Chapter 6 #2
“My lady,” Adrian said, recovering himself and straightening his cravat. “Good day. May I present Captain Tristan Marlowe. An old friend…Well, the oldest if I’m honest, though he’d never let me forget it if I weren’t. Tristan, my wife, Lady Ashcroft.”
“Captain.” She inclined her head, composed and correct, her chin tilted up and shoulders back, her eyes soft and demure as she blinked her eyelashes. He watched her glance flick once, carefully and quickly, down to the cane and the leg beside it.
Reading it the way she reads everything. The way she read Cassandra’s hand on the doorframe, the way she’d read my own stillness that first night. Is she a woman, or a mind reader? What kind of a woman learns so much in the sickroom of a dying husband, more than my own physicians? It is curious…
“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, my lady,” Tristan said, gracious as ever. “Although, I must extend my sympathies in advance.”
“Oh dear, is it as bad as that?” Lady Ashcroft deadpanned.
“You’ve married a man who once wagered his own cravat on a horse he’d never seen run.”
“Did he win?”
“He did not,” Tristan said, delighted. “I have never let him forget it.”
“I am glad of it. Did you come to see Lady Cassandra?”
“Yes, I was hoping she might be up for visitors.”
“I just finished visiting with her myself, and she is in need of some rest. She did wish me to inform you that she will join us in the drawing room shortly.”
***
Cassandra came down not long after, and it was then that Adrian understood, watching his oldest friend go entirely still in his chair, that four years had done more than take a piece of Tristan’s leg. He watched his friend’s eyes go wide as she strode into the room.
I had not considered this.
The girl who came into the room was not the child Tristan had left behind at fourteen, all elbows and awkwardness and stubbornness, forever trailing after her brother’s friend and being sent away for it. Adrian saw Cassandra through his eyes.
She had surely become a woman in those years, beautiful if too pale, moving with a grace of someone still learning to trust her own balance. But he could not deny Cassandra was a comely woman all the same, with a directness in her gaze that hadn’t softened with the years, only sharpened.
“Captain Marlowe,” she said, and there was nothing of her usual languor in it after the morning. “I remember you used to put frogs in my slippers.”
“I have entirely reformed,” Tristan said, and he had not taken his eyes off her at all.
“Have you. That seems a great deal to claim on a first meeting in four years.”
“I’ve had a great deal of time to reform in. Very little else to do with it, in fact, lying about various field hospitals disagreeable to nurses who deserved a great deal better of me than I gave them.”
“And did the nurses believe your reform, or only humor it?”
“Neither. I don’t believe they were listening to me. I was told, on more than one occasion, they put cotton in their ears to drown out my blabbering on about this and that. I do not do well with pain, you see.”
Cassandra’s mouth twitched, despite herself, into something that wanted badly to be a smile and only partly managed it. “That sounds like an excellent technique.”
“You will get tired. Sit down, please, Sister,” Adrian said, more sharply than he meant to, and both looked at him with mild surprise. He realized the two people in front of him had briefly forgotten he was in the room at all.
“You needn’t defend my stamina or my honor, Adrian. I promise you I am quite well, and remember exactly how many frogs I suffered through,” Cassandra said, settling into the chair opposite Tristan.
“How many?” Tristan asked.
“Three, in fact. Over the course of one very long summer.”
“Three seems excessive, even for me at fourteen.”
“It was not excessive, and you had help. I have always suspected Adrian, though he has never once confessed to it. It could have been our cousin, Jonathan…”
“I would never,” Adrian said flatly.
“You absolutely would have,” Cassandra said, without so much as glancing his way, her eyes set only on Tristan. “I have simply chosen, out of some misplaced familial loyalty, not to raise it in company…until this precise moment!”
Tristan laughed at that, and the whole manor felt lighter for it. “In my own defense, you were a menace,” he said. “You once put a garden snake in my boot. Don’t think I forgot that. Do you deny it?”
“I deny it,” she said with a raised eyebrow.
“You cannot deny it.”
“And why not?”
“You’ve just admitted the frogs.”
“The frogs were your doing. The snake was entirely your fault. You started it.”
“Ah, I drew first blood…I suppose you are right. My memory fails me at times, I suppose,” Tristan shrugged as he accepted a cup of tea from a maid.
