Chapter 5 #2
She could not see it. The water was opaque, black with the peat, murky at the bottom with disturbed silt.
The necklace was somewhere in there, a foot down in cold water and mud.
The clasp had been failing for months; she had been meaning to have it repaired, and now it was at the bottom of a ditch on the Yorkshire fell, and she was standing at the edge of it making an involuntary inventory of everything it represented.
Her uncle. The only person who had ever been hers in the particular, permanent way that parents are supposed to be.
The Christmas when he gave it to her, both of them pretending it was not because he had no other present and she had no other person.
The weight of it at her throat every day for five years.
The thin, tarnished, entirely worthless proof that someone had once thought of her when he did not have to.
She was not going to cry about this. She absolutely was not going to cry about this.
She crouched at the edge of the ditch and reached down. The water was bitterly cold, and her fingers sank into the muddy bottom but found nothing. She reached further. The water came over her wrist. Rose, who had turned when she heard the sound, was watching with wide, serious eyes from the path.
“I can see it,” Rose said. “A bit to the left.”
Cynthia moved her fingers left. Cold, dark, silted mud. Nothing. Her eyes were stinging, which was entirely due to the cold air. She pressed her fingers along the bottom, searching…
“Miss Browne.”
She looked up.
Declan was on the path above them.
She had no idea how long he had been there.
He was not, to her knowledge, in the habit of walking this particular path.
She found him watching the moor through the study window often enough, but this was different.
Perhaps he had been walking. Perhaps he had been following them from the moment they left the house.
He looked at her hand in the ditch and then at her face.
She knew what her face was doing. She could feel the stillness, the shield she’d raised a moment too late, because he was already watching.
She straightened, took her wet hand out of the cold water and pressed it against her coat. “The clasp failed,” she said. “My necklace.”
He said nothing. He looked at the ditch. Then he looked at her face again, and she watched him read it. All of it. The things unsaid. The loss underneath. He was very good, she had discovered over these weeks, at reading the things people were not saying.
He stepped off the path and into the ditch.
His boots went in to the ankle immediately.
He did not hesitate, did not look down at them, did not acknowledge that they were Hessians; she knew enough about gentlemen’s attire to know what Hessians cost, going into six inches of black moorland peat water as though this were an entirely ordinary thing to do.
He reached down without ceremony, his fingers sinking below the surface, and he searched the bottom methodically, steadily, because he had decided he would find it.
Rose, from the path, watched with the absolute stillness of a child witnessing something significant.
Cynthia could not speak. She stood at the edge of the ditch with her wet hand and her face doing something she was not fully in control of while she watched him stand in the water in his ruined boots and search for a dead clergyman’s necklace.
He found it.
She could tell from the slight change in the angle of his arm, a shift of the wrist, a closing of the fingers. He straightened and opened his hand.
The necklace lay across his palm, black with peat water, the cross tilted sideways, the broken clasp trailing. He looked at it for a moment. Then he stepped out of the ditch and held it out to her.
She took it from his palm. His fingers closed briefly over hers as she did, not a grip, not even a clasp, only the half-second contact of a hand completing a transfer, and then he released her.
She was standing on the path with the necklace pressed between both her hands and the Duke looking at her.
“You should have the clasp repaired,” he said. “The silversmith in Thornwick is competent.”
He stepped back, looked down at his boots, assessing, then turned and walked back along the path toward the house without looking back.
Rose, beside Cynthia, was watching him go with enormous eyes.
“Uncle got muddy,” she said.
Cynthia could not speak. She held the necklace against her chest with both hands and watched him walk away.
Who are you, she thought without meaning to, without any of the careful reservations she generally attached to thoughts about him.
He was nearly at the rise now, his figure dark against the gold of the late morning light.
Who are you, she thought again, while she was standing on a moorland path feeling something she had no intention of examining today.
“Come on,” she said to Rose, in a voice that was almost entirely steady. “We should get back.”
They walked home across the fell, and everything was exactly as it had been an hour ago except that it was entirely different somehow. Cynthia held the necklace in her fist the whole way back and did not let herself think.
She discovered it that evening.
She had gone to change before dinner and had set the necklace on her bedside table because she could not put it on without a clasp. She stood looking at it for longer than was probably warranted before going downstairs. After supper, returning to her room, she looked at it again.
Sometime during the next day, it was gone.
She registered its absence at the bedside table and felt the small drop of her stomach.
On her way downstairs, she passed the hall table, and had she not been looking for her necklace, it would never have caught her attention.
There was a small box on it. Plain wood, the kind a jeweller might use.
Set precisely in the center of the table, where the handkerchief had once sat folded, where the biscuit plate appeared twice a week.
The necklace lay inside on a fold of clean cloth. Cleaned, every trace of peat removed, and the silver polished to a brightness it had not had in years. And the clasp: new. Neat, strong, professionally fitted, the work of a silversmith who knew what he was doing.
No note.
She looked at the empty box for a long moment.
She thought about Thornwick, and a silversmith, and the hours between yesterday morning on the fell and this morning at her bedside table, and the logistical fact that someone had arranged several things in the interval with no announcement and no expectation of appreciation.
She put the necklace on. It sat at her throat where it had always sat and the new clasp held cleanly. She went back to her room, stood at her small window, looked at the heath, and thought: He pays attention to everything. And then he fixes it, quietly, with no note, and walks away.