Chapter 17
Cassandra kept her back after the morning’s exercises, waving off the maid who came to gather the pillows, and once the door had shut behind Nell she spoke.
“I am in love with Tristan. I’ve never said it aloud to anyone. I half thought if I never said it, I might go on pretending it was only friendliness.”
“I don’t imagine friendliness produces quite that particular look on a person’s face. You have it all the time. I think everyone knows, my dear.”
Cassandra laughed, unsteady, and reached beneath her pillow for a folded paper, creased soft from handling. “He left this for me. I found it under my book yesterday, and I have read it so many times I could recite it in my sleep, though I promise you it is not very good. Do not judge my love”
Nell took it and read. It was, as promised, not very good. It was clumsy in meter, earnest past the point of art, the sort of thing a soldier wrote who was better at arms than poetry, and who had written it anyway.
“It’s the loveliest bad poem I’ve ever read,” Nell said, and meant it, and Cassandra laughed again, more truly this time.
“What frightens me is not Tristan,” she said, sobering. “I have never in my life been less frightened of anything. It’s Adrian.”
“Yes, there is the matter of your brother.”
“He has spent four years deciding what is safe for me, what I may do, whom I may see, how far I may walk unattended. A suitor is the least safe thing in the world, to a brother who has made an entire religion of my safety. He will find some reason. He always does.”
Nell heard her out and did not tell her she was wrong to hope, though a more cautious woman might have counseled optimistic caution. She only thought, listening, how strange a thing it was to be trusted with something true.
She was handed a girl’s whole unguarded heart to hold carefully, when everything Nell herself had given this house in return was built on a name that wasn’t hers. She shook it off and took Cassandra’s hands in hers.
“I think,” she said instead, “that your brother has begun learning to yield on things he once refused outright. I would not despair of him yet.”
“Perhaps you are right.”
It was Adrian who found her there a few minutes later.
“Betsan let slip a thing to me last night that I gather was not meant for my ears,” he said, once Cassandra had been sent off with some excuse to give him and Nell a moment. “That today is your birthday, and that you mean to let it pass unremarked.”
“It is not a day I set much store by,” she said, cursing the day.
“I mean to set some store by it regardless. Walk out with me.”
***
He took her down to the shore, past the last of the kitchen gardens and through a gate she had not known led anywhere at all, until the house disappeared behind them and there was nothing ahead but open sand and the grey rush of the water.
Out here, with the wind taking their words before either of them could weigh them too carefully and no one within a mile to perform for, the guardedness went out of them both at once. It was as though it had only ever been a thing the house required of them, and the shore did not.
They talked of nothing in particular, which came natural and right. The tide, the gulls, some foolishness of Tristan’s from years before that made Adrian laugh twice in the space of ten minutes.
Nell loved the sound of it. She could not, walking beside him with the sand giving softly under her boots, remember the last time doing nothing had felt like quite so much.
It was there, with the wind at her back and the house long out of sight, that he stopped and drew something small from inside his coat.
“It was my mother’s,” he said, and only held it out to her. It was a necklace, old, the gold worn soft with handling, finer by a considerable measure than anything Nell had owned in her life or ever expected to. “It has sat locked away in the dark. I would rather it not go on doing so.”
She knew she ought to refuse it. It was not even her birthday.
And yet, she understood even as her hand rose toward it, very possibly this was the one thing in this house that could buy her free of Mr. Greaves outright.
And it also was, she understood in the same breath, the one thing she would never in her life be able to bring herself to sell.
“May I?”
She nodded and held still, lifting her hair out of the way as he stepped behind her.
“Hold still, please,” he murmured, his voice low against the hair at her temple.
His fingers were warm, steady and careful against her nape as he worked the small catch.
He felt his breath hot on her neck as he took a slow, deliberate exhale.
The sudden, overwhelming happiness of it was so sharp it very nearly hurt her.
In some ways, this was one of the most intimate things she had ever shared with a man.
“There,” he whispered, his thumb brushing lightly over the sensitive skin beneath her ear as he finished. He rested his hands gently on her shoulders, catching her reflection in the glass ahead of them. “It suits you so well.”
She reached up, her fingertips tracing the cool metal resting at her throat, matching the heat of his gaze as they looked in the mirror.
“Thank you,” she said, the words coming out softer than she intended, breathy and desiring.
“You sound as though you’re surprised,” he said with a quiet smile, leaning down just enough to hold his cheek almost against hers. “It’s only a necklace, Honoria.”
It isn’t just a necklace. It’s everything.
She had this single hour, this piece of jewelry, this whole bright morning with a lie he knew nothing of, and would go on knowing nothing of for as long as her luck held.
***
That night she could not sleep for the heaviness of it. It was as if she felt the worth of the necklace, locked now in her own trunk, pulling down on her. The day’s happiness, complete with the morning and a lemon cake after dinner just for her, had gone thin and strange in the dark.
Long past midnight she gave up on sleeping and went down for water. She pulled on her dressing robe and took a taper in her hand. She went down the quiet halls, the house asleep around her like a hug she did not deserve.
Passing the steward’s room, she found the door was not quite shut, and voices coming low through the gap. She nearly dropped her candle at Mr. Greaves’ easy and unhurried tones, and Mr. Coombe’s tight retorts just south of arguing.
She stopped, frozen in her slippers.
I will go on in a moment, she told herself.
“He’s begun asking after the books,” Mr. Coombe said, loud enough that Nell could make it out. “You must see it cannot go on much longer, not with him looking so closely at every little thing.”
“Let him look,” Mr. Greaves said as she heard him light a pipe, entirely untroubled, almost amused by it. “You have to be calm and collected, Mr. Coombe. You are only useful for as long as you’re useful. Do you catch my meaning?”
The threat in it was so plain, so casually delivered, that Nell felt the whole passage go cold around her. If only she could ascertain just what was transpiring between them, what Mr. Greaves had on Mr. Coombe to begin with.
I should go and tell him right now what I heard.
But she could not say a single word of how she came to know it without saying who she was, and what Mr. Greaves held over her in turn, and every lie that had brought her to this passage in the first place.
And the moment she said any of it aloud, Mr. Greaves would have no further reason to hold his hand at all. To warn Adrian was to ruin herself. To save herself was to stand by, silent, and watch him be robbed by a man he had trusted for a decade without once thinking to look too closely.
It is an impossible situation.
She went back up the stairs with no way through it that she could see, and no water, the necklace at her throat gone suddenly as heavy as a stone, and she was sinking.