Chapter Nine
On St. Stephen’s Day they went out with the Christmas boxes, and Ophelia was glad of the work; it was the one thing that had always kept her from thinking.
There was plenty to do. Every tenant and servant must have the coins, meat, candles, and mended clothes Lady Elise had set aside, and with the lanes buried too deep for any cart to get through, everything had to be carried by hand, boxes and sacks balanced on hip and shoulder up paths that had been hedgerows a fortnight before.
They set out in pairs and threes. By some rearrangement of the parties that bore Miss Pettibone’s unmistakable hand, Ophelia found herself paired with Adrian for the cottages in the side valley while the others took the nearer lane.
They crossed the white shoulder of the hill together beneath a hard blue sky, each carrying a box, and Adrian several sacks slung from his shoulders, their breath hanging white in the air ahead of them. The silence between them was not quite comfortable and not quite otherwise.
The village children were out with the wren, a ragged procession carrying holly and ribbons from door to door and shouting the old rhyme.
Ophelia and Adrian stood aside to let them pass.
He watched them go, delight open on his face, a London duke thoroughly undone by a pack of Welsh children, and her foolish heart turned over again.
She looked hard at the snow instead of at his face.
“You told me you grew up among ledgers and clerks,” he said when the children had gone shrieking down the hill. “I begin to understand what that means. Six weeks here, and you know this valley better than I know estates I have possessed all my life.”
“One learns quickly when one wishes to be useful.”
“One does. You have made a study of it.”
He shifted the box on his hip and looked out across the dazzling valley. When he spoke again, the lightness had left his voice.
“I know you have reasons for keeping your past your own. I will not ask for it, nor make it mine against your will.” He glanced at her.
“But I should like you to know that you need not face whatever comes entirely alone. I am not without influence; should you like me to exert it on your behalf, you need only ask.”
Her throat closed. Cruelty she knew how to answer; this left her defenceless.
She nodded once, unable to speak, and they went on up the hill.
They had delivered all the bags and Ophelia’s box and were on their way to the very last cottage when the weather turned.
A wind struck out of the north. The light thickened to yellow, and then the snow came level into their faces. The valley vanished. One instant the far cottage stood a half-mile above them beneath its white burden; the next, the world had closed to a roaring arm’s length.
Ophelia had grown up first in India, then in London, and did not understand the danger. Adrian did. His manner changed at once, every trace of lightness gone, and his gloved hand closed around her wrist.
“The croft. There.” He pointed towards a dark shape barely visible through the driving white. “We cannot go on or back. Come.”
He hauled her from the path and across a buried field. She stumbled after him, half-blind, until they struck the low wooden door together. Adrian dragged it open against the wind and thrust her through ahead of him.
The door slammed behind them, and Ophelia peered around into the half-darkness inside. It was hardly more than a shepherd’s croft, bitterly cold and smelling of old hay and lanolin. Snow streamed past the cracks in the boards, but the walls held off the worst of the wind.
“It will blow itself out,” Adrian said, catching his breath. She heard him put some lightness back into his voice for her sake. “An hour, perhaps two. The others will have reached the nearer cottages and be sitting snug beside someone’s fire, saying what fools we were to take the high path.”
He found the driest corner and pulled down loose hay to make a seat. Then he removed Sir Rhys’s enormous greatcoat, revealing his lighter London coat beneath it, and held the heavier one out to her.
“Take this.”
“You will be cold,” she protested, though her teeth were already chattering.
“I have another, and I am warm from carrying the box. You are shaking.”
There was no point denying it. Ophelia let him wrap the greatcoat around her and sank into the hay. The coat was warm from his body and smelled faintly of wool, snow, and the Christmas greenery they had cut five days before.
Adrian sat beside her, leaving a careful foot of cold air between them.
They talked because the alternative was to listen to the storm and wonder whether anyone would come to look for them.
Adrian told her about riding a horse into the foyer of a London club for a wager, an exploit that had ended with a broken vase, a furious steward, and the horse acquiring a taste for sugared almonds.
Ophelia told him that she had never seen deep snow before coming to Wales.
“What did you have instead?”
“Rain. Heat. Ships.”
She gave him small pieces, chosen ones. The Bombay shipyards at dawn, when the first hammers rang out through the mist. The forests of masts and the smell of salt, tar, and wet timber.
The time she had found an error in a cargo account, when she was only nine, and been rewarded with a coin by a clerk who had first laughed at her and then discovered she was right.
“My mother made him apologise as well,” she said. “She considered that the more valuable part of the reward.”
“She was right.”
“She generally was.”
Adrian asked nothing about where her mother had lived or why Ophelia had left those shipyards behind. He received each small truth and did not reach for another.
