Chapter 18
That night, Owen received Aurelia’s letter just as he was beginning to think he had no right to expect one.
He had spent the journey home from the park in a state of restless dissatisfaction, displeased with himself in a way that felt both familiar and particularly unwelcome.
There had been moments on the picnic blanket when he had almost forgotten himself entirely.
With Aurelia, in the open air, with the grass cool beneath them and the soft movement of leaves overhead, he had felt something dangerously close to ease.
And then he had spoiled it.
He knew too well how such omissions could feel like a species of deception, however unintended. He had seen the change in her face when she realized he had been closer to the affair than she had understood. He had seen the hurt, and then the careful restraint that followed it.
That restraint troubled him more than any anger could have done.
Anger, at least, was honest. It came with color in the cheek, force in the voice and some outward sign by which a man might know how much damage he had done.
But Aurelia’s withdrawal had been quiet, akin to a closing of shutters against weather she had long expected.
He had thought of it all through dinner, though he ate what was set before him and answered his mother when she spoke.
He had heard the clink of glass, the faint scrape of silver upon china and his mother’s little sighs of dissatisfaction, but all of it had seemed to come from a room adjoining the one in which his thoughts resided.
He saw only Aurelia turning her face from him, Aurelia gathering herself with that painful dignity which asked for no comfort because it had learned not to expect any.
When his butler entered the study after dinner with a single note upon a tray, Owen looked at it as though it might deliver either pardon or sentence. He took it at once. As soon as he was alone, he broke the seal and unfolded the letter beneath the lamplight.
My Lord,
I could not be easy this evening without writing to you, for I would not have you think me either ungrateful or unjust after what passed between us this afternoon.
I understand now why you did not speak sooner of your own closeness to that unhappy affair, and though I was startled at first, I do not believe you meant to mislead me.
I hope you will therefore allow me to say plainly that I forgive you.
I must also ask your pardon for the manner in which I answered when you referred to my last letter. I had written more openly than I ought, and I found, when you spoke of it aloud, that I was ashamed of having let so much of myself appear.
It is a foolish inconsistency, but I begin to think I live in two different ways at once.
We all do, perhaps, in society, showing one face and keeping another hidden.
Yet for people such as you and me, it feels stronger than that, as though the life one presents and the life one truly lives scarcely belong to the same person.
I looked again this evening through what remains of my father’s notes, and I am now almost certain that Sergeant Carter left the army very soon after the operation.
I remember my father saying once, in great frustration, that he had gone before he could be properly found.
I cannot prove it, but I have long suspected he was paid off, or in some manner encouraged to disappear.
I wished to tell you this at once, and also to say that I was sorry the afternoon ended in discomfort, for before that I had thought it a very happy one.
Yours sincerely,
Aurelia Finch
Her forgiveness affected him. So did the frankness of her thoughts on divided selves, on letters, on truth.
More than any of those, perhaps, he was struck again by the fact that she would never have said half of this aloud, not because she lacked courage, but because the world had trained caution into her too deeply.
And yet on paper she gave him these things freely, trusting he would understand them.
The trust humbled him. It warmed him, too.
He read the letter again, lingering absurdly over phrases that had no bearing on Sergeant Carter or General Langley or the altered report.
Before that, I had thought it a very happy one.
The words ought not to have pleased him as much as they did. They were simple enough. Any acquaintance might have written them after a few hours of tolerable entertainment. Yet, he knew that she had not written them lightly.
Aurelia Finch was not a woman who scattered assurances as other women scattered compliments over tea. If she admitted happiness, it was because the feeling had first survived the scrutiny of her own distrust.
That, too, he understood.
Owen reached at once for another sheet of paper. He did not pause to debate whether he ought to write again so soon. He had spent enough time already forcing himself into silence when instinct urged otherwise.
The truth was simple: he wanted to answer her. More than that, he wanted to continue the strange private conversation that had opened between them in ink and somehow felt more intimate than many spoken exchanges.
He had spent the entire day with her and yet, still felt compelled to tell her about it. That fact ought to have given him pause. Instead, it only made him pick up the pen more quickly.
Miss Finch,
Your letter has relieved me more than I can easily express, and I thank you for it with all sincerity.
I had not fully understood, until I read your words, how much I feared I had forfeited your good opinion.
To know that you do not judge me harshly in the matter is a greater comfort than I deserve.
You need not ask pardon for anything you said this afternoon. If there is inconsistency in finding some truths easier to write than to speak, then I am guilty of the same fault. I understood very well what you meant in describing the feeling of living two different lives, and I think you are right.
Most people carry some division between what they show the world and what they keep for themselves, but in certain cases the separation grows so great that the two halves scarcely seem to belong to one another.
I have often felt something of the kind myself, though I do not believe I should have known how to put it so well.
What you say of Carter is of real consequence.
If he left the army so soon after the operation, and under circumstances sufficiently irregular to draw your father’s notice, then I agree there is reason to suspect he was induced to remove himself.
Whether by money, pressure, or fear, I cannot yet tell, but it gives us a direction, and that alone is no small gain.
You say the afternoon ended in discomfort. I am sorry for the part I played in that. Yet since you have spoken with such kindness, I will confess in return that until then, I had found it one of the happiest I have spent in a very long while.
There was something in the ease of it, and in the company, that felt more real than many occasions of far greater ceremony.
Harrow, I think, believes himself a very dignified man even while paddling in a lake like a schoolboy, and Miss Blackmore’s laughter did little to preserve his gravity.
I suspect the whole scene would have shocked half the matrons of London into silence, which only increases its value in retrospect.
You will perhaps think me foolish for adding this, but after returning home I found myself unwilling to let the day end without writing to you.
It seems I have grown accustomed already to wishing to share my thoughts with you, whether they are of use to our investigation or not.
That is, I suspect, a habit I ought to examine with more caution than I am presently inclined to do.
Yours faithfully,
Owen Honeyfield, the Marquess of Westbridge
By the time he finished, the investigation had become almost incidental in the letter, as though it were the excuse under which some more personal correspondence had smuggled itself in.
He had not meant to write like this. He had certainly not meant to reveal so much of his own interior life in a single evening.
Yet looking over the sheet, he could not quite bring himself to regret it.
What had begun as an arrangement of convenience had become real friendship, not merely the appearance of accord maintained for the sake of society.
It had happened quietly, in half-spoken moments and letters sent across London under the shelter of fiction. But it had happened.
And he was glad of it. More glad than was prudent, perhaps. The whole matter had a time limit upon it whether either of them acknowledged that fact or not. The season would end. The investigation would either bear fruit or fail. Their false courtship could not last forever.
Still, even if what lay between them was brief, it was real enough to matter.