Chapter 18
“London suits you poorly. You have been scowling since Piccadilly.”
Louisa adjusted her bonnet against the drizzle and did not dignify this with an answer.
They had been back in the city for five days.
Five days of grey skies after Wiltshire’s open green, five days of smoke and close streets and the relentless clatter of a thousand carriages all trying to occupy the same quarter-mile of road.
She had not expected to miss the country.
She had not expected to miss the house party at all, and yet on the first morning back in Curzon Street, she had woken to the sound of a coal cart instead of birdsong and felt the loss of it settle across her chest.
Oliver fell into step beside her on the pavement.
“I am not scowling,” Louisa retorted, pretend-haughtily. “I am concentrating.”
“On what?”
“On whether to continue this walk or push you into the gutter.”
He laughed easily. “The gutter is shallow on this side. You would need to cross the street for a satisfying result.” He steered her around a puddle left by the morning’s rain. “Besides, I have brought you a peace offering. It is inside the shop.”
Hatchard’s stood at 187 Piccadilly with its bow windows fogged from the rain.
Oliver held the door. The shop smelled of leather dressing, coal smoke, and the dry sweetness of uncut pages.
Half of fashionable London appeared to have taken shelter from the weather, and the reading gallery above them creaked under gentlemen who had come for the newspapers and stayed for the warmth.
“This way.” Oliver led her past the front counter, past a display of sermons nobody was buying. He stopped at a table near the back where three slim volumes lay in a stack, their covers unmarked, their spines blank.
Louisa picked up the first volume. She turned it over. No author’s name. No publisher’s flourish. Only a title stamped in plain lettering.
“I have heard of this,” she said. “Eleanor mentioned it. The author is anonymous.”
“The author is anonymous, and the subject is a family of five daughters in the country, which should tell you everything you need to know about the publishing industry’s expectations for the book. Yet Hatchard’s has run through two printings since Easter.”
“Have you read it?”
“I finished the third volume at three o’clock this morning, which is why I look as though I have been dragged behind a horse.”
She studied him. He did look tired. His cravat was a shade less precise than usual, and there was a faint bruise of sleeplessness beneath his left eye. She found the imperfection oddly endearing, which was not a thought she intended to pursue.
“And?” she asked.
“And I believe it was written by a woman, though I cannot prove it. The ballroom scene in the first volume is too accurate. No man alive would notice which mothers are watching which gentlemen across the room.”
“A woman notices because she has spent her life being watched.” Louisa opened the first volume and read three lines. “A man walks into a ballroom and sees the room. A woman walks in and sees every pair of eyes already measuring her.”
Oliver leaned a shoulder against the bookshelf. “You say that as though you are speaking from direct experience.”
“I am speaking from twelve consecutive Thursday evenings at Almack’s, which is experience enough for a lifetime.”
He laughed. A gentleman by the fire lowered his newspaper to frown at them, reconsidered, and raised it again.
“The gentleman in it is impossible,” Oliver said. “He insults the heroine within an hour of meeting her and spends the rest of the book expecting to be forgiven.”
“Perhaps he is proud, and he confuses pride with principle. Half the men at White’s do the same, and nobody writes novels about them.”
“Because nobody at White’s is interesting enough. This fellow at least has the decency to realize he is wrong, which puts him ahead of most of the peerage.”
“A man who realizes he was wrong?” He laughed at her teasing manner. “He does have some help in realizing that,” he admitted, and she nodded.
“And I take it that it falls upon the love interest to assist him in that realization.”
“Which is precisely why he needs her.” Oliver picked up the second volume and turned it between his hands.
“The entire book is built on two people who misread each other because they are too afraid to ask a direct question. She mistakes his silence for contempt. He mistakes her refusal for indifference. The whole disaster could have been avoided by a single honest conversation.”
Louisa was quiet for a moment. She placed the first volume back on the table and aligned it with the other two.
