Chapter 7
“There is a great deal to be said for remaining unaffected.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, about the night she bludgeoned Lord Filminster in his study.
* * *
Millie was in the carriage before him.
She was at the window with her notebook open on her knee, wearing an undecided expression about the previous evening, Nicholas presumed, and clearly having decided not to refer to it until she had fully processed it, which, he estimated, might take some time.
The expression was one of absolute concentration directed at the middle distance, which was doing nothing in particular to deserve such attention, but was receiving it anyway.
Nicholas settled into the seat across from her.
Not beside her, as he had been since the first morning out of Grimsfell.
Across. It was a small adjustment, and he made it without comment.
She glanced up once, blue eyes moving briefly to his face before returning to her notebook. She said no words, uttered no sound.
Betty Smith, in the corner, opened her eyes a fraction. Closed them again with a serenity that implied her post was comfortable and she intended to keep it.
They did not speak for the first hour.
It was, unexpectedly, the most comfortable silence they had had.
Not the silence of two people avoiding speaking with each other.
Though it was also that. Rather, the silence of two people who had been in close proximity for four days and had reached a point where the silence did not require constant supervision.
He peered out the window. She wrote in her notebook.
The road from Cirencester climbed and then opened into country that became progressively more familiar to him.
The particular quality of the Oxfordshire light on limestone.
The way the horizon flattened and then expanded.
He had not thought about whether he would feel anything returning to it and discovered now that he did, though he could not have said precisely what.
He watched the hedgerows. He watched the sky. He watched Millie write two lines and pause and push her spectacles up her nose with one finger and write two more. He averted his eyes before she could catch him mooning over her, thinking about her kiss.
Then Millie said, without preamble, still buried in her notebook, “When were you at Oxford?”
He was quiet for a moment.
The question was simple. She had asked it with her customary directness. He gazed at the road and thought about Oxford in a way he had not thought about it in some time. The sequence of it. What had come before. What it had cost to get there.
“Late,” he said finally. “I attended later than most.” He paused.
Then, because she was waiting with the patient, unhurried scrutiny she gave to answers she actually wanted, he indicated his leg with one hand.
A brief and encompassing gesture that he had long since perfected as a way of conveying a great deal without saying any of it. “There were some years in between.”
He thought about those years although he did not wish to. Simon had blamed himself. With the thorough and devoted guilt of an elder brother because he had made an offhand remark about being brave and then had to contend with his younger brother’s three-story fall attempting to demonstrate it.
Simon had spent those years tutoring him.
Patient, tireless, structuring Nicholas’s education with the same easy competence he applied to everything.
Turning the long months of recovery into an outcome.
Nicholas had not, at the time, understood what this cost Simon.
He understood it now and found the understanding distinctly less comfortable than ignorance had been.
His mother had retreated. He understood now, having read her journals, what the retreat had meant.
The exact nature of her feelings about a youngest son who had been pleasing when he was perfect.
Who had since become a source of private revulsion she had not permitted to show on that composed and ageless face.
He had thought, as a boy, that she was simply uncomfortable with sickness.
He had been wrong by a margin that still surprised him.
The journals had made it plain. Her ambitions.
Her arrangements. The footman. The laudanum administered to his father in doses that had accumulated toward a conclusion that had been accidental but predictable.
She had still had use for the old man and not expected his death, but had orchestrated it without meaning to.
Nicholas had read all of it.
He was not going to say any of this.
Millie had no notion of who he was.
He was finding, with some private discomfort, that her not knowing was what had made these four days different.
The first four days in recent memory not shadowed by the whole accumulated weight of it.
The Scott family history. His mother’s journals.
The nephew who had accused him of attempted murder.
The powerful men who had accused Simon of murder.
The long, embarrassing list of faults, what he had done and been and failed at in the years between his fall from the window to last autumn when Isla had failed to murder his oldest brother, John, and had succeeded at … murdering … herself.
In this carriage, he was merely Nick, with a bad leg and an Oxford education and a sardonic habit. The simplicity of it was an escape he had not known he needed until he had it. Distance. Anonymity.
“Oxford is a magnificent institution,” he finally said.
“It takes young men of reasonable intelligence. Places them in very old buildings. Subjects them to several years of elaborate ritual designed to produce the impression of learning while ensuring that nothing so vulgar as a useful thought is ever permitted to take root. It is …” he said, “the nation’s most expensive and architecturally distinguished method of producing elegant inaction. ”
Furrows formed between Millie’s eyebrows.
“The libraries are excellent,” he allowed.
“I will give it the libraries. All else is ceremony and Latin and the persistent conviction that being in the room constitutes an education in itself. Which, to be fair, it largely does. The room does most of the work. The men inside it are largely decorative.”
“You attended one of the finest institutions of learning in the world,” Millie said evenly, clearly a woman assembling an objection from quality materials.
“Women like me have spent their lives attempting to gain access to what you were simply offered. What you were offered and are apparently content to mock.”
He heard it. The edge beneath the level voice.
Not anger. Something more critical than anger.
More considered. He thought about the Bodleian and the Radcliffe Camera and the reading rooms she could not enter.
Had never been able to enter. Was still not able to enter.
And about a scholar’s daughter who had spent years pursuing Mr. Metcalfe’s research through every indirect channel available to her.
Because the direct ones were not available to women.
And had never been. The full weight of his own carelessness landed with jarring impact.
“I am sorry,” he said. He said it without a trace of sarcasm. Without the lightness he used as cover. Plainly. As Nick Scott, who had just been ungrateful about something that a more intelligent and more capable person had been denied entirely through no fault of her own. “That was unworthy of me.”
He waited. He braced, having been corrected by her before and having developed a healthy respect for the duration and thoroughness of the process of said correction.
Instead … she smiled.
Not the small, wry acknowledgment he had seen before. Not the brief flicker of amusement she occasionally permitted herself when one of his remarks landed correctly despite his best efforts to make it land otherwise.
This was a full smile. Complete and unmanaged.
The kind that reached her eyes and altered her entire face.
His heart flipped so abruptly and entirely and unauthorized that he had to make a conscious effort not to show it on his own face.
He turned his head to gaze out the window as if discovering a profound personal interest in the Oxfordshire hedgerows.
Dear God, he thought, and left it there because there was nothing useful to add.
Betty, in the corner, did not open her eyes. Her breathing remained perfectly even. She is, Nicholas concluded, extraordinarily well-compensated.
They arrived in the city of Oxford during the early afternoon.
The spires were gray-gold in the thin winter light against a sky that had been considering rain since Burford and had not yet made up its mind.
The carriage came through the city gate, and Millie sat up straight.
He watched it happen without meaning to.
The subtle change in her bearing as the city closed around them.
The shoulders settling. The chin coming up a fraction. Millie was preparing for battle.
Then they passed the Bodleian.
She turned to the window. Not with the swift, cataloging glance she gave most things, but with a stillness that spoke of awe.
She peered at it, just for a moment. Long enough to see it properly.
The blue eyes moving over the stone frontage with an expression he had not seen on her before.
Not her scholarly attention, nor the piercing assessment of problems requiring solution. It was … more reverential?
Longing was the word. He had not expected to see it on her face, and he found, when it appeared, that it required him to look away.
Not because it was uncomfortable but because it was private.
He was not certain she knew she was showing it.
He was not going to be the person who made her feel seen in a moment that was not intended for an audience.