Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
"Ido not see why we cannot simply go this morning. The modiste has had the blue silk set aside for me a full week, and if we wait any longer someone else will have it out from under me." Mary buttered her toast, entirely undeterred by the fact that no one at the table had yet agreed with her.
"We shall go this afternoon, once your father has finished with his correspondence," their mother said, not looking up from her own letter. "I am not traipsing across London on an empty stomach and an unfinished breakfast, Mary, however urgent you believe the blue silk to be."
"It is very urgent."
"It has been urgent for a week, by your own account, which suggests it is not quite so urgent as all that.
" Their father did not look up from his newspaper either, though the corner of his mouth twitched in the way it always did when he found his youngest daughter more entertaining than he let on.
"Perhaps if you set your mind to something other than silk for a little while? I’m certain the modiste might survive the delay. "
"I have set my mind to a great many things this week. I simply prefer the silk."
Amelia let the exchange wash over her, only half listening, more occupied with her own tea than the fate of Mary's gown, until her mother set down her letter with an expression that made clear the real subject of the morning had only just arrived.
"Lady Thornton told me yesterday that half the drawing rooms in Mayfair are saying the Duke of Ravensmere has finally found a woman who can hold his attention.
" Her mother said it lightly, though her eyes cut toward Amelia with rather less lightness than her tone suggested.
"I only mention it because I imagine you'd rather hear it from me than from Lady Thornton herself, at some ball, in front of an audience. "
"People say a great many foolish things, Mama. I would not put much stock in it."
"Would you not."
"He is interested in scholarship. In arguing a point until one of us concedes it, which happens rather less often than he'd like.
" Amelia buttered her toast, avoiding her mother's eyes.
"That is the whole of it. He treats me as he'd treat any other person capable of holding up their end of a discussion.
There is nothing more to read into it than that. "
"Mm." Her mother's mouth twitched. "Well.
If it is truly nothing but scholarship, I daresay you won't mind hearing that Mrs. Aldridge saw you both at Richmond and has been telling anyone who'll listen that you looked, and I quote, 'entirely too pleased with each other for two people arguing about Herodotus. '"
"Mrs. Aldridge sees romance in a pair of gloves left on the wrong chair."
"Perhaps. Or perhaps she simply saw what was there.
" Her mother picked up her cup, and something gentler crept into her expression beneath the teasing.
"I am not scolding you, Amelia. I only want you prepared, should this go anywhere.
A duke's attention is not a small thing, and neither is the talk that follows it. "
Before Amelia could answer, a footman appeared at the door with a small silver tray, a single calling card resting on it. "For Miss Hartwell."
Her mother reached for it before Amelia could, turning it over, reading it with an expression that grew steadily more delighted. "His Grace requests the pleasure of your company for a promenade this afternoon, weather permitting." She held it out, eyes bright. "How very scholarly of him."
"It is likely another discussion of his paper."
"Of course it is." Her mother did not believe that for a single moment, and made no effort to disguise it, watching with open amusement as Amelia took the card, read it twice though the message ran to a single line, and set it down with a composure that feltconsiderably less steady than she'd intended.
Mary, grinning around a mouthful of toast, added, "I believe the modiste can wait after all. I would much rather hear how this goes."
"It is not going anywhere, Mary. It is a walk."
"Mm," said both her mother and her sister, in near-perfect unison, and Amelia was already thinking, despite every effort not to, of what she might wear.
"I shall need to change."
"You have not yet said whether you're going."
"Naturally I am going. It would be rude to refuse.
" Amelia was already halfway out of her chair, toast forgotten, her mother's soft laugh following her out of the room as she went, and did not slow her steps even slightly, whatever composure she'd been aiming for entirely abandoned by the time she reached the stairs.
The park was quiet at this hour, a handful of nursemaids with their charges and a scattering of early riders the only company, and Amelia's mother followed a discreet distance behind them with a pleased look on her face.
Sebastian found himself matching his pace to Amelia's with an ease that felt, increasingly, like something he no longer had to think about doing.
"You never finished explaining your objection to my treatment of the Athenian sources," she said, falling into step beside him. "You promised me a proper answer at the lecture and gave me half of one before Dr. Wetherby interrupted us."
"I have been considering it. I still think you're wrong, though I grant the point about bias in the secondary accounts."
"You grant the point but still think I'm wrong. That is a very fine line to hold, Your Grace."
"I hold a great many fine lines. It is a particular talent of mine." He glanced sideways at her, and something in him eased at the sight of her already half-smiling, braced for the argument like a fencer taking her mark.
"A convenient talent, apparently, given how thoroughly you complained of unreliable sources when we first met and are now quoting one selectively to suit your own case."
He laughed, the sound catching him almost as off guard as it caught her, and thought, not for the first time, how strange it was that a woman who spent half her conversation dismantling his arguments had somehow become the person whose company he looked forward to more than anyone's.
This is dangerous. He let the thought surface and pass without dwelling on it, the way he'd been doing with increasing frequency these past weeks, refusing to look at it too closely.
They walked on a while in easy quiet, and Sebastian found his mind drifting, unhelpfully, to how little effort any of this required, how thoroughly unlike every other conversation he was obliged to have in London.
He did not perform anything with her. He did not measure his words for the benefit of a listening room, did not weigh how a sentence might read in tomorrow's gossip.
He simply spoke, and she argued, and somewhere in the arguing he had stopped noticing the absence of the careful distance he kept with everyone else, until the absence itself had become the thing he noticed most.
"You've grown quieter than usual. What is it?"
"Nothing."
"You are not a woman who says nothing and means it."
She hesitated, before speaking. "I've been thinking about your paper. The one on women and scholarship. You've never once told me why you actually believe it."
