Chapter 14
Three nights she did not go, and she was aware of every one of them.
The first was easy enough, or she told herself it was.
She stood at the balcony rail with her arms folded and watched him work the last light out of the day — coat off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, hauling a length of timber across the yard with the easy, economical strength of a man who had long since stopped needing to think about how his own body worked.
The muscle along his back moved beneath his shirt with each pull, shoulders set, the fabric clinging where the day's heat had gotten into it.
When he paused to wipe his brow with the back of his wrist, dragging his shirt half up his stomach in the process, she felt the pause somewhere low in her own chest — a small, answering catch of breath she did not examine too closely.
She went in before he had finished. She was pleased with herself about it for nearly an hour.
The second night he trained. Not work this time — something older, something that had nothing to do with the house at all.
He stripped his shirt off entirely before he began, tossed it over the fence post, and moved through the drills bare-chested in the cool night air, moonlight catching along the line of his shoulders, the shift of muscle across his back as he turned, low and fast, strikes thrown at nothing with a precision that had clearly been beaten into him over years rather than months.
Sweat gathered at the hollow of his throat and ran in a slow line down his chest, catching silver each time he moved through the light.
Amelia's mouth had gone dry.
He lied to you, she reminded herself, which was perfectly true and had stopped being much use to her at about the second night, and she stayed at that rail until her legs had stiffened under her and did not go down, and was a great deal less pleased with herself afterward.
The third night, he did not move at all.
He knelt at the edge of the garden, near the roses, hands loose on his knees, and simply — stopped.
Amelia waited for him to rise, to reach for a tool, to do anything at all, and he did not.
Minutes passed. Then more. She had never seen a man hold that kind of stillness before, the particular quality of it, as though he had gone somewhere else entirely and left his body kneeling there to keep his place.
She had given up pretending, by then, that it was pride keeping her at the rail. It was pride keeping her from going down, which was a different thing, and rather a poorer one, and she was too tired that night to argue herself out of knowing it.
She did not know how long she stood watching him not move before he finally rose.
He did not look toward the house at first.
Then he did — turned, unhurried, and looked directly across the dark field at her balcony, at her, standing there in her nightdress with her hair loose and her hand still on the rail.
There was no surprise in it whatsoever. He had known she was there.
He had very likely known she was there on the first night, and on the second, and had said nothing and done nothing and let her stand.
Heat climbed her neck that had nothing at all to do with the summer night.
Then he turned and went down the slope of his own garden and was gone into the dark of the trees.
Amelia let out a breath she had not known she was holding.
He came out on her side of the fence.
She saw him step clear of the hedge into open ground — her father's ground, forty yards from a house with eleven people asleep in it — and stand there where the moon could get at him, entirely visible, making no attempt whatever to be otherwise.
He did not come any further.
He looked up at the balcony one moment longer, and then went to the old ash tree at the edge of the lawn and put his shoulder against it and waited.
And that was all.
Amelia stood at the rail with her heart going hard enough to feel in her throat.
He had not called out, or waved, or asked her for anything at all.
He had simply put himself on the one piece of ground in England that could ruin him, in plain sight, and stopped there — close enough to be seen, far enough that she could turn round and go to bed and he would never once mention it to her afterward.
She went inside without deciding to, already reaching for the pins in her hair, already crossing to the glass to see what he would see.
She brushed it out properly this time, not the quick plait she usually managed for bed, and pinched some color into her cheeks the way her old nurse had taught her — a trick for winter mornings, never meant for this — and stood a moment studying her own reflection with an attention she rarely gave it, her breath still not entirely steady.
Then she chose the blue gown, the one that did not need a maid to fasten, and dressed with hands that were not quite steady, her skin already warm beneath the fabric before she had even reached the door.
She crossed to it.
And, very slowly, she opened it.
◆◆◆
Amelia came through the gap in the fence already listening for him, and found him waiting on her side of it, half in shadow beneath the old ash tree, close enough that she nearly walked into him before she saw him at all.
"You are on my land."
"I am aware." He kept his voice pitched to match hers — quiet enough that no one beyond the tree would catch more than a murmur. "I needed to speak with you."
"I had gathered that much."
"Yes." Something that was almost a smile. "I thought you might have."
He did not say anything for a moment.
"I have thought about the other night a good deal," he said. "I did not wish to leave it where we left it."
"It was your own doing that left it there."
"It was."
He did not defend himself, and he did not apologize either, and Amelia found she preferred that to whatever she had been braced for.
"Then say what you came to say."
"The thing I have kept hidden since I came here was never my name," Benjamin said. "That was only the part anyone could see. What I have actually been protecting is a man in London."
Amelia went still.
"Who is he?"
"That I will not tell you, and I would rather you did not press me on it." He said it plainly. "Not because I doubt you. Because a name you do not have is a name you cannot be made to give up, by anybody, in any room, however it is put to you."
"Then tell me what he does."
"He is putting a case together. Legally, through the proper channels, on my father's behalf.
" He let that sit. "Papers. Two letters in my father's own hand.
The names of four men who sat in that courtroom and are still alive.
He has been knocking on doors in London for weeks and having most of them shut in his face, and he is going to go on knocking, and one day one of them will not shut. "
Amelia looked at him for a long moment.
"And why are you not there with him?"
"Because I am the noise." Benjamin said it without any particular drama.
"A man of my name walks into an office in London and every door in the city closes at once.
But a stranger rebuilding a ruin in a small village is a curiosity, and curiosities draw the eye, and while every eye that matters is fixed on a hill in Ashcombe, an old man in London walks up steps that nobody is watching at all. "
"You put yourself in front of it."
"I put myself where it was pointing anyway.
" He shrugged slightly. "And I will tell you the rest of it, since I am here.
If it were only my own skin, I do not believe I would trouble myself very much whether the whole county worked out who I am.
I have been the traitor's son since I was twelve.
It is not a thing that frightens me any longer.
" He looked at her. "It began to matter a great deal more a few weeks ago. "
Amelia said nothing to that.
She was working something out.
"You understand what you have just handed me," she said at last.
"Yes. The ability to put an end to my mission."
Amelia looked at him for a second, before she answered him.
"I have a feeling there are more things you are not telling me but thank you for trusting me with this. It clearly matters a great deal to you."
"You are right again, but I cannot possibly tell you everything in one night.
There will be things I do without telling you first." He continued evenly, holding her eyes.
"Not lies. I have given you my word on that and I mean to keep it.
But there are things I cannot put into your hands beforehand — because if any of them goes badly, I want you able to say, honestly and to anybody who asks, that you knew nothing of it before it happened.
" He paused. "I am telling you now so that when one of them comes, you will know which sort it was. "
"So, while you knelt there for an hour, unmoving — that is what filled your mind? Rehearsing all of that?"
"That," he said, "and a great deal more besides. It helps me steady my thoughts, more than it helps me plan lies for you, if I am honest."
She studied him, curious now. "How do you do it? An entire hour, without moving at all. I do not think I could manage five minutes."
"I learned it from a man during a mission in the east." Something in his voice softened at the memory. "For years afterward, it was the only way I knew to find any peace at all. He called it meditation."
Amelia blinked, genuinely startled. "I find my peace in sleep. You might simply try that instead."
It was meant lightly, a small tease — and she watched, too late, as something crossed behind his eyes at it. Not anger. Something quieter and worse, gone almost as quickly as it came.
"You are fortunate," he said, "that sleep comes so easily to you."
She felt the shift and moved to smooth over it before it could settle.
"Teach me, then," she said. "The meditation. If it is truly so useful."
He considered her a moment, and whatever had darkened in him eased back into something gentler.