Chapter Five
By the middle of December, Adrian was prepared to declare the siege of Miss Jones the worst-conducted campaign since Walcheren, and he had never enjoyed anything half so much.
Every approach failed. She made placid observations on the weather and ignored his gentle teasing, pretending not to understand, though he was sure he saw the occasional spark of amusement in her eyes.
Or perhaps annoyance. it was impossible to tell.
The new novel he left where she must find it came back to its shelf unread.
Adrian redoubled his efforts to make himself approachable.
He carried in wood for the fires and hauled crates up from the cellar without being asked, until the boot-boy stopped troubling to fetch anything himself.
He made himself agreeable to every creature at Plas Eira, down to the half-wild stable cat, who had lately begun to tolerate him.
The household opened to him like a Christmas orange, all save the quiet, grey-gowned woman around whom it apparently now revolved.
He knew who she was, or was nearly certain. Ophelia James, the vanished nabob’s daughter, the heiress whose flight from her own wedding had been the talk of London. What held him now was how thoroughly she had disappeared into Olivia Jones, and how rarely the woman beneath allowed herself to show.
She was a magnificent actress. Adrian, who had talked his way past guarded doors across fashionable Europe and once even charmed a smile out of his grandfather, was being held at bay by a woman armed with the weather and a cough.
Her dullness was not a failing but a fortification, each flat answer fitted against the next until a man could find no purchase anywhere.
No one built such walls around nothing, and he could not quite understand what her walls were for, anyway.
The grey weight of duty had not found him in Wales.
He woke curious, a sensation he had almost forgotten, and each day presented itself as something to be anticipated rather than escaped.
He avoided considering what that meant. Avoidance was, after all, the one discipline he had practised faithfully.
The day of the ledgers shook him all the same.
He entered the small library on a grey afternoon in search of nothing, his usual errand, and found Miss Jones at the writing table with his aunt’s household books open before her, the fire behind her burned down to embers. She had not heard him enter.
For ten heartbeats, he watched the dull Miss Jones become someone else entirely. Her pen moved swiftly down the columns, figures dropping into place without hesitation. This was no young lady’s careful arithmetic; it was the sure, unhesitating hand of someone who had kept accounts for years.
Then she saw him.
The ledger closed a breath too quickly, the only clumsy thing he had seen her do since that dropped spoon at dinner. The woman with the pen was folded away, and Miss Jones rose in her place.
“Lady Elise wished her accounts examined, Your Grace. The steward’s sums were unreliable.”
“Were they?” He kept his tone as idle as hers.
“Yes. I have finished now.” She moved towards the door, the ledger already returned to its place on the shelf. “The snow seems likely to continue.”
“It does seem so.”
Adrian stood aside to let her pass. He did not ask why his aunt had entrusted the household accounts to a charity goddaughter, or how that goddaughter cast columns like the chief clerk of a trading house.
He already knew, or believed he knew, the name she was hiding. The ledger had shown him something more interesting: what she could do when she forgot to hide herself.
His other source of intelligence was Miss Pettibone, and a more cheerfully catastrophic informant no man had ever possessed.
He understood that she had been assigned to him and that his aunt meant her to be an encumbrance. He submitted good-humouredly, partly because he was fond of the old creature and partly because a man being managed often learned more than one being resisted.
The difficulty lay in the quality of the information divulged.
Miss Pettibone would talk about Miss Jones for hours, requiring no encouragement beyond an attentive face, and everything she knew was wrong in a different direction.
Miss Jones’s father, Adrian learned, had been in shipping, or possibly the Church.
He was dead now, poor gentleman, unless he was living retired abroad.
Miss Jones had come to Lady Elise a month ago, or perhaps two, or even three, from circumstances into which Miss Pettibone had never enquired, because one did not.
They had certainly been very trying. His Grace would have remarked her eyes, in those first days; it had taken quite a few days, or weeks, or even a month or two, at Plas Eira before she began to look a little less haunted.
Miss Jones was four-and-twenty, or nineteen.
She had no fortune, which was a great pity, for she had been brought up grand as a bishop’s daughter, which she was, of course.
One could always tell by the curtsey. Miss Pettibone’s mother had said a curtsey was a woman’s whole history told in a single motion, and Miss Jones’s was history of the first water.
“I have noticed it,” Adrian said truthfully.
He had rarely seen a lady of any age move with the grace Miss Jones showed in every step.
She walked like water flowing, frictionless, and though he suspected it was meant to be part of her disguise, part of what made her unnoticed, he found it entirely fascinating.
