Chapter 15 #2
He kept his eyes on the stalls ahead and did not look toward Annabelle again for the better part of ten minutes.
When he did, she was laughing at something James had said, low and easy, entirely unbothered, and Dominic found this considerably more irritating than he had any reasonable grounds to find it.
Helena seemed oblivious to the grim thoughts crossing his mind, because she gestured toward her mother, who had been studying the ring-toss board at the first game stall for the better part of five minutes.
“Shall we see whether Lady Rosenhall attempts it? She has been eyeing that post since we came through the gate.”
As they watched, Lady Rosenhall picked up one of the wooden rings, held it a moment, and dropped it clean over the nearest post. She handed the rest back to the gamekeeper without comment and moved on.
“You see,” Helena said. “She always recovers.”
Dominic cleared his throat, not knowing what to say, and they kept walking in silence. His head was already full to bursting with too many emotions he simply did not have the time to sort in that moment.
Ahead, Annabelle had her head bent toward James’s height and was listening to him describe something about the wheels on a tin monkey. James was speaking in the short, factual bursts he used when something had caught his interest more than it had put him on guard.
Annabelle caught him watching her twice.
The first time was at the glass marble stall, when she glanced up from explaining to James how light moved through the blue ones and found Dominic’s eyes already on her. He moved them toward the juggler at the path’s edge without altering his expression.
The second time was near the pamphlet stand, and this time the eye contact held for three seconds before he turned away toward Helena’s voice, and Annabelle looked back at the pamphlet she’d been holding and read nothing.
She set it down.
James had already moved. She registered the empty space at her left before she registered him at the far end of the row, twelve feet ahead and closing on a low table, moving with the purposeful momentum of a boy who had fixed on something and stopped checking whether the crowd was in his path. She reached out.
Dominic was there before she completed the movement.
She did not see him come from her right, and then his arm was past hers, his hand closing on James’s collar at the table’s edge, and the back of his knuckles came against the inside of her wrist where her glove ended.
The contact was less than an inch of skin, but it was warm, and it stayed, and he did not pull his arm back, and neither did she, while the fair went on all around them; the crowd pressing past at their backs, the keeper saying something to James, a child somewhere to the left laughing at the juggler.
Annabelle was close enough to him to feel the warmth at her shoulder, and could see from the corner of her eye the line of his jaw as he kept his eyes on James and not on her.
So, she did not look at him either, both of them watching James, even as the press of his knuckles against her bare wrist sent sparks crackling up and down her spine.
James had both hands on the table. There was a small brass horse on it with a key at its flank, and when the keeper wound the key, the horse’s hind legs kicked through their arc. James watched it complete the sequence, then looked at the keeper.
“Again,” he said.
The keeper obliged and wound the key. The horse kicked.
“Again.”
That was when Dominic let his arm fall, and Annabelle drew hers back; and the moment settled into the noise of it and was gone.
“May I have that one?” James asked the keeper, pointing at the horse.
He left with it wrapped in paper and tucked under one arm.
Helena bought him a gingerbread swan from the next stall, and he ate it with the methodical concentration of a boy whose attention was elsewhere.
He made observations as they walked: the structural weakness of a canvas stall-cover in a strong wind, the angle the rope walker above them would need to correct for his weight distribution, the number of children who had bought the same gingerbread shape without apparently consulting each other.
After an hour, he had stopped tracking the crowd’s edges and started walking through it.
By the south row, he was at Annabelle’s side without appearing to have put himself there, his sleeve brushing her arm when the path narrowed.
Lady Rosenhall was mid-debate with Helena about the ring-toss game, which she had now attempted, by Helena’s count, twice.
“The first time I was testing the weight,” Lady Rosenhall said.
“You said you were aiming at the far post.”
“I was assessing the trajectory.”
“You missed the far post both times.”
“I hit the second post both times. That was my intention.”
Helena looked at James. “She was aiming at the far post.”
James considered Lady Rosenhall, then the memory of the second post. “The far post is harder,” he said, with the gravity of a boy offering genuine technical counsel. “But you can correct the angle if you stand slightly left of center.”
Lady Rosenhall regarded him. “That is very sound advice, Lord James.”
“I know,” he said.
Helena started laughing. Lady Rosenhall pressed her lips together and looked ahead with great dignity.
Dominic, two steps back, said nothing. But Annabelle heard it all the same: a short exhale through his nose, very nearly a sound.
They were at the carriages by the time the light came down amber and low over the rooftops.
James had grown slow-limbed in the way of a tired child who had not admitted to being tired. He was still holding the paper-wrapped horse against his chest.
Lady Rosenhall arrived at the first carriage and said, “I am prepared to call this a satisfactory outing,” and Helena said, “High praise,” and Lady Rosenhall said, “I ate a toffee apple, Helena. I believe it qualifies as considerably more than high praise.”
She got in. Helena touched James lightly on the shoulder in parting; he tolerated it with the look of a boy logging an objection, and got in after her.
James looked at Annabelle. “Tuesday,” he said.
“Tuesday,” she said.
He nodded. Then he turned to Dominic and looked at him for a moment with the close attention he gave to problems he was working through.
“You were less grumpy today,” he announced.
Dominic held his gaze. One corner of his mouth moved upward, briefly. “Thank you,” he said.
James gave a small nod of satisfaction and walked to his carriage.
Dominic looked at Annabelle, and there was a glint in his gaze that made her feel as though she were prey being considered by a particularly indecisive but hungry predator.
“Thank you,” he said, again. He had not glanced toward the carriages or toward the gate. His eyes were on her, and he did not move them.
Annabelle held his gaze. “Of course,” she said.
She had meant it to close the conversation. She did not turn immediately. He did not look away, and the evening air came in cold off the street, and somewhere at the fair’s edge the small trumpet started up its final number, and neither of them said anything further.
Helena was at the carriage door.
Annabelle looked at Dominic once more, unable to keep her eyes from sliding back to his. Just catching his eye made her pulse kick in her throat, so she quickly turned back to the carriage and got in.
The carriage moved south. Lady Rosenhall had her eyes closed and her head back against the squab. Helena was describing something about the ring-toss game, and Annabelle was following none of it.
At the corner, she turned and looked back through the window.
Dominic was still standing where she had left him, at the mouth of the street, hands clasped behind his back. James’s carriage had already pulled into the evening traffic. He was the only one still there, watching the carriage go.
The street turned, and he passed from sight. Annabelle faced forward.
“He hasn’t moved,” Lady Rosenhall said, her eyes still closed.
Annabelle didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing. And Helena, beside her, said nothing either, much to her relief.
The carriage rolled on. Annabelle looked at her hands in her lap and straightened her gloves, one finger at a time, and did not look back again.