Chapter Thirty
“I do not dance,” said Gideon.
“I know,” said Cecilia.
“I have not danced in eleven years.”
“I know that too.”
“I am going to stand in a room full of people who will stare at me, and I am going to do it for three hours, and then we are going home.”
“Two hours,” she said. “I told Mrs Fenn two hours.”
“Two hours.” He looked out the carriage window, where the assembly rooms had come into view at the end of the village street, lit from within, the musicians’ tuning carrying even over the wheels. “I could develop a complaint.”
“You could not. You are in excellent health, and you know it.”
“I might be sickening for something.”
“You have not sickened for anything in all the months I have known you. You are aggressively well. It is one of your least convenient qualities.”
“I shall endeavour to be sick more often, if it would oblige you.”
“It would not. It would only alarm the children. Be well, and be brave, and we shall be home by ten.”
He said nothing to that. She looked at his profile in the carriage light, a man who had committed to a course and not yet settled whether to complain the whole way or only the first part.
She put her hand over his. He looked down at it and then at her.
“If anyone stares,” she said, “I shall say something so cutting they will wish they had found something else to look at.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “That is, I suspect, not the diplomatic approach.”
“I am not always diplomatic. I am sometimes accurate.”
He turned his hand beneath hers and held it. “Two hours.”
“Two hours. And then we go home.”
The rooms were full, the first assembly of February, the neighbourhood six weeks indoors and full of opinions about it.
Gideon walked in, and she caught the moment the room registered them, the small sequential turn of one person noticing and the next, the sound of it shifting for three seconds and then resuming.
She kept her gaze off the people who were looking and walked with him steadily, because to hurry would have said a thing she had no intention of saying.
His arm was rigid under her hand, held in its position by an act of will. She pressed her hand to it lightly.
“The musicians are better than I expected,” she said, in a tone pitched for him. He did not answer once. “The violinist in particular.”
“She is,” he said, and his voice had evened a degree, which was enough for the moment.
Mr Hartley from the estate two miles east came to greet them, having decided the Duke of Aldenmere’s reappearance was entirely unremarkable and meaning to conduct himself accordingly.
“Aldenmere. It has been an age. You will not recall it, but you settled a boundary question for my father, by letter, some ten years past, entirely in his favour and against your own interest. He never afterwards stopped mentioning it.”
“I recall the boundary,” said Gideon. “I do not recall it being against my interest.”
“It was. You were young and scrupulous to a fault, and I am given to understand the fault has not improved with age.”
“It has not,” said Gideon, and Hartley laughed, and the worst three seconds of the evening were behind them without Cecilia having been required to do anything at all.
He introduced his wife, who looked at Gideon frankly and said she understood the east gardens were being restored, and that she had always held the view that the beeches were one of the finest in the county in autumn.
“I think so too,” said Cecilia.
“The roses will come in by April,” said Gideon, after a beat.
“You are very confident of your roses, Your Grace.”
“I have planned for them for ten years,” he said. “Confidence seemed the least I owed them.”
It went on like that, a second conversation and a third, and the rigidity began to go out of his arm. He was not performing, only standing in the room being what he was, and the neighbourhood, meeting that, found it was not the beast it had imagined for a decade.
Between the second and third sets, in the small interval, he asked her to dance, quietly, as he said things he had decided on and would not hedge. “Dance with me.”
“You said you did not dance.”
“I said I had not danced in eleven years. Those are different statements.”
She let the laugh come, the warm, close one. “Indeed. They are.”
He led her onto the floor and danced, his eyes on her face rather than their feet, which she took as a compliment.
“You are not the beast they imagine,” she said, between measures.
“Am I not?”
“No. You are considerably more inconvenient. The beast was simple. You are not simple in the least.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“It is an observation. I make no complaints.”
“They are watching us,” he said.
“They are, and they may. You dance like a man crossing a frozen pond, testing each step before he trusts his weight to it, and it is the most romantic thing the county has witnessed in a decade.”
“You are enjoying my discomfort.”
“I am enjoying your courage. The two look much alike from the outside, and you will have to trust me on the distinction.”
“You are doing very well,” he said, and she understood that he meant the dancing and also everything else, and she received it in the same register.
“I know. You told me.”
“I shall tell you again,” he said, “at intervals, until you find it tiresome.”
“I shall never find it tiresome. You may take that as a standing instruction.”
They came off the floor and stood shoulder to shoulder by the refreshment table, and a small bright-eyed woman introduced herself, Mrs Alderton, the rector’s wife.
“You have three children at Aldenmere now, I am told. Are they settling?”
“They are,” said Cecilia.
“How lovely. And how good for the house, to have children in it again.” Then she turned to Gideon, with a frank warmth, having decided the thing and meaning to say it. “We are very glad, Your Grace, to have you among us again.”
She said it plainly, with none of the small protections people put around a difficult thing to make it easier, and to his face.
Gideon looked at her for a moment. “Thank you,” he said, with the same directness, and beside him something in the room settled, nothing announced, only the quiet definite settling of a door that had stood ajar a long time and now stood open.
“We will not be doing that again,” he said when they were in the carriage.
“You danced. You spoke to half the county. Mrs Alderton is composing a letter about you at this very moment, and it will be a kind one.”
“That is precisely my objection. I have spent a decade comfortably regarded as a monster, which required no effort. This will require maintenance.”
“You will manage. You have me to make the cutting remarks, should the maintenance ever fail you.”
“That is the single part of the arrangement I find wholly satisfactory.”
“We will do it again, in any event, when the girls wish to be presented. Years from now.”
“Years from now is a different matter.”
“It is,” she agreed, and put her head on his shoulder, and he put his arm round her without comment, as one does the obvious thing.
The carriage turned into the Aldenmere drive, the house lit from within because she had left the lamps burning, and she liked to come home to a lit house, to the evidence of its being lived in before she was inside it.
“We are home,” she said.
“Yes. We are,” he said, and pressed his lips to her hair.
The footman opened the door, and they went in, out of the February dark and into the warmth of the house that had been waiting for them.