Chapter 8
Owen had not expected the past to step out of a drawing room and stare at him straight in the eyes.
For one moment after Aurelia’s question, he could only stand there with the noise of the evening continuing absurdly around them, in the form of the uneven music at the pianoforte, the murmur of conversation and the occasional burst of laughter from guests who had not the least suspicion that anything in the room had altered.
Yet for him, the whole tenor of the evening had changed in an instant.
He had been there.
He said the words because he could not, after what she had told him, bear to let her go on speaking under a false impression of his ignorance. But now that they were spoken, he felt the full discomfort of them settling upon him.
Aurelia was looking at him steadily, waiting.
Owen drew a breath he did not need and said, “I was a junior officer at the time. I know of that affair, though I had no authority in it.”
It sounded, even to himself, too near a defense.
Her expression altered only slightly, but enough to let him know she had heard the same thing.
“I did not say that you did,” she replied.
“No.” He tightened his hold upon the glass in his hand, then loosened it again. “No, you did not.”
The truth of it made him more uneasy still.
He had not been one of the men who decided anything. He had not drafted reports, nor stood in rooms where reputations were weighed against truth and found more valuable. He had been too young, too ambitious, too ready to believe that those above him had to understand things better than he did.
Everyone involved understood. They had all spoken with the confidence of senior men accustomed to being obeyed, and Owen, fresh enough to command to mistake certainty for honor, had accepted what he was given.
Now, standing before Miss Finch, he began for the first time to feel the full powerlessness of that acceptance, because he saw the consequences it had.
He could remember only snippets of the affair, but he knew why it had required management.
It was about an advance, ill-judged or unfortunate depending upon who was telling it, then confusion in the field and a retreat costlier than anyone had expected.
Questions followed afterward, the sort of questions that, left alone, might have climbed uncomfortably high.
The official account had been composed with admirable neatness.
So neat, in fact, that Owen had admired it at the time, not for its elegance, but for the way it seemed to restore order to chaos.
Responsibility had been distributed carefully.
Certain mistakes were softened. Certain names were preserved from closer examination.
And his own path, beginning there at the ragged edge of promise, had continued upward untroubled.
If the report had been different, if more blame had fallen where perhaps it ought to have done, would his own advancement have been slower? More contested? He did not know. The possibility had never occurred to him in quite that shape before. He had benefited, along with many other military men.
The knowledge sat badly.
More than that, he had never known that whatever had been done to preserve reputations in the army had spilled outward into private lives. Now, there was a family ruined, a woman ostracized and years of consequence extended far beyond the men who had signed their names and moved on.
That ignorance made him feel, all at once, both uncomfortable and absurdly naive.
Aurelia had not yet looked away. “You knew of the incident,” she said. “But not of my family?”
“No.” The word came quickly, and with more feeling than he intended. “No, I knew nothing of that.”
Some part of him needed her to believe that much.
He saw her take in the answer, weighing it.
“I knew there had been … difficulties afterward,” he said more carefully. “I knew that the military needed to make sense of what happened, and so, an official report was drafted.”
“So, you knew nothing of those who objected?” she asked again.
“No,” he admitted. “To be quite honest, I didn’t even know that there were those who objected. In the end, it all seemed so clean, and the matter settled.” He paused. “If I had known …”
He stopped there, because he did not know with any certainty what he would have done. Objected? To whom? In what way? As a junior officer then, without title, still making his way? The temptation to claim noble retrospective courage was strong and contemptible both.
“If you had known?” she prompted.
Owen met her gaze and chose honesty over comfort. “I do not know what I might have done. But I should at least have known it was wrong.”
There was silence for a moment after that. It seemed to him that Aurelia was trying to determine not only what he meant, but what sort of man he was behind his words.
“You said your father believed there had been a cover-up,” he pointed out. “Did he have reason beyond suspicion?”
Her face settled at once. There it was, the line he had reached too soon.
“My father had his reasons,” she said. “After my mother refused to support the official account, our house was searched. Papers were taken and others were destroyed. You may judge the rest for yourself.”
Owen heard the closure in the words and did not press immediately, though every instinct now urged him toward the matter.
If her father had known something, if he had seen something in papers, letters, or accounts, then there might be more to the matter than Owen had ever allowed himself to consider.
He knew that the matter had been … somewhat adjusted.
Loose ends needed to be tied, and when the official report was handed in, everyone seemed satisfied with it.
Owen considered the matter closed. Now he found himself wondering, for the first time in earnest, whether it had been shaped into something like a lie.
He thought of the smooth certainty with which the whole thing had been carried past scrutiny. He thought of the men promoted, decorated, left standing. He thought, too, of names omitted. And of the Finches, exiled from society while the rest of them dined well and spoke of honor.
“What happened to them?” he asked quietly. “To your parents, I mean … after.”
Again, she hesitated. The piano stumbled through another phrase in the corner.
“My father is dead,” she revealed with anguish in her voice.
The simplicity of it, after all that lay beneath, struck him more sharply than a longer answer would have done.
“I am sorry.”
Aurelia gave a slight inclination of her head, accepting the words without encouraging them.
“My mother lives abroad,” she continued. “She does not care for England.”
He suspected that was a mercy in expression, and almost certainly deliberate.
“And you?”
Her eyes held his then, level and unreadable. “I care for it only when duty requires.”
The answer might almost have been light, if not for the bitterness so carefully kept beneath it.
Owen felt again that unwelcome sense of his own ignorance.
