3. A Dull Dinner Improves #2
It was indecently refreshing.
“You would publish everything?” she asked.
“No.”
That answer surprised her. “No?”
“Truth matters. So does harm. The difficulty is that the powerful are very fond of borrowing the language of harm when they mean embarrassment.”
Genevieve felt the Wire note in memory, though it lay locked far from this room. A child reduced to two words. A scandal that might become appetite. She looked at Daniel and saw no easy cruelty in him, which made him more difficult to dismiss.
“And the press,” she said, “is very fond of borrowing the language of truth when it means circulation.”
“Also agreed.”
“Mr. Hartley, if you continue agreeing with me, this argument may suffer.”
“Then say something indefensible.”
“The undersecretary’s speech had moments of substance.”
“That is not indefensible. It is perjury.”
Her laugh escaped again, warmer this time. Daniel looked pleased and faintly alarmed by his own pleasure.
The library door opened. A gentleman peered in, saw them, hesitated, and withdrew with the careful expression of a man who had interrupted either flirtation or political sedition and preferred not to testify.
Genevieve glanced toward the door. “We are about to become material.”
“For your column?”
“For someone else’s. I do not print myself.”
“A severe limitation.”
“A necessary discipline.”
Daniel took up his glass from the table, though he still did not drink. “Do you always sound as if your virtues have been edited?”
The question struck closer than he knew. For half a second Genevieve’s practiced answer did not arrive.
Then she smiled. “Only in rooms where evasion carries.”
CAB WHEELS AND UNFINISHED SENTENCES
The night had turned wet while the dinner pretended permanence.
By the time Genevieve descended the front steps, the pavement shone beneath the lamps and the waiting cabs gave off the mingled smells of damp wool, horse, leather, and London soot.
Footmen moved with umbrellas. Guests emerged in little bursts of silk and black coats, each departure wrapped in thanks, false regret, and calculations about who had been seen leaving with whom.
Daniel Hartley appeared beside her without ceremony.
“Miss Ashby. Your cab?”
“I believe that exhausted horse is mine. We have much in common.”
“You conceal it better.”
“I have had more practice than the horse.”
A footman opened an umbrella. Daniel took it with a nod before the man could decide whether a journalist was authorised to be useful. He held it over Genevieve with practical care, not courtly flourish. The distinction pleased her inordinately.
They walked the short distance to the cab.
Short distances, Genevieve had found, could become treacherous when neither party wished to waste them.
“You will write about the speech?” Daniel asked.
“Not directly. It would be unkind to the speech to expose it to readers.”
“Mercy again.”
“Taste, Mr. Hartley. We covered this.”
“I am still unconvinced that taste should be allowed near evidence.”
“And I remain unconvinced that evidence should be allowed out without a chaperone.”
He looked down at her. Raindrops tapped the umbrella above them, small and quick. “Do you ever tire of turning everything into a sentence?”
Yes, she thought.
The answer rose so plainly that it startled her. Yes, she tired of sentences, of masks, of turning danger into phrasing and exhaustion into wit. Yes, sometimes she wanted a fact to remain unarranged long enough to feel honest.
She said, “Only when the sentence is poor.”
Something in his expression suggested he had heard the evasion without knowing its shape.
The cabman adjusted his reins. The horse stamped once, splashing a little water near the kerb.
Daniel offered his hand to help her step up.
Genevieve looked at it. A bare second too long. His gloves were dark, plain, rain-specked. She placed her hand in his because refusing would have made the moment visible, and because accepting it was worse.
His grip was steady: no squeeze, no presumption, only warmth through kid leather and the brief, absurd sensation of being assisted by a man who had spent the evening arguing against every professional instinct she possessed.
She stepped into the cab and settled her skirts.
“Mr. Hartley,” she said.
“Miss Ashby.”
There was nothing more to say that would not reveal too much. Not factually. Fact was safe. Feeling was the dangerous evidence.
He seemed to reach the same conclusion. His mouth tilted. “I hope society survives your restraint.”
“I hope Fleet Street survives your principles.”
“It has tried not to.”
“Then you must persist out of spite.”
“Principle, Miss Ashby.”
“As I said.”
The cabman clicked to the horse. The wheels began to turn, slow at first over the wet stones.
Genevieve should have looked ahead. Instead she looked back once.
Daniel stood beneath the borrowed umbrella at the kerb, watching the cab pull away with an expression too thoughtful to be social and too unguarded to be dismissed as professional. The lamplight caught the rain around him and turned the street into a blurred black mirror.
Genevieve faced forward before he could see her smile.
Inside the cab, away from the house, away from the footmen, away from the company of people who mistook polish for safety, she let the smile stay.
Only for a moment.
Then she folded her hands in her lap and reminded herself that interesting men were often inconvenient, that journalists were professionally impossible, and that arguments in libraries did not alter the structure of one’s life.
The cab wheels answered with a rhythm that sounded suspiciously like disagreement.