Chapter 8
Adrian found Tristan on the terrace after breakfast the next morning and fell into step beside him without preamble.
It was the way he’d fallen into step beside him a hundred times in another life where there had been Oxford quadrangles, London pavements, and once, most memorably, the deck of a boat bound for the Azores. Adrian shook his head and came back to the present moment as they began to walk.
“There’s a matter that’s been sitting ill with me,” he said.
“I gathered as much. Out with it.”
“Mr. Coombe brought me a debt a week past.”
“I assume that is common for an Earl. Was it the day I arrived, when he came in so gloomily?”
“Yes. It was large, sudden, no warning of it beforehand in our many meetings. I asked if it would be worked out and he said it couldn’t wait. So, naturally I authorized it paid out of the marriage settlement without looking closely.”
“Seems reasonable enough. What troubles you then?”
“While I’ve done as much before, when he’s brought me a thing and sworn to its urgency…I’ve never had cause to question it. Something does not sit right with me this time, Tristan.”
Tristan’s cane found the flagstones in an easy, practiced rhythm, and he was quiet a moment. Adrian glanced up at him sideways to be sure he’d been heard.
“I’m thinking.”
“And?”
“Had you heard of the debt before in passing then? From any other quarter, or a solicitor’s letter? An earlier mention, anything of the kind?”
“No. I was never one to pay attention, and yet I’d remember if something like this had come up.”
“What was it for?”
“Repairs to a tenant cottage on the northern boundary. Roof and foundation both, he said, and the family in danger of the weather getting in before winter.”
“Which tenant?”
Adrian opened his mouth to answer and found that he could not. “He did not mention it. I’d have to ask him.”
“You paid a debt for a man whose name you don’t know, on the word of a steward who told you it couldn’t wait and interrupted your visit with your oldest friend.
” Tristan said it without heat, which Adrian appreciated.
“Then why should it fall due all at once, with no history to it that you’d ever caught wind of? ”
He shrugged as they walked further away from the house and deeper into the grounds.
“I spent three years watching quartermasters keep the books for officers who never thought to ask them a question. It’s a particular kind of debt, that sort, the one you speak of.
Not always dishonest as a rule...but always worth a second look. In my experience that is.”
“You think Mr. Coombe is stealing from me.”
Tristan’s mouth curved, and he shrugged once more. “I’m not accusing anyone of anything, Adrian. I’m telling you what I’d do if a quartermaster brought me the same.”
“And what’s that?”
“Count the stores myself, and let him watch me do it.”
Adrian said nothing to that because the logic was too sound.
Yet, the idea of it gnawed at him. If he had been deceived, it was likely going to be much worse than one debt.
For four years, he had let Mr. Coombe’s word stand in for his own eyes on the ledgers, telling himself it was trust, because that’s what his father had done.
He found, walking beside Tristan now, that he was thinking, for the first time in all that while, of opening the books himself and reading every bloody line.
Then he realized just how many lines that would be, and the shame of admitting how long it had been since he had cared about anything other than his sister’s health.
Then they came round the hedge, and thoughts of the ledgers left with the autumn wind.
Cassandra and Nell had begun enjoying a picnic on the lawn below the terrace. While it was now October, it was rather warm.
They had a cloth spread out and a meal that consisted of various meats and cheeses, fresh bread and preserves. Then it hit him like a cannon to the chest. His sister was laughing. Out of doors. In the sun, her face turned up to it without flinching.
“Well,” Tristan said softly, beside him. “There she is, like sunlight herself.”
“She does look well, doesn’t she?” Adrian remarked.
For an hour it was almost another life.
Tristan had produced a slim volume from some pocket of his coat and approached them.
“I believe I have your entertainment,” he said as he opened the book and began reading a verse aloud, badly, presumably on purpose.
Finally, Cassandra could not let it stand.
“That is not how it goes. I cannot allow you to butcher Chaucer like that, Captain Marlowe.”
“It is precisely how it goes.”
“It is not, and you know it is not.”
