Chapter Eleven
“You are angry because he looked at me.”
The carriage had pulled away from Amabel’s blazing windows into the dark of the streets, and Royce sat across from her with his face turned to the glass.
He had not said a word since handing her up, which was answer enough for a woman who read silences for a living.
The box smelled of cold leather, the candle-smoke they had carried out of the house in their clothes, and the wheels found every seam in the road.
Across the small distance, his knee sat a hand’s breadth from hers, but neither of them moved to widen it.
“I am not angry,” he said.
“You are sitting in the dark grinding your teeth at a window. I have catalogued enough men to know the genus. You are angry because Davenant flirted with me and Veyr sat beside me and you could do nothing about either without proving you cared, and that has cost you something.” She pulled off one glove, finger by finger, for something to do with her hands.
“You may as well say it. I have had the most educational evening of my life. I can take one more lesson before bed.”
“I am not angry that he looked at you.” He turned from the glass at last, and the passing lamps laid bars of light and dark across him in turn.
“I am angry that I wanted to put my body between you and the whole room, which is not a thing a husband under your terms is permitted to want, and which would have told every soul present exactly how to hurt you. The anger is at myself, and it has been all evening. You have merely been reading the wrong man’s jaw. ”
A lamp slid past and laid its light across the scar and took it away again, and in the dark behind it she could not see his face at all, only hear him breathing with the care of a man counting something.
“The wrong man’s jaw,” she said. “You make even your confessions sound like corrections.”
“It is the only register I own. I learned to apologise in a house where an apology was a weakness to be filed and produced against you later, so I learned to do it sideways, dressed as correction, where it could not be kept. You are the first person in years I have wished to do it properly to, and I find I have mislaid the knack.”
“Then teach me to read the right one.” She tucked the glove into her lap.
“You set your hand over mine at the table. That was not a strategy. Strategy would have been a hand on the table for the room to see. That was under it, where no one could, which means it was for me, or for you, and I should like to know which.”
“It was for me.” He did not soften it, which she had come to understand was the most honest he had ever been. “I wanted to touch you, and I had promised not to, and a hand under a table is the compromise of a man losing an argument with himself. Do not make a study of it. It does me no credit.”
“Everything about you does you no credit, by your own account. You are the least flattering witness to your own character I have ever examined.”
“And Davenant. You think his flirting was a sport.”
“I think his flirting was reconnaissance. Charm in that room is how a man learns what a woman guards, and what she guards tells him where to cut. By the fish course, he had learned you guard your mother and very little else, and he will have carried it to three people before the candles were trimmed.”
“He seemed only bored.”
“The bored ones are the dangerous ones. Boredom is what they call the hunt once they have done it often enough that it no longer quickens them. You charmed him back, which was right, but you only understand what you did. You did not make a friend. You fed a spy a meal you had chosen, which is the most anyone manages in that room, and more than I managed there for years.”
She was silent for a few seconds. “You looked at me on the dance floor as though the room were empty. You said so yourself. Was that strategy?”
“That was a mistake, and a useful one, since it gave the room a story to tell that was kinder than the truth.” A muscle worked at his jaw.
“Stop circling the thing you mean to ask me, Giselle. You have been circling it since the carriage door shut. Ask it plainly. I am too tired to fence with you tonight, and you fence better than I do when I am tired.”
She was quiet for a moment again, the dark and the rocking of the carriage close around them. “When Veyr named my mother. When he called her mad and said the affliction might descend. You started to rise, and I felt that you were going to take me out of that room.”
“I was.”
“By the arm, in front of all of them, like a child who had stayed up past her bedtime, or like a wife who could not be trusted to hear her own mother slandered without weeping into the soup.” Her voice climbed, and she dragged it down.
“Why? Tell me why, exactly, in plain words, and do not dress it as protection, because protection is what men call it when they want a woman to be grateful for being made small.”
“Because for one moment I could not tell the difference between protecting you and removing you, and the two looked identical from where I sat, and that frightened me more than Veyr did.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and the lamps caught the scar at his jaw.
“I have spent seventeen years removing things to keep them safe. People. Papers. Myself. It is the only way I know how to keep a thing alive, by taking it out of the room, and it works, and the things I have kept alive that way are alive, but they are also alone. I looked at you about to be hurt, and my hands reached for the only tool I own.”
“It is a bad tool.”
“It is the only one Veyr’s school ever taught me. I know it is a bad one. I am asking you to be patient with a man relearning his hands at three and forty.”
“He said he knew her. My mother. I knew her a little, he said, as though it cost him nothing.”
“I marked it too. Veyr admits to knowing no one a little. If he set himself beside your mother’s memory tonight, in front of witnesses, it is because he has judged the connection safer owned than found, which means there is something to find, and he would rather you had his telling of it first.”
“You heard all of that in four words.”
“I heard a man lay down a card he would much rather have kept, which tells me his hand is worse than he is letting us see. It is the only encouraging thing that happened all evening.” He watched her across the dark. “You have not wept. I told you the carriage was the place for it.”
“I do not want to weep. I want to fight, which is poorer company for you, and I am sorry for it.”
“Do not be sorry. I would rather be shouted at by you than wept upon by anyone else alive. The weeping I have watched bury people. The fighting is how I know you mean to go on living, and I find I have a great deal staked on your going on living, more than the terms allow me to say.”
