Chapter One
The cold came in through the window frames.
Arabella had noticed it in her first week at Longmere Hall, the way the autumn air found the gaps in the casements and moved through the room regardless of whether the fire was lit.
The fire was not lit. She had not asked for it to be lit, because she had asked once, in October, and Cavendish had looked at her across the breakfast table with the particular expression she had come to think of as his accounting face — the one that added her requests to a running ledger she was never shown — and said that the household fires were laid in the evenings and that he was certain she would find the mornings perfectly comfortable once she was properly settled.
She had been here six weeks. She was not properly settled. She had stopped mentioning the mornings.
It was not yet six o'clock. The sky beyond the walled garden was the particular grey that preceded dawn in the north, a grey with no warmth in it at all, and Arabella sat at the small writing desk in her room with her shawl around her shoulders and both hands wrapped around a cup of tea that the housemaid — a silent girl named Peg who moved through the house as though she too had learned to take up as little space as possible — had brought up without being asked.
It was the one small mercy of rising before the household: Peg always noticed, and Peg always brought tea, and Arabella had decided that this constituted a form of friendship even if neither of them had said a word about it.
She drank the tea. And she remembered the Duke of Newbury and his visit a few weeks ago.
It wasn’t just that the man could make a nun forget her vows of chastity, it was that she thought, for the briefest moment, that he understood her situation.
She’d been waking every morning since, hoping he would ride in, upon his white charger, and rescue her.
So far, she’d been sorely disappointed. Besides, she knew heroes were fictional.
Besides, what could he do? Cavendish was her legal guardian and he held all the power and he knew it.
She watched the garden go from black to grey.
Before: she would have had something to say about a sky like this.
Something about Turner, perhaps, or the specific melancholy of northern light, delivered to whoever was nearest in a tone that invited argument.
Her father had loved to argue with her about art.
Simon had pretended to find her opinions tiresome and then stolen them wholesale and presented them as his own at dinner parties, which she had found so thoroughly aggravating and so thoroughly characteristic that the memory of it now sat in her chest like a stone she had decided to stop moving around.
She did not think about Simon in the mornings if she could help it. Mornings required a certain steadiness of purpose that grief did not assist.
By seven she had dressed herself — another small economy of will, not ringing for Peg when she did not need to, hoarding the moments that were entirely her own — and gone downstairs.
Breakfast at Longmere Hall was taken in the dining room regardless of whether the dining room was cold, which it always was, and regardless of whether Cavendish was present, which he always was.
He was already seated when she came in. He had a newspaper.
He always had a newspaper; she had not yet determined how they arrived, since the nearest village was four miles distant and she had seen no regular post rider, but they appeared each morning with the reliability of a bad habit.
He looked up when she entered, which he always did, and smiled, which he always did, and the smile was pleasant and regular and told her absolutely nothing.
"Good morning, Arabella."
"Good morning, sir."
She had stopped, early on, trying to calibrate the precise form of address.
"Uncle" felt wrong in her mouth and also technically inaccurate — he was her father's third cousin, which made him something so remote that English had not bothered to assign it a word.
"Mr. Cavendish" had produced a slight tightening around his eyes that she had not wished to repeat.
"Sir" had been accepted without comment, and so "sir" it was, which was what you called a schoolmaster, which was, she had concluded, not entirely inapt.
She sat. Peg appeared with toast and a soft-boiled egg and disappeared again.
Arabella ate with the methodical attention of someone who understood that the body required fuel regardless of appetite, and she watched Cavendish read his newspaper, and she was aware, as she was always aware at breakfast, of being watched in return.
He was good at it. She would grant him that.
Another man might have stared outright; Cavendish simply held a peripheral attention on her that never quite manifested as a look she could object to.
She had caught it first in the week of her father's funeral, before she had understood what it was — had thought initially that he was merely keeping an eye on her because she had been unwell, because she had not eaten, because she was newly bereaved and he was, nominally, responsible for her welfare.
She understood it better now. It was the look of a man taking inventory of a property he had recently acquired. Checking for damage. Assessing condition.
She had seen him apply the same look to the house. She had noticed, in her first days here, that both assessments were conducted with the same thoroughness and the same absence of sentiment.
She kept her face pleasant and ate her egg.
"You slept well, I hope?" he said, without looking up from the newspaper.
"Thank you, yes." The little sleep she did get saw her dreams filled with him. His fair hair, his stunning green eyes and those lips. She’d never fantasied about a man’s lips but maybe it was because the warmest smile came from them.
She had not slept well last night. Her idea that Newbury would rescue her was fading as each week dragged by. She had been awake since before four, lying in the cold dark and thinking, as she had thought most nights in the past three weeks, about the Duke of Newbury.
Not in the way that would have made Simon tease her, had Simon been alive to do so. In the way that a woman in a locked room thought about a man who had stood in a drawing room and understood, without being told, exactly what he was looking at.
With barely any appetite breakfast passed slowly. She could not leave the table until Cavendish did. It was a form of torture. Finally he left and she made her way to her assigned room.
The letter to Douglas Algate she began at half past ten, at the same small writing desk, in the hour between breakfast and the midday meal that Cavendish called luncheon and she called the second accounting.
She had written to Douglas twice since August. She knew neither letter had arrived.
She knew this because Douglas would have replied, and Douglas's replies would have reached her by some means or another even if they had to be smuggled inside a delivery of candles, because Douglas Algate was the most quietly determined person she had ever known and he had told her, in July, standing in her father's study at Langton Park the afternoon before the funeral, that she was not to worry because he was going to sort it out.
She had believed him. She still believed him, in the abstract way that she believed in things she could not currently see: the existence of London, the likelihood of spring, the proposition that she had once been a person with opinions about Turner that she had not needed to carefully conceal.
She wrote: Dear Lord Frasier —
She stopped.
The question was not what to write. She knew what to write.
She had composed the letter in her head during the hours before dawn, had arranged it with the precision of someone who understood that every word counted and that brevity was not a stylistic choice but a practical necessity, since a shorter letter was easier to conceal and a concealed letter was marginally more likely to survive the journey.
She would tell him her fate. She would tell him that she was well, because she was, technically, in the sense that she was not ill.
She would tell him, in the careful language of a woman who had learned to say difficult things without saying them directly, that she needed him to find a way to write back.
She would tell him about the Duke of Newbury.
That was the part she was still composing.
Three weeks ago, on a morning no different from any other morning at Longmere Hall, Grice had announced a caller.
She had been in the drawing room, which was where Cavendish preferred her to be during the hours she was not required elsewhere, engaged in the kind of needlework she had never particularly enjoyed and had taken up because it gave her hands something to do that looked like compliance.
She had been thinking about the ivy on the garden wall and whether there was any arrangement of circumstances in which Peg might be persuaded to carry a letter as far as Shap, and then Grice had said the Duke of Newbury and Cavendish had said show him in, and something had happened to the quality of the air in the room that she could not have explained precisely but that she had felt.
She had known, distantly, who Harry Fairfax was.
A friend of Simon's, from years ago, from the period of Simon's life that had overlapped with London and the kind of young men who did inadvisable things near Vauxhall and never discussed them afterward.
She had not met him. She had heard his name in the context of a handful of stories that Simon had told with the self-satisfied air of a man who wanted credit for interesting friends without being required to explain the specifics.
She had not expected a duke to arrive at Longmere Hall on a grey October morning and claim to be in the area visiting family.