Chapter Six #2
By the time they parted at the end of Milsom Street, Molly had the vertiginous sensation of having made a friend. A real one. The sort who saw you clearly and liked you anyway, which was, in Molly’s experience, the rarest thing.
***
The next two days confirmed what the first three had suggested.
Molly Granger was constitutionally incapable of occupying a city without altering the arrangement of it.
She charmed the lending library on George Street into granting her borrowing privileges with what the librarian later called “the most persuasive argument for the civilising power of the novel I have encountered in thirty years of running this establishment.” Within a fortnight, she had also acquired two invitations to card parties, a free posy, and a supper at the home of a family whose lost child she had restored to its mother in the Abbey churchyard.
She was earning just enough at the milliner’s to cover her board at Mrs Bramble’s, with pennies left for bread and tea.
It was a life held together with string, charm, and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its own impossibility.
And yet it held. It held because Molly poured into it the same ferocious energy her father had called exhausting, and Lord Vyne had called something to be settled, and Molly was beginning, very cautiously, to call useful.
Lord Harrowden was not a daily presence.
He was, however, an unmistakable one, occupying the edge of her new life like a sentinel at the boundary of a camp: present, watchful, and difficult to ignore.
She glimpsed him in the Crescent, walking with that measured military stride; at the Pump Room, standing near a pillar with his arms crossed; and once, through the window of a tea shop on Cheap Street, sitting alone with a cup he was not drinking, his attention fixed upon the street as if waiting for a danger that had not yet shown itself.
He was watching over her.
She knew this as she knew most things about people: by instinct, through the accumulated evidence of small observations her mind arranged before she had consciously named them.
Every time she turned a corner, he seemed near enough to be found.
Every time she entered a room, his eyes discovered her before the rest of him moved.
And every time she caught him looking, he looked away, always just slightly too late.
She should have minded. She had fled one man’s scrutiny and ought to have been disturbed by another’s.
But Cillian Swifton’s vigilance felt nothing like Lord Vyne’s.
Vyne had watched her as a buyer watches a purchase, calculating worth, assessing compliance, measuring the distance between what she was and what he intended to make of her.
Cillian watched her as one watches something easily startled: from a careful distance, attentive without pressing closer, uncertain how much nearness would be permitted.
She caught him watching from the tea-shop window on Thursday afternoon, and instead of looking away, she waved.
He looked startled.
Then he looked away.
Then, very slowly, almost imperceptibly, the corner of his mouth moved in a direction that might, with considerable generosity, be described as upward.
Molly filed this away. She filed it as Dorothea filed social intelligence: carefully, and for future reference.
The almost-smile on Cillian Swifton’s face was worth noting, not because it had been directed at her particularly, but because it suggested there was more to him than stillness, silence, and severe opinions about preparation.
She found herself thinking of the conversation in Mrs Bramble’s parlour more often than was sensible.
Not only of what had been said, though she thought of that too.
She thought of the Earl of Harrowden. Of his hand moving towards her elbow, then stopping before it reached her.
Most of all, she thought of the way his eyes had changed when she said the word settling—something quick and bright flaring behind the flatness, like a match struck in a dark room.
She thought of his voice when it dropped below its careful register, low and quiet, like stones turning under water.
The deadpan conviction with which he had admitted to loathing ill-preparedness, which had nearly made her laugh, and which ought to have alarmed her, given that he had been sent to bring her home.
Instead, absurdly, it had felt like relief.
She was thinking of this, unwisely, while arranging bonnet ribbons in Mrs Holt’s window on Thursday afternoon, when she looked up and saw him.
Not Cillian.
Cillian was across the street, visible through the tea-shop window, sitting at his usual table with his usual untouched cup. But beside the tea shop, half-hidden by the awning, stood a man she had never seen before.
He looked drained of colour, as though something in him had been bleached away. His coat was the colour of old slate; his face had a grey, indistinct quality, and his stillness seemed almost a kind of camouflage. He was not admiring the shop window. He was watching it.
Watching her.
When her eyes met his, he turned away without haste and walked up the street towards the Pump Room.
Molly’s hands stilled on the ribbon.
The city was full of strangers, she told herself. Full of men in dull coats who paused at shop windows and moved on. There was no reason to suppose every passerby belonged to the life she had fled.
She finished the ribbons, straightened the hat forms, and stepped back from the display with her usual critical eye. But the coldness in her blood did not pass. When she glanced again at the place where the man had stood, it was empty.
The emptiness was somehow worse.
A man who watched and then departed was a man who had seen what he came to see.
She mentioned it to Dorothea later that afternoon, as they walked through the Crescent in the fading light, Dorothea’s arm linked through hers in that rare, companionable manner she offered only to those she had decided were worth the trouble.
“There was a man outside the shop today,” Molly said. “Watching.”
“Watching the shop, or watching you?”
“I could not tell. He left when I noticed him.”
Dorothea’s stride did not change. Nor did her expression, though her arm tightened, just slightly, against Molly’s.
“Bath is a small city. People notice newcomers. It may be nothing.”
“It may be.”
“But you do not think so.”
The stillness of him kept returning to her. The patient attention. The unhurried way he had left. And behind it, the memory of Lord Vyne’s hands at her father’s dinner table, kept perfectly still while his eyes did all the work.
A man like Vyne would not come himself.
He would send someone.
“It is probably nothing,” Molly said, smiling at Dorothea, and changed the subject to the card party she had been invited to on Friday evening.
Her voice was easy. Her manner was light. Only Dorothea, who had made a career of seeing what others attempted to hide, noticed that Molly’s hand had tightened around her arm and did not release for the remainder of the walk.
***
Across the street, in the tea shop where he had taken to sitting with more regularity than he cared to examine, Cillian Swifton set down his cold tea.
He had been watching Molly Granger for days, and had ceased pretending it was only duty.
She moved through Bath as though the city had been waiting for her, and the pleasure she took in every new discovery was so unguarded that watching it made him feel almost embarrassed, like a man witnessing something private.
He had seen her arrange the milliner’s window that first time.
The transformation had been immediate, so plainly the work of a natural gift, that something unfamiliar had stirred beneath his ribs.
Pride, perhaps. Recognition. Some other feeling he did not care to name, born of watching a person discover that she was good at something, and that being good at it mattered.
He was thinking of this, and of the way the light caught her profile through the shop glass—the line of her jaw, the quick animation of her hands as she worked—when a familiar voice interrupted him.
“Is that the girl you are supposed to be retrieving?”
Cillian turned.
“Teddy.” Cillian’s voice carried the particular flatness he reserved for his brother, a tone intended to convey weariness and managing, despite his best efforts, to convey something closer to affection. “What are you doing here?”