The not-asking was its own kind of intimacy.
After a while, he said, “I told you I became excellent at leaving rooms. I did not tell you when I decided to.”
Ophelia waited.
“When my father died, I was twelve. They put me in black and stood me beside my grandfather at the funeral. The church was colder than this, or so I remember it. He looked down at me and said, ‘Well. You are what is left to us.’”
His voice remained light, but only just.
“What is left,” he repeated. “As though I were scrapings at the bottom of a dish. I decided then that I would be the lightest, easiest thing ever left to anyone. If I wanted nothing and attempted nothing, I could never disappoint him as thoroughly as he expected.”
“That was a terrible thing to say to a child.”
“It was the kind of thing my grandfather said.”
“And he was wrong.”
Adrian gave a quiet laugh. “My history rather supports him.”
“You carried half the valley’s Christmas on your back today.”
“A single afternoon does not make a useful life.”
“No.” Ophelia turned towards him beneath the greatcoat. “But it proves you capable of one.”
He went very still.
She could not see his expression clearly in the dimness, but she felt his attention settle upon her.
“You should take care, Miss Jones.”
“Of what?” She could not keep the challenge from her voice.
“Speaking to a man as though you expect something of him.”
“Does it frighten you?” she asked, curious despite herself.
He was quiet a moment, as though weighing what the truth would cost him.
“Quite dreadfully,” he said at last.
The answer was lightly given, but the truth beneath it was not. Ophelia heard both.
The storm beat against the walls. A little snow had sifted through the cracks and lay in white lines across the earthen floor.
After a time, Adrian said, “May I tell you something else?”
“That is not generally how questions work,” she said, amused.
“I have never had much respect for rules I do not understand.” His voice gentled. “You need not disappear from me.”
The words found a place in her that a question could not have reached.
“Sometimes disappearing is the only choice one has.”
He waited. He did not ask why.
She could have left it there. He had given her that freedom.
“From being a thing other people decided,” she said. “That is where I learned it. When you cannot run or fight or speak, you learn to disappear where you stand. It is the only freedom left, to become so still that they forget you are a person.”
The words fell into the darkness between them.
“That is more than I meant to say,” she whispered finally, a little ashamed of it.
“No one should have required that of you.”
There was no charm in his voice now and no pity. Only a quiet anger that was not aimed at her.
The silence after that was different from the silences before. They had each placed something true and dangerous into the other’s keeping, and neither knew what to do next.
“What was it that you wanted to tell me?” she asked finally, and he half-laughed.
“I have clean forgot. Nothing of great importance, doubtless, so let me tell you something of no importance at all, to pass the time.”
The storm went on. The grey afternoon faded, and the cold drew them nearer by degrees. The careful foot of air narrowed until Ophelia’s shoulder rested against his arm. Neither of them acknowledged when it happened.
The snow whispered at the cracks.
Ophelia looked up to say something light and found his face very near hers.
Adrian had gone utterly still. Desire showed plain in the way he looked at her, but he did not lean closer. He would not take that final inch from her.
The choice was hers.
That was what undid her. No one had ever left a choice of such import entirely in her hands. She wanted to close the space between them, to learn the feel of his mouth against hers. She wanted it more than she had allowed herself to want anything in years.
She began to lean towards him.
Then the practical part of her, the part that had spent years balancing ledgers and weighing consequences, reminded her that a life still waited beyond the snow.
She was promised to a man Adrian knew. Her name was a scandal across England, her father’s fortune under threat. If she kissed Adrian, even if she accepted his gentle offer to wield his influence on her behalf, she would draw this kind man into the wreck with her.
Ophelia pulled back.
She drew the greatcoat close and lowered her face.
“I cannot,” she said. Her voice shook. “It is not that I do not wish to. I must not.”
Adrian moved back at once.
“No. Of course. You need not explain.”
He did not sigh or ask her to reconsider. He merely restored the distance she needed, and sat beside her in the growing dark.
They waited a hand’s breadth apart while the storm died beyond the walls. The space between them felt more intimate than touch.
Ophelia had not protected herself at all. What lay between them was a fact now, and the snow that had hidden her from the world had trapped her with a man she could not afford to want.
The wind dropped.
Far off, faint, came Bronwen’s voice calling their names.
Ophelia gave Adrian back the greatcoat. They rose and brushed the hay from their clothes, moving carefully and not looking at one another.
Outside, the cold struck sharp and clean after the closeness of the croft, and Ophelia was glad of it; it gave her something honest to feel. Then they went down the hill together, following the bob of Bronwen’s lantern through the thinning snow, to be found.