Chapter Seven
The Yule log had been cut before the snow, a great butt of seasoned oak left waiting by the stable wall.
Now, in the blue cold of Christmas Eve afternoon, the men dragged it over to the house on ropes, with much shouting, slipping, and unnecessary advice from Miss Pettibone, who had wedged herself in the doorway in a state of high delight.
The duke hauled with the rest, coatless and with his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow.
Ophelia had come to the door only to persuade Miss Pettibone back to the fireside, but found herself unable to leave.
The men’s laughter, the creak of the rope, Adrian with snow in his dark hair and his idle elegance forgotten in the plain effort of pulling: the sight held her transfixed.
He saw her. He always saw her now.
Instead of waving or calling out some gallant nonsense, he only grinned at her, breathless and conspiratorial, as if she were in on a great joke with him, and bent again to the rope.
Ophelia made herself look away. She took Miss Pettibone’s arm and went inside, her heart thumping foolishly.
The log was brought in, set in the vast hearth, and lit with a saved splinter of last year’s, for the luck of it, Bronwen explained. As darkness came down, the fire grew until the hall was washed in amber and the cold driven into the corners, though a draught still crept under the great door.
The wassail bowl arrived steaming, a great brown sea of spiced ale.
Everyone exclaimed over it and to Ophelia’s dismay, Mrs. Probert promptly disclaimed all credit, insisting it had been made to Miss Jones’s special recipe.
Adrian stopped with the cup at his lips, an arrested stillness catching his face, and Ophelia pretended not to see it.
Then the waits came, heard first as a thread of music in the frozen dark.
The singers from the village below struggled up through the drifts with a lantern and a fiddle, as they had every Christmas Eve out of memory.
The household crowded to the door and flung it open, and the carols came in on the cold: Ar Hyd y Nos in Welsh, then While Shepherds Watched in English, the singers’ breath steaming in the lantern light.
Lady Elise sent out gingerbread, hot wassail, and Christmas coin. Adrian stood beside Ophelia in the doorway watching the singers, and neither of them spoke.
It was the happiest she had been since her mother died.
She had not meant to let down her guard. The warmth of the season somehow got into her regardless: voices raised together in carols of praise, the sweetness of the wassail still on her tongue.
After the waits had been thanked and fed and sent home, the household settled into the lazy quiet that followed. Somewhere in the long evening, Ophelia found herself sitting with Adrian in the deep window seat at the end of the hall, where frost had begun to flower on the glass.
She never knew how it began or how it became so easy. They spoke first of the fine singing by the waits, and Sir Rhys’s dreadful coat. Then, by degrees she did not follow, they began to speak of true things.
Adrian told her, lightly and in fragments, of the fierce old grandfather who had thought Adrian a waste of space, and of the uncle who should have inherited.
His own father had been charming, feckless, and dead by the time Adrian was twelve, after his uncle just a year earlier, still unwed, leaving Adrian the only surviving heir to the title, much to his grandfather’s fury.
He made a joke of it, but Ophelia had learned to hear what lay beneath his comedy, as he had learned to hear what lay beneath her silence.
“And so I became excellent at leaving rooms,” he said, turning his cup between his hands. “The moment anything grows heavy, I am gone, charming to the last. My aunt calls it my gift.”
He glanced at her, and for once his smile looked like an effort.
“I tell you this because you have the most disconcerting way of listening, and because you are the only person I have met in years who appears to want nothing from me. It is extraordinarily restful.” He watched her, thoughtful.
“I cannot decide whether you dislike me or only mistrust everything I represent.”
The question was too close to the bone.
She felt the danger of it as one feels the edge of river ice underfoot. Safety required that she rise, make her excuses, and go upstairs.
Instead, she looked at him.
The firelight moved across his face, his eyes steady and level as he watched her, but there was no demand in his expression.
Only hope, that she might choose to open one of the doors she kept locked and guarded.
He had asked a real question, plainly and without a hook, and he was waiting for a real answer.
“I do not dislike you,” she said at last. “I am afraid of you. They are not the same, though I have spent a long while pretending they were.”
Something in his expression changed, but he did not interrupt.
“You have refrained from questioning me,” she continued. “I appreciate it. I will allow you one question tonight, and then I must go up.”
“A dangerous gift,” he said gravely.
“Spend it wisely.”
He considered, turning his cup.
“You understand useful work in a way I do not. You know the larder and the linen, the price of tallow and how long the stores will last. Where did you learn it?”
The question made her catch her breath, though he had asked it gently, his eyes on the fire rather than on her, leaving her every avenue of retreat. And considering, it was a far less dangerous question than many he might have asked.
She found that she could give him one true piece without giving him the whole.
“My father is a man of business. A great deal of business. I grew up among ledgers, clerks, and ships’ manifests. I could cast up a column before I could sew a straight stitch. He intended another life for me, but the skills were acquired all the same.”
Adrian nodded slowly, thoughtfully. He said nothing, though she was sure more questions were burning his tongue. She respected him all the more for his choosing not to press.
“There,” she said, lifting her chin. “That is more than I have told anyone in this house. I do not know why I have told you, except that you have a very unfair way of asking.”
“It is my single talent,” he said. “Making people tell me what they had rather not. My grandfather considered it a most ungentlemanly accomplishment.”
He smiled, but his eyes still spoke of more questions.
“Thank you, Miss Jones. I shall abide by our bargain and ask nothing more, though you should know that speaking of your father in the present tense rather invites another.”
She had slipped, and he had seen it. Her heart began to pound with sudden panic.
He did not press his advantage, though. He merely showed her where she had left herself exposed and allowed her to close the door.
“It grows late,” she said quickly, rising to hurry away.
She was shaken less by the knowledge in his eyes than by what he had chosen not to do with it.
Miss Pettibone caught her on the stairs and said what Ophelia had not allowed herself so much as to think.
The old lady waited on the half-landing, her candle throwing a small circle of light. She took both Ophelia’s hands in hers, her whole face bright with certainty.
“My dear, I shall say nothing to a living soul, so you may be easy. But I have eyes in my head, whatever else the good Lord has taken, and I know the look of a man who has left off playing.” Miss Pettibone beamed at her. “His Grace is grown serious about you.”
Ophelia shook her head in denial.
“Oh, do not tell me otherwise. I have lived a great while. A woman learns some things even when no one thinks to explain them.”
Miss Pettibone pressed Ophelia’s hands, kissed her cheek, and went into her room, serenely certain that she had done a great kindness.
Ophelia shut her own door and stood in the darkness with one hand pressed over her mouth.
His Grace is grown serious about you.
The foolish, romantic old woman who thought every story ended in a wedding had spoken aloud the one hope Ophelia had kept deliberately in darkness. Pettibone had held a candle to it, and now Ophelia could not pretend she had not seen it.
She got into bed and lay looking at the ceiling, the sheets cold enough to sting until her own warmth beat it back.
She had allowed herself one warm evening. She had given him something willingly, a truth placed deliberately in his hands rather than a secret let slip by accident.
He had found the flaw in it all the same. Worse, he had warned her and asked nothing more.
I cannot decide whether you dislike me or only mistrust everything I represent.
Neither, she thought into the darkness.
That was the danger.
For this one night, she would not make herself think of the thaw, or of what still waited for her in the world beyond the snow. Tonight she would only remember his hand warm in hers as she freed him from the ribbon, and how easy it had felt to be simply Olivia Jones.