Chapter 20 #2
“Ashton has purchased a colt at Tattersalls,” he said, pressing the glass into her hand. “A bay, sixteen hands. Ashton believes it will take the cup at Newmarket, though I have my doubts about the hindquarters.”
“I see,” Louisa said.
“The sire was Dorimant. Do you know Dorimant?”
“I do not.”
“Magnificent animal. Won at Epsom twice. Ashton paid four hundred guineas, which I told him was excessive, though of course one cannot put a price on bloodline.”
“Of course not.”
She sipped the lemonade. “Does he intend to race the colt this Season?”
Frederick’s face brightened. “He does, in fact. At Ascot, if the animal is ready. The trainer is cautious, but Ashton has never been a patient man.”
“And you? Would you have purchased him?”
“Not at that price. Three hundred, perhaps. I told Ashton as much, but he is sentimental about Dorimant’s line.” Frederick finished his wine. “You are very easy to talk to, Louisa. Most young ladies glaze over entirely when I mention horses.”
“I am fascinated by horses,” she said, and smiled, and hated herself a little for how easily it came.
Frederick’s name appeared three times on her card. Oliver’s did not appear at all.
Eleanor found her beside the cloakroom at half past eleven. The crowd had thinned. The orchestra was playing the final set, and the remaining dancers moved through the figures with the loosened posture of people who had stopped performing for the evening.
“Your mother’s carriage is waiting,” Eleanor said. She studied Louisa’s face in the candlelight of the corridor. “You look tired.”
“I am tired.”
“You have been tired since the cotillion. You have also been drinking warm lemonade and discussing horses with a man who does not know you dislike horses.”
“I do not dislike horses.”
“You are terrified of horses, Louisa. I was the one next to you when you were thrown off a mare years ago; you cannot lie to me.”
Louisa pursed her lips. With a sigh, she took her shawl from the attendant. She wrapped it around her shoulders and did not answer.
They walked to the carriage together. The night air was cooler than the ballroom, and the street was busy with departing guests, wheels and hooves and the voices of coachmen calling to one another above the noise.
Eleanor climbed in first. Louisa followed.
The door closed, and the carriage pulled forward into the line of traffic moving south along the square.
“He used my Christian name tonight,” Louisa said. “During the cotillion.”
“I heard.”
“He asked about marriage. Children. What sort of life I hoped for.”
Eleanor was quiet for a moment. “And what did you tell him?”
“That I wanted to be a partner. That I wanted to be useful, not decorative.”
“Good. And what did he say?”
“He said I was sensible. He said I would not find the household duties burdensome.”
The carriage swayed over a rut. A lamp outside the window threw a bar of light across Eleanor’s face, then passed.
“Eleanor.”
“Yes.”
“He told me what he expected. The household, the hosting, the obligations. He listed them. And then he told me I was capable.”
“You are capable.”
“He said it the way one approves of a well-built shelf.”
Eleanor did not laugh. She turned toward the window, and Louisa watched her profile against the passing streetlamps, the set of her mouth, the careful stillness she held when she was deciding how much truth to spend.
“I am going to ask you a question,” Eleanor said, still looking at the glass. “And I need you not to answer with what you have rehearsed.”
The carriage turned onto Curzon Street. The wheels found the cobbles and steadied.
“Do you still want Frederick?” Eleanor faced her. “Or have you spent so many years wanting him that you no longer know how to let the dream go?”
The question landed in the dark of the carriage, and Louisa felt it settle against her ribs beside the weight she had been carrying since the library, since Oliver’s mouth on hers, since the three days of sleeplessness and the four-minute call and the careful, ruinous distance he had placed between them.
She opened her mouth.
Eleanor waited.
The carriage stopped outside the Fairchild townhouse. “I do not know,” Louisa admitted, her voice small.
Her cheeks flushed. For two years the answer had been yes, automatic, rehearsed, polished smooth by repetition.
The yes had been the only fixed point in a life that shifted beneath her feet with every quarter’s rent.
The yes had kept her steady when the gowns were let out and taken in and let out again, when the silver was sold, and the carriage horse went lame, when her father closed his study door and left the letters unopened on the salver.
She had built the yes into the walls of her plans, and now it was gone, and she could feel the draught where it had been.
Eleanor reached across the seat and took her hand.
“Good,” she said quietly. “That is the first honest answer you have given me in weeks.”
The coachman opened the door. Louisa stepped down into the night.
She did not look back at Eleanor. She crossed the pavement, climbed the steps, and let herself into the house where the hallway clock was striking midnight and her mother’s voice was calling from the drawing room to ask how the evening had gone.
“Very well,” she called back, and closed the door behind her, and stood in the dim hallway with her shawl still clutched around her shoulders and the taste of warm lemonade still on her tongue and no idea, for the first time in two years, what she wanted.