Chapter One #2
“I have a wide acquaintance and very little to do. It comes to the same thing.” He moved a careful inch and gestured at the empty road. “Combe End. Then you will be at my brother’s house within the week, I think. There is a card gone out to half the neighbourhood for an evening at the Hall.”
Helena looked up at that, the search forgotten for a breath.
“We are invited. I had not understood the family would be yours.” A small wondering settled over her.
“I knew the Duke of Pecking kept the great house, of course. Everyone within thirty miles knows the Duke. I did not know he came supplied with a brother who pulls reticules out of hedges.”
“Most people do not. He keeps me in a cupboard and produces me at Christmas, lightly dusted.” He let the line land and then spoilt it, the way he always did when a true thing crept up on him.
“It is the natural order of younger brothers. The estate goes to the one born first, the sermons go to the one born second, and the dancing, thank goodness, goes to whoever can be spared. I have made myself very useful at dancing.”
“You speak of being spared as though it grieved you.”
“It does not grieve me in the least. I have arranged my whole life around being spared. It is by far the most comfortable position in any house.” He smiled, and it did not entirely reach the corners of the thing.
“Now find me that smile you have been hoarding, Miss Fairford, and I shall go back to looking.”
The smile arrived at last, brief and real, before grief reached up and pulled it back under the surface.
“You will let me warn you about Pecking Hall before you come to it,” he said.
“Warn me?”
“It is imposing, and cold, and hung with portraits of people who all appear to have disapproved of being painted.” He shifted his weight by a careful inch. “You will arrive expecting a house and discover a courtroom with rather better curtains.”
“That sounds very ducal.”
“It is the most ducal house in three counties, and my brother suits it the way a blade suits a scabbard.” He let the affection show, since it cost him nothing to spend.
“Rhysand came into the world ten minutes ahead of me and has spent every hour since punishing the world for its lateness. Understand me, he is a good man. I should hate you to mistake my meaning. He is a good man the way a winter is a good winter. Thorough. Bracing. Entirely survivable, provided one has dressed for it.”
Marianne laughed before she could prevent it, then frowned at herself for the lapse.
“And does the good winter dance, my lord?” Helena asked.
“Never. He considers it a frivolity that encourages young people to enjoy themselves, of which he takes a very dim view.” Sylvester watched her colour lift a shade at the word dance and judged the moment ripe.
“I, on the other hand, dance with great commitment and very little skill, which the ladies tell me is the more endearing combination of the two.”
“You make him sound a tyrant.”
“I make him sound a duke, which to a stranger amounts to the same thing and to me does not.” He surprised himself with the weight he put on it, and stepped back from the weight at once.
“He is no tyrant. He pays his tenants’ physicians and remembers the name of every child on the estate and has never once in his life done a charming thing where a correct one would serve as well.
You will dislike him on sight and be ashamed of it within the month.
Most people are. It is the most predictable event in the county calendar. ”
“That is a strange way to defend a brother.”
“It is the only way I have. I cannot praise him without it sounding like a complaint, and I cannot complain of him without it coming out as praise. We have been confusing the neighbourhood in exactly this fashion since we were six years old.”
“And which of you began it?” Marianne asked.
“He did, by being born first and taking all the gravity for himself. There was none left in the room by the time I arrived. I have had to manufacture my own ever since, and mine is a lighter grade of the stuff.”
Helena laughed, properly this time, the sound startled out of her, and pressed her fingers to her lips as though to catch it and put it back where it had come from.
“You need not put it away again,” he said. “It is only a laugh. They are not rationed at the Hall, whatever else is.”
“I am not in the habit of laughing at strangers in ditches.”
“Then I shall take it as the rarer compliment.” A woman who apologised for her own gladness had learnt the lesson in a lean house, that a light heart was an expense the family could not always meet. He kept the thought to himself and offered his hand instead, to help her over a rut in the verge.
