Chapter Seventeen
“You are doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Walking in silence and thinking very loudly. You think louder than most people talk, did you know that? I can almost hear the wheels going round.”
Cillian glanced at Molly, who was walking beside him with her hands clasped behind her back in an unconscious imitation of his own habitual posture.
The resemblance pleased him in a way he had no intention of examining.
Examination would require admitting that watching her had become one of the fixed points of his day, and behind that admission stood several others he was not yet prepared to meet.
“I am not thinking loudly,” he said. “I am thinking at a perfectly ordinary volume. You are merely unusually sensitive to silence.”
She turned to him, almost affronted. “I am sensitive to your silences in particular. Other people’s silences are merely empty. Yours have furniture in them.”
The observation was so accurate that Cillian had no answer, which Molly appeared to find deeply satisfying.
They were in the gardens because the gardens had become their place. It had happened without discussion, without arrangement, in the quiet way habits form between people who spend enough time together for their steps to fall into the same rhythm.
They were careful, of course. Bath was not a city that permitted a young woman and an unmarried gentleman to forget themselves without assistance from every observing eye.
They walked in public places, at respectable hours, and never so far from the paths or the lamps that Mrs Bramble, Dorothea, or half the city might not have testified to their propriety if required.
Each evening, after the shop had closed and the day’s work was done, they walked.
Sometimes Dorothea joined them. Sometimes Teddy appeared.
But most evenings it was only the two of them, moving through Bath as the light faded and the city turned from gold to amber to the dusty blue that came before the stars.
Tonight, the gardens were quiet. A few couples walked at a distance. The air was mild, with the smell of cut grass and roses, and the last light did what it always did to Bath: softened every line, gilded every stone, and made the world appear kinder than it was.
Molly had been different since the parlour.
Since the evening he had told her the truth about Vyne, and she had said, I knew, with a steadiness that did not come from composure so much as confirmation. Some knowledge, long carried in the dark, had at last been brought into the light and given a name.
She was still herself. Still warm. Still capable, Cillian suspected, of conversing with a lamppost until the lamppost felt singularly improved by the acquaintance.
But there was a new gravity beneath her brightness now.
Not heaviness exactly. Certainty. The ground beneath her had become harder, and though it hurt her to stand upon it, she did not waver.
He admired her for that.
He had once reserved such admiration for men who held their ground under fire. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that Molly had been doing precisely that since the night she fled Somerset.
“Why are you still here, Cillian?”
The question arrived without warning, as Molly’s questions often did, dropped into the silence like a stone into still water.
“Because I was sent to—”
“You were sent to bring me home.” She stopped walking. “You have been in Bath for four weeks. You are not here because of my father any longer.”
He stopped too.
The path stretched before them, bordered by roses. Behind them, the fountain murmured. The few couples had drifted farther off, and the fading light made their privacy feel almost complete.
“No,” he said. “I am not here because of your father.”
“Then why?”
He turned to her.
She stood with her hands at her sides now, her face open and serious. There was no performance in it. No bright defiance, no chatter thrown up like a screen. Only Molly, asking him for the truth, though she must already know enough of it to be afraid of the answer.
Cillian Swifton had spent two years rationing his words like ammunition.
In four weeks, he had spent more of them than in the two years before.
He had said together on a street, you were enough in a parlour, and laughed in a wine shop.
The laugh had broken something open in him, and whatever had entered through the breach would not be shut out again.
He sat on the nearest bench.
After a moment, Molly sat beside him.
The evening had begun to deepen from amber into violet, and somewhere in the city a church bell was ringing.
“Before the war,” he said, and the words came out rougher than he intended, “I was someone.”
He stopped. The sentence was absurdly simple, and already he had failed to say it properly.
“I had opinions. Ambitions. I quarrelled over trifles and talked of nonsense as though it mattered. I danced at balls. I walked through the world as though I had a right to be in it.”
Molly did not move.
The girl who never stopped talking sat beside him in perfect silence, as though she feared that even breathing too loudly might startle the truth back into hiding. He understood the courtesy of it and was grateful.
“Then the Peninsula.”
His hands had settled on his knees.
“For months I saw…” He stopped again. The sentence was leading him towards Badajoz. He would not follow it. “I saw men I loved die. I cannot describe it. Not because there are no words, but because to give it words is to bring it nearer, and I have spent two years trying to keep it at a distance.”
He stared at the path between his feet. A small beetle was making its slow way across a flagstone. He watched it as though its progress were of the greatest importance.
“Then I came home. James was dead. The title was mine. The house, the estate, the tenants, the responsibilities. All mine, though none of it had been meant for me. It had been meant for him, and he was in the ground before I could even understand that I had lost him.”
His fingers pressed flat against his knees.
“The man who came home was not, I think, a man in any useful sense. He was a function. He signed papers, answered letters, received reports, ate breakfast, walked the grounds when he could not sleep. He did what an earl is expected to do, and did it well enough that no one was required to notice what was missing.”
He felt Molly beside him, still and listening.
He could not look at her yet.
“I was empty,” he said. “That is the plainest word for it. The parts of me that had once made life seem worth entering were gone, or locked away so securely that I no longer knew the difference. I was competent. I was correct. I was of use. But I was not alive in any manner that mattered.”
The bell had ceased some moments ago. He had not noticed when.
“And then I came to Bath to retrieve a ridiculous girl with no money and one mismatched shoe.”
His mouth moved, not quite a smile.
“And she talked to me. For four weeks. Pigeons, goats, shop windows, centrepieces. Most of it excessive. Some of it sensible. All of it impossible to ignore. And somewhere in the midst of all that noise, I began to hear the world again.”