“Oh, dear…”
“It is when April with his showers sweet, the drought of March has pierced the root. You said September and October!”
“I suppose I did?”
“You are doing it deliberately to provoke me!”
Lady Aschroft laughed, and Adrian watched the way her dark eyelashes fluttered over her bright eyes.
“I have been a soldier for six years, Cassandra. I no longer remember how anything is meant to go. Enlighten me.”
She snatched the book from him, with a briskness that would have startled anyone who’d known her only these four years past. She read the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales properly, correcting him with the delight of a woman in an argument she cannot lose.
He let her win it, and Adrian watched her blossom with the victory.
He noted it for more consideration at a later time.
For now, he just looked at the scene in front of him, scarcely believing such joy could exist in his household.
“Now you,” Cassandra said, when the verse was settled to her satisfaction. “Tell me the truth. Was Spain anything like Lord Byron describes?”
“Oh, lovely Spain! Renowned, romantic Land,” Lady Ashcroft said as she bit into an apple.
“Hotter, I say,” Tristan said. “And with considerably less rhyme.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I generally give. It is not terribly entertaining, or at least diverting, to speak of war.”
“You give it to everyone else, perhaps. I am not everyone else.” She said it lightly. “You make a joke of it every time it’s raised, and everyone lets you, because it’s easier than pressing.”
Tristan was quiet for a moment, which said a lot in itself. When he spoke again, the idle warmth had gone out of his voice, leaving something raw and true underneath.
“My time was spent mostly waiting, Lady Cassandra,” he said.
“War is not what you may think. Waiting, yes…that’s the part the poets skip.
Weeks of waiting, and then very little time at all to be frightened in, and then more waiting, to see who you’d turn out to be once it was over.
” He glanced down at the cane. “Could have been worse.”
“Could have been better,” Cassandra said, but did not push further, and Adrian understood, watching them, that she had gotten more truth out of Tristan in under an hour by being present, and asking the hard questions.
“I believe that’s all the stories I have.” Tristan shrugged.
“Tell me something of him, then,” she said at last, nodding at her brother, “from before I was born. He’ll never tell me anything himself! He thinks I ought to believe he sprang into being fully grown and disapproving.”
“I would very much like to hear this as well,” Lady Ashcroft said.
“Cassandra…no one wants to hear this,” Adrian pleaded.
“Eighteen years old,” Tristan said, ignoring him entirely, warming to it at once.
“Half a bottle of your father’s best claret gone, and someone…
I will not say who, though I could, and it would surprise the hell out of you…
wagered him five guineas he hadn’t the nerve to ride a horse up the front steps of White’s. ”
“He never did such a thing.” Cassandra gasped.
“He did. Got the horse halfway through the door before the porter caught the bridle.”
“What happened to the horse?” Lady Ashcroft asked.
“He was considerably calmer about it than the porter was. I have never in my life heard a club steward use language that belonged in Dublin.”
“Adrian rode a horse into a gentlemen’s club! No wonder why he ended up a member at Boodle’s! That explains it…”
“It was borrowed,” Adrian said, with as much dignity as he could summon. “I won the wager, too.”
He found, to his own shock, that he was almost smiling. The corner of his mouth was pulling up against his will.
“Five guineas,” Cassandra said, delighted. “Was it worth it?”
“At the time, unreservedly.”
“And now?”
He considered the question, watching his sister laugh in the sun.
“Now I find I don’t remember the wager half so well as the getting caught part. It is a good story.”
It was then he found his wife watching him. She had gone still as she listened, and she was looking at him as though she’d caught sight of a door he kept shut swinging briefly open on its hinge.
She looked intrigued, and try as he may he was intrigued by her, softened by the pleasantness of that afternoon. He held her eyes, as well as his breath. He looked away.
***
Later, while Cassandra and Tristan fell to arguing happily over some fresh point of the verse after dinner in the drawing room, Adrian thought more of the afternoon.
His sister had found herself an opponent willing to be argued with, and a man who did not treat her disagreement as a thing to be admonished.
