Chapter 7 #3
She said goodnight to Mr. Metcalfe, who glanced up from the Latin text and said goodnight back with the complete and warm attention of a father who knew who she was. Who loved her without qualification or complication. Who was, in this moment, entirely himself.
She showed Nicholas to his room. A good room lined with books and warm from a fire built up in anticipation. And she told him she would return in a few minutes.
He changed. He settled on the plump bed. She knocked twice as she always did, and then came in. After drawing the low chair alongside the bed, she sat and uncapped the jar. Her hands found the muscle with the deep attention that was, by now, familiar.
The silence was like the Cirencester silence. Full rather than empty. The fire was crackling. The room was warm. Outside, Oxford was conducting its evening business with the settled authority of a city that had been doing so for eight hundred years.
She worked. He gazed at the ceiling. The muscle had been inventorying its grievances since Burford. Under the steady warmth of her hands, it began to yield.
After a while, he put his hand over hers.
She halted. Then turned back to him.
“Thank you,” he said.
She appeared genuinely surprised. It arrived, unmanaged, on her face before she had decided about it.
“For what?”
“This.” He indicated her hands on his leg, and meant more than the gesture contained. And let her understand that he meant more. “And for an interesting few days.”
He paused, because he wanted to say it accurately and accuracy required some thought. He had learned, since sobering up, to take the time for it rather than say the first reaction that arrived.
“I have been having some difficulty with my thoughts, in recent months. Since some time ago.” He left it there without filling it in.
He did not have enough of her trust, yet, to fill it in.
Filling it in would require telling her things that would require telling her other things.
He was not ready. She was not ready. The evening was not the right occasion.
“Since meeting you, I have been enjoying myself. Genuinely. I wanted you to know.”
He said it plainly. Because it was plain and true and he had arrived, since sobering up, at the position that plain, true facts deserved to be said, despite his mother’s thoughts on the truth.
Her gaze found his. The surprise had not left her face, but something had joined it, warmer and less defended.
“I have enjoyed the last few days more than anything in some time.” She said it in her characteristic tone.
Direct and factual. Undecorated, the only way she offered anything.
Which made everything she offered worth considerably more than it would have been coming from someone else.
He was staring into her eyes. The firelight was in them, and the spectacles were slightly crooked on her nose, and the scarlet ribbon was vivid at the back of her neck.
Her hands were warm on his leg. He thought about what Oxford represented.
And about the moment, which was coming as surely as morning, when Nick Scott would have to become the Honorable Nicholas Scott and the way she saw him would change.
And he wanted to delay that moment as long as he could.
His thumb traced slow patterns over her knuckles. He was aware it was not appropriate but did not have the will to stop.
She stared down at his hand on hers. Then her eyes came up and found his.
Her expression was open, vulnerable, and it occurred to him that this was what she looked like when she was simply present in the moment.
When she had, for a brief interval, set the weight of it down.
The quest and Mr. Metcalfe and the years of solitary pursuit and all of it, set down for a moment in a firelit room in Oxford.
He settled back. Reluctantly. Because the treatment was not finished and the leg still required what it required regardless of complications. She returned to the work. Her hands were pleasing and thorough. The muscles were quieter now. He closed his eyes and let it happen.
He dared to hope. A private and specific hope.
That she would not be too angry when she learned the truth.
He meant no malice by any of it. He was simply a man who had stumbled into four days of being known without the weight of the past he carried.
He should have told her who he was, could have done so.
But it had been such a relief to forget his past, and now he liked it.
To be appreciated, perhaps even admired, by a woman whose opinion he valued.
He had not planned it. He had not planned much since the bedchamber at Grimsfell, which was, in retrospect, where planning had ceased to be the operative mode and instinct had taken its place.
She will be angry, he thought. She will have every right to it.
And then, immediately after, with quiet conviction: It will have been worth it.
He let the sensation of her ministrations wash over him … and he was asleep before she finished.