some point, but I did my best not to dwell on those thoughts. Besides, I never used the word."
"You didn't need to." He glanced at her.
"You stepped out of a broken-down carriage in the middle of a busy London street, argued with a complete stranger in front of a gathering crowd, and still managed to get yourself, your sister, and what I can only describe as a remarkable quantity of luggage safely to your destination. "
She kept her expression composed. It was the expression she used when she was mildly pleased and did not intend to show it. "I had very little choice in the matter."
"Most people, given very little choice, do very little." He looked ahead again. "You are not most people, Julia. I rather think you know that."
She was quiet for a moment. The path split ahead, and she chose left without breaking stride, following an angle he had also calculated toward the center. He fell in beside her and said nothing about it.
"You make it sound like an accomplishment," she said finally. "It was not. It was simply a necessity."
"Most accomplishments are."
He watched the words land. Something shifted in her expression, small and quickly contained, and she looked ahead and did not respond. He did not press her.
The center opened before them. The hedges pulled back into a wide circular clearing with a stone table at its center and three interlocking puzzle boxes arranged on top. Four paths led outward in other directions. All of them were empty.
First.
He moved to the table and took the second box, leaving her the first, which had a sequence of engraved symbols along its face.
She picked it up without hesitation and began turning it in her hands, her attention complete and immediate.
He had noticed that about her from early on.
When Julia Norish focused her mind on something, she did not apply herself by halves.
They worked without speaking. He turned the sliding mechanism on the second box's base, assessing the resistance at each increment, and in his peripheral vision, he could see her working through the symbol sequence with the same methodical concentration.
The clearing was quiet. Somewhere beyond the hedges, other teams were still navigating.
He was aware of her in a way that had become familiar enough now that he had stopped arguing with it.
The second box yielded. He set it open on the table and reached for the third.
"You have been carrying something for a very long time," he said.
Her hands stilled for just a moment on the outer ring of her box. Then they resumed.
"I do not say that to be presumptuous." He kept his eyes on the rotating rings in front of him, giving her the space.
"I say it because I have been watching you manage everything and everyone in your orbit since the moment we met.
Your sister's nerves. Your aunt's expectations.
The opinions of every guest in this house.
" He turned the first ring. "Your father's absence. "
"I was not aware I was so transparent," she said.
"You are not." He set the third box down, and the mechanism released. "But I have been paying attention."
A soft click came from her side of the table. Her box opened.
She stared at three cards. He waited. He had learned that when she went still in that particular way, something was being decided.
"I have been my father's keeper since I was fourteen years old," she said.
The steadiness in her voice was the kind that cost something.
He knew the sound of it. He had used it himself, in rooms where he could not afford to waver.
"He is not a bad man. He never was. But he is like a child in the ways that matter most, incapable of managing money, incapable of managing consequence.
Someone had to do it. There was no one else. "
She picked up one of the cards.
"I told myself it was temporary." Her thumb moved across the card's surface.
"That eventually he would steady himself, or the debts would resolve, or something would shift, and I would be able to put the weight down.
Nothing shifted. The weight only grew heavier.
And now there is Poppy, and there is this Season, and there is you, and I am so very tired of being the only person who can see the full shape of a problem and the only person willing to stand in front of it. "
She stopped.
He looked at her. She had not intended to say that much.
He could see it in the slight tension at the corners of her mouth, the way she was looking at the card in her hand rather than at him.
He thought of the morning he had stood in Henry's study, reading the inventory of what Norish had taken from a dying man, and of all the years he had spent feeding his own resentment on the certainty that the Norishes were one and the same, cut from identical cloth.
I have been wrong about this one.
"You have been very lonely," he said.
She looked up at him.
He watched the word find her.
He watched her careful composure—worn like a second dress—absorb the blow and almost hold. Then it faltered: her eyes brightened, and she looked away, pressing her lips together with the practiced control of someone long accustomed to containing grief in company.
She would not weep. He could see her deciding it through sheer determination.
Then a single tear escaped, and without conscious thought, he moved.
He stepped around the corner of the table and put his arms around her, carefully, without hesitation, the way one steadied something that had been standing under too much weight for too long.
She went very still, the way she always went still when she was taking stock of something unexpected.
Then, slightly, she leaned.
He stood there and let her, and did not make it into anything more than it was.
He had not held another person like this in an extraordinarily long time.
He had told himself, over the years, that he had no particular need to embrace another person.
He noted, now, that he had been mistaken about that also.
From the left-hand passage came the sound of approaching footsteps and a woman's triumphant voice announcing that she had known all along.
Julia straightened. One finger pressed to the corner of her eye, so practiced he would have missed it if he hadn't been watching.
Then she turned back to the table and arranged the three cards in order with complete composure, as though nothing had happened, or as though she had decided that nothing would be made of what had.
"I believe that is the answer," she said.
He looked at the cards. "It is." He glanced toward the path. "We should record it before anyone arrives."
She was already writing, the pencil moving in her neat, precise hand. She folded the paper and tucked it into her glove. She did not look at him.
But he looked at her.
She turned to face the path that led out, back toward the afternoon, the other guests, the noise already swelling as the first of the other teams rounded the corner and burst into the clearing, breathless and flushed.
"Miss Norish."
She turned.
He held her gaze with everything he had not said and would not say yet, not here, not now, not in the center of a hedge maze."You are not alone in this."
On impulse, he placed both palms on her shoulders, which caused her to look up at him for one moment. He watched her take it in, and hold it, and then draw herself up to her full height, which was not very great but was entirely sufficient for the woman inside it.
"Thank you, Your Grace," she said quietly.
She was aware, distantly, of voices around the corner of the hedge. She was aware that her face was against the lapel of the Duke of Pridewell's coat, that his hand was at her back, and that the voices were getting closer.
She stepped back. But it was too late.
The clearing filled with noise, people, and the ordinary business of the afternoon.
The Marquess of Thynne came first. He rounded the left-hand path at speed, his companion half a step behind, both of them flushed with the momentum of people who had been moving fast and were not yet ready to stop.
Anthony pulled up short when he saw them.
His eyes moved from Leander to Julia, taking in the distance between them, which was now appropriate, and then to the space that had very recently not been appropriate, and which a man of Anthony's particular attentiveness would have no difficulty reconstructing.
He said nothing. He did not need to say a word. The woman beside him drew a small, sharp breath that communicated everything a full sentence would have and turned to murmur something to the pair arriving behind her from the right-hand path.