“Honest conversations are more difficult than novels make them appear,” she said simply.
He looked at her. The teasing left his face, and what replaced it was not an expression she could easily name.
“Yes,” he said. “They are.”
For a moment their eyes met. None of them spoke. It was Oliver who turned first, leading her toward the carriage wordlessly.
He handed her up before she could object, folded himself onto the opposite seat, and rapped the roof twice. The wheels turned into the crush of Piccadilly, where every carriage in London appeared to have chosen the same hour to move.
“We shall be an age,” Oliver said, peering through the glass at the blockage ahead. A coal dray had lost a wheel across half the street, and its driver was engaged in a shouting match with a hackney coachman that showed no signs of resolution.
“Good,” Louisa said, and then colored at how quickly it had come out. “I mean only that the rain is pleasant from inside a carriage.”
Oliver did not respond, though a small smile formed on his face.
Rain crawled down the glass in thin threads. The carriage rolled forward a length and stopped. Oliver stretched his legs into the narrow space between the seats, careful of her skirts.
“You said honest conversations are difficult.” He was looking at the rain, not at her. “In the shop. You said it as though you had tried and found the cost too high.”
Louisa kept her eyes on the window. A flower seller on the corner was holding a sheet of canvas over her baskets, hunched against the drizzle.
“When my father’s money went,” she said, “it did not go all at once. It went the way a tide goes out. First the carriage. Then the horses. Then the servants, one at a time, until there was a cook doing three people’s work and a girl of twelve sweeping the stairs.”
Oliver said nothing. She continued speaking, her voice small.
“My father could not bear to watch it happen. So he stopped watching. He took his dinner in the study. He left the letters unopened on the salver, because an unopened letter is not yet a debt.” A cart passed close and threw a fan of dirty water against the glass.
“I opened them. I was sixteen. I wrote to the coal merchant, and to the vintner, and to Mr. Pike who collected the rent, and I asked each of them for time.”
“In your father’s name,” Oliver said. He did not make it a question.
“I practiced his hand for a fortnight. His capitals, the way he crossed his sevens. By the end I could sign it better than he did.” She turned from the window. “I have never told a living soul. He would sooner have watched the house go than know his daughter had learned his signature to save it.”
The carriage lurched forward two lengths and stopped again. Neither of them noticed.
“How old were you when you first kept the household accounts?” he asked.
“Twelve.”
“And how old when anyone thanked you for it?”
Her mouth curved without quite becoming a smile. “They thanked the accounts. They thanked the household running smoothly. They never quite got round to thanking the girl sitting at the desk.”
“I understand better than you may think.” He turned the brim of his hat between his fingers, studying it as though the stitching required his full concentration.
“When I was a boy I grew very good at reading a room before I entered it. The set of my father’s shoulders through a doorway.
Which footman would not meet my eye. What that promised for the evening.
” He set the hat on the seat beside him.
“I told myself it was cleverness. It was not cleverness. It was fear.”
The rain intensified. The flower seller abandoned her corner and ducked into a doorway.
“You have never told me that,” Louisa said softly.
“I have never told anyone. It seems we are trading in confidences neither of us can afford to have repeated.” His voice warmed. “You have the more incriminating of the two. I merely learned to flinch at the right moment. You committed forgery before your first Season.”
The laugh broke free of her, startled and graceless, and the air between them shifted by a degree.
“Oliver.” She pressed her gloved fingers against her mouth. “You must not say it like that. It sounds as though I ran a counterfeiting operation from my father’s study.”
“You rather did. A small one. Very exclusive clientele.”
She laughed again. He watched her do it, his expression unreadable.
The dray had been hauled to the curb. The traffic unknotted itself in lurches, and Curzon Street came up grey and rain-slicked before either of them was ready for it. Hargreaves drew the horses to the curb outside her door.
“Thank you,” she said, reaching for the handle. “For the outing. And for not saying what everyone else would say about… everything.”