He turned to her then.
She sat very still, her hands folded in her lap, the violet light soft upon her face. Her expression was one he had never seen before: quiet, open, and trembling at the edges, as though she were holding something too large to be safely contained.
“You brought me back to life, Molly. I do not know how you did it. I do not think you knew you were doing it. But I am not the man who arrived in Bath, and I cannot return to being him.”
His voice lowered.
“The reason I am still here is not your father. It is not Lord Vyne. It is not duty, nor obligation, nor any sensible arrangement of circumstances. I am here because you are here. Because wherever you are has become the only place in which I feel wholly present. Because since the night you shut a door in my face and I stood on the landing wanting to know what had frightened you, I have been moving, step by step, towards this moment, though I was too much a coward to name it.”
The garden seemed to hold still around them. The roses scented the air. The first star appeared above the rooftops, a single point of light in the deepening blue.
Molly did not speak for so long that the silence became almost a presence between them.
Cillian sat with the aftermath of his own words and felt the terrible exposure of having said the truest thing he knew.
“At least you have said it now,” she whispered.
Then she drew a breath, and her voice changed.
“And I am not the girl who climbed out of a window in Somerset.”
He looked at her.
Her voice was unsteady, nothing like the bright, carrying voice she gave the world. This one was smaller, rougher, and more real.
“I am someone else now. Or becoming someone else. I do not quite know her yet.” She tried to smile, and failed. “She arranges windows and sells wine most persuasively. She has friends. A city. Work. A life she has helped to make with her own hands, from almost nothing.”
Her breath caught.
“And I am frightened every day that it will be taken away. But I am more myself here, in fear, than I ever was in safety.”
“I should like to know her,” he said. “This woman you are becoming. I should like to know her too.”
“You already do.”
She turned to him, and her eyes were bright with tears she was holding back by force of will.
“Better than most, I think. And I think I have seen you too. Perhaps from the Crescent, when I touched your arm and neither of us understood what we had begun.”
“I knew,” he said. “Or I think some part of me did. From the landing. From the door.”
“The door I shut in your face.”
“The door you shut in my face. You stood there with an apple, a bandaged ankle, and the full intention of sending an earl about his business, and I thought, with more clarity than I had had about anything in two years, this girl is going to be a problem.”
“Am I a problem?”
“Far from it.” His voice roughened. “You are the answer to a question I had forgotten I was asking, which makes you, by any reasonable measure, the opposite of one.”
Molly’s breath caught: a small, involuntary sound that brought Cillian’s hands halfway from his knees before he checked himself.
The restraint was visible. They both knew what it meant.
He wanted to touch her, and was afraid the touching would be too much: too much for where they were, unmarried and unchaperoned in a public garden at the edge of evening; too much for what propriety allowed; too much, perhaps, for this fragile thing before it had a chance to become what it was going to be.
Molly saw the restraint. Of course she did.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then, very carefully, she shifted her hand upon the bench between them, palm down, not touching him, not quite. It was not a demand. It was barely even an invitation. Only a small courage laid openly in the space between them.
Cillian looked at it.
Then he placed his hand beside hers, close enough that his little finger brushed her glove.
No more than that.
It was absurd, how much could be contained in so little.
A brush of kid leather. A breath held. A restraint observed rather than broken.
Yet Molly’s fingers turned, just enough to meet his, and for one quiet moment they sat with their hands lightly touching, hidden by the fall of her skirt and the deepening dusk.
They did not kiss.
It would have been too much, and too soon, and too public.
More than that, it would have asked the moment to become an ending when what they needed was a beginning.
Beginnings required patience. Cillian, at least, had patience enough: a soldier’s discipline, repurposed now for the more difficult task of not reaching too quickly for what mattered most.
“I should go inside,” Molly whispered eventually. “Mrs Bramble will worry.”
“Mrs Bramble is watching from the kitchen window.”
Molly glanced towards the boarding house. The kitchen window was lit, and in it, silhouetted against the lamplight, stood the unmistakable shape of Mrs Bramble, holding a cup of tea and making a very poor attempt to appear interested in her own garden.
“She is terrible at pretending,” Molly murmured, the corner of her mouth lifting.
“She is not pretending. She is supervising.”
Molly looked back at him.
“There is a difference,” Cillian said, “and Mrs Bramble would consider it an important one.”
“She has been supervising since the beginning.”
“I am aware.” His gaze remained on her face. “I have come to find it reassuring.”
They rose.
Their hands separated fully then, and the loss of that small contact was immediate: the absence of warmth where warmth had been, the memory of her fingers lingering at the edge of his hand like the impression of a seal in wax.
They walked to the boarding house door, paused on the step in the lamplight from the kitchen window, and Mrs Bramble’s silhouette tactfully withdrew.
“Cillian.”
“Molly.”
“That was the most you have ever said to me.”
“That was the most I have said to anyone in years.”
“I am glad it was me.” Her gaze met his in the lamplight, soft and bright and wholly unguarded. “I am glad I was the one who heard it.”
“There is no one else I could have said it to.”
She touched his hand once more, briefly: the lightest press of her gloved fingertips against his palm, proper enough to survive any witness and intimate enough to undo him.
Then she went inside.
The door closed, and Cillian stood on the step in the quiet evening with the impression of her touch still in his hand.
He walked back to the White Hart through streets gone soft with lamplight.
The man moving through Bath was not the man who had arrived four weeks ago, hollow, dutiful, and carefully numb.
He carried words he had said, words he had not yet said, the scent of roses, and the unfamiliar certainty that he was falling in love.
The falling terrified him.
He did not wish to stop it.