Chapter One #2
She had not expected, within the first thirty seconds of entering the drawing room, to understand that he was lying.
Not about knowing Simon. That part had been true; she had heard it in the way he said her brother's name, with the particular weight that belonged to people who had actually known someone rather than people who were constructing the impression of having known them.
But he was not in Westmorland by coincidence.
Men did not become dukes by dropping in on the wards of third cousins on a passing whim, and Harry Fairfax had the look of a man who had been sent, or had sent himself, with a purpose he was not going to announce in front of Cavendish.
She had sat in the chair furthest from Cavendish and closest to the door. She had not done it consciously. She had done it the way she did everything now, by instinct honed over six weeks of understanding which arrangements of herself in a room cost the least.
He had noticed. She had been almost certain of it at the time, and she had become more certain of it since, in the hours she had spent turning the visit over in her mind.
He had noticed, and he had not reacted, and that restraint had told her something about him that nothing else in the twenty minutes of conversation about Simon and the road from Shrewsbury had told her.
He saw it. He understood what he was seeing. And he was not going to say so in front of Cavendish.
They spoke about Simon. She had been careful — she was always careful — choosing her words with the precision she had developed over six weeks of learning where the edges were.
She had watched Cavendish from the corner of her eye and felt him listening, cataloguing, and she had given him nothing to catalogue.
She had been composed and warm and appropriately grateful for the condolences, and she had kept her hands folded in her lap with the stillness of someone who had decided to be still, and she had not once looked at the door.
She had very much wanted to look at the door.
When he rose to leave, he shook Cavendish's hand and said all the correct things about the road and the weather, and then he had turned to her and taken her hand and said, steadily, looking at her with the directness of a man who was accustomed to saying exactly what he meant while appearing to say something else entirely: I hope we'll have the opportunity to continue the conversation about Simon another time, Miss Langton.
I think you could tell me things about him that I would be glad to know.
It was not about Simon. She had understood that immediately.
She had looked at him. For a moment, something had moved through her that she had not allowed herself to feel since July, since her father's funeral, since the morning she had written to Douglas and said that she was frightened and then climbed into Cavendish's carriage because there had been nothing else to do.
"I would like that," she had said. "Very much."
He had bowed and left, and Cavendish had watched him go with an expression she could not read, and she had returned to her needlework, and she had not permitted herself to think about it again until she was alone.
She had been thinking about it ever since.
She folded the letter paper in half. Placed it in the drawer. Locked the drawer with the small key she kept on a ribbon around her wrist, because there was no other place that was reliably hers.
She did not know what the Duke of Newbury intended to do.
She did not know whether he had gone south to London or back to Saxton Castle or somewhere else entirely.
She did not know whether his parting words had been an assurance or merely the formula of a man who had stumbled into an awkward situation and handled it graciously and then forgotten about it the moment he reached the end of the lane.
She knew he had not forgotten about it. She knew this with the certainty of someone who had learned, over six weeks, to trust her reading of things rather than the more comfortable interpretation of them.
He had come to Longmere Hall because someone had asked him to, or because something had sent him, and he had seen exactly what was there to be seen, and he had looked at her on his way out the door and said something that was not about Simon.
She would solve the route. When the route presented itself, the letter to Douglas would be ready. She would tell him about the visit. She would ask, as carefully and obliquely as she knew how, whether he knew anything about the Duke of Newbury's intentions.
In the meantime, she would do what she had been doing for six weeks: she would continue to think, and plan, and remain, in the interior of herself that Cavendish had no access to, the woman who had once argued about Turner at her father's dinner table and stolen the good chair by the library fire and told Simon, with considerable feeling, that his taste in poetry was an embarrassment to the family and he ought to be grateful she was the only one who had read enough to notice.
She had loved Simon very much. She had told him so, once, when he was ill and she had sat up with him through the night. He had been extremely put out by it.
She smiled at her locked drawer and went downstairs to endure luncheon.
The garden was walled but she was outside that dull grey prison of a house.
The walls at Longmere were perhaps twelve feet high and built of the local grey stone that everything in Westmorland appeared to be built of, a stone so thoroughly the colour of the sky that on overcast days the garden acquired a quality she might have called atmospheric if she had been feeling generous, which she was not.
There was one gate. The gate was kept locked.
The key, she had established through a careful month of observation, was kept on a hook in the butler's pantry, and Grice did not leave the key unattended.
She was permitted to walk in the garden between two and three o'clock on days when the weather allowed it, accompanied by Peg, who walked two paces behind her with the expression of a girl doing her conscientious best at a task she had not expected her position to include.
Today the weather allowed it, barely. The cold had a wet edge that suggested rain before evening, and the flower beds were the exhausted brown of late November, and the gravel paths between them were beginning to go soft underfoot.
Arabella walked with her hands inside her muff and counted the circuits she made around the perimeter.
Fourteen circuits equalled approximately one mile. She had paced it out in October.
On her fifth circuit, she passed the section of wall where the ivy had grown thickest, and she did not look up at it.
She had looked up at it, carefully and thoroughly, on several previous occasions when she had calculated that Peg's attention was elsewhere.
The ivy was established but not structural.
It would not hold weight. She had already known this; she simply found herself continuing to assess it in the way that the mind returned to problems it had not yet solved.
She thought, as she had thought several times during the hour's walk, about the lane at the end of which Longmere Hall sat.
About the length of it. About how long it had taken the Duke of Newbury's horse to disappear around the turn in the trees, in October, which she had watched from the drawing room window with Cavendish standing six feet behind her and had therefore been required to watch with an expression of pleasant indifference.
"Miss?" said Peg, from two paces behind her. "The sky's coming over."
"Yes," Arabella agreed. "I think we had better go in."
On the way across the garden she came very close to saying something to Peg about the ivy — a remark, light and oblique, the kind of thing that might be a question if the other person chose to take it that way.
She had had a particular talent for remarks like that, once.
They had been one of her better qualities, she had always thought: the ability to say the thing she meant while leaving the other person room to pretend she hadn't said it, which was a form of conversational courtesy that most people appreciated even when they didn't know they were being offered it.
She did not say it. Wards who made oblique remarks to housemaids about locked gates were wards whose walks in the garden were reduced to thirty minutes, or twenty, or none at all.
She had not tested this specific consequence, but she understood the logic of Cavendish's system well enough by now to extrapolate.
She held the remark in her chest, next to the stone, and went inside.