Chapter 26 #2
The thought arrived at the base of her throat and stayed there, hot and unmanageable. Was she so entirely dispensable? All of it? If she actually left now, would he truly not care?
She had not asked for a declaration. She had not asked him to become a different man.
She had asked one question, received an answer she disagreed with, and gone.
And apparently that was sufficient reason for him to absent himself so completely that even a week later, faced with her on a pavement twenty feet away, he could produce nothing more than: I am glad to hear it.
She moved along the stall without purpose. A tray of enameled pins. A set of glass buttons. A row of small brooches arranged on a length of dark velvet.
She stopped.
The brooch at the center of the row was a small thing: a cheap silver setting, the stonework simple, the stone itself a piece of paste glass not much larger than a coat button.
The glass was blue. A clear, sea-glass blue—pale and transparent, shot through with its own light even in the grey of the morning.
She picked it up, set it back down…and picked it up again.
She knew that color. She had been looking at it across dinner tables and through music room doorways since April.
It was the color of his eyes in the afternoon, when he had been somewhere cold and come inside, and the warmth of the room had not yet quite settled back into his face, and for those first few seconds, you could see what was actually in them.
She stood at the stall for what was probably too long. Then she said how much to the stallholder, passed the coins across, dropped the paper-wrapped piece into her reticule, and walked.
Helena appeared at her elbow three stalls on, green ribbon in hand.
“What did you get?”
“A brooch.”
“May I see it?”
Annabelle passed the reticule. Helena unwrapped the paper and held the brooch up to the overcast sky, turning it.
“Oh, that is pretty.” She tilted it in the light. “The blue is very fine. You should wear it with the grey walking dress—the contrast would be lovely.” She glanced up with the smile she kept back for when she meant something. “Will you wear it?”
The heat rose into Annabelle’s face so thoroughly and so fast that Helena’s smile faltered mid-expression.
“As if! I bought it,” Annabelle said, with considerably more composure than the situation warranted, “to pick apart.”
Helena looked at the brooch, then at Annabelle. Then, without saying a single word, she wrapped the paper back over the blue glass and handed it back. Which was, under the circumstances, the greatest proof of genuine friendship Annabelle had ever received.
“This,” said Miles, pulling out the chair across from him and sitting in it without invitation, “is the second-worst tavern in Jermyn Street.”
Damnation. Dominic looked at his friend with a tired expression.
He had been in this corner for the better part of two hours, and he had believed he would not be found here.
He had believed this was the specific point of being in a narrow, unremarkable establishment that did not appear on any social register and had no footmen.
“The worst is three doors further along,” Miles continued, settling his coat and putting his hat on the table. “I am speaking from experience. They serve the wine warm. Warm, Dominic. There is no excuse for it, in any establishment that calls itself a tavern, at any hour of the day.”
“How did you find me.”
“Your coachman was parked outside.” Miles looked around the room—card players in the far corner, a man in a blue coat at the bar, the fire going down—with the unhurried efficiency of a man who cataloged rooms by reflex.
“I asked him why the Silverford carriage was outside a Jermyn Street tavern. He told me you had gone in on foot two hours before he happened to park here for reasons of his own, and he was considering coming in for warmth.” He looked back at Dominic. “He seems like a sensible man.”
“I walked here.”
“I know you walked. It did not impede the inquiry.” He gestured at the barman and, receiving a glass, filled it from Dominic’s decanter without asking. “Where is your wife?”
“At home.”
“Why are you here?”
The barman had retreated. The card players had started an argument about a hand. Outside, a cart went past, its wheels loud on the wet paving.
“I required air,” Dominic said.
“Air was available in the street,” Miles said. “You walked through a great deal of it between Mayfair and here. Air was not the point.” He held his glass without drinking. “What happened?”
“Nothing has happened.”
“Dominic.”
“Nothing of consequence. We had a conversation. I gave her an answer. That is the end of it.”
Miles looked at the table. He had the expression Dominic associated with men who had already arrived at their conclusion and were waiting to see whether you would get there on your own. “What answer?” he said.
Dominic turned his glass. “She wants—she wants things I cannot give her. A family. Everything that goes with it. I told her plainly where I stood.” He set the glass down. “She heard me. The conversation is finished.”
“And the week.”
“What week?”
“The week since the conversation, during which you have been—” Miles gestured, briefly, at the room, at the decanter, at the second-worst tavern in Jermyn Street.
Dominic said nothing.