Chapter 12
The group promenade was a social obligation Edmund tolerated with the composure of a man who had long ago concluded that large cheerful gatherings were the price one paid for being seen. He had not, however, paid the price very often. Three years in the North had spared him most of it.
But the Season required certain appearances, and the appearance of the Cavendish household in Hyde Park on a fair Wednesday afternoon was, Catherine had informed him over breakfast, one of those that could not be skipped without consequence.
Sophia did not attend. She had pleaded a headache after breakfast, with the slight pallor and the careful brevity of a woman who was not lying but was also not telling him everything, and he had accepted the headache without comment and left her with a book and the morning light through the drawing room window.
He had registered, on the walk to the park with Catherine and Arabella, that he had been considering the question of her pallor for most of the journey. The consideration was not yielding any useful conclusion, he thought he had better put it aside until he had something concrete to act on.
Edmund walked along the carriage path with the long, slow procession of the fashionable hour breaking and reforming around him; Catherine and Arabella strode a few paces ahead, and Lord Marbury, whom Edmund had known at Oxford and who had hailed him by the railings, walked beside him with the cheerful, undirected energy of a man who considered a promenade a sustained opportunity for conversation.
Lord Marbury was telling him about a horse. Edmund heard only perhaps every third word. He was a polite man; he kept his face arranged. But the part of his mind that had been trained on the estate, to monitor a dozen small irregularities at once, had noticed that Arabella had stopped.
He noticed it the way one noticed any small disturbance in a moving body of water. Catherine had walked a pace and a half on before she registered Arabella was no longer beside her and turned back.
Arabella was standing with her hand on the railing and her face turned slightly aside, in conversation with a man whose back was to Edmund.
There was nothing immediately alarming in it.
Arabella knew people. She was introduced every week.
She had been told repeatedly, that the entire purpose of a Season was to know people, and she had taken the instruction to heart.
But something made him watch.
The man turned slightly. Edmund recognized Lord Graystone before he had consciously registered who he was looking at, the way one recognized the silhouette of a dog one had been bitten by; automatically and without recourse to thought.
Lord Graystone was wearing a coat of dark blue superfine and gloves of fawn kid, and he was leaning toward Arabella with the particular inclination he used when he wished to suggest that the conversation he was having was the only one in the world worth having. Arabella was listening to him.
She was listening with an expression Edmund had never seen on her before, attentive in a way that had gone very still. A stillness of the sort that happened when something was being taken in rather than when someone was simply being polite.
She laughed, quietly, at something Lord Graystone said.
It was not Arabella’s usual laugh. Arabella laughed at large, with the unhedged delight of a girl who had never been taught to ration her enthusiasm. That was a smaller laugh. A practiced laugh.
The laugh of a young woman who was beginning to understand that a small laugh was its own form of flirtation, and who was trying it out on a man who had assured her, by every fiber of his attention, that he was the right person to try it out on.
Lord Marbury had said something beside him. Edmund had not the slightest idea what.
Lord Graystone glanced up briefly across the distance. His eyes found Edmund with the precision of a man who had known exactly where Edmund was standing and had merely been waiting for the right moment to look. He nodded pleasantly.
Edmund returned the nod with the bare minimum of civility that could be sustained in a public park. Lord Graystone said something else to Arabella, the kind of remark made by a man taking his leave, and moved on at his unhurried, untroubled pace.
The distrust in Edmund’s chest was a physical thing.
It tightened beneath his ribs, sharpened the edges of his vision, making him aware, with a small detached part of his mind, that his hands had closed at his sides into a position closer to fists than was strictly conventional.
He uncurled them and turned, with deliberate slowness, back to Lord Marbury.
“Forgive me,” he said. “You were saying.”
“I was saying,” Lord Marbury said, with the cheerful patience of a man who had not noticed anything and would not have understood if he had, “that the horse was sixteen hands, which is a great deal more horse than I had been promised by the dealer. But you, have evidently lost the thread, Lord Ashfield. Are you well?”