The light had gone amber and long across the field. The air off the hedge smelled of warm dust and bruised grass and the first cool breath of the evening coming up behind it. Helena rose and pressed the back of her wrist briefly to her eyes.
“My lord, we cannot stay here past dark, mended or not, and the coin…” She stopped herself. “The coin is only a coin. I am behaving like a child over a piece of metal.”
“You are behaving like a daughter over the last of her father. The two are easily confused, and only one of them is anything to be ashamed of.” He had not intended to say a true thing, and was mildly put out with himself for the slip.
“Grant me one more minute of honest looking. If I should find it, will you grant me something in return?”
“You wish to be rewarded for doing a kindness?”
“I wish to be rewarded for trying, Miss Marianne, which is the only labour most gentlemen are ever paid for, and even then reluctantly.” He turned the whole warmth of his attention on Helena. “A dance. At the Hall. When you come to it.”
“If you find my father’s guinea,” Helena said, and her chin came up steadier than it had been a moment before, “I shall dance with you twice, and gladly, and tell everyone present you are the cleverest man in the county.”
“Twice.” He pretended to weigh the terms as though they cost him dear. “You drive a hard bargain for a woman on her knees in a ditch. Very well. Done, and witnessed.”
“You have not given it back yet,” Marianne said, “and you are already naming your price.”
“It is the only sort worth making, Miss Marianne. A man who waits until the goods are safely delivered has no leverage left and must rely on gratitude, which is the least reliable currency I know.”
“You know a great deal about leverage, for a younger son.”
“It is all a younger son has. The elder has the land. I have my timing.” He held her look a beat longer than was comfortable for either of them. “You would have made an excellent younger son yourself. It is a pity they wasted you on being sensible.”
He looked down then, as though the thought had only that instant struck him, and lifted his boot, and there in the print it had pressed into the dust lay the guinea, gold and warm and wholly innocent of how it had come to be lying there.
“Ah.” He bent and took it up between two fingers. “Fortune has elected, at long last, to behave herself.”
He held it out on his open palm. Helena took it and closed her fingers around it so hard the knuckles paled, and when she lifted her eyes to him, they were bright and wet along the rims.
“You have saved me from a very foolish grief, my lord.”
“No grief is foolish that has loved someone.” He said it lightly, and meant about half of it, which for Sylvester was an unusually generous proportion to mean.
Marianne had risen too. She was looking at the patch of road where he had stood, and then at the toe of his boot, and then up into his face, and her expression had emptied of everything but attention, with none of a girl of nineteen’s giddiness left anywhere in it.
“It rolled a good distance, for a coin,” she said.
“Coins are restless things. They have nowhere to be and all day to get there.”
“You stood just there the whole while we searched.”
“I find it best to hold a position once I have taken it.” He met her look without a single flicker. “A habit I learnt from my brother, who would assure you it is the one useful thing he has ever managed to teach me.”
She did not answer. She did not need to answer. She had seen enough to suspect and not nearly enough to say, and the two of them understood that distinction precisely, the way two people understand a thing they will never agree to mention aloud.
Mr Grigg and a labourer from a passing farm cart set their shoulders to the wheel, and the carriage came free of the rut with a lurch and a long complaint of strained wood.
Bess handed the ladies up. Helena settled the reticule in her lap with one hand laid flat across it, in the manner of a person holding a thing they have only just learnt they are able to lose, and looked back at him once through the small rear glass as the road carried her on towards the beeches.
Marianne did not look back. She had not stopped watching him since the moment the coin appeared in the dust. It came, in the end, to much the same thing.
Sylvester gathered his reins and set his foot to the stirrup.
A wiser man might have ridden home ashamed of himself.
He rode home interested instead, turning the afternoon over for its small pleasures, and had decided before the second mile was behind him that he would claim the slower of the two dances first, when the candles had burnt low and the music had gone soft and a girl is most disposed to believe whatever a charming man chooses to tell her.
Shame, he had always found, could be sent for later. It so rarely insisted on coming early.