Chapter 10
“Iassumed you would start with gowns.”
Oliver stopped walking. The gravel path curved beneath a canopy of elms whose leaves had thickened into the deep, settled green of a London June.
Hyde Park hummed with the afternoon’s business: nursemaids along the Serpentine, two boys chasing a terrier through the grass, gentlemen on horseback whose laughter carried over the water.
“Gowns,” he repeated.
“Or hair. Deportment. How to flutter a fan without looking as though I am trying to cool soup.” Louisa kept her parasol tilted against the sun, its shadow cutting a pale arc across the bodice of her walking dress.
“Eleanor said you would begin with fashion. She has a theory that all gentlemen believe women’s difficulties can be traced to an insufficiently low neckline. ”
“Eleanor has met the wrong gentlemen.”
“Eleanor has met all the gentlemen. That is precisely her complaint.”
He studied her. She walked with her chin raised, her pace brisk, her free hand gathered in the folds of her skirt. She looked prepared. She looked as though she had rehearsed this walk the way she rehearsed conversations.
“I am not going to teach you about gowns,” he said.
“Then what, exactly, are we doing in Hyde Park?”
“Learning to speak.”
“I can speak. I have been speaking for twenty-two years.”
“You have been speaking carefully for twenty-two years. There is a difference.” He clasped his hands behind his back.
A warm breeze moved through the elms. Somewhere near the water, a child shrieked with the uncomplicated joy of someone who had never once worried about saying the wrong thing at dinner.
“Tell me what happens when you approach Frederick at a gathering.”
Louisa’s grip on the parasol tightened. “I have told you.”
“Tell me again. From the beginning. Walk me through it.”
She exhaled. A strand of hair had escaped her bonnet, curling against her temple in the heat. She did not push it away.
“I see him across the room. I decide to approach. I rehearse three topics in my head. I cross the room. By the time I reach him, I have discarded two because they sound foolish. I open my mouth. The remaining topic comes out wrong. He smiles politely. I panic. I say the weather sentence. He agrees. I say the weather sentence again. He excuses himself.”
Oliver nodded slowly. “And how long does this take?”
“Four minutes. Sometimes five, if there is a pause I cannot fill.”
“Four minutes,” he repeated. “During which you have asked him exactly zero questions and allowed him to learn exactly nothing about you.”
She turned sharply. The parasol swung with her, its shadow sweeping across his waistcoat.
“That is not fair.”
“It is accurate. You spend every conversation performing for Frederick rather than speaking with him. You are so occupied preparing your next sentence that you forget the purpose of the current one.”
“The purpose of conversation is to avoid humiliating silence.”
“The purpose of conversation is to make the other person feel interesting.” He slowed his pace.
A pair of ladies passed them, both glancing at Oliver with reflexive curiosity.
He smiled. They smiled back. He returned his attention to Louisa.
“Most people enjoy talking about themselves. If you ask a man about his interests, his opinions, his recent endeavors, he will talk for a quarter of an hour without requiring any contribution beyond the occasional thoughtful question. At the end of it, he will walk away convinced that you are the most captivating woman he has ever met.”
“Because I listened?”
“Because you made him feel heard. Which is rarer than you imagine.”
She was quiet for several steps. The gravel crunched beneath their shoes.
“You do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Make people feel heard. You ask Lord Williston about his horses. You ask Mrs. Beckwith about her garden. You remember the names of people’s children. Everyone walks away from you feeling as though they are the most fascinating person in the room.”
“That is the method. I am simply better practiced.”
“It is not a method.” She looked at him steadily. “I believe you genuinely care what people have to say.”
The observation caught him off-balance. He covered it with a half-smile. “A dangerous accusation. You will ruin my reputation as a shallow, charming wastrel.”
“Your reputation is safe. Nobody who watches you charm a room would suspect you of sincerity.” She paused. “I would not have suspected it, either, if I had not been paying close attention.”
The breeze shifted. He caught the scent of rosewater from her hair, faint beneath the green smell of the park. Her eyes held his, grey-blue in the dappled light, steady in a way she rarely was when Frederick’s name entered the conversation.
He looked away first.
“The principle is simple,” he said, redirecting them both.
“Ask questions that require more than a yes or no answer. Follow the answers. Build the next question on what they have just told you, so they feel the conversation is a bridge rather than a series of disconnected rooms.” He stopped walking.
