Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ravensmere House rose out of the dusk like something out of a different century, its tall windows glowing amber against the darkening sky, a house Amelia had glimpsed only briefly from the outside and never once entered until tonight.
"It is larger than I expected," she said, as the carriage rolled to a stop before the front steps.
"It was built for a much larger household than mine." Sebastian's voice carried an odd, careful lightness, and she noticed, as he handed her down, that his hand lingered before he released it and stepped back.
The entrance hall swallowed her whole, marble underfoot, a staircase curving up into shadow, portraits of Ravensmere ancestors watching from the walls with the particular disapproval only oil paint could manage.
A butler met them at the door, bowing low.
He led the rest of the staff, and they all bowed in unison.
Amelia stood very still, suddenly conscious of dozens of unfamiliar faces turned toward her.
"Welcome to Ravensmere House, Your Grace. Your Grace." He said it twice, first to her and then to Sebastian, and Amelia felt the strange, unsteady thrill of hearing the title applied to herself for the first time.
"Thank you, Hopkins. That will be all for tonight." Sebastian dismissed the assembled staff with a nod, and the hall emptied by degrees until only the two of them remained beneath the great, curved stair, the silence between them stretching.
"This is the drawing room." He gestured vaguely toward an open doorway, and she noticed his hand did not quite settle, moving instead to adjust a cuff that did not need adjusting. "The library beyond it. My study is through there, though you need never trouble yourself with it unless you wish to."
"You are giving me a tour."
"I am attempting to make you feel less a stranger in your own home.
" He said it too quickly, and she caught, beneath the words, that he was less composed than his tone let on, his eyes not quite meeting hers, his jaw set the way it had been the day he'd walked away from her in the park.
"I confess I am not entirely certain of the correct etiquette for a wife's first evening in a house she has never once seen. "
"Neither, am I."
They stood a moment in the vast hall, both clearly aware that the conversation had arrived, unavoidably, at the one subject neither had yet found the courage to address directly.
"I do not wish to share your bedchamber," she said finally, the words arriving faster and blunter than she'd intended, though she watched them land and forced herself not to soften them after the fact.
Something flickered across his face—relief, she though, though not entirely. "You need not."
"I mean it plainly, Sebastian."
"I heard you the first time." His hands moved to clasp behind his back, a posture she recognized now as the one he adopted whenever he wished to appear more composed than he felt.
"You may take whichever room in this house you prefer.
The blue room overlooks the garden. It gets the morning sun, and my mother favored it before she removed to the dower house.
There is a small sitting room adjoining it, should you want somewhere entirely your own. "
"You are not going to argue with me."
"I have no wish to argue with you tonight.
" His voice had gone quieter, and she caught the way his throat worked before he continued, the way his eyes dropped briefly to the floor before returning to hers, as though the honesty cost him something to produce.
"This house is yours now, Amelia. Every room of it.
You need no permission from me to go anywhere you please.
I would not have you feel otherwise on your first evening in it. "
She had braced herself for duty, for the correct, cold performance of a husband claiming what she was not yet ready to give.
She had not braced for this, offered without expectation of thanks, delivered by a man whose hands, she noticed, had not stopped moving since they'd stepped through the door, adjusting a cuff, smoothing a lapel, anything, it seemed, to avoid simply standing still in front of her.
"Thank you," she managed.
"The maid is waiting upstairs, she will show you to the blue room." He inclined his head, formal again, though the movement came a beat too quickly, as though he wanted the gesture finished before either of them could linger on it further. "Sleep well, Amelia."
"And you."
He turned toward his study rather than his own bedchamber, and she noted it, and climbed the stairs to the blue room alone, glancing back once to see him still standing at the foot of the stairs, watching her go with an expression he smoothed into nothing the instant he realized she'd turned.
She lay awake a long while that night in an unfamiliar bed, turning over everything she had and had not seen.
She thought about the lingering hand at the carriage door, the too-quick answers, the restless fingers, the way he had watched her climb those stairs as though he could not quite decide whether to call her back.
Whatever this marriage was, she thought, it was clearly costing him rather more than his composure let on. She fell asleep without any clearer sense of what to make of that than she'd had when the evening began.
He was gone before she woke the first morning, and the second, and by the third Amelia had stopped expecting otherwise. Hopkins informed her each time, with careful neutrality, that His Grace had left early on estate business and did not expect to return before evening.
She wandered the house instead, discovering rooms she had not known existed and corridors that seemed to lead nowhere.
She read in the blue room's small sitting room, in the library, and in the garden when the weather allowed it, and found each empty hour compounding the last until the silence of Ravensmere House felt less like solitude and more like a verdict on how little her presence in it mattered.
On the third evening, she heard his study door close and did not let herself think twice before crossing the hall and opening it without knocking.
"Sebastian."
He looked up from his desk, surprise crossing his face before he schooled it back into something more careful. "Amelia. I did not expect—"
"No. You never do, because you have made a considerable effort these three days to ensure you are never in a position to expect me at all.
" She stepped fully into the room, closing the door behind her.
"You left before I woke this morning. And yesterday.
And the day before that. I have eaten every meal in this house alone, Sebastian, and I have run out of patience pretending I do not notice. "
"I have had estate business."
"For three consecutive days, all of it apparently requiring you to leave before dawn and return only after I have retired." She crossed her arms, though her hands were not nearly as steady as the gesture suggested. "Do you take me for a fool?"
"I do not."
"Then do not offer me estate business as though I cannot see plainly what is actually happening.
" Her voice rose, despite every effort to hold it level.
"Does my presence upset you so thoroughly, Your Grace, that you intend to spend the whole of our marriage arranging your days so that you need never actually be in a room with me? "
"That is not what is happening."
"It is precisely what is happening. Tell me plainly if I have done something to offend you, I would rather know the truth than spend another day guessing at it in an empty house."
"You have done nothing."
"Then why." Her voice cracked on the single word, and she hated how thoroughly it betrayed her.
"Why, Sebastian. I stood in that church and married you, and I have given you every courtesy since, and you have repaid it by making certain we are never once alone together long enough to speak. Tell me why?"
She could hear her own breathing now. His eyes closed briefly and his hand went to the back of his neck.
"My God."
"What?"
He rose from his desk, whatever careful composure he had been maintaining finally giving way.
She stopped breathing as he came toward her.
One step. Then another.
"You think your presence upsets me." His voice had gone low, rough, raw in a way she had never heard from him before. "It devastates me, Amelia. Because of how much I want you."
The words landed through her chest like a physical thing, and she stood there, momentarily incapable of any response at all.
"I have spent three mornings leaving this house before dawn," he went on, crossing the small distance between them, "because I did not trust myself to sit across from you at breakfast and behave as though I did not want to cross the room and finish what we started in that library.
I told myself I was giving you space. The truth is I was protecting myself from wanting something I no longer knew whether you wanted from me. "
Her stomach clenched.
"I cannot walk into a room with you without knowing where you are."
He took another step. "I cannot hear you laugh without wanting to hear it again."
He stopped in front of her.
"I cannot speak to you without remembering the last time you looked at me. I cannot sit across from you without thinking about what it would feel like to have you beside me instead."
His breath came harder now.
"You proposed to me out of duty."
"I proposed because it was the right thing to do. But that is not why I wanted you to say yes.”
He reached for her hand, slowly, giving her every chance to pull away.
She did not. "I wanted you before there was a scandal to repair.
I wanted you before your father ever found us in that house.
I simply did not understand until afterward that wanting you and choosing you were not different things.
And I have been too great a coward these three days to say so plainly, until you stood in my doorway and forced the truth out of me. "