“Your memory,” Cassandra said, “once told an entire dinner table that I’d fallen into the lake of my own accord, when the truth was you’d dared me to do it and then failed to catch me!”
“I caught you eventually,” he said as he took a sip. “Or at least I hope I did.
“Eventually,” she agreed, “is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.”
Adrian sat back and watched the two of them volley the exchange with nothing much to add. He was a man who had wandered into a match he never agreed to referee, and found he had nothing useful to contribute to either side of it. If nothing, he admired it.
There was a rhythm to it he hadn’t expected. It was quick, unhesitating, each of them plainly enjoying being met at speed by someone who wouldn’t simply defer. It reminded him of his few talks with Lady Ashcroft.
“You’ve grown sharp-tongued,” Tristan said, when the banter had settled, at least somewhat, and there was something quieter under the observation now, resembling admiration. “You weren’t before. Or you were, but it stayed mostly in your own head. Is that right?”
“A great deal changes in four years.”
“So, I’m told. I feel completely the same, and completely different. Does that make sense?” He said it lightly, but his eyes didn’t match the lightness, and for a moment, neither of them said anything further.
“I myself have learned to accept that contradictory things can be true. I can feel happy and sad at the same time, strong and weak…I believe I understand you as well, Captain Marlowe.”
Adrian watched them and noted the careful, considerate attention his friend paid her. It resulted in a bright, frank interest from his sister, which she had shown little of in years now in anything at all.
Not since the accident took the shine out of her, glimmers of it now just peeking out from beneath the surface. And he did not know how he felt about his best friend being the source of it.
***
While Tristan and Cassandra found their feet with each other, trading old grievances about frogs and boots with an ease that seemed to want no help from anyone else in the room, least of all his, his wife came quietly to his side shortly after.
She stood near enough that he caught the plain, unfashionable scent of carbolic soap under whatever the housekeeper had given her. She stood a moment simply watching the pair of them across the room before she sat down next to her husband and spoke.
“She’s stronger than she’s been in years, isn’t she?” she asked, low, meant only for him.
“Perhaps.”
“I can see now that it isn’t only the exercises doing it. A body mends faster when it has something to rise for.” Her eyes went, briefly, to Cassandra and Tristan, and back. “She has that now, I think, for the first time in a long while.”
“You sound very certain. A diagnosis made across a drawing room?”
“I’ve made worse assumptions with a great deal less to go on. I think this is as plain as day.” A faint, private smile crossed her mouth, there and gone. It’s in how she’s holding her shoulders. Do you see it?”
“And if I do?”
He wanted to say he would judge for himself what was good for his sister.
In fact, he had the words half formed, the guarding of Cassandra a habit so worn it required no sentient thought.
But he found, looking at Honoria, that there was nothing in her face to guard against. No design in it.
Whoever she was, she was not angling for advantage.
No calculation of what such an observation might buy her, no glance toward him to see how the words had landed and whether they might be pressed further to some purpose.
Only a plain gladness, offered without expecting anything in return for it. The gladness of a kind woman who had watched another rise from a bed she’d half feared would keep her.
“Thank you,” he said, and meant it more plainly than he managed to mean anything in some time. “For whatever part of it is yours.”
“Very little of it is mine. Most of it was always in her. I only kept out of its way and helped it out.”
She was near enough that he could have reached her hand without moving his feet, and for one unguarded moment, the years of careful distance he’d kept from every living soul in this house felt less like the safety he’d built it to be.
She unsettled him in a way that made him painfully aware of how long it had been since anyone had told him a true thing about his own family, expecting nothing in return.
He was about to say something poignant, or attempt it. At the very least, if he opened his mouth with nothing to say, he could introduce her formally to Captain Marlowe. He rose to his feet when Mr. Coombe appeared at the door, grave-faced.
“My lord. A private word, if I might. At once.”
“Mr. Coombe, we have a guest. It can wait.”
“It cannot wait, my lord.” Mr. Coombe’s eyes flicked once, briefly, toward the room at large.
He assessed Tristan with Cassandra, still laughing at something, then Honoria close to Adrian’s side.
That solicited a second, more considering glance, then he lowered his voice further still.
He took a half step closer. “It concerns the accounts.”
“What accounts?”
“There is trouble with the money.”