Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
The journal was from March, almost two months out of date, but the article on the development of the pianoforte was interesting enough to occupy her for a while, even if the style was too pedantic for her taste.
Aurelia had her feet tucked under her, the tea going cold on the side table.
Nike's head was on her knee. She had joined her in the morning room half an hour ago. The dog had been glued to her side ever since the farrier’s visit.
Maybe she felt she needed to be near them now that her secret was out in the open.
Aurelia cooed as she stroked Nike’s ear.
For the first time in several days, she was somehow not thinking about anything serious.
It was a pleasant state of affairs on the whole.
She intended to stay in that bubble of tranquility for as long as possible, her and Nike, the memory of her conversation with Evander the night prior keeping her company enough until she found him again.
He had gone to read in the library alone.
She knew by now that meant he wanted some time alone and was too tired to go walking outdoors.
She shifted to reach for her tea and caught movement outside the window. She looked up without thinking about it, until she spotted what was there and gasped.
Frederick and Seraphina were on the front steps.
Frederick had his riding coat on and Evander’s horse was already brought around, so she supposed he had been planning a ride.
But the way he held himself said something else entirely.
Seraphina was speaking to him, gesticulating.
Aurelia couldn't hear anything through the glass, but she could see Frederick's face.
He was holding very still while she spoke to him, and that was strange.
Whatever Seraphina was saying, he did not like it.
He said something back, short and savage.
Then he mounted quickly and rode away without looking at her again.
Seraphina stood on the steps for a moment, watching him go.
She shook her head, said something with a snarled expression.
Then she turned and went inside, taking the steps two at a time until she disappeared from sight behind the ivy.
Aurelia looked back at her copy of The Lady’s Monthly Gallery of Culture. She read the same paragraph about piano materials three times while analysing the strange scene in her mind.
Within five minutes the door opened.
“There you are,” Seraphina said, a little out of breath. There was colour in her cheeks, and her usually smooth hair was out of place by her temples. “I wondered where you had hidden yourself, my dear.”
“I wouldn’t say I was hidden – just reading,” Aurelia said, watching her.
Seraphina sat down in the chair across from her without waiting to be invited. Nike lifted her head and assessed the newcomer, then put it back on Aurelia's knee.
“Frederick… has gone out,” Seraphina said. “With Mr. Poole alone, I think, to have a chat about the future, or something equally vague. Your husband suggested they go riding together before breakfast, and Frederick was very keen.”
She settled back in the chair with fabricated ease. Aurelia was surprised she could tell, as though the events of yesterday had made her more discerning somehow.
“It's good for him, I think, to be taken seriously by someone. He has always needed that from Evander, and he can only provide so much in that regard. He’s just a man.”
“I'm sure,” Aurelia said.
She glanced back at the journal. Meantime Seraphina looked around the room.
“You know, I have been thinking,” Seraphina continued, “about what I said on the hill yesterday.”
Surprised, Aurelia did not look up from her page, merely asking, “Oh?”
“I want to apologise for what occurred. It was indelicate of me and I should not have said it. My only concern…” There came a small pause.
“It is Frederick. If he were to find out I had mentioned that evening at the house party, he would be hurt.
He does not know all the details of what happened between Evander and me before we ran off together, and I would rather he didn't find out. He is sensitive about Evander, about what Evander thinks of him.”
Seraphina’s decision to call Evander by his name at times and by the Duke at others struck Aurelia as odd. But it was not the oddest thing to come out of the new Lady Canterbury’s mouth that morning.
Aurelia merely nodded, turning the page. “I promise I won't say anything to Frederick,” she said.
“I didn't think you would. But I wanted to ask just in case you had views about it.” She smoothed her skirt with one hand.
“The truth is, I feel badly about everything. What happened to you was not fair. Finding yourself in a marriage that was never designed for you, that takes a particular kind of resilience. I admire it, truly.”
Aurelia set the journal down then, slowly. She didn’t particularly want to be having this conversation. She felt she had made amends with Evander last night, but that didn’t mean a part of her didn’t want to strike Seraphina dead for kissing her husband years ago.
“I didn't find myself anywhere,” Aurelia said, more bitterly than she intended. “I made the decision to accept his hand. We have spoken about this before.”
“Of course. Yes.” Seraphina smiled. “But what you said… That is exactly what I mean. You are very capable. I have always thought so, even when we hardly knew each other.” She looked at her with an expression of forced sincerity.
“I want us to be close, Aurelia. We are sisters now. Legally, at least. And I think women in our position need each other. We are surrounded by Battle men, after all. They are not always easy as a species.”
“No,” Aurelia admitted against her better judgment. Agreeing with Seraphina about anything felt like a betrayal of her own womanhood. “I suppose they aren't.”
“It would be good to have someone we could each trust and confide in.”
“Maybe.”
“Which is what I wanted to say actually, not about the house party, though that came up first.” Seraphina leaned forward slightly, dropping her voice to the registre of shared confidence.
“But about Evander specifically. Because I think you should know, from someone who has spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand him, that he is a man who knows exactly how to behave in any situation. Even as a young man he had this ability to appear to feel whatever the moment required.”
A strange way to talk about someone, Aurelia thought, but she said nothing, not wanting to provide Seraphina more ammunition.
Quite frankly, she wanted her to stop talking and leave altogether, as quickly as possible.
She glanced absently at the clock in the corner while Seraphina went on, her good manners wearing thinner by the second.
