Chapter 17
It was exactly three days later that Owen found himself seated upon a picnic blanket in Hyde Park with a plate balanced on one knee and the uneasy but undeniable sensation that he was enjoying himself.
The day had been chosen with care. The weather was mild, and the park sufficiently full of carriages, riders, nurses, strolling families, and all the respectable clutter of London leisure to ensure that their party would be seen.
That, after all, was part of the point. A private excursion would have been improper.
A public picnic, on the other hand, announced precisely what it was meant to announce.
If anyone cared to observe Lord Westbridge attending Miss Finch in the open air with her cousin and Captain Harrow close by, they were welcome to do so. Indeed, they were meant to.
Still, Owen had not expected the outing to feel so pleasant.
The four of them had settled beneath a wide green tree where the light came down in shifting patches through the leaves.
Thomas had brought more good humor than provisions, though fortunately the servants had supplied enough of the latter to compensate.
Clara was laughing over everything: the arrangement of the basket, the stubbornness of the wine bottle, and Thomas’s very poor attempt at slicing cold ham with a pocketknife before Owen intervened and forbade him to butcher the luncheon.
Even Aurelia, who had arrived at first with her usual caution wrapped about her like an invisible shawl, had gradually begun to smile more freely.
They had eaten, talked, and watched the world go by, and to Owen’s surprise the whole thing felt less like an exercise in appearances and more like a proper afternoon.
Thomas and Clara did most of the talking at first, their ease with one another becoming more marked each time Owen saw them together.
Clara met Thomas’s teasing with bright indignation and then laughter.
Thomas seemed to glow under the smallest scrap of her attention.
It was all so absurdly open that Owen ought, perhaps, to have found it tedious.
Instead, he found it rather restorative.
And Aurelia … he looked at her more often than was strictly necessary.
She was sitting opposite him on the blanket with one hand resting lightly against the grass.
When Clara laughed, Aurelia’s mouth curved before she seemed aware of it.
When Thomas launched into some embellished account of a fellow officer who had once fallen into a ditch while attempting to impress a colonel’s daughter, Aurelia actually laughed aloud, low and warm and wholly unguarded.
Owen felt the sound somewhere under his ribs. He had not felt so relaxed in years.
Aurelia reached for the little dish of strawberries at the same moment he did.
Their hands merely brushed above the blanket, his fingers grazing the side of hers before both of them drew back with the speed that would have been amusing, had Owen not felt the contact travel through him like a struck match.
“Oh, sorry,” she blushed, pressing her fingers to her lips, looking utterly lovely.
“No, it was I,” he replied, feeling that his voice was altered by the smallest degree.
Thomas was still talking. Clara was still laughing. The park continued around them with all its ordinary sounds. No one had noticed. After all, there was nothing to notice. And yet, Owen was absurdly aware of the exact place where her hand had touched his.
He felt his heart full in a way he had never known it before.
The thought came to him unexpectedly and, once it had come, refused to be denied.
There had been afternoons abroad when he had known relief, certainly.
He had moments between engagements and evenings of camaraderie, which were the rough and temporary comforts of men who had survived the same chaos.
But relaxation was something else. It implied ease without vigilance, pleasure without debt, and a lowering of the internal guard he had scarcely realized was always there.
And with that came another, stranger thought: perhaps it was possible to move on from some part of it after all.
He did not mean forget. He knew better than that. But perhaps a life might still be built around the cracks, if not over them.
It was a dangerous sort of hope, and he distrusted it immediately.
Still, it remained.
When the meal was finished and the plates packed away, Thomas rose and extended a hand to Clara.
“Come,” he urged tenderly. “The lake is there, and I refuse to believe anyone can have spent a proper spring afternoon in the park without at least pretending to be a child for ten minutes.”
Clara looked delighted. “Pretending?”
Thomas grinned. “Very well, then. Without being one.”
She placed her hand in his and got up at once.
Aurelia looked after them with a mild look of protest. “Do not go too far.”
“We shall remain entirely respectable,” Thomas promised.
“You are incapable of it,” Owen scoffed, though he could barely hide his amusement.
“On the contrary, I am at my most respectable when in love.”
Clara flushed beautifully. Aurelia made a sound halfway between exasperation and affection, and Thomas, looking pleased with himself, led Clara off toward the edge of the water a little way ahead.
They did not go far, only near enough that the sound of their laughter still carried clearly back to the blanket.
For a while, Owen and Aurelia remained where they were, watching the younger pair wade in the shallows, Clara lifting her skirts just enough to keep them dry and then failing entirely when Thomas sent a light splash against her ankle and had to dodge the retaliation.
“They seem very happy,” Owen said, though he wasn’t certain if he were merely thinking aloud.
Beside him, Aurelia smiled. “They do.”
There was a wistfulness in her tone that caught his attention more than the words themselves. She reminded him of someone who was looking at something beautiful from a distance, behind a line she had long ago taught herself not to cross.
Owen found himself wondering whether she was truly as certain as she claimed to be that she did not want marriage. He had accepted it before because she had spoken of it so plainly. But then Aurelia spoke plainly of many things she seemed to feel deeply.
He let the thought rest only a moment before turning away from it. It was not his business. More than that, it was dangerous ground, and they had more important matters between them than whether she had once imagined a different future for herself.
Still, he could not entirely stop looking at her. He thought, with a dangerous suddenness, that perhaps this was the real Aurelia, not the guarded woman who measured every word in a drawing room, but this calmer, easier version of herself. She felt safe to be herself here, and he had done that.
