Chapter 10 #2
"You are right," she said after a moment, quieter. "I was being selfish. I only hope they do not ruin what is there before anyone tells them otherwise."
"They will not. You have already told them."
"I have not."
Frederick looked at her, one eyebrow lifting slightly. "And what were those papers you left on the stone at the gate, a few days past?"
Amelia felt the color come up in her face. "Frederick. You must break this habit of watching me every hour of the day."
"I will not," he said, entirely unbothered. "But I have not yet told your father about it, and it sits uneasily with me that I have not. I do not intend to keep something from him again, my lady — not for you, not for anyone. Once was already more than I ought to have allowed myself."
Amelia held his gaze for a long moment.
"Thank you," she said, "for telling me plainly."
Frederick only nodded, and the two of them stood a while longer at the edge of the garden, listening to the laughter carrying faintly over the wall.
They had barely fallen silent when a figure came round the far hedge — unhurried, hands still faintly dusted with sawdust, coat left somewhere behind him at the worksite.
Benjamin.
Frederick straightened at once, and Amelia felt the whole shape of the morning change with him.
"Forgive the intrusion." Benjamin stopped at a respectful distance, addressing himself to Frederick first, which did not go unnoticed. "I did not mean to come this far onto your ground uninvited. I only wished to mention something before it slipped my mind."
"Go on," Frederick said, not unkindly, though his eyes did not leave him.
"There is a stretch of the boundary fence, toward the rear of both estates, where it has come down entirely.
I saw it two nights past, walking the edge of my own land after dark.
" Benjamin glanced briefly at Amelia, then back to Frederick.
"I mean to have it mended. I would have done it already, but the men are stretched thin with the roof, and I did not want to send someone in haste and have him trample whatever is growing near it without knowing better. "
"That is considerate of you," Frederick said, carefully neutral.
"Though I will tell you plainly — that gap has stood as it is for some years now.
We knew of it well before you came. We left it as it was because mending it meant clearing the growth around it, and there was no urgency in the doing, with no one living on your side of the wall to make it a concern.
" He studied Benjamin a moment. "I am somewhat surprised you found it at all.
It sits well hidden, between the trees and the old growth along that stretch.
A man would have to be looking for it — or walking that ground with more care than most."
"I walk most of my land after dark," Benjamin said. "It helps me learn its shape faster than daylight does. I noticed the gap because the trees on either side of it grow differently — older on your side, newer where mine has been left to itself. It seemed worth marking."
Frederick's expression did not change much, but something behind it shifted slightly, the way a man's does when a stranger has just answered a question more thoroughly than he expected.
"Well," he said. "That is more attention than most men would spare a broken fence."
"It is the least I owe." Benjamin's gaze flicked to Amelia again, brief and direct. "The instructions you were kind enough to send, and to finding me men who would otherwise never have looked twice at Russell Hall."
Amelia said nothing, though something in her chest had gone warm and a little unsteady.
"When do you mean to have it done?" Frederick asked.
"Once the roof is finished. Six days, perhaps seven." Benjamin inclined his head slightly. "I did not want it left unspoken between us in the meantime — in case anyone wondered why a fence stood open on my side and nothing was done about it."
Frederick studied him a moment longer, weighing something Amelia could not see the shape of.
"I appreciate you telling us directly," he said at last. "Rather than leaving us to hear it secondhand."
"I find that is generally the better way of doing things."
"So do I." Something in Frederick's tone had eased, very slightly, though his manner remained as measured as ever. "A few days will do no harm. I will see that none of our own people wander toward it in the meantime."
"I am obliged to you." Benjamin glanced once more at Amelia — nothing improper in it, nothing that could be remarked upon, and yet she felt the whole of it land somewhere just beneath her ribs. "My lady."
"Mr. Sterling."
He inclined his head to them both and turned back the way he had come, unhurried, and was gone round the hedge as quietly as he had appeared.
Frederick watched the space where he had stood for a moment before he spoke again.
"Well," he said. "That was not what I expected."
"What did you expect?"
"I am not entirely certain." He glanced at her sideways. "But I confess, my lady — that was rather better than it."
◆◆◆
The heat had not broken with nightfall, and Amelia had given up trying to sleep through it an hour ago.
She lit the lamp low and reached for the herbal she kept by the bed — her mother's, originally, the binding gone soft with handling — and let it fall open where it always fell open now, to the page near the back with the small, careful illustration of a pale blue-white bloom.
The Aegis Bloom. She had read the entry perhaps a dozen times and it had not grown less remarkable with repetition.
A flower said to ease fever beyond anything else recorded, to close wounds that would otherwise fester, rare enough that the author claimed to have seen it growing wild only twice in a lifetime of searching — and yet there it was, pressed and drawn and named, proof that it existed at all.
She traced a finger along the page without quite meaning to.
If half of what was written here was true, it would be worth more than every other plant in her garden combined.
She was still turning it over in her mind when the heat finally drove her up and out to the balcony for air.
The night was clear, moonlight strong enough to throw shadow, and for a moment she simply stood there letting the cool of it settle over her skin.
Then she saw him.
Benjamin was in the garden below Russell Hall's east wall — not working, not building anything, but moving through something else entirely.
Shirtless in the heat, his coat and shirt discarded over a fence post, he dropped low and drove through a set of press-ups with a rhythm too even to be anything but long habit, then rose and moved into something harder — footwork, low and quick, then a series of strikes thrown at nothing, controlled and exact, the kind of motion a man only kept if his body had been taught to need it.
The moon caught the sweat on him each time he turned, silver along his shoulders, gone dark again as he moved out of the light.
Amelia did not move.
She told herself, distantly, that this was none of her concern — a man was entitled to do as he pleased on his own land in the middle of the night — and she went on watching anyway, the herbal still open and forgotten in her hand.
He did not know she was there. That much was plain in the unguarded economy of it — no performance in it at all, nothing done for an audience, only the discipline of a man working something out of himself that would not leave any other way.