Chapter 13
“You may walk beside me, Your Grace, but do not look so victorious. I agreed to exercise, not surrender.”
“I have been practising defeat all morning. I had it perfectly when I left the Abbey. The walk up the lane appears to have undone it.”
“Then walk back down and try again.”
“And lose half an hour of your company by it? I think not. I shall have to make do with a sort of moderate pleasure and hope no one mistakes it for triumph.”
Sarah followed at the agreed six paces, with the careful expression of a maid who had been given strict instructions and meant to honour them by appearing to hear nothing.
The afternoon was clear and cold, with the light coming long across the stubble fields, and Melody had put on her father’s old riding cloak because her own was at the dyer’s and there had been no replacing it.
The cloak smelled of stables and Sir Marcus’s pipe, and she had spent ten minutes in the hall trying to decide whether the smell was charm or shame, and had walked out at last with it on because Cole had been on the step three minutes early and decision had been taken out of her hands.
“The book,” he said.
“I burned it.”
“You did no such thing. You finished it in a single evening and were vexed by the ending.”
“You cannot possibly know that.”
“I have a footman in your house, Miss Carrow. Sarah told him on the back step that you read until the candle guttered.”
Behind them Sarah made a sound that was not quite a cough.
“Sarah is a traitor.”
“Sarah is a romantic. I think it will turn out to have been one of the qualities I admire most about her.”
“You are not to admire my maid.”
“Then I shall confine my admiration to her mistress, which was always its natural object.” He looked sideways at her. “Did you read the last page?”
“No.”
“I am proud of you,” he said.
“Your pride is premature and usually misplaced. I did not read it because the candle went out. I would have read it. I will read it tonight.”
“You will not,” he said. He had watched her do it before.
“I will,” she said, and they both knew she would not.
“You will sit with the book on your knee and you will turn to the last page and you will close the book unread because you cannot bear to know the ending of a story I have spoiled on purpose, and you will pretend you forgot. I have known you to do it before.”
“I have known you to be wrong before,” she said. “We are well matched.”
“In nothing but our willingness to revise the record afterwards. You taught me the practice. I learned at the source.”
“That is unjust. I never revised. I improved.”
“You improved away from accuracy. I have made a study of the technique. Your father once told me it was the chief reason he could not let you keep the household ledgers.”
“Papa said no such thing.” She kept her eyes on the lane.
“He did. He told me at the side table, the Christmas before I left, while you were arguing with Henry about whether geese had souls. He said, she has a head for figures and a heart for fictions, and I cannot tell which one will run our books. I have remembered the sentence for five years on the strength of its accuracy.”
She had nothing for that one, because it was the kind of thing Sir Marcus would say, and it was the kind of thing Sir Marcus had probably said, and the picture of him saying it at the side table while she had argued with Henry about geese was so exact that she could see the wine in his glass.
“That is a great deal to claim for a man who has been home one month.”
“It is a great deal more than that, and you know it.”
She did not answer that, and the lane bent here and dropped away to the orchard, the long grey wall of it visible through the bare apple branches, and she let the bend take them around the silence before he could fill it with something she would have to defend against.
The orchard was older than either of them and had been ruined longer.
The wall had been good once, a Carrow grandfather’s work in dressed stone, and was now in three falls along its eastern side, the gaps grown over with bramble and the top course green with moss.
Beyond it the trees stood in their autumn skeleton, the last apples brown on the ground, and the air smelled of cider and cold stone, the way it had smelled the afternoon she was two-and-twenty and Cole had told her she was reckless in a bonnet.
She had not meant to think of it. The smell pulled it out of her without consulting her.
There had been a kite. A little boy from the village had been crying behind the wall because his kite had got caught on the top course in a wind.
There had been no man tall enough about, only Cole and herself walking the lane with Sir Marcus a long way back about a fence dispute.
She had said I will get it and gathered her skirt and put her foot in a gap in the stones and climbed before either Cole or the boy could decide whether to stop her.
The wall was four feet high. It was not a difficult climb.
She had done worse on the apple ladders since she was twelve, and at twenty-two it had not occurred to her to be a person who could not climb a wall.
Cole had said let me, and reached for her elbow.
She had said I am not fragile.
He had said No, merely reckless in a bonnet.
And she had untangled the kite from the top course and dropped it down to the boy without falling, and turned to find Cole standing at the foot of the wall with his hand still half raised, looking at her with an expression she had not at the time understood.
She understood it now. He had decided something about the woman on the wall and had not yet found the words for it, and his face had said as much.
She had told him, climbing down, that he was insufferably certain about things he had no business having opinions on, and he had said Captain Certainty, at your service, and she had reviled him for half a mile and forgiven him for the rest of the afternoon.
“You called me Captain Certainty here,” Cole said.
“You were not a captain.”
“You were a prophet.”
“I was annoyed.”
“I treasured it.”
She kept walking past it. The wall ran beside them, brown and green and falling, and she did not look at the place where she had climbed it, because to look at it would have been to admit it was still there.
The sound of approaching hoof beats echoed along the lane behind them.
It was a party of riders, four of them, a country gentleman she half knew and his guests up from town for the shooting.
They came past at a brisk trot with their faces turned, taking in her and taking in Cole, missing nothing they could carry home.
The smallest of the four checked his horse and stared frankly for the second it took to pass.