“He couldn’t pretend to be warm if his life depended on it,” she said.
“But he scratches just beneath the surface to find some interest he can display. It’s a very good skill, since it keeps a woman guessing.
It is not dishonesty. It is more that he is so thoroughly trained in the correct response that even he cannot always tell the difference.
His father’s influence. He was a severe man, worse than Evander. ”
Aurelia felt her throat go dry. She recalled the night prior, the things Evander had admitted to her.
He hadn’t been warm then, not exactly. But he had been honest. She could tell – thought she could tell.
A man didn’t come up with lies that easily.
Not lies like that, about transgressions and misplaced brides, and marriages that should have felt simple but didn’t.
Seraphina continued: “I don't say this to be cruel. I say it because I was in your position once, more or less. And coming back here has reawakened some old feelings. Watching him and trying to read what was real and what was, well, what was simply Evander being appropriate. It is very difficult to distinguish, even for me, and I had considerably more time to study the man than you did before you married him.”
“I'm sure you tried to study him very thoroughly indeed.”
“On many occasions, he made me feel that there was something there between us. Something real, even if it was borne from old promises. And I am a woman who has been wanted by a great many men, you know. I don't say that to be vain. I say it to give you some context. My father was batting them off with a stick at one point, saying I was a promised Battle woman. If someone like me could be made to feel uncertain about Evander’s feelings – to wonder whether it was duty or something more – then I think it is entirely understandable that you might find the same difficulty.”
“Do you think?” Aurelia said, keeping her voice level.
“I do. And it must be particularly… Well, I only mean that he chose you under circumstances that were not typical. Not because of what you are, obviously. You are perfectly–” She stopped, as though finding the word took a lot of effort from her.
“You are perfectly convenable. But the circumstances were what they were. And when circumstances push two people together, it can be very easy for both parties to mistake that pressure for feeling. Or heaven forfend, for love.”
Aurelia glared at her, at the careful expression and the kind voice that didn’t register right when Aurelia received it.
Why say all this? She wanted to ask Seraphina directly.
But how could she do that without upsetting their already delicate situation?
Was it possible Seraphina really did care – or was her marriage to Frederick not as happy as she predicted?
Misery loves company, Aurelia thought. Especially when wives did not love their husbands, as the pantomime on the front steps just now might have suggested.
She mustered just enough composure to say, “Thank you for the advice.”
It seemed to satisfy the lady. Seraphina rose, smoothing her skirts again even when there was nothing to smooth.
“I hope you won't take this moment as anything other than what it is.
I only want you to go into this with your eyes open.
It would be a shame, after everything, to build on something that isn't quite what it appears to be.”
“Yes, it would be.”
“And we’re sisters now, aren’t we? We have to look out for one another, and look out for ourselves beyond that.”
Seraphina left then with a little nod. The door closed behind her. Nike sat up and watched the door for a moment with her ears forward, then lay back down and grumbled.
Aurelia picked up her magazine and scowled at the front page.
Seraphina was wrong. She was very intelligent and beautiful, but she was wrong and had completely missed the mark about Evander.
She didn’t know what had happened in the sitting room last night, and she didn’t know what had been building for weeks before that.
She said she knew Evander enough to warn Aurelia about his weathervane moods and his obsession with rightness, but she was wrong. She did not know him, and Aurelia did.
She closed the journal and got up, leaning down to kiss Nike between the eyes before leaving.
She had been meaning to go to the music room.
She had a theme she had been developing for two weeks, something she couldn't quite put together, that kept circling back to the same four bars in the E minor key.
It was the key she associated most with Evander.
She wanted to work on it before dinner, and she was nearly at the music room door when she changed her mind and went to the library instead, where she knew Evander had gone to read.
Retracing her steps down the corridor, she reached the library door and pushed it ajar without stopping to question why it was closed. Her heart fluttered in her chest at the thought of being alone with Evander again, a smile coming to her mouth, the music forming slowly.
But when she saw what was inside, she stopped, a foot barely over the threshold.
Evander was there in the large and dim room, yes.
He was standing near one of the windows, looking out.
The light from outside made him see all dark.
He was not alone. Seraphina was in front of him.
She stood close, closer than any purpose required, her hand raised toward his face like she was either going to hit him or embrace him.
His face tilted down toward hers, and there was a moment, from where Aurelia stood in the doorway, where it looked like…
It looked like…
Aurelia felt her face contort in agony. She couldn’t move, had looked for only a second before turning away.
She understood what she was seeing, stifled a scream, then she stepped back.
The door closed gently as she pulled it with both hands, so it made no sound.
She stood in the corridor with her back against the wall beside the door frame and looked at the opposite wall, squeezing her eyes shut.
She had been so certain. She had been so sure that she knew him now.
But Aurelia had been wrong. Or she had been right then and was wrong now.
Either way, she walked back down the corridor to the music room and went in in total silence.
She sat down at the pianoforte and put her hands in her lap, and she looked at the keys for a long time without actually playing anything.
The theme she had been developing spun in her head, the four bars that kept circling back and forth and back again.
She thought about the last few months, the kisses and the long silences that had been the good kind, and she thought about how thoroughly she had been building something she was now not sure existed in the way she had thought it did.
Outside the window, the grounds were green and peaceful, and somewhere across the house in the library, something terrible was happening that she had walked away from without fully understanding, but that made her want to put on her coat and run all the way back to Aunt Violet, even if she died before she got there, lost in the wilderness between this new home and the last.