“There is nothing to say. You were sixteen, and you kept a roof above your family. I should have shaken your hand, not heard your confession.” His gloved fingers closed over hers on the latch, warm through two thicknesses of kid leather.
He lifted it for her. “Go in. You are letting the rain into my carriage, and Hargreaves will hold me personally responsible.”
She stepped down into the wet. She did not permit herself to look back until the door had shut behind her. When she turned, the carriage was already moving, and the warmth on her hand where his had rested faded slowly, like the last note of a hymn in an empty church.
* * *
Three evenings later, at Lady Rutherford’s, a soprano was murdering an Italian aria with conviction. Oliver could see Sebastian’s mouth moving, but he was barely aware of the sound leaving his lips.
“You have not heard me,” Sebastian said, swirling the wine in his glass.
“I heard every word.”
“Then repeat the last of them.”
Oliver’s mouth opened. The words were not there.
His attention had gone across the drawing room to the cluster of chairs near the pianoforte, where Louisa stood in a gown the color of a winter sky, listening to Frederick Langley describe a horse he intended to buy at Tattersalls, using both hands to demonstrate the importance of the endeavor.
Sebastian followed the line of his gaze without turning his head.
“Ah,” he said simply, and Oliver scowled irritably.
“Do not.”
Sebastian set his glass on the tray of a passing footman.
“You searched her out before you greeted Lady Rutherford. Before the hostess, who was standing directly before you with her hand extended and who watched you do it. You have done the same at every gathering for a fortnight. I have been counting.”
“We have an arrangement.”
“That would hold if the room had been watching. It was not. You searched her out the moment you crossed the threshold, when the only person present to observe was yourself.” He paused. “A man performs for an audience. You did that for no audience at all.”
Oliver had no answer ready. Across the room, the soprano reached for a note well above her means and missed it cleanly.
Louisa caught his eye. She tilted her head a fraction toward the singer and pressed her lips together against a laugh that was plainly, unmistakably, intended for him.
Frederick, at her shoulder, smiled as though the joke belonged to his conversation.
“How long?” Sebastian asked.
Oliver did not pretend to misunderstand. “It is not what you think.”
“It is exactly what I think. The question is not what I think. The question is what you intend to do when Langley proposes, and you lose the privilege of looking for her at all.”
“She wants Frederick. She has wanted him for years.”
“She wanted the idea of Frederick for years. What she wants now is a different question entirely, and you are too busy pretending the answer does not concern you to notice that it has changed.”
Oliver drank his wine. Across the room, Frederick was touching Louisa’s elbow, guiding her toward the supper table with proprietary ease. She went. She smiled at Frederick. She said a word Oliver could not hear, and Frederick laughed and pulled out her chair.
She looked up, and across thirty feet of candlelit drawing room, past the soprano and the chattering guests and Frederick’s hand resting beside her plate, her eyes found Oliver’s.
She held them for three full seconds. The expression on her face was not a smile.
It was not a question. It was recognition, plain and involuntary, the way a head turns toward a familiar voice in a crowd before the mind has granted permission, before the question of why that voice matters more than every other has even been asked.
Then Frederick leaned toward her and said a remark, and she turned to him, and the thread between them all but vanished.
Oliver looked at Sebastian and found his friend watching him steadily.
“You are going to tell me to be careful,” Oliver relented with a sigh.
“I am going to tell you that it is too late to be careful.” Sebastian picked up his glass from the footman’s returning tray.
“What I am going to ask is whether you are prepared to be honest. With her. With yourself. Because this arrangement of yours was built to protect you both from the wrong people, and I am watching it fail in the only direction that matters.”
The soprano finished her aria. The room erupted in applause.
Oliver clapped with everyone else, his hands moving without instruction, his gaze already drifting back toward the supper table where Louisa sat with the man she had spent four years wanting, while the man she had not yet thought to want stood thirty feet away, clapping for a song neither of them had heard.