The thought landed with startling force.
He had made her feel safe.
To think that his presence, so often useless in the matters that truly counted, could offer her even a little peace, affected him more than he cared to admit.
He wished, absurdly and with too much force, that he might offer it always, that she might be free to be this Aurelia more often.
And more than that, though he scarcely allowed the thought to form, he would like her always to be this Aurelia with him.
He set that aside at once. Wishing for impossible things was a dangerous habit.
“Your cousin appears to think Captain Harrow invincible,” he said, if only to say something safer.
“She thinks him delightful,” Aurelia replied.
“Well, she is not alone.”
Aurelia glanced sideways at him, and there was almost mischief in her eyes. “Do you mean to confess affection for your friend?”
“I mean only that he is difficult to dislike unless one is my mother.”
“That is no true measure. I suspect your mother dislikes most of what is easiest to love.”
The words were lightly spoken, but they touched something real enough that Owen laughed.
“Why, Miss Finch,” he teased, “are you improving in boldness?”
She beamed. “Only in the open air.”
“I shall have to keep you out of doors, then.”
The answer came too quickly, and for a brief moment something passed between them, some perilous awareness that they were speaking with a familiarity their formal arrangement did not entirely account for.
He had only one way to steady the mood.
“In your last letter, you wrote that France never became home, however long you remained there.”
He had meant it kindly. More than kindly, if he was honest. He had wanted to know more. They were pretending intimacy well enough in public. He had thought perhaps they might dare a little of the real kind in private.
Aurelia’s expression changed at once. No one less attentive than Owen would likely have seen it. But the ease went out of her shoulders. Her hands stilled. The warmth in her face retreated.
“I … ought not to have written so much,” she said as if scolding herself.
He felt, absurdly, as though he had frightened a delicate bird from his hand.
“You may write whatever you please,” he urged. “I did not mean—”
“No, I know.” She gave a small, apologetic smile that did not reach her eyes. “It is only easier, somehow, to speak on paper than aloud. I fear one grows careless with ink.”
“There are worse faults.”
“Yes,” she replied softly. “But I would rather not dwell on France just now.”
He looked at her, disappointed more than he should have been, and because she knew him well enough already, she looked back. There was a silent apology in her gaze. And something else too, something more vulnerable, as though she knew she was withdrawing and did not quite want to.
Owen let the subject go.
“Very well,” he told her.
He disliked the change, though he could hardly blame her for it. If anything, he blamed himself for forgetting how much she still carried. So once again, he turned to safer territory.
“What is next?” he asked. “With the investigation.”
That, at least, she answered readily enough.
“I keep going through the notebook,” she revealed. “The more I read it, the more certain I become that my father was not chasing shadows. Langley was there. I know he was. He had something to do with it.”
Owen nodded. “I can vouch for the fact that he was one of the main people in that whole affair.”
Aurelia turned slightly toward him. “You are certain.”
“Yes.” He drew a breath. “Whether Langley himself ordered the cover-up or only benefited from it, I cannot yet say. But the original mistake, the decision that led to the disaster, was his. He was in charge of the mission.”
Aurelia’s eyes sharpened.
Owen looked out toward the water and continued before he could reconsider.
“I knew even then that something was being concealed. There were conversations after, official versions that did not sit cleanly against what had happened. But I was junior. I had no authority over what was said or how the matter was shaped afterward, and they always made it appear as if it were nothing of consequence, just boring bureaucracy.”
Aurelia was quiet.
He went on, more heavily now. “I did not realize, then, what it would cost beyond the immediate thing. Men died … men I knew, men I fought with, even there.”
When he finally looked back at her, the expression on her face was not what he had expected.
“You … were there?” she asked.
He nodded once.
“I had not understood that,” she sounded confused. “I thought … you spoke as though you had only known of it afterward, or from a distance.”
There was no accusation in her voice yet, but there was hurt in the misunderstanding itself, and Owen felt it keenly.
“I am sorry I was not clearer,” he apologized at once. “If I gave you that impression, it was not deliberate.”
But even as he said it, he knew it was only partly true. He had not meant to deceive her precisely, yet he had allowed her to believe him further removed than he had been because it was easier.
Aurelia looked away.
The sounds of Thomas and Clara at the water came back into sudden prominence. Their laughter, the splashing and the bright ordinary life of the afternoon were continuing only yards away while something colder settled between him and Aurelia on the blanket.
“I did not lie to you,” Owen tried to explain, hating how defensive the words sounded.
“No,” she echoed, still not looking at him. “You merely did not tell me.”
He had no good answer to that. The ease of the day, which only moments before had seemed almost miraculous, had tightened again. Owen could feel the distance opening where he had only just begun to believe it was closing.
“I … do not know what to make of that,” he heard her whisper.
He could not blame her. He scarcely knew what to make of himself in it.
“I should have been earnest from the start,” he admitted.
“Yes,” she nodded.
Nothing in her voice was raised, nothing dramatic or cruel. Yet the softness of it made the truth sharper.
Owen looked toward the lake again, toward Thomas and Clara and their uncomplicated happiness, and thought with some bitterness that simple things never seemed to remain simple for long.
When they rose a short while later to join the others, the conversation between him and Aurelia had gone careful again.
And though the park remained lovely, and the afternoon outwardly successful, Owen carried away from it the unwelcome knowledge that he had finally shown her one of the things about himself he most disliked: not the lie, perhaps, but the instinct to hold back the truth until it became impossible to explain why he had withheld it at all.