Chapter 25 #3
Lady Beatrice had not moved. Her face was unreadable, a mask of the kind Arthur had seen her wear at a hundred dinner parties and receptions. But her hands, clasped in front of her, were trembling.
“You are asking me to admit that my entire life has been built on a mistake,” she said.
“No.” Alistair released Sophia’s hand and walked to his mother.
He was taller than her by a head, but he did not loom.
He simply stood, close enough that she could not look away.
“I am asking you to admit that you are strong enough to change. That you are more than the feud. That you are my mother, and I love you, and I want you to be part of my life, our life, without the weight of all this history pressing down on you.”
For a long moment, no one spoke. The rain had stopped. Through the window, Arthur could see the first pale streaks of sunlight breaking through the clouds, turning the wet grass to silver.
“I will consider it,” Lady Beatrice said finally. The words came out stiff, reluctant, as though they were being dragged from her by force. “I make no promises. But I will consider it.”
Alistair kissed her forehead. She flinched, then stilled, then lifted one hand to touch his cheek, a brief, almost furtive gesture, as though she were afraid of being seen.
“That is all I ask,” he said.
Sophia crossed to Lady Eleanor and took her hands again. “Will you come home with me? There is a great deal to discuss, and I would rather not do it alone.”
Lady Eleanor nodded, her composure returning in fits and starts.
“Yes. Yes, of course.” She looked at Lady Beatrice, and something passed between them, not warmth, exactly, but the beginning of something that might, with time, become civility.
“I will write to you. About the boundary. And, other matters.”
Lady Beatrice inclined her head. “I will read your letter.”
It was not a reconciliation. It was not forgiveness. But it was a door, propped open, where before there had been only a wall.
Arthur stepped aside as Lady Eleanor and Sophia moved toward the door. Sophia paused beside him, close enough that he could smell the faint trace of rosewater on her skin, the same scent she had worn at the Hargraves’ reception a lifetime ago.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For keeping my secret.”
“I did not keep it. I simply did not give it away.”
“That is the same thing, in this world.” She smiled, a real smile, tired and unguarded and nothing like the polished expression she wore in ballrooms. “You see more than people give you credit for, Mr. Finch.”
“I know.”
She laughed, a soft exhale, and then she was gone, her mother’s arm linked through hers, the two of them disappearing into the pale morning light of the hallway.
Arthur turned back to the room. Alistair was still standing with his mother, speaking to her in a voice too low to carry. Lady Beatrice’s face was still stiff, still resistant, but her hand had found her son’s sleeve and was resting there, a small, unconscious gesture of connection.
Arthur retrieved his coffee cup from the windowsill. The dregs were cold and bitter, but he drank them anyway, because it gave him something to do with his hands.
“Well,” Alistair said, looking up. “That could have been worse.”
“It could have been a great deal worse,” Arthur agreed. “You are fortunate that your mother loves you more than she loves the feud.”