Then the trot carried them on round the bend towards the village, and the lane was quiet again.
Melody stood with her chin up and her thumb on the seam of her glove and her count already going behind her eyes, one fence post, two fence post, three.
“The third rider has a dreadful seat.”
She turned her face towards him without meaning to.
“What?”
“The third one. The man in the green coat. He carries his hands like a butler. If you must count something, count his errors. There are more of them than there are fence posts, and they will not run out before we reach the orchard gate.”
A laugh escaped her lips before she could prevent it.
“That is unkind.”
“I have a quantity of unkindness in reserve for men who stare at women in country lanes. I am rationing it severely. He has had his portion for the afternoon.”
“You ought not to make me laugh in public, Your Grace.”
“It is one of the few public uses I have for a title. The county forgives a duke for amusing a lady. They suspect everyone else of motives.”
The count had stopped without her leave. Her thumb was still on the glove seam, but the going behind her eyes had quieted, and she walked half a dozen paces before it occurred to her that he had done it on purpose, and another half-dozen before she decided not to mind.
The orchard gate was off its top hinge. They went through one at a time, Sarah after them, and the path narrowed past the gate to a single-file track between the wall and the stile that led down to the field beyond.
The stile itself had failed in the autumn rains, one of the cross-bars given way and a hurdle set across the gap as a temporary patch, the hurdle long since failed as well, and there was no going over without help and no going round without taking the muddy edge by the wall.
“The muddy edge, then,” Melody said.
“After you.”
“You are too gallant by half, Your Grace. The mud is no respecter of rank.”
“I should hope not. I have been muddy on three continents. I find it democratic of the substance.”
She went first into the muddy edge. It was narrow and pitched, and her boots were good and her skirt was old, and she was managing it perfectly well until her foot came down on a patch of churned clay that turned out to have nothing under it.
The next moment she was slipping, and the moment after that he had her.
His hand at her waist for one second only, steady, gloved, the lightest pressure of fingers through the cloth of her gown, and she was upright again before she had fallen.
She stepped away from him at once, and too quickly.
A slower step would have been kinder to both of them, but the flesh proved unequal to the spirit’s resolve and his hand fell, and the muddy edge resumed beneath her boots.
“Thank you, Your Grace.”
“You are welcome.”
A pause that lasted three steps.
“I remember when you trusted me not to drop you,” he said.
“I remember when dropping me was the worst thing you might do.”
It got out of her before she could weigh it.
The bramble caught her cuff and she stopped to free it, and was glad of the bramble, because it gave her hands an occupation and her face the excuse of attending to her sleeve.
She did not look at him, and he did not press, only waited until she had her cuff free and then walked on as though the sentence had not been said, which was a worse acknowledgement of it than any words would have been.
They reached the field and the path widened and the going was easy and the silence between them was no longer the sharp silence of refusal but a softer one, the silence of two people who had said something true and were not yet sure what to do with it.
“There is a thing I must ask you,” he said eventually.
“You ask a great many things, Your Grace. I have given up trying to count them.”
“This is the last one for today,” he said. “There is some prospect of my going up to town for the little season.”
“I am aware. The whole county is aware. You cannot ride to the village inn without being told. The post-mistress had heard before I had.”
“My mother is writing the Linwoods. Lady Linwood is some sort of connection of your father’s.”
“Through my Aunt Susan, who passed away before I was born. Mama corresponded with her until the last and has corresponded with Lady Linwood ever since. They send each other receipts for marmalade and small grievances about their husbands. It is a friendship I have never quite understood.”
“There is some prospect Lady Linwood will write your mother, asking your family for the season. Brook Street. Would you come?”
She walked a dozen paces without answering. The field opened on the slope down to the lake and the light made the water look colder than it could possibly be, and she put one foot in front of the other and did the arithmetic of London in her head and did not, for once, count anything.
“You ask me to walk into a room I have spent four years not having been in.”
“I ask you to consider whether the room is more frightening than the country lanes you have already walked through this autumn. I do not say it will be easier. I say I have begun to suspect it may be no worse, and that you have already done the harder work, which is the daily.”
“London is not the daily,” she said. “London is the public. The two are different countries.”
“Then pray visit us as a traveler of leisure, intent only upon observing the beauties of the country. You are not required to enjoy a season to attend one.”
“You speak as a man who has not been a woman in a London ballroom.”
“I am at the disadvantage you describe. I shall not pretend otherwise. I ask only because I would rather be in the same city as you while you decide whether to be terrified of it, than in this one while you decide for me.”
“If I am to be humiliated, Your Grace, I prefer to know the scale of the theatre.”
“That is not a no.”
“It is not a yes.”
“I shall take it for a not-yet-no, which is the best class of answer I have had from you in five years.”
“You are too easily pleased.”
“I have not been pleased in five years. I am out of practice and easily impressed. Forgive me.”
“I find I am out of practice in a great many things, Your Grace. Forgiveness is the slowest of them to return.”
She did not forgive him, because the asking had not really been for forgiveness, and the afternoon was already turning towards its proper end.
They walked back the way they had come, past the broken stile and the orchard gate and the falling wall.
Sarah, who had managed not to hear a word of any of it, walked behind them with her face composed and her step careful and her hands very quietly clasped in front of her, in the small private satisfaction of a maid who had decided some hours ago that her mistress was going to be all right.