Chapter 13
Amelia stood at her window a long while before she admitted to herself what she was doing.
There was no light at Russell Hall tonight. No shadow crossing behind a broken pane, no small moving glow of a lantern in the dark. Only the black shape of the house against a sky gone deep and starless, and the garden below it lying still.
She turned from the window, crossed to her bed, and knelt to draw the wooden box out from beneath it.
The mortar sat inside where she had left it, her mother's, heavy and cool under her palm. She did not open it. She only held it a moment, thinking of the things she made and gave away and had learned to do without anybody in her own house ever saying the word aloud.
I know what it is to hide, she thought. And I told him. I told him first, and nobody made me.
She set the box back beneath the bed.
The night was clear and cold enough to sting. She checked the windows along the east wing first — Frederick's dark, as it had been an hour past. Then her father's, at the far corner, no candle showing beneath the door.
All of it quiet. All of it asleep.
She went.
The lane was pale under the moon, the hedgerows throwing long shapes across it, and Amelia walked it with her shawl drawn tight and her heart going harder than the distance warranted.
The gap in the fence came up faster than she expected it to, half-swallowed now by the ivy Benjamin had let grow across it, and she slipped through sideways as she had learned to do, into the dark of his garden.
The roses had grown since she had last stood among them. Thicker at the base. Taller along the wall.
She did not look at them.
She had been standing there only a few minutes when she saw him.
He was coming from the direction of the house, unhurried, and the moment his eyes found her he lifted a finger to his own lips — not a word yet, not until he had crossed the last of the open ground and come into the shadow of the ivy where the wall and the trees closed round them both.
Only then did he speak.
"Lady Amelia." His voice was low, pitched for her alone. "I did not expect you tonight."
She said nothing.
He waited. Then something in his face changed by a degree.
"Is something wrong?"
Amelia put out her hand.
She held it there between them, level, the way a person does at an introduction, and she did not say anything at all, and she did not take her eyes off his face.
"Amelia Whitfield," she said. "A pleasure to meet you."
It took him about two seconds.
She watched the whole of it arrive — watched him understand what was being asked and what it meant that she was asking it — and something went out of his face that she had never seen leave it before.
He took her hand.
"Benjamin Russell," he said.
His voice was not entirely steady on it.
"It is a pleasure to meet you at last, Amelia. As I ought to have done from the beginning."
She let go.
"You lied to me." She said it quietly, because the alternative was not saying it quietly at all. "To me, and to Frederick, and to every man on this ground who calls you Captain. Why?"
"Because I wanted to keep you clear of it.
" He did not look away. "And because I told myself there would be a better moment for the telling.
I have had a fortnight to find one." He drew a breath.
"There is not a better moment. There never was going to be one, and I think I knew that on the first day.
I betrayed your trust. You have every reason to be angry with me. "
"I am not angry."
"Amelia—"
"I am insulted." Her chin came up. "There is a difference and I should like you to hear it.
I have known you a few weeks, Mr. Russell.
I am perfectly aware that is nothing at all.
But in that time I gave you my word, and I sent men to your gate, and I stood in my own garden and told Frederick to his face that you were harmless.
" Her voice went once and she caught it.
"I thought something was beginning. I do not know what.
I have not put a name to it and I did not intend to for some while yet.
But there was something, and I did not invent it, and you knew that as well as I did when you stood in the wreckage of that rose walk and gave me a name that does not exist."
Benjamin looked at the ground.
It was the first time she had ever seen him lower his gaze from anything.
"I have no excuse for you," he said. "I was never any good at excuses. I did it, and I have regretted it from the moment it left my mouth, and I have gone on doing nothing about it every day since. That is worse than the lie and I know it is."
"You could have told me yourself." Her hands had closed on the ends of her shawl.
"Any night in a fortnight. I would have thought better of you for it — I would have thought a great deal better of you for it.
" She shook her head. "I have shown you plainly what I think of this county's opinions.