“I am well. The sun is warm.”
“It is not warm. It is mild.”
“Mild, then.”
Lord Marbury accepted that with the easy charity of someone who had concluded long ago that Edmund Cavendish was not made for the conversation of public parks, and resumed his account of the horse.
Edmund attended to it more carefully that time, with the discipline of a man who knew that turning his attention to Arabella, in the visible wake of Lord Graystone’s departure, would invite whomever was watching to make precisely the connection he most wanted them not to make.
Arabella rejoined the group a moment later and said nothing about the exchange.
Catherine, who had seen it up close, gave Edmund a single steady look that said, in a silence he could read fluently, we shall discuss this at home, and turned back to their sister with a placid remark about the weather.
Arabella took Catherine’s arm again with the small, slightly self-conscious composure of a girl who suspected she had been observed and was determined to demonstrate that there was nothing to observe.
The image stayed with him for the rest of the afternoon.
Not the conversation, which he had not heard.
It was the quality of Arabella’s attention during it.
The sense that whatever Lord Graystone had been saying had not been new to her, that they had, somewhere in their brief acquaintance, established a language he had not noticed them beginning.
He filed it away carefully, in the part of his mind he was beginning to keep for the things Lord Graystone was doing in his household, and he kept walking beside Lord Marbury, his face arranged for public consumption, and he understood that confronting Arabella in a public park would only push her closer to whatever Lord Graystone was building.
He would speak to her at home when the time was right. He hoped he would recognize the time when it came. The waiting was, in the meantime, its own kind of agony.
He returned to the Cavendish townhouse in the late afternoon and discovered, in the entrance hall, that Sophia’s headache had subsided. His wife was in the morning room with Henry.
She had been pressed, apparently, into adjudicating a dispute between two painted tin soldiers about the relative merits of cavalry advancement and was conducting the duty with the same gravity she might have brought to a question of estate law.
Henry was kneeling on the carpet with his entire battalion arrayed in front of him.
Sophia was sitting on the floor beside him, her skirts arranged with unconcerned competence, her chin propped on one hand, and she was listening to Henry’s arguments with the careful expression of a magistrate who intended to give the matter its proper weight.
Edmund stopped in the doorway.
He had been intending to cross the room.
He had been intending to ask after the headache and ruffle Henry’s hair, possibly to suggest that the campaign be moved to the morning room table where the soldiers would not be trodden on by Mrs. Holloway when she came in with the tea.
He did none of those things. He stood in the doorway with one hand on the doorframe and the other in his pocket, and he watched.
Sophia was speaking, quietly, in the patient register she reserved for Henry. Henry was nodding with great seriousness, his small face arranged in the expression of solemn statesmanship he wore when he was discussing the deployment of a horse.
The afternoon light from the eastern window was falling across them; on Sophia’s dress and Henry’s dark curls, and on the dust motes drifting in the bar of light between them, and it occurred to Edmund, with a force that startled him, that he had been looking forward to coming home.
He had been looking forward to coming home for several days. He had not registered, until that moment, that it was something he had begun to do.
He filed it alongside the other things he was not yet ready to examine, and went in search of his correspondence.
There was nothing of consequence in the afternoon post. A bill from his tailor. An invitation to a card party the following week. He went to his study and sat down at his desk, and for a long moment he did not move. Then he reached for the lower drawer and took out Lord Graystone’s letter.
The one that had arrived the week before, the one whose careful, gentlemanly phrasing about inheritance and accounts he had read twice and filed and not, until that moment, returned to.
He read it again.
It was no less precise on the third reading.
If anything, it was more so. Lord Graystone’s sentences sat on the page with the patient, unhurried weight of a man who had written them in the certain knowledge that they would be read more than once and had taken measures to ensure that each reading produced a slightly clearer picture of what he was actually saying.