Chapter 6 #2
She lowered her hand. The furrowed expression remained for another moment. Then she returned her attention to her notebook, having heard a reasonable clarification and electing to accept it.
“Lines are an accounting of a life well lived,” he said, and he found he meant it.
Which was the sort of thought that presented itself without warning now that he had stopped suppressing arrivals.
“Of trials and of joy. The very character of a person, written where anyone may read it if they look. Whether they have lived a good life or a bad one. And, like a fine wine, they age into greatness.”
Miss Metcalfe held his gaze for a moment without writing anything. Considering her scribbling for the past two days, it was unusual enough to notice.
Then she returned to Malory.
By Cirencester, he had the sense of it clearly.
It had assembled itself across the miles of limestone and wide sky. The way things assembled themselves now that he was not drinking was subtle uninvited, arriving in full when he was not attending to it.
He was not Nick Scott. He was the Honorable Nicholas Scott.
The youngest brother of the Baron of Blackwood.
The city of Oxford was full of men who knew his brother, his family, his name, his history, and some knew him.
Men who would give him away without thinking, in the way people blabbed about events that were attached to baronies and old scandals.
The moment one of them said something within her hearing …
the fiction would be over. And it was not a large fiction in his own reckoning of it.
He was Nick. He was Scott. Neither of these details was untrue.
But she would not make that distinction.
He knew she would not make that distinction because she was the most direct and honestly made person he had encountered in his adult life.
And there was no version of this in which she considered him with those earnest blue eyes and decided that the omission of a title and a family name was a small matter.
The lack of occupation, him being a gentleman of leisure and whatnot.
She is going to be angry. Nay, furious!
He did not flinch from this because he had been practicing not flinching from the facts of life and was improving, if not yet reliable.
He watched the Cotswold stone passing beyond the window.
She was going to be furious, and she was going to have every right to it.
He was not going to have much to offer in the way of a defense that she would find persuasive.
The defenses he had available were self-serving.
She was not a woman who accepted self-serving defenses.
He had known this for approximately forty-eight hours and had been constructing a resolution around it at a very slow pace because he did not have a resolution to arrive at.
His mother had hidden the depths of her ambitions from everyone who knew her.
He had read the journals she had kept. Poisonous, meticulous.
The private record of a woman whose face had never expressed what she felt.
He had understood for the first time the architecture of a concealment sustained over decades.
The effort of it. The cost of it, to everyone who had trusted the impassive surface and to the madwoman who bore it.
Miss Metcalfe had no hidden layers. She was direct in a way that was almost architectural, load-bearing, a character trait her entire structure rested on.
She said what she meant. She meant what she said.
She would no more conceal a feeling than she would conceal a primary source.
He found this, which he had initially categorized as socially awkward, increasingly and inconveniently beautiful. Fascinating. Glorious.
And he was deceiving her. When she was starting to feel like home. Like someone who could turn him into the better man that Simon had said he could be, and Nicholas had always disavowed.
The thought turned up with the unwelcome accuracy of something true.
He did not argue with it. He had been trying to argue with facts less since sobering up, on the basis that facts he argued with had a tendency to remain regardless and the argument simply exhausted him.
But he observed it with discomfort because he knew he had no business in a situation he was going to be unceremoniously booted from when the truth came to light.
He was going to get her to Oxford. Help retrieve the journal. Facilitate the manuscript. Gather information. And leave. That was the plan. The plan was clean and rational, and he had been holding it with both hands since Bath and it remained entirely reasonable.
She did not deserve to be deceived. And if he was being honest, which he was trying to be, because it was the one virtue available to him, he did not deserve what she was becoming to him.
The peace of it. The companionship that did not require performance.
A person who regarded him without the accumulated weight of all his name carried and who appeared, from the available evidence, to find what remained worth her time.
Who was not appalled by his physical scars but noticeably attracted to him despite them.
He would walk away from it cleanly. She would not know what she had nearly been to him. It was the only kindness he had to offer.
He held this resolution all the way to Cirencester.
Then she said, without glancing up from her notebook, “You were quiet today.”
“I was thinking,” he said.
She glanced up. “About what?”
“Oxford,” he said.
She nodded and returned to her notes. He studied the side of her face. The loose curl that had escaped its pin and rested against her jaw. The scarlet ribbon.
Serious trouble, he thought with resigned clarity as he accepted that he must walk up to the gallows and do his best to maintain some dignity in front of the gathered crowds.
The carriage rolled on through the pale Cotswold afternoon, and Nicholas did his best to hold on to his resolutions, while wishing he could simply reach over and tug Miss Metcalfe into his arms in front of Betty Smith and God himself, just to feel the press of soft lips again.
* * *
The fire had been settled for some time before she knocked.
Nicholas had moved the chair closer to it after dinner, a concession to the leg that he made without argument on days when the cold had been in the carriage with them for long enough.
He was in his banyan. The liniment already on the table. He had been watching the fire with a glazed stare, thinking about a topic he had decided not to think about. Which was the only kind of thinking he had been doing with any consistency since climbing into Miss Metcalfe’s carriage.
She knocked twice. Precisely. How she did everything.
“Come in,” he said.
She entered in her wrapper, along with the scarlet ribbon.
She settled into the business of it with the briskness that had, over the past few evenings, acquired its own notable character.
Not the aloofness of someone performing a task.
The interest of one who has found the task absorbing.
She drew the low chair alongside his. Situated herself.
Uncapped the jar. Her hands were on his leg before he had said anything further.
The silence between them was not the silence it had been on the first evening. It had been changing. He had been watching it change and had not remarked on it. Which was a form of discretion he was finding increasingly difficult to maintain.
She worked. He accepted her ministrations.
Outside, Cirencester was doing whatever Cirencester did in the evening, at a sufficient remove that it did not impinge.
The room was warm and the fire was peaceful, and her hands moved with the earnest interest he had come to recognize.
She genuinely minded everything. Manuscripts, journals, Arthurian history, the injury in his leg. She did nothing halfway.
After a while, she said, quietly, “Is it improving? Overall.”
“Yes,” he said. “More in the past four days than in the weeks before.” He frowned at the fire. “It is either the compound or the consistency.” He paused. “Or something else …”
She said nothing immediately. Her hands continued their steady work. Finding a point of tension above the old break and addressing it with the patient pressure that his leg had begun to anticipate along with what could not, he felt, be entirely characterized as medical relief.
“Angelo’s formula is very good,” she said.
“Yes.”
“But he is not here.”
“No.”
“I am.”
“I know.”
Neither of them said anything. He was staring at the flames and she was staring at his leg, and the room conducted itself around them with complete indifference to the atmosphere of views unsaid accumulating inside it.