They had reached a bend in the path where a wrought-iron bench faced the Serpentine.
Two swans drifted near the far bank, white against the dark water. “I have a challenge for you.”
“I do not like challenges.”
“You like them enormously. You simply prefer to pretend otherwise.” He nodded toward a cluster of figures standing near the boathouse. “Do you see the gentleman in the brown coat? Beside the tall woman with the green parasol?”
Louisa squinted. “I see him.”
“Do you know him?”
“I have never seen him before.”
“Excellent. I would like you to walk over there, introduce yourself, and hold a conversation with him for ten minutes.”
Her face drained of color. “You cannot be serious.”
“Ten minutes. Ask him questions. Follow his answers. Do not prepare a script. Do not rehearse. Trust that you are interesting enough to keep a stranger talking, because you are.”
“Oliver, I cannot simply walk up to a man I have never met and begin a conversation.”
“You collided with me at the Bancroft ball. That went rather well.” He stepped closer.
Close enough that his shadow fell across the brim of her bonnet.
“You spoke about Carthage in front of six strangers. You held your own through three dances at a Thornbury ball. A ten-minute conversation in Hyde Park is well within your range.”
“Those situations were different. You were beside me.”
“I will be beside you now. Twelve feet away, on that bench, pretending to admire the swans.”
“Swans are vicious creatures. No one genuinely admires them.”
“Then I shall be twelve feet away pretending to admire vicious creatures. Go.”
“It is entirely improper!”
“It is not.”
She stared at him. Her fingers worried the handle of the parasol. He watched her measure the distance to the boathouse, calculate the odds, assemble the familiar architecture of retreat.
Then she straightened her shoulders. She closed the parasol with a decisive snap and handed it to him.
“Hold this.”
“With pleasure.”
“If I humiliate myself, I expect you to intervene.”
“You will not humiliate yourself.”
She turned and walked toward the boathouse before the courage could drain from her.
Oliver sat on the bench. He held her parasol across his knees, the ivory handle warm from her grip, and watched.
The gentleman in the brown coat was perhaps fifty, with a neat beard. Oliver saw the moment Louisa reached them, saw her hesitate for half a second, saw the decision crystallize in the set of her spine.
She spoke. The gentleman turned. His expression moved from surprise to polite interest to genuine engagement within the span of thirty seconds. His wife joined the conversation. Louisa’s hands moved as she spoke, her fingers sketching shapes in the air when her thoughts outpaced her caution.
Five minutes passed. She had forgotten the script. She had forgotten the performance. She was simply talking to another human being, and the ease of it showed in every line of her body.
Eight minutes. The gentleman produced a card from his waistcoat pocket. Louisa accepted it with visible surprise.
Ten minutes. She curtsied and said her farewells. The gentleman bowed. His wife reached out and clasped Louisa’s hand warmly.
Louisa walked back toward the bench. Her pace quickened with every step. By the time she reached him, her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright.
“Sit,” he said.
She sat. She pressed her hands against her knees. Then she turned to him, and the smile that broke across her face was so unguarded that he felt it.
“He is a botanist,” she said. “He has spent the last two years cataloguing every species of fern in the Lake District. His wife thinks he is mad. She told me so while he was explaining the reproductive habits of bracken. He invited me to a lecture at the Linnean Society next Thursday.”
“You held a conversation with a complete stranger for ten minutes and received a social invitation.”
“I held a conversation with a complete stranger for ten minutes and received a social invitation.” She laughed, breathless. “I did not mention the weather once.”
“I am enormously proud of you.”
The words left his mouth before he could smooth them into a lighter shape. They sat between them on the bench, unvarnished, too honest for the occasion. Louisa’s laughter stilled. She looked at him. The flush in her cheeks deepened.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Her hand rested on the bench between them. His hand held the parasol beside it. The distance between his knuckles and hers was perhaps two inches, and he was overly conscious of it.
He did not close the distance. He did not move his hand. But he did not move it away, either, and when a breeze lifted the loose curl from her temple and pressed it against her cheek, his fingers twitched against the parasol handle with the suppressed instinct to brush it back.
“We should return you to the carriage,” he said. “You have a musicale to prepare for.”
“Must I prepare? You told me not to rehearse.”