Chapter 24 #3
Melody crossed the morning room and stood in front of him. She did not, in coming, ask him to come to her. The asking had been earlier. The coming, she had decided, was hers.
“Your Grace.”
“Miss Carrow.”
“I have a thing to give you, and a thing to take. I shall take it first.”
“Take what you wish.”
She put her gloveless hand against the side of his face.
The hand had been gloveless since the front hall in Brook Street and she had not, in the morning, put gloves back on.
He had not touched her bare hand in almost five years.
He turned his cheek into the palm, the smallest fraction, the way an animal turns its head into a hand it has decided to trust, and he did not move otherwise.
“Cole.”
“Melody.”
The kiss came from her, before he had been ready and after she had been long ready.
It was brief. No courtship in it and nothing of the country either, and no payment to the man who had written the letters she had read.
It came from a woman who had said the man’s name a half-minute before saying it once more, and who had walked six doors down a street she had refused to walk for three weeks.
She had taken back into her own hand a thing she had set aside in 1810 because the hand of the man who had given it to her had been unavailable to take it.
The hand had become available at noon, and she took.
He did not move otherwise than to put his hand at the side of her waist, lightly, with the old practised courtesy of his younger-self, which he had never in all that time forgotten.
His hand stayed there for the length of the kiss and was withdrawn when the kiss ended and her hand at his face remained a second longer and was withdrawn after the second.
“That was the taking, Miss Carrow.”
“That was the taking. The giving is at the table.”
She turned and went to the window. The inscribed book sat where she had set it three-quarters of an hour ago. The Dowager’s correspondence sat where the Dowager had set it. Melody took up the book in her left hand and brought it to him.
“This was given me in the orchard the summer before you went away. I have kept it close to me all these years. I have carried it to you this morning concealed in the safety of my muff.I shall not return it to you, because you gave it to me. I shall ask you to give me another.”
“Another book,” he said.
“Another book. Not today. In time. With the same inscription, or with a different one, or with an inscription I shall write in for you. I have a great many years in which to ask for it. The first I should like, however, to ask now.”
“Yes.”
“I should like to ask you to walk with me, this afternoon at three, to my father’s house, where we shall sit in my father’s drawing room and you shall undertake the formal asking he has already in his head agreed to.
We shall be very correct, Your Grace. I shall pour the tea.
My mother shall weep again. My father shall be courteous and a little awkward.
On the small table by the window in my father’s drawing room I shall set this book.
Beside it I shall set the leather case you brought me three weeks ago, and the things shall be in the same room together for the first time since the orchard, and I shall sit between them with your hand in mine, and the inscription on the front of the book shall, at last, be answered. ”
He took the book from her hand. It was lighter than he remembered.
The dark blue boards had worn at the corners.
The gold on the spine had not faded. He set it back down on the small table at the window, beside the morning correspondence, and he put his own hand over hers on the back of his other hand, briefly, and let go.
“At three, Miss Carrow.”
“At three, Your Grace.”
“Cole.”
“Yes.”
“At three.”
She went out into the corridor without looking back, with a small dry steady step, having taken what she came for and meaning not to spoil it by lingering.
He stood at the window a moment longer with the book on the table beside his hand.
In the street below the Eversley carriage was turning the corner towards Berkeley Square at the slow speed a coachman gives a marchioness who is composing herself in private.
Sir Marcus and Lady Carrow were walking the six doors back to the Linwoods’, with Sarah behind, and Melody had not yet caught them up at the door, because Melody had come out of the morning room at a pace that was her own.
He went down to find Beale. There was a coat to be brushed and a hat to be put out and any number of small offices to perform in the next four hours.
A man with a coat to brush had been delivered, the way a soldier was delivered from an action, into the simple labour of the body that follows the surviving of a thing.
The book sat on the table at the window. Six doors down Brook Street, in the small back drawing room of the Linwood house, the case of letters sat on its Pembroke. At three, they would be in the same room.
It was the first morning in five years in which the inscription in the front of the book had been a sentence with a future to it.