Adrian found himself walking a little apart with his wife as they took a turn about the room.
He realized somewhere around the third or fourth step that no one was listening to them, or paying attention to them at all.
They had been married the better part of a fortnight.
He had sat beside her at breakfast, across from her at dinner, and passed her twice daily in the corridor with the nod one gives a stranger one is obliged to know intimately, and none of it, he understood now, had amounted to being so near to her.
He took a deep breath and inhaled her scent, more jasmine than carbolic after the herbaceous digestif they had enjoyed. He looked up at the portraits with their painted eyes looking down at him, and he simply shook his head.
Neither of them filled the quiet with talk, which he appreciated. It was not an uncomfortable silence either, which surprised him as much as she had the habit of doing.
“You’re not going to ask me,” she said eventually on their sixth lap, without turning her head, “why I’ve said nothing at dinner about the state of your footman’s hip?”
“Should I have expected you to? I do not think I noticed such a thing myself,” he said, his gaze suddenly searching him out.
“I find it hard to miss things.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“It has been a matter of survival for me,” she started, her eyes looking at him. “Observing things, being proactive and methodical and—”
He glanced at her, surprised into something that wasn’t quite a smile either, and found that he liked how much she noticed things, about houses, about rooms, about people. He liked the world he saw through her eyes.
“Shall we take a turn about the terrace?” he asked as he opened the French doors and they strode outside.
They went down the terrace stairs to the gardens. The autumn air was beginning to chill, and he offered her his coat. The sun was just setting over the moors, and it cast a brilliant, soft pink light.
“This is a beautiful sunset,” she said as they continued.
The ground was uneven as they walked further, root-broken beneath the grass where some old hedge had once run and been grubbed out and never quite forgotten by the soil, and her foot turned on one of the buried roots before she’d seen it coming.
She pitched, not far, not dangerously, but enough that she began to wobble. His hand was at her waist before he had decided to move it there, and hers had closed hard on his forearm to steady herself. Her deft fingers found the fabric of his vest and gripped with a strength that surprised him.
On instinct, he bent slightly toward her with his hand spread wide against the small of her back. He could feel her lean into his touch, her back somehow hot even through his coat.
He looked down at her lips and then averted his gaze, up to the skies. It was over almost as soon as it began. She had her footing back, plainly, well before either of them moved. Her weight settled and she was able to balance her own again.
“Thank you,” she said.
“It is nothing,” he replied, but did not step back when he should have.
She did not step back either. They stood a moment longer than a marriage in name would dictate.
Yes, he had told her that nothing more would be asked of her than the name itself.
Both of them were aware of it, and neither saying so, and there they stood nonetheless.
He was near enough to see that her dark blue eyes were not quite the blue he’d assumed at a distance. There was some green at the rim.
“You’ll want to watch the ground here,” he said as he finally pushed away to a normal distance.
“I generally do watch it,” she said, a little wry, a little breathless. “It seems today it wasn’t enough.”
“No,” he agreed, not sure whether he’d meant the ground or something else.
They walked on. The silence that followed was not the same silence as before. It had a weight to it now, and they felt it. It was the heart-racing self-consciousness neither of them had invited, and neither seemed to know how to set down.
He felt like a young man, watching the toe of his boot against the grass. And even when he was watching the grass, he was truly watching her. Then, the color went out of it all at once, draining from her cheeks with a speed that alarmed him.
What is it? He wanted to ask but instead followed her gaze back up toward the house, where a man was being shown down across the lawn toward them. He was unhurried, smiling faintly at the gardens as he came, pausing once to admire the trees along the terrace wall.
Adrian squinted and knew he was a stranger. Adrian had never in his life laid eyes on this man and thought nothing of it at all.
Perhaps she is just skittish of unannounced visitors?
There was no mistaking his wife, who had gone pale and still at the sight of this stranger. He looked down at her hands and saw them clutched tightly in the fabric of her skirt. She said nothing at all, and they walked back toward the house.