Chapter 20
“I mean to say a thing,” Adrian said, “and I find I’d rather say it badly than not say it at all.”
Adrian found Tristan alone with a decanter and no particular purpose, and sat without being asked, the way he’d learned to sit uninvited in a great many rooms lately.
“That’s usually how the important ones come out. Go on.”
“The arrangement has stopped being one.” He turned his glass without drinking from it. “I married her for a name on a settlement and nothing more.”
“And now?”
“I find I want her in earnest, Tristan, not as a matter of convenience settled and forgotten. I don’t entirely know what to do with wanting something again. It’s been a long while since I let myself want anything at all. I don’t know where to begin to fix this.”
“Well. It’s about time something in this house went right for you.” He raised his glass a fraction. “I confess I’ve watched it happening for a fortnight and wondered when you’d catch up to the rest of us. Good job.”
Adrian couldn’t quite manage the answering smile. “I can’t leave it there, though. Clean, I mean.” He set the glass down, turned it a half-turn on the desk. “There’s something she keeps from me.
The past she won’t touch. She’ll speak of a father, in passing, and go no further, and if I press she finds some smooth way round it that satisfies the question without answering it.
There was a man at the fair who left her white as a sheet, and she gave me some tradesman’s tale about it that didn’t sit right even as she said it.
She goes still at the strangest moments… ”
“Is she afraid of something?”
“No, not fear exactly, more the stillness of someone who doesn’t want to share what’s in their head.” He shook his head. “I cannot tell whether it’s a secret she’s guarding, or a thing I ought to be afraid of…”
Tristan heard him out without interrupting, and when Adrian finished, he set his glass down. Then he spoke.
“Then stop guessing and just ask her. You’ve just told me you love the woman, Adrian.
Love doesn’t survive long on guesswork. Ask her plainly, tonight, and let her answer be what it is.
But don’t go on building a case against her in the dark.
That’s no way to treat a wife, however she came to be one. ”
Adrian sat with that for a moment, and found he had no argument to set against it.
“Tonight, then,” he said, and rose.
***
She is not in her rooms.
He told himself there was nothing in that worth remarking on.
She must have gone on a walk in the last of the light, a visit to Cassandra, some errand of Mrs. Scott’s that had carried her off to a corner of the house he hadn’t thought to look.
But he did not quite manage to believe himself.
The rooms had a wrong feeling to them when he stood in the doorway, some quality he could not name.
It is too orderly. Too still. Not the ordinary stillness of a room its occupant meant to return to within the hour, but something more final than that, a tidiness that felt, unaccountably, like a room being left rather than merely stepped out of.
He crossed to the dressing table, meaning to look for some note, some ordinary explanation left in her own hand, and found instead his mother’s necklace lying plainly across it.
It was the very anchor he had fastened at her throat himself, on the shore.
The thing that had sat locked away untouched for four years before he’d given it to her.
Laid down now as though by someone who had taken it off with great care and could not bring herself to carry it any further.
He stood looking at it a long moment and could not make it mean anything good.
He was still holding it as he walked out, the gold gone warm from his own hand, when he came down and met Mr. Greaves in the passage below, the man already in his coat, a folded paper held loosely in one hand, on his way out into the dark.
“My lord.” Mr. Greaves inclined his head, unhurried and pleasant as ever.
“I’d hoped for a word, but it’s a small matter.
It will keep till morning.” His eyes flicked, briefly, to the necklace still caught in Adrian’s fist, and away again before Adrian could be certain he’d truly seen it at all. “I’ll wish you goodnight.”
He was gone into the night before Adrian had thought of a single question to put to him. Adrian turned back toward the stairs and found Betsan there instead, wide-eyed, twisting her apron between her hands.
“What is it?”
“My lord…I don’t know where else to bring it. Someone must be told. The countess is gone.”
“Gone where? She’s likely only gone out—”
“No, my lord.” The girl’s voice cracked on it, urgent past all her usual deference, as tears began to spill down her cheeks. “Not walking. Not visiting. Gone.”