He had moved through the consequences of that old affair as though they were contained neatly within military history.
But they had not remained there. They had spread into drawing rooms, into households, into years.
They had shaped this woman’s life in ways he was only beginning to glimpse.
He wanted to ask more.
He wanted to know what her father had found, what her mother had refused, what precisely had been done to crush them afterward. He wanted, too, to understand why her surname had stirred something in him before his mother’s explanation, as if some half-buried part of memory had known it mattered.
But Aurelia’s expression warned him not to mistake her willingness to speak at all for willingness to tell him everything.
Owen glanced toward the window, where Harrow and Miss Blackmore were still deep in easy conversation, untouched by any of this.
Strange, he thought, that the evening should hold both such simplicity and such complication under the same roof.
When he looked back, Aurelia was watching him in that intent, guarded way she had, as if measuring whether his discomfort arose from guilt, decency, or merely surprise. Owen could not have said with confidence which of the three it was … perhaps all of them.
He did not know how long they stood in that small, uneasy pause, only that the room pressed in upon it at last. A servant moved past them with a tray.
Their host struck a triumphant final chord and was rewarded with the sort of applause polite society reserved for mediocrity in command of a musical instrument.
“I think,” she said, “we have both made the evening heavier than our host intended.”
Owen seized the opening with gratitude. “Then perhaps we owe him the courtesy of becoming shallower.”
“Do you excel at shallowness, Lord Westbridge?”
“No,” he said. “But I may attempt it under guidance.”
That drew the faintest movement at the corner of her mouth.
“Very well. We shall speak of something harmless.”
“Does anything harmless remain?”
She glanced toward the walls of the drawing room, where several small framed paintings hung between mirrors and sconces. They were family portraits, a pastoral scene, an over-bright hunt, and one marine print so darkly varnished it was nearly impossible to make out what it had once represented.
“Art, perhaps,” she suggested.
Owen followed her gaze. “That depends very much upon the art.”
She looked at him then with the air of someone testing whether a promise was worth the making. “Very well. What do you like?”
Owen considered a moment. It had been a long time since anyone had asked him what he liked rather than what he intended, preferred, inherited, or meant to do with the rest of his life.
“History paintings,” he revealed. “Battle pieces, naval scenes. Copley, when he is good. Anything with movement and consequence in it. The Death of Nelson. The Battle of Trafalgar. That sort of thing.”
Aurelia tilted her head slightly. “Of course. “You are exactly the sort of man who would admire cannon smoke and dying admirals.”
“That is very severe,” he frowned. “Especially since you have not yet heard my reasons.”
“Then I am prepared to improve my opinion if your reasons are sufficiently noble.”
He looked back toward the dark marine print on the wall, though he hardly saw it.
“I do not know that they are noble. Only that such paintings attempt, at least, to show the cost of things. They do not always succeed. Often, they sentimentalize too much, or clean what ought to remain ugly. But at their best they remind people that battles are not lines in a dispatch or triumphs in a newspaper. They were lived by men and suffered by them.”
Her eyes brightened at his words. “You think they tell a version of it. Or at least, they try to.” He paused, not wishing to remain too long on any subject which might allow old fears to creep back in. “And what would you defend with equal seriousness?”
Her eyes moved, not to the battle print, but to a small landscape hanging nearer the window: a river beneath a lowering sky, all soft light and distance. It was by no means remarkable, but it was still peaceful.
“Landscapes,” she said. “Always.”
He might have expected it. There was something in her that suited open skies and thoughtful distances better than crowded rooms.
She rested her fingers more lightly on the stem of her glass now. “I like paintings that do not demand too much from the viewer. Landscapes simply are what they are. A field does not flatter itself. A storm does not pretend elegance. A river is not improved by being called heroic.”
He smiled slightly. “No, only flooded.”
That won him a soft laugh. “And besides, there is truth in landscape too. Light, weather, distance, season, those things may be romanticized, certainly, but the best painters do not romanticize them. They observe.”
“Observe,” he repeated.
“Yes. They look properly.”
Owen felt something in him still at the phrase.
They look properly.
That, he thought, was precisely it. Perhaps more than taste joined their answers.
He had spoken of war paintings because they mattered when they resisted false glory.
She spoke of landscape because it mattered when it resisted false prettiness.
They had chosen different subjects, perhaps because life had given them different territories to understand, and yet the instinct beneath the choice was much the same.
“You think our tastes prove us opposites,” he said.
She glanced at him. “Do they not?”
“You tell me.”
Aurelia considered him with the slightest narrowing of her eyes. “You choose battle. I choose countryside. You admire violence rendered honestly. I admire peace rendered honestly. I should say that suggests very different lives.”
“It suggests different scenes,” Owen agreed to disagree. “Not different principles.”
That seemed to arrest her for a moment.
He went on, more slowly now, because he had the odd feeling that what he was trying to say mattered, though he could not have explained why. “If what you value in landscape is truth, then I do not think we differ so much at all. We only look for the same thing in different places.”
Her gaze remained on him.
“The same thing?” she asked.
“The real thing,” he told her. “Not the polished version arranged for drawing rooms.”
He sensed that she understood him more quickly than most people did and he, in return, understood something of her which had little to do with gowns, family introductions, or the accepted categories by which a room like this sorted human beings.
For one deeply inconvenient moment, Owen felt nearer to her than he ought. And because life was ill-bred enough to interrupt whenever anything threatened sincerity, a new voice entered the space between them.