Chapter Six #3
“Looking for you, as any neglected brother must.” Teddy stepped inside, removed his hat, and crossed the room as though his arrival had been expected by everyone present.
“Imagine my astonishment when my butler informed me you had been seen in Bath these several days past, and had not once troubled yourself to call upon me.”
“I came on urgent business.”
“So I gathered. Though urgent business, in my experience, does not usually prevent a man from sending his brother more than three lines by post.”
“There was little to report.”
Teddy glanced through the window towards the milliner’s shop opposite. “On the contrary, there appears to be a great deal to report.”
Cillian said nothing.
“Ah.” Teddy dropped into the opposite chair, signalled the waitress with a smile that produced immediate service, and ordered coffee with the ease of a man who ordered things for a living. “That sort of urgent business.”
“There is no sort.”
“Of course not. There is only a runaway young lady, a brother who neglects his correspondence, and half of Bath apparently better informed of your movements than I am.”
“Your phrasing is theatrical.”
“My injury is profound.”
Teddy’s gaze moved past him, through the window, to the milliner’s shop opposite.
“So,” he said. “The girl.”
“Miss Granger.”
“The runaway. Sir Gerald’s daughter. The one you rode to Bath to recover and have instead taken to observing from a tea-shop window with what I can only call uncommon dedication.”
“Your phrasing is inaccurate.”
“My phrasing is charitable.”
Teddy grinned with their mother’s grin, wide and warm and entirely without malice. It was, in Cillian’s professional assessment, the most effective weapon in his brother’s considerable arsenal.
“She is pretty,” Teddy said, watching as Molly emerged from the milliner’s shop and paused on the pavement to say something to a passing woman that made the woman laugh.
“She is a catastrophe.”
“She may be both, brother. The two qualities are by no means mutually exclusive.”
Teddy sipped his coffee and watched Molly greet a flower seller with the enthusiasm of a woman encountering an old friend rather than a stranger she had met two days before.
“I like her,” he continued.
“Everyone seems to like her. That is the difficulty.”
“Is it?”
“She is a young woman with no fortune, no protection, and a powerful man who expects to marry her. She is living in a boarding house on four shillings a week and the kindness of strangers. Being liked is very well until the man she has fled arrives in Bath and discovers that the entire city can direct him to her door, because she has personally introduced herself to every living soul within it.”
Teddy turned to look at him.
The grin had gone. In its place was something more careful, more considered: the expression of a man younger than Cillian, but not foolish, and long accustomed to reading what his elder brothers did not say aloud.
“You are anxious for her.”
“I am considering the practical danger.”
“You are anxious for her,” Teddy said again, more quietly.
“Cillian, I have not seen you anxious for anything since you came home. I have scarcely seen you take an interest in anything beyond drainage, accounts, and whether Jennings has hidden your brandy. Yet here you sit, neglecting tea, estate business, and brotherly obligations in order to watch a young lady arrange bonnets across the street.”
“Your assessment is inaccurate.”
“My assessment is excellent. I sell wine for a living. Reading people is my trade.” Teddy finished his coffee, set down the cup, and stood. “Come to dinner tomorrow night. Bring her.”
“I am not bringing her to dinner.”
“Bring Mrs Bramble as well. And that tall woman I saw her walking with—the formidable one in green.”
“Dorothea Finch. And in any case, they are otherwise engaged tomorrow evening. Some card party, I believe.”
Teddy’s brows rose. “You believe?”
“I was told of it in passing.”
“In passing,” Teddy repeated, with an expression of grave appreciation. “How remarkable, the quantity of information that passes a man when he is not the least interested.”
Cillian looked out of the window. “The matter is settled, then.”
“The dinner?”
“There will be no dinner.”
Teddy considered him for a moment, then laughed softly and reached for his hat. “Very well. I shall not press the point at present.”
“That is unusually wise of you.”
“Do not grow accustomed to it.” Teddy clapped him on the shoulder, a liberty Cillian endured with rigid composure and the private acknowledgement that the contact felt, against every defensive instinct he possessed, good.
“But I meant what I said. You have been standing at the edge of rooms for two years, Cillian. It would do you no harm to step inside one.”
Then he left.
Cillian remained in the tea shop with his cold tea and his brother’s words settling somewhere he would rather they had not. Across the street, Molly Granger walked away down Milsom Street, arm in arm with Dorothea Finch, her voice carrying through the open window, warm and impossible to ignore.
He watched until she turned the corner and disappeared.
Then he sat a moment longer, looking at the empty pavement, and reached, without thinking, for his cold tea.