Chapter Five #3
She understood that question. Goodness, how she understood it. Her entire existence was a performance now: the grateful dependent, the capable helper, the woman who wanted nothing and expected nothing and was content with the crumbs from her relatives’ table.
She was so very tired of performing.
But she had no choice. He could afford to be tired; he had wealth and power and a title that protected him from consequences. She had nothing but her reputation and her usefulness, and if she lost either, she would lose everything.
She should not go back to the library. She should contrive some discreet way to restore the book and avoid him entirely for the remainder of the visit. She should support Georgiana, keep to the edges, and pretend this morning had never occurred.
That was what prudence demanded.
Cecilia looked down at the volume in her hands. Thought of his voice. His manner. The way the name Cecilia had sounded when spoken with care rather than obligation.
She closed her eyes.
She was in trouble.
And she was not entirely certain she wished to escape it.
***
The afternoon brought archery for the ladies, and Cecilia was summoned to attend Georgiana.
The event had been arranged on the south lawn: bright targets, satin ribbons, bows of modest weight suited to feminine hands. The young ladies looked charming as they drew and released, laughter drifting over the clipped grass like birdsong.
Cecilia stood apart, holding Georgiana’s spare gloves and a flask of lemonade—a distance that was social as much as physical.
She tried not to think of the library. She tried not to think of thoughtful eyes and measured speech and the quiet recognition that had passed between them. But memory tugged, persistent as a thread caught on a nail.
No. This was foolish. Dangerous.
She forced her attention on the scene before her. Lady Arabella Worthington possessed an admirable posture and little aim. Miss Patience Hartley improved steadily with practice. Georgiana performed prettily—competent enough to please, never so impressive as to threaten.
And there, at the edge of the field, stood the Duke of Ashworth.
He did not shoot. He stood among a cluster of gentlemen who discussed sporting dogs and autumn hunting, his expression composed into something unreadable.
Until his gaze found hers.
It lasted no more than a breath. Across the lawn, over parasols and ribbons and drifting laughter, his eyes met hers—calm, unhurried, unmistakably aware.
Then the moment was gone, and he turned back to his companions.
Had she imagined it?
“Cecilia!” Georgiana called sharply. “The gloves—these pinch dreadfully.”
“Of course.” Cecilia hurried forward with the requested items, grateful for the interruption. This was her place. This was her role. Fetching gloves and holding lemonade and being useful.
Not catching the eye of dukes across crowded lawns. Not recalling conversations in libraries. Not wondering what he had meant by ‘I find you interesting.’
She helped Georgiana adjust her gloves, offered encouraging words about her performance, and retreated once more to the margins.
She did not look at him again.
But she felt his presence like a weight, like a warmth, like something she could not name and did not dare examine too closely.
***
That evening, Sebastian told himself—firmly—that he would not think of her.
He had come to dinner prepared to attend to Miss Ashwood’s cousin and the other eligible candidates assembled for his benefit. He had resolved to be charming. Attentive. Dutiful.
He lasted scarcely ten minutes.
His gaze drifted to the edges of the room, to the quiet spaces where servants moved and companions waited. To the place where she might have stood, had she been required.
She was not there.
He should have been relieved.
Instead, disappointment settled in his chest with uncomfortable familiarity.
You exchanged a few words with her, he reminded himself savagely. One brief encounter. She is a stranger.
But she did not feel like a stranger. She felt like someone he had been waiting to meet without knowing he was waiting.
“Your Grace?”
He turned to find Miss Hartley regarding him with patient curiosity. She had been seated beside him this evening—his mother’s arrangement, no doubt—and had been making a valiant effort at conversation while his attention strayed elsewhere.
“Forgive me.” He summoned a smile. “You were saying?”
“I was asking about your library at Ashworth Hall. Lady Marchmont tells me it is quite impressive.”
“It is… extensive.” He searched for a remark that might pass for charm and found only duty. “My grandfather was the true collector. He believed every great house must possess a library worthy of its dignity.”
“And do you continue his work? Adding to the collection?”
“When I find volumes of interest.” The reply felt mechanical, his thoughts already drifting. “Do you read, Miss Hartley?”
“Oh yes—novels, chiefly. I find them such a comfort. Mrs Radcliffe is my particular favourite; her heroines are always so delightfully imperilled.”
Sebastian nodded, offered an agreeable murmur—yet the mention of reading caught at him like a hook.
Cecilia in the library, the quiet certainty with which she held her borrowed volume. The neat marginalia. The way she had spoken of Thornfield—of work, of necessity, of education become an odd relic no one wanted.
What if I am tired of performing?
He had said that to her. To a woman he barely knew. The truth had slipped from him unguarded—and she had looked at him with those thoughtful eyes and understood far more than he had meant to reveal.
People wanted things from him. They always had.
They did not see him.
She had. Or he feared she had. Or he hoped she had.
All three were equally dangerous.