The admission sat in the dark between them, too large for the box, and she did not hurry to fill the silence it made.
The honesty of it took the fight out of her by degrees, the way warmth takes the ache out of a cold-stiffened joint, slow and against her will.
“I will not be removed from every room where a man is cruel to me, Your Grace. There would be no rooms left. I have been in rooms with cruel men my whole life, alone, with no duke to reach for my arm, and I survived all of them by staying. If you take me out of the rooms, you have not saved me. You have only finished what the cruel men started, which was to make me small enough to be carried.”
“I know.” His voice had gone very low. “That is exactly what frightens me. Not Veyr, not the men over the wall, but you. I imagine you walking into every room they set for you with your chin up, refusing to be carried out, because the day will come when the room is a real trap, and your courage will be the thing that springs it, and I will be one set away, watching, having promised not to remove you.” He turned his hands over on his knees, empty.
“I do not know how to keep you alive if I cannot take you out of the room. It is the whole of what I am asking the night to teach me, and the night is being unhelpful.”
“Then ask me.”
“Ask you what?”
“Whatever you were about to decide for me by reaching for my arm. You want a tool that is not removal, and it is asking. Before you take me from a room, you ask whether I wish to go, and you abide by the answer, even when it is no, even when my staying frightens you witless. You wrote me the tool already, the day you wrote you would not touch me unless I asked. You have simply never thought to aim it at a door.”
“That is a far harder promise than the one about touching you.”
“Yes. The touching promise costs you only your hands. This one costs you the right to save me against my will, which is the single kind of saving you were ever taught.”
The carriage had slowed as they came near home, the streets quieter now, the lamps further apart so that the dark between them sat longer in the box. Somewhere in the last exchange, the distance between them had become a thing she felt with her whole skin.
“It is the same with rooms,” she said, and she had not meant for her voice to drop.
“You stay. That is the other way to keep a thing alive. You stand beside it, but you do not move it. You let it be in danger, and you are in danger with it. Beatrice does it, and you did it tonight, one set away, hating it. You are capable of the new tool. You only find it more frightening than the old one because the old one lets you leave and the new one does not.”
She watched the words land on him in the dark, watched him take them in the way he took in a difficult deed, slowly, testing each clause for the trap, and the absence of one seemed to trouble him more than a trap would have.
He gave her no answer and only looked at her across the narrow dark while the carriage rocked, and the want that had been gathering all the way from Amabel’s rose between them until it was the loudest thing there, louder than the wheels.
If she leaned the smallest distance forward, the promise would break.
He would let it, and she knew it as plainly as a watermark held up to a candle.
Neither of them leaned, and the held distance pressed into every corner of the carriage.
“You should put your glove back on,” he said roughly, after a silence that had lasted a street and a half.
“We are nearly home, and a duchess does not arrive at her own door half gloved and looking the way you do, or the footmen will tell the kitchen, and the kitchen will tell the house, and by morning there will be a version of this carriage that neither of us will survive with our dignity.”
“And how am I looking, Your Grace?”
“You are looking at me as though you have decided something, and I have promised not to let you decide it in the dark of a carriage after the worst evening of your life, when you cannot tell desire from gratitude from sheer relief at being out of that room alive.” He sat back, deliberately, and put the width of the carriage back between them by main force.
“Glove. Please. Before I become a man who breaks his word over a thing you would regret by daylight.”
“You are very certain I would regret it.”
“I am certain of nothing tonight save that you have laughed twice, have been called mad by proxy and dawned upon a room full of enemies, all of it since sundown. A decision taken on top of all that is not a decision. It is a breaking wave. I will not be a thing that merely happens to you on a bad night. When you decide, you will decide on an ordinary afternoon, with the curtains open, having slept, and you will find me exactly where you left me. Now, glove please.”
She put the glove back on, finger by finger, and the carriage drew up at the steps of Calder House, and the footman opened the door onto the cold, clean air of the ordinary night.
Royce stepped down first. It was the wrong order, the duke handing himself out before the duchess, but he did it anyway.
The reason was clear when he turned and offered his hand up to her.
Handing her down put her hand in his with the whole weight of her descent behind it, and he kept it a moment longer than the step required.
“You were extraordinary tonight,” he said, low, only for her. “I have watched a great many people walk into that room. I have never watched one walk in as though the room were lucky to have them. Veyr does not know what he has woken, and I am not certain I do either.”
“That is the kindest cruel thing anyone has said to me.”
“It was meant as both. I am out of practice at meaning only one thing at a time.”
“We are standing on the step, Your Grace, and the footman can hear us.”
“Let him. He has heard worse from better men, and nothing from me in seventeen years that are worth repeating. This he may repeat.”
“You are still holding my hand, Your Grace.”
“I am.” He looked down at it, the gloved fingers in his, and then he did the thing that was not a kiss but undid her more thoroughly than a kiss could have.
He raised her hand, bent his head and set his mouth to the backs of her gloved fingers.
It was the gesture any gentleman gives any lady at any door, the shape of pure correctness, and he held it there a breath too long, his lips warm through the kidskin, his eyes on hers the whole time.
The form of the thing said nothing at all, but the fact of it said everything.
The kidskin was the last honest inch between them, and it would not last the week.