I hide half of what I am from my own father and I told you so, and I told you before you told me anything at all, and I did not have to. "
"You are right."
"And still you did not trust me."
She turned to go.
He caught her arm — not hard, only enough — and let go of it again at once.
"Please."
Amelia stopped. She did not turn round.
"It is not that I did not trust you," he said, and his voice had gone lower. "I did not trust myself."
She waited.
"I stood in a camp yard a fortnight ago and I said aloud, to a sergeant who had earned the right to hear it, that I was done hiding.
That I would carry my father's name openly and let the country make of it what it liked.
" He said it evenly, which cost him something.
"I meant it entirely. Then I came here, and the first stranger who ever asked me for it was a woman kneeling in my mother's rose walk who had every reason already to think me a fool and a vandal, and it went out of me before I had finished drawing breath.
Sterling. Smooth as anything. Twenty years of practice and it came up like a reflex. "
He turned his hat once in his hands and stopped doing it.
"I have called myself a coward about it every day since," he said. "I would rather you had that than something that sounded better."
Amelia turned round.
"I do understand it," she said, more quietly.
"I want you to know that I do. But I had earned it, Mr. Russell.
That is the whole of what I came here to say.
Not because of who my father is or what I am owed — I have never once cared about that and you know it.
Because I would have kept it. From my father, from Frederick, from the entire village, and I would not have thought twice about it, and you never gave me the chance to. "
"I know."
"It does not appear that you did."
That landed, and he took it, and did not defend himself from it.
"No," he said. "It does not."
They stood a moment with that between them.
"Then let me have one thing," Amelia said at last. "Since I am here, and since I am already ruined if anybody wakes. Twenty-three years. How does a man vanish for twenty-three years in a country this small?"
"One man saw to it."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the whole answer." A faint, tired thing crossed his face.
"There was a commander at that camp. Aldric — a general now.
Whatever went on inside those walls stayed inside them, because he made it so, and because he had trained every man there to believe that keeping a brother's confidence was not a courtesy but an obligation.
He rose. I rose under him. And by the time anyone thought to ask a question about me, there was nobody left at that gate willing to answer it. "
"He sounds like a good man."
"He is the hardest man I have ever known," Benjamin said. "And yes. He is."
Amelia nodded slowly, and drew her shawl closer, and looked at him for what felt to her like a long time.
"You seem so honest when I speak with you," she said.
"That is the difficulty. You are the first person in my life who has ever spoken to me as though what I know and what I care about actually signify — not as a curiosity, not as something to be managed or corrected — and I have gone about for a fortnight thinking rather a great deal of you for it.
" Her voice stayed level. "And underneath the whole of it, you had already decided not to trust me. "
"I cannot change what I did." He said it without any attempt at softening it. "I can give you my word that I will not lie to you again. It is all I have to hand tonight, and I am aware of precisely what it is worth at present."
"So am I." Amelia said it plainly, and it was not cruel, and it was not kind either. "I am not certain any longer that your word carries what it did last week."
Benjamin said nothing at all.
She turned toward the gap in the fence, and went three steps, and stopped.
"But I will tell you this much," she said, without looking back. "Benjamin Russell has a great deal better sound to it than Sterling ever did."
And before he could answer she was through the ivy and gone into the dark, leaving him standing alone among the roses with something unguarded still sitting on his face.
◆◆◆
The next morning, Amelia came down later than she meant to and found the front hall in motion — trunks being carried out to a waiting carriage, a footman coiling rope, the particular brisk disorder of a household preparing to send guests off.
She found her father near the stairs, directing a servant toward the wrong door entirely.
"Are we going somewhere?"
"Why should we be?" He did not look up from the trunk being maneuvered past him.
"We are perfectly positioned exactly where we are.
" He glanced at her then, correcting himself.
"Earl Somerset and Earl Harrington are the ones leaving.
Some matter in London requires their attention — urgent enough that they mean to be on the road within the hour. "