“There.” Miss Pettibone gave a deeply contented nod over her knitting, the needles never once slowing.
“I told Lady Elise how it was. He notices everything, I said. It is quite the most promising thing I ever saw. And she said, ‘That is what I am afraid of, Pettibone,’ which I did not perfectly catch, but I am sure was very right, for dear Lady Elise is always right.”
Out of the harvest of nonsense, Adrian kept two things: that something in Ophelia’s past had been very trying indeed, and that his aunt had said, That is what I am afraid of.
This was not, he thought, the remark of a woman guarding a poor relation from a rake, for his aunt knew perfectly well he would never treat her goddaughter badly. It sounded far more like the remark of a woman who feared what Adrian might uncover merely by paying attention.
Lady Elise had never been particularly fond of cards, but it was apparent that her small household required diversion beyond Miss Pettibone’s catastrophically muddled readings after dinner, and thus, one particularly cold evening, she suggested a game of whist. Adrian was given Miss Pettibone as his partner.
Lady Elise, there being no help for it in the arithmetic of her drawing room, took Miss Jones.
Miss Pettibone played enthusiastically, following no system anyone could discern. She revoked twice, serene as a cardinal, and trumped Adrian’s winning king because the knave had, she said, a sly face and wanted taking down.
Adrian watched his hand collapse into ruin in some amusement. His real attention was at his left elbow, where Miss Jones was being dull at cards.
She played a shade too slowly. Twice she hesitated over an obvious discard, and once she asked what were trumps. To anyone else, it was mild incompetence. To a man who was already certain she was playing a part, it was theatre.
Her eyes were too still and her mistakes too carefully placed. She was not failing to play; she was playing down, and the effort cost her something every trick.
He was more fascinated than ever.
Aunt Elise, perhaps recognising too late that the close proximity of the card table was a mistake, declared them done after Miss Pettibone destroyed yet another winning hand of Adrian’s, and called for tea.
Miss Jones retreated, plainly relieved, to her usual chair in a shadowed corner near the fire.
Then came the music, and the music finished him.
Miss Pettibone insisted upon it. Dear Miss Jones must play. The instrument was never opened, and Christmas was coming. There could be no denying her.
Miss Jones offered just the right measure of modest reluctance before sitting at his aunt’s pianoforte.
She gave them the dullest performance Adrian had ever been privileged to attend: a very quietly sung hymn taken at the pace of a funeral barge, an occasional wrong note on the instrument marring the song, though he noted her voice did not match the error.
Aunt Elise nodded along. Miss Pettibone, who surely could not hear a note, kept gracious time with her knitting needle, twice as fast and in another measure altogether.
In the third verse, for perhaps four bars, Miss Jones forgot herself.
A phrase came through clean and shapely, the inner notes given their weight, a natural authority in the hands, her voice rising clear as a bell. Then her guard returned. The funeral pace resumed, the volume of her voice dipped even lower than it had been previously, and the next wrong note arrived.
Adrian kept his eyes on the fire until the hymn had laboured to its conclusion.
“Most instructive, Miss Jones. I have never heard that piece taken with such restraint.”
He won for his pains the briefest flick of a glance. Something that was not dullness looked out at him, took his measure to the inch, and slammed the door again.
He toasted it privately with his aunt’s dreadful apple brandy, harsh enough to sting his throat.
I saw you, he did not say. Only for four bars, but I saw you.
He would have liked to hear her perform that piece as well as she was truly capable of doing. He suspected he might have enjoyed it as much as he had ever enjoyed anything in his life.
His aunt knocked on his door as he was just about to retire for bed that night, the stub of a candle in the stick she carried guttering low as she glared at him above the dim flicker.
“You are laying siege to that child, Adrian. Do not trouble to lie to me. I have watched you do it for a fortnight, and I am asking you to stop. You gave me your word. Nothing at all, you said.”
“I have asked her nothing, Aunt. Not one single question about anything more personal than her opinion of the weather or whether she would like another slice from the roast. Would you have me send her to Coventry, and speak not a single word to her? I do not think even I can make my manners so poor.”
All of which was true, and he heard for himself how little it answered.
The candlelight moved on Elise’s face and showed him how tired she was. When she spoke again, the anger had gone out of her voice, which was far worse.
“There are people in this world who can afford to be found interesting, and people who cannot. You have never once in your life had to be no one, Adrian. She has.” Elise looked at him steadily. “Do not make a game of her safety, however kindly you mean it.”
She took her candle and went, leaving him alone on the dark landing with nothing to say, the cold of the stone floor climbing through his stockinged feet before he thought to move.