“Your Grace?”
Miss Hartley again—more gently, but with a hint of strain. He realised he had drifted once more into silence.
“My apologies,” he said. “I find myself unusually fatigued this evening. The day’s exertions, you understand.”
“Of course.” Her smile did not quite reach her eyes. “Perhaps tomorrow you will be more yourself.”
I do not know who that is, he thought, but he did not say it.
He smiled instead. He conversed. He performed.
Dinner continued. The young ladies sparkled, the mamas manoeuvred, and the elegant machinery of society turned on, heedless of his weariness.
When the gentlemen at last withdrew for port, he excused himself at the earliest moment that would not give offence.
The library called to him. And he answered.
***
She was not there.
Sebastian stood among the books, surrounded by knowledge and silence, and acknowledged the disappointment he had been attempting to ignore.
Of course she was not there. It was late; she would have duties, or she would be confined to her small room on the upper floor, or—most sensibly—she would have chosen to stay away after their encounter that morning.
I am often here in the mornings, he had said. Should you happen to return a book...
An invitation, veiled in courtesy and deniability. He had known it even as he spoke. She had known it too; he had seen the calculation in her eyes.
She had neither accepted nor refused.
He crossed to the section where he had found her that morning, examining the shelves as though they might reveal some trace of her presence. The book she had borrowed was gone, of course. The space it had occupied gaped like a missing tooth.
He selected a volume at random and settled into a chair by the cold hearth. He would read. He would distract himself. He would not think about grey dresses and dark hair and a voice that said his name like it meant something.
He read the same paragraph four times without understanding and closed the book.
What ailed him? He had met hundreds of women—thousands, perhaps—beautiful, accomplished, eminently suitable. None had remained in his thoughts like this; none had unsettled his composure, or made him feel absurdly young and unguarded.
Because they did not see you, whispered a voice he disliked. They saw the title. The fortune. The influence. She saw you.
But what, precisely, had she seen? A man confessing weariness to a stranger. A duke admitting that the role he played chafed. Seldom an attractive portrait.
And yet she had not recoiled. Had not offered false comfort or empty reassurance. She had looked at him with those watchful eyes and said, We both know our roles. It would be wiser to perform them.
She understood. That was it. She understood performance—understood the discipline of presenting a life one did not entirely inhabit. She lived that discipline daily, for stakes far higher than his own.
His performance was tiring. Hers was survival.
And still, that morning, she had remained. Had accepted fellow scholars as a fiction under which they might briefly meet as equals. A pretext—dangerous, fragile—but a space in which the world’s expectations loosened for a moment.
Would she return? Would she speak to him as she spoke to those books—directly, thoughtfully, without artifice?
Had he any right to hope so?
No. None. She had no freedom; he had no excuse. The distance between them was fixed, and any attempt to cross it would wound her, not him.
He should turn his attention to duty—to his mother’s plans, to the succession, to the life expected of him. He should forget Miss Cecilia Ashwood and her careful notes and her unguarded intelligence.
He stared at the unopened volume in his hands and admitted, at last, that he would do no such thing.
Tomorrow morning, he would come to the library.
And he would hope—against reason—that she would be here.
***
Sleep did not come easily that night.
Cecilia lay in her narrow bed, staring at the ceiling she could barely see in the darkness, and replayed the morning’s encounter for the hundredth time.
I find you interesting.
The words should not have affected her so strongly. They were ordinary words, the sort of polite nothing a gentleman might say to any woman. But he had not said them as a polite nothing. He had said them with weight, with attention, with genuine curiosity in his grey eyes.
He had meant them.
She did not know what to do with that. Five years of invisibility had not prepared her for being seen. She had forgotten what it felt like to matter to someone, to be worthy of attention and interest rather than mere utility.
It was dangerous. She knew it was dangerous. A duke’s interest in a baronet’s poor relation could only end one way, and that way led to ruin.
And yet it had felt—good. To be looked at as though her thoughts mattered. To be invited, however cautiously, into a space where she might exist as herself, not merely as Georgiana’s useful shadow.
Sebastian.
She whispered the name into the darkness, testing its shape. Not Your Grace, nor the distant abstraction of the Duke—but a man who was weary of performing, who read serious books and noticed hers.
She was being foolish. She hardly knew him. One conversation did not constitute a connection.
And yet—
I am often here in the mornings.
An invitation wrapped in propriety, but an invitation nonetheless. He would be there. He wished her to come.
She should not go. She should contrive a discreet way to return the book, avoid the library, resume the life she knew—silent, capable, unseen.
She turned onto her side, pressing her face into the pillow, and admitted that she would go anyway.
One more conversation. One more glimpse of what it felt like to be seen. Then she would retreat. She would accept that a spark, once, was all she would ever have.
Just one more conversation.
She told herself it would be enough.
She told herself she could stop.
She told herself the quiet lies that allowed survival—and in time, she slept.