Chapter 14 #2
"Sit," he said, and she did, on the cool grass beneath the tree, and he lowered himself across from her.
"The whole of it, in the beginning, is only this — control your breathing, and let your mind wander wherever it wishes.
Do not fight the thoughts. Do not try to stop them.
Only let them pass through, the way weather passes over a field. "
She closed her eyes, drew a slow breath, held it a beat too long, and opened her eyes again almost immediately.
"That is all there is to it?"
"In the beginning, yes." A faint smile. "In time you learn to hold the reins a little more — not to silence the thoughts, but to choose which ones you allow to consume your day, rather than letting them choose for you.
It is difficult at first. Nearly everyone gives up before it becomes worth anything.
But it repays the difficulty tenfold, if you stay with it. "
"I want to try again."
This time she took it seriously — spine straight, hands still in her lap, breath drawn slow and deliberate — and Benjamin, watching, reached out to correct the set of her shoulders, two fingers against her back, guiding her posture with a gentleness that made her breath catch for reasons that had nothing to do with meditation at all.
A gust of wind came through the trees just then, lifting a loose strand of hair across her face. She turned her head, instinctively, before catching herself and holding still again, as he had told her.
Benjamin saw it happen.
He did not reach for her with his hand. Instead he leaned closer, and blew the strand gently aside — careful, deliberate, close enough that she felt the warmth of his breath against her cheek before she felt anything else at all.
Her eyes opened.
His face was inches from hers.
Neither of them moved for a long moment. Then, without either of them quite deciding it, the distance closed, and he kissed her.
It was slow, and warm, and entirely unlike the many things she had imagined it might be — surer, somehow, and gentler, as though he had been waiting a very long time and had no intention of rushing it now that it had finally come.
Her hand found the front of his shirt. His found the curve of her jaw, careful, as though she might startle and vanish if he moved too quickly.
When they parted, neither of them spoke at first. He took her hand instead, threading his fingers through hers, and they sat there together beneath the tree in the dark.
"So," he said finally, a smile in his voice. "How was it?"
"Not ideal," she said. "But plausible."
They both laughed, low and quiet, and he shook his head.
"I meant the meditation. What did you think of, when your eyes were closed?"
"I will not tell you that." A small, teasing lift of her chin. "You never told me what filled yours."
"Fair enough." He turned her hand over gently in his, tracing the lines of her palm without seeming to notice he was doing it. "I was replaying in my mind our last conversation. Though I confess, I never did hear the whole of it — how you came to know the truth about me. You never said."
"By accident, if I am honest." She held his eyes.
"I do not think it matters how, in the end.
But two of my father's associates came to visit.
One of them told us — told my father, mostly — that the old Duke's son had been spared.
Sent into the army. And once I had that piece, everything else I already knew fell into place around it. "
Something in Benjamin's face went very still.
"Not many people know that," he said quietly. "I believed there was only one man visiting. And he has come to Ashcombe before."
"Yes." Amelia's voice tightened, some of the ease going out of the moment. "Earl Somerset. This time there was a second man with him as well. Earl Harrington."
The color drained from Benjamin's face and came back wrong — a dark flush along his jaw, his eyes closing for a moment as though against some sudden pain.
When he opened them again, something in his expression had gone somewhere Amelia had never seen it go before.
Cold. Distant. Dangerous in a way that had nothing performed in it at all.
"You know him," she said carefully.
He did not answer. He looked down at the ground between them, jaw locked, hands closed into loose fists at his sides, and for a moment he seemed to have forgotten she was there entirely.
Amelia drew back, just slightly, before she could stop herself.
He saw it.
Whatever had gripped him let go all at once. His shoulders dropped. His face came back to himself, stricken now rather than dangerous.
"I am sorry," he said. "That was not meant for you."
"What is it?" she asked gently. "Benjamin. What has he done?"
He was quiet a long moment before he answered.
"He is the man responsible for my parents' deaths.
" His voice had gone flat, controlled, the way a man speaks when the alternative is not speaking at all.
"I do not know the whole of it yet — not the particulars, not how he managed what he managed.
But I know he was behind it. I remember hearing his name once, a fragment of it, the night everything came apart — I was a child, half-asleep, and I have carried it since without ever being certain what it meant. Now I am certain."
Amelia felt something cold settle into her own chest.
"He told my father he was a friend of your family," she said. "He said your father's fall grieved him."
Benjamin looked at her, and then past her, toward the black shape of Russell Hall against the sky.
"Thank you," he said quietly, "for telling me."
"What will you do now?"
He was silent a moment, and then, slowly, something almost like a smile returned to his face — smaller than before, but genuine.
"I am going to go and think of the happiest thing that has happened to me in a very long while," he said. "Until my mind is quiet again."
"I hope it works."
"It will." He reached for her hand once more, drew her closer, and kissed her a second time — slower than the first, deliberate, as though he meant to fix the memory in place for exactly the purpose he had just described. "Though I think repetition shall make certain of it."
She understood, then, precisely what he meant.
They stood together a moment longer beneath the tree, saying nothing further, before they parted — she back through the gap in the fence toward her own dark house, and he toward his, the night closing quietly behind them both.
◆◆◆
Benjamin came back through the gap in the fence with his jaw still tight and his hands not yet steady, and he did not slow his stride until the roses stopped him.