"I have told you why. Discipline, tradition, formal instruction—"
"You've presented the argument. I'm asking about the reason underneath it.
" She kept her eyes forward, on the path, giving him room not to answer if he chose it.
"I don't think you came to that conclusion from evidence at all, Your Grace.
I think you decided what you believed first and built the argument around it afterward. "
He stopped walking.
“And I think whatever taught you to expect so little of women has to do more with something painful than it does with scholarship.”
The words landed somewhere he had not expected them to reach, somewhere he kept locked well behind the composed, argumentative version of himself he presented to the world, and for one unguarded second he felt it plainly.
"That is not what happened."
"Is it not?" She turned to face him, and there was no triumph in it, none of the sharp satisfaction she wore when she won an argument, only something gentler, something that looked, unbearably, like concern. "You argue like a man defending a wound, not a theory."
Do not let her see it. Do not let anyone see it.
The old instinct rose fast and hard, the same one that had carried him through a decade of his mother's visits, through every ballroom conversation he'd ever performed his way out of.
He reached for it now with something close to relief, because the alternative, standing here and actually answering her, felt like stepping off a ledge he had spent years making sure he'd never have to find.
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"Then tell me. Help me understand it properly, instead of guessing."
"There is nothing to understand. It is a scholarly position, not a confession, and I would ask you not to treat the two as though they were the same thing simply because it suits your argument better.
" He heard his own voice go flat, controlled, and hated the sound of it even as he could not stop producing it.
"You are reaching for something that isn't there, Miss Hartwell. "
"I don't think I am."
"Then we disagree." He looked away from her, jaw tight enough to ache. "I have matters to attend to this afternoon. I ought to see you home."
"Sebastian."
He stopped.
The sound of his name in her voice did something absurdly unsettling to him. She had never called him that. Not once. ‘Your Grace’ had always kept the proper distance between them, a small but reliable boundary he had never thought about until she crossed it with a single word.
He turned slowly.
Amelia seemed to realize what she had done only after the fact. Her lips parted, and for the briefest moment, uncertainty flickered across her face.
Neither of them spoke.
"I will have my carriage sent round," he said at last, though his voice had come out lower than he intended.
He turned away before she could say his name again, putting distance between them with a speed that had nothing to do with matters awaiting him anywhere, only the raw, unfamiliar need to be away from her before she more of his hidden truths.
He did not look back, though every step away from her cost him more than he wanted to acknowledge, and the whole walk home passed in a single, circling argument with himself, her words returning again and again, no matter how firmly he tried to set them aside.
She has no right to see that clearly. No one has ever seen it that clearly.
And beneath the anger, quieter, harder to dismiss, the thought he liked least of all was that he had not wanted to leave her standing there nearly as much as the rest of him insisted he had, and that some reckless, ungoverned part of him was already, infuriatingly, composing the apology he had no intention of delivering.
The study door slammed harder than he meant it to when he arrived home that evening. The afternoon’s business having done nothing to improve his mood.
Sebastian crossed to his desk and swept the nearest stack of papers aside. They scattered across the floor. His elbow caught the glass beside them. It hit the rug and rolled, wine bleeding dark into the weave.
He stood there a moment, breathing hard, staring at the mess as though it had appeared without his help.
The door opened quietly behind him. "Your Grace."
"Not now, Hopkins."
Hopkins came in anyway and knelt to gather the papers without comment. He righted the glass, set it well out of reach, and only then looked up.
"Permit me, Your Grace. I have known you since you were nine years old. I have never once seen you throw a glass."
"I did not throw it. I knocked it."
"With considerable feeling." Hopkins straightened, folding the ruined papers into a neat stack on the corner of the desk. "Shall I have Cook send up something? You missed your dinner."
"I am not hungry."
"No," Hopkins agreed, mild as ever. "You rarely are, when something is actually troubling you."
Sebastian said nothing. He dropped into his chair and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and the study was quiet except for the small sounds of Hopkins tidying what remained of the papers, in no hurry to leave.
"It is Miss Hartwell," Sebastian said finally.
"You need not say, Your Grace."
"I know…I just…" He lowered his hands and looked at the old man, who had buttoned him into his first coat and stood at his father's funeral without once losing his composure, and who was, Sebastian realized with some discomfort, very possibly the only person in this house who had ever actually known him.
"She said something to me today. About the paper. About why I wrote it."
"And was she wrong?"
"That is the trouble. I don’t think she was.
" Sebastian stood, restless, and crossed to the window, though there was nothing to see but his own reflection in the dark glass.
"She saw straight through years of careful argument to the one thing underneath it, in the space of a single walk in the park, and I have spent a decade making certain no one managed that.
Not Tristan. Not my own mother. No one."
"That does not sound like a fault in her, Your Grace."
"It does not feel like a fault in her." He pressed his palm flat against the cold glass. "It feels like losing something I have held onto rather carefully."
Hopkins set the last of the papers down and came to stand a respectful distance behind him, the way he had for years when the subject grew larger than either of them cared to say directly.
"Your mother lost control of herself for a great many reasons, Your Grace, most of them poor ones.
Questioning what you believe is not among them.
I would say it is closer to the opposite. "
"You are not paid to philosophize, Hopkins."
"No, Your Grace. I am paid to see that the glassware survives your evenings, and I find myself failing rather badly at it tonight.
" A faint, dry humor crept into the old man's voice, gentling the room by degrees.
"For what it is worth, sir, I have watched you build a very tidy argument to keep yourself safe from precisely this.
I confess I am not sorry to see it give way. "
Sebastian did not answer. He stood at the window a long while after Hopkins had gone, turning the day over in his mind, and finding no version of it in which he could simply set her words aside and call the matter closed.