Chapter Seven #2
The grace of it struck him almost harder than the question had.
“I do not see the teapot,” he said, his voice rough. He cleared his throat.
She pretended not to notice. It was a kindness he would not forget.
“The spout is the thin part on the left. The handle is that curve on the right.” She pointed up at the offending cloud. “It is exceedingly obvious.”
“It looks like a rock.”
“It looks like a teapot. You are merely resistant to whimsy, which is a condition I mean to cure.”
“I have not consented to treatment.”
“Treatment has already begun. You are walking through the Royal Crescent on a Friday afternoon and looking at clouds. Only yesterday, you were sitting alone in a tea shop, staring into an empty cup. This is progress.”
“This is coercion.”
“Coercion and progress are occasionally difficult to distinguish.”
Cillian kept walking, but the corner of his mouth threatened movement.
Dorothea rejoined them at the turn, falling into step with the satisfaction of a woman whose absence had been timed to perfection.
Her gaze moved briefly to Cillian’s face, which seemed to be doing something it did not often do.
It was not openness. It was not ease. But it was, at least, less fortified than it had been at the start of the walk.
Then she looked at Molly, whose face was betraying, as usual, more feeling than discretion recommended: tenderness, mischief, and the particular warmth of a woman who had performed an act of kindness and intended to deny all knowledge of it.
They walked back through the city, their conversation moving from one subject to another with the quickness of minds that enjoyed collision.
They discussed the lending library, the card party to which they had been invited that evening, the perils of whist, the scandalous unreliability of partners, and the milliner’s window, which had attracted so much attention that Mrs Holt was considering extending Molly’s position.
“She used the word considering,” Molly reported, “which I choose to interpret as certainly, because optimism is a survival strategy.”
“Optimism is a delusion that occasionally proves useful,” Dorothea said.
“You are a terrible cynic, Dorothea.”
“I am a realist. The distinction is that cynics expect disappointment, while realists observe what actually occurs, which is often worse, because life has a vulgar fondness for invention.”
Molly laughed, and the sound carried down the street with such unguarded pleasure that Cillian felt it like warmth through glass.
It should have been a small thing: a laugh, a bright afternoon, two women discussing whist and hats and the unreliable nature of human beings.
Yet something in him answered it all the same.
Not a cure. Not a transformation. He had no patience for such convenient miracles.
But something frozen had shifted.
He could feel it beneath the numbness he had worn like armour since the Peninsula: a slow, reluctant movement, a faint crack in a surface he had mistaken for permanence.
He was not ready for it. He knew that with the clarity of a man assessing unfavourable terrain.
He had come home from war with little left in him beyond the architecture of function, and now he was walking through Bath beside a woman who had asked, simply and without fear, whether it had been awful.
A woman who had accepted his answer without flinching.
A woman who had touched his sleeve once, briefly, and then spared him the burden of response by pointing at a cloud and calling it a teapot.
The place where her fingers had rested still seemed to remember her.
He should not have been cataloguing it. He should not have been thinking of the precise position of her hand, or the warmth of it through the cloth, or the way her voice had softened when she said, I am sorry—quieter than her usual voice, stripped of performance, a voice from beneath the brightness.
But he was cataloguing all of it.
They reached the bottom of Milsom Street as the afternoon softened towards evening and the city turned gold in the lowering light.
Dorothea announced, with no convincing urgency, that she had correspondence to attend to, and departed with a nod to Cillian and a look at Molly that communicated, in the efficient shorthand of close female friendship, several pointed opinions about the walk, the earl, and the general state of affairs.
Molly watched her go. Then she turned back to Cillian and, for the first time that afternoon, seemed uncertain what to do with her hands. She smoothed the cuff of her glove, found it already smooth, and smoothed it again.
“Thank you for walking with us.”
“I was conscripted.”
“You were invited. Enthusiastically. By Dorothea, who invites no one anywhere. You should feel honoured.”
“I feel fatigued.”
He said it without conviction, and she heard the lack at once.
“You feel better,” she said. “I can tell because your shoulders have descended by at least three inches since the Pump Room. You were carrying them somewhere near your ears, which is a posture I associate with men who are either very cold or carrying something heavy. It is not cold today.”
She was right. His shoulders had lowered, though he had not noticed it. Molly Granger noticed everything, and with an accuracy that was becoming inconvenient.
“You are very observant for a woman who talks as much as you do,” he said.
“I talk because I observe. The talking is how I arrange things. Most people suppose it works the other way round—that I talk too much and therefore miss things—but the truth is quite the opposite. I see everything, and I say a great deal of it, and I have spent most of my life being told I should be more agreeable if I did less of both.” Her chin lifted slightly.
“I have lately decided not to believe that.”
She said it without bitterness, but with a firmness he had not heard from her before. A thread of steel beneath the brightness. Cillian recognised it: the sound of someone who had spent too long being diminished and had begun, at last, to gather herself back.
The recognition hurt, faintly and precisely.
“You should not do less of either,” he said.
Molly turned to him. The evening light lay warm on her face, and her expression held something quieter than he had seen there before.
“That may be the kindest thing you have ever said to me, Lord Harrowden.”
“I have known you only a few days.”
“Then you have a great deal of ground to recover.”
She smiled, but it was not quite her usual smile. It was smaller, more private—the smile of someone who had been given something unexpected and was deciding where to keep it.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then the sound of wheels over stone broke the pause, and Molly glanced towards the street, as if remembering the hour, the city, and the practical danger of standing too long with an earl at the corner of Milsom Street.
“I ought to go,” she said. “Goodnight, Cillian.”
His name again. The second time she had used it, and the second time it landed with a force out of all proportion to two syllables.
In her voice, his name sounded different.
Warmer. Nearer. As though she were calling something back from a great distance, rather than merely addressing the man before her.
“Goodnight, Molly.”