Chapter Seven
“I invited you because you look as though you have not seen sunlight in a year, my lord.”
Dorothea Finch delivered this observation without preamble, apology, or the faintest suggestion that it might be considered rude.
She stood on the pavement outside the Pump Room, holding a parasol she clearly regarded as more decorative than useful, and fixed Cillian with the directness of a woman who had long ago dispensed with the social convention of softening uncomfortable truths.
“Miss Finch.” Cillian inclined his head, the bow precisely as deep as courtesy required, and not a fraction deeper.
“Miss Finch,” Dorothea repeated, with a little lift of her brows.
“Very proper. Quite unnecessary. Molly has furnished me with your name, your title, your opinions on conversation, and the curious circumstance of your purchasing a lady’s hat from Mrs Holt yesterday with no lady, so far as anyone can discover, to give it to.
I think we may consider the introductions accomplished. ”
Cillian glanced at Molly, who stood three feet to Dorothea’s left, studying a pigeon on the railing with an intensity that suggested she was deeply, urgently fascinated by pigeons and had had absolutely no part in whatever scheme had produced this encounter.
“I might have mentioned the hat,” Molly said, without looking away from the pigeon. “Casually. In passing. As an amusing observation.”
“As a highly revealing observation,” Dorothea amended. “I also find it interesting that you have been in Bath for a week, keeping watch over a runaway lady you were meant to retrieve, while permitting the business of your own estate to languish.”
“That is a considerable exaggeration.”
“Only in phrasing, my lord. Not, I think, in substance. Now. Miss Granger and I are walking to the Royal Crescent. You are coming with us, my lord.”
Cillian looked at Dorothea Finch, then at Molly Granger, who had abandoned her pretence of pigeon fascination and was watching him, trying very hard to suppress a smile and failing in a way that made the corners of her mouth tremble.
“The Royal Crescent,” he said.
“A fifteen-minute walk. I am sure you will find it agreeable.”
“I suppose I may endure a little air.”
He fell into step beside them, and the three of them set off along the broad pavement towards the upper town.
The walk Cillian had not asked for, had not wanted, and had accepted only because refusal would have demanded more social exertion than compliance, became—against every expectation—the most tolerable thing that had happened to him in days.
This was largely Molly’s doing.
She talked as water runs downhill: naturally, inevitably, and with a liveliness that made resistance seem both pointless and faintly ridiculous.
She talked of the architecture, which she had previously claimed not to care for and now admired with an enthusiasm that betrayed the earlier claim entirely.
“Look at those columns. The proportions are perfect. Someone measured those by hand, with a ruler and a pencil, and got them exactly right, and now they have been standing there for all these years, holding up a pediment, and nobody walks past and says, Thank you, columns, or Well done, pediment. Buildings are the most neglected of the arts.”
She talked, too, of the ladies’ gowns, the saddest-eyed dog in Bath, and the novel she had borrowed from the lending library, in which a woman shipwrecked upon an island had built an entire civilisation out of coconut shells and determination.
“The coconut engineering is doubtful,” Molly said, “but the principle is sound. A woman alone may build anything if she decides to.”
“The principle may be sound,” Dorothea observed, “but I question whether the author has ever actually handled a coconut.”
“Details. The point is the building, not the materials.”
Cillian walked beside them and listened, and the listening was not the passive, mechanical exercise it had been for the past two years.
Molly’s voice drew him forward as a current draws a swimmer, and the alertness it stirred in him was the alarming kind blood brings to a limb after long compression.
She noticed things. The way the light changed as they moved from the narrower streets to the open sweep of the Crescent, from shadowed closeness into breadth and gold.
“Oh,” she said softly, and stopped walking.
The single syllable contained more feeling than most people managed in entire speeches.
The Royal Crescent opened before them in its long, curving sweep of pale stone, the grand houses facing the green lawn, the city falling away below in a tumble of rooftops, church spires, and the silver thread of the river.
It was beautiful. Cillian had recognised as much on his previous visit, but the knowledge had gone no deeper than that.
Beauty, like every other pleasure, had seemed to belong to a country from which he had long been exiled.
