CHAPTER TWELVE #2
The folly came up out of the trees, a little round Greek conceit of pale stone with four columns and a domed roof, the sort of monument a great-grandfather erects when his fortune vastly exceeds his employment.
She stopped at the foot of the three shallow steps.
The stone stood pale as bone in the thin light, the dark gathered thick beneath the dome, and for a moment she thought the place empty and felt something that was half relief and half a grief she had no right to feel.
Then the dark under the dome moved, and a man came forward to the head of the steps, and the moonlight took him.
“You came,” Vance said softly. “I did not permit myself to hope you would.”
For a moment he was exactly as he had been.
The moonlight was kind, and it gave her back the man from behind the curtain at the Davenport ball, the warm voice and the soft fond look, and he took both her cold hands in both of his and she let him, and her eyes were wet before she knew they had filled.
“I came to tell you that you must not write to me again,” she said. “That is all. I wished to deliver my mind to you directly, so that there could be no possibility of a misunderstanding.”
“Then, Pray, deliver it and I shall depart and you will never be troubled by me more.” He drew her hands up against his chest. “But let me first tell you that I was wrong, Ellen, that I have been wrong since the day I let the world’s opinion frighten me away from the only good thing that was ever offered me. ”
“You let my poverty frighten you away. Let us at least be honest in the dark.”
“Then I was a coward, and a fool, and I have paid for it every day since.” He bowed his head over her hands.
“Do you remember the night behind the curtain at the Davenport ball? You told me you had never once said a true thing to a man in a ballroom, and that you would say one to me. Do you remember what it was?”
“I remember.” Her voice was not steady. “I was a child.”
“You were the most honest creature in that whole gilded room, and I knew it, and I let them carry you off because I had not the courage to be poor at your side.” He pressed his lips to the backs of her fingers, once, the way he used to.
“I have rehearsed this a hundred times and I am making a ruin of it. I only wished to say that I never left off. That whatever has been done to you since, whatever cold house you have been carried into, there was one man in the world who saw you and wanted you for no reason on earth but yourself.”
It was the precise shape of the thing she had wanted for two months to be told.
It went straight into the soft unhealed place beneath her ribs and found it, and her eyes spilled over without her leave, and she loathed herself for it and could not stop.
She had been so long unchosen. She had been bought and shelved and given roses by an unseen hand and a horse with no reason offered for it, and here was a warm voice in the dark saying the one word her whole bruised pride was starving for, which was you, and yourself, and for no reason but.
“Why now,” she managed. “Three weeks silent, and then a letter pushed under my door at midnight. If you meant a word of it, why not come to the house, or write to me openly, in the daylight, like an honest man.”
“Because your duke would have turned me from the door, and you are fully aware of it.” Smoothly, a shade too smoothly, and his eyes lifted past her shoulder toward the black under the trees, the first time, and she was too far gone in her own weeping to mark it.
“There was no other road to you. Forgive the manner of it, Ellen. Blame the manner, and spare the man.”
“I do not know what to do with you,” she said. “I came here to send you away and I find I cannot even do that much.”
“Then do not send me away this minute. Stay only this one minute.” He stepped closer, and his arms went round her, and for one half-second it was the embrace she had dreamed of for a year and a half.
She felt the rough wool of his coat against her cheek and the old remembered warmth of him and let her eyes fall shut on it, one breath, the single breath she had been promising herself in secret for eighteen months.
And then it was not the embrace at all. His grip closed.
It went from tender to hard between that breath and the next, his arms locking at her back so that she could not draw away, and the soft look went out of his face like a candle pinched between a finger and a thumb.
“Charles.” She set her hands against his chest and pushed, and he did not give. “Let me go. You are holding me too hard.”
“Just a moment longer.” His voice had changed too, flattened, gone businesslike, his eyes no longer on her at all but lifted past her shoulder toward the trees. “Only a moment, and it is done, and no fault of yours.”
She heard it then. Behind them and to the left, in the black under the trees, the careful crackle of more than one man trying to move quietly over dead leaves, and lower than that, unmistakable and obscene in the stillness, a man’s soft satisfied laugh.
“Who is that?” She went rigid in his arms. “Charles. Who is in the trees?”
“No one you will ever have to look at again.” His mouth was near her ear, almost gentle, which was the worst thing in it. “Hold still. It is very nearly done.”
The whole of it arrived in her at once, in a single sickening drop, the way the floor goes out from under a person on a stair they thought had one step more.
The letter, the folly, and the dark she had chosen for herself, the men in the trees with their eyes already full of her.
She had not been wanted. She had been arranged.
“You have sold me.” The utterance of it was far more agonising than the initial tight embrace. “You wrote me that letter and you have sold me to whoever is laughing in those trees.”
He did not trouble to deny it, which was the last cruelty, and that silence undid the last of her fear and turned it to something hotter.
“Let me go.” It came out small and then not small at all.
She twisted, and clawed, and got one hand free and struck at his face and felt the blow land, and he caught the wrist and gathered her back against him with an ease that frightened her worse than violence would have, and she filled her lungs to scream into the indifferent park, because a scream at least would spoil whatever picture they had come into the dark to take.
A horse came down the path at a hard fast pace.
She heard the hooves before she saw anything, and then a denser shadow detached itself from the gloom of the trees and a voice came out of it that she would have known at the bottom of the sea, level and cold and entirely without hurry, and it uttered a menacing phrase into the night.
“Let go of my wife.”
Vance let go.
He let go so fast she stumbled, and caught herself on a column, and Theodore Pillard rode out of the shadow into the thin moonlight in his greatcoat with his face like the stone of the folly, and dismounted without seeming to hurry, and did not raise his voice and did not need to.
He looked at Vance. That was all. He stood in the wet grass and looked at the man for the length of one long second, and Vance, who had stood in a line of his fellows before the open mouths of French guns and not run, went grey to the lips and could not hold the look.
Vance opened his mouth. Whatever he had meant to bring out of it, some explanation, some appeal to the code that was supposed to bind one gentleman to another, remained in the cold air between them, because there was nothing in the duke’s face to address it to.
Theodore did not threaten him. He did not name a second, or a meadow at dawn, or a pistol.
He only looked, with the patience of a man who had a great deal of time and a great deal of it already misspent, and the looking told Vance more plainly than any words that he was not worth the trouble of a duel, that he would be attended to by other means at another hour, and would never once see the hand that did it.