Molly stood on the pavement and took it in, and for a moment, he saw it as she did—freshly, vividly, as though the world had not yet had time to grow dim.
“This is extraordinary,” she said. “Who built it?”
“John Wood the Younger,” Dorothea supplied. “Completed in 1774. Thirty houses. Among the finest examples of Georgian architecture in England, if one believes the guidebooks—which I generally do, since they so often have the good sense to agree with me.”
“Imagine designing it,” Molly said. “Imagine standing here fifty years ago, looking at nothing but a green hillside, and thinking, I know what belongs here. And then building it. And then it remains, long after everyone who first walked past it is gone.” Her gaze moved along the graceful curve of stone.
“That is a magnificent kind of stubbornness.”
She turned to Cillian. “Do you not think so?”
“I think stubbornness is a quality you understand very well.”
“Is that a compliment or a criticism?”
“It is an observation.”
“You are careful with your observations, Lord Harrowden. You ration them like ammunition.”
She was right. He rationed everything. Soldiers did that when supplies were scarce, and his own reserves had been depleted almost to nothing.
Yet she was getting past his defences. He could feel it: not as a breach, not yet, but as the first faint pressure of spring against frozen ground.
They walked the length of the Crescent. Dorothea, who possessed the social instincts of a general and the tactical awareness to match, discovered an acquaintance at precisely the necessary moment and stopped to exchange civilities, leaving Molly and Cillian to begin the return alone.
The silence between them lasted perhaps eight seconds.
“What were you before you were an earl?” Molly asked.
She said it with the same plain curiosity she brought to everything, as though she were asking about the weather or some harmless piece of Bath gossip, and the question struck him with unreasonable force.
“A soldier,” he said.
“Where?”
“The Peninsula. Spain. Portugal.”
“How long?”
“Three years.”
She walked beside him for several paces without speaking. Her silence was not like his. His was a wall. Hers was a space deliberately made.
“Was it awful?”
Three ordinary words, and they struck harder than they had any right to, because no one had asked him that.
In two years of being home—of dinners, documents, estate business, and the careful sympathy of neighbours, acquaintances, and servants—no one had asked whether it had been awful.
He had been thanked for his service. He had been told he was brave.
He had been told his brother would have been proud.
He had been offered a great many sentiments that arranged themselves around the war as mourners stand at a polite distance from a coffin: respectful, decorous, and careful not to look too closely at what lay within.
He wanted to tell her about Badajoz. About the waiting. The assault. What men became when discipline broke. The sounds of it. The mornings when birdsong still reached him, for one terrible instant, as artillery fire before his mind corrected the mistake.
He wanted to tell her he had gone to war as a man who laughed and come home as one who had forgotten how.
He said none of it.
“Yes.”
Molly looked at him. There was no pity in her face. Pity was what he expected when the war was mentioned, and pity was what he despised, because pity was distance: a way of standing on the far side of another person’s pain and acknowledging it without entering.
What he saw in her eyes was something else. Simpler. More dangerous.
Understanding.
The understanding of a woman who had known her own captivity, her own siege, her own desperate escape over a wall in the dark.
“I am sorry,” she said.
Nothing more. No elaboration. No attempt to mend, explain, or console. Only the clean acknowledgement that something terrible had happened to him, and that it mattered.
Then she touched his arm.
It was a liberty. Not a great one, perhaps, but enough.
An unmarried young woman did not lay her hand upon a gentleman’s sleeve in the open street, not without inviting notice and comment.
There were words for such behaviour—forward, unbecoming, and others less charitable—and any matron close enough to observe it would have found use for at least one of them.
Molly either did not care or cared less than she ought.
Her fingers rested lightly on his sleeve, just above the wrist. The contact lasted no more than two seconds, yet he felt the warmth of it through the cloth with startling precision.
It was not flirtation. It was not demand.
It was simply there: a small, steady pressure, given without ceremony and withdrawn before it could require anything of him.
She squeezed once, and let go.
Then she pointed at the sky and said, “That cloud looks exactly like a teapot.”
Her voice was easy. Her stride resumed. Without fuss or pity, without obliging him to remain in the wound she had uncovered, she moved them both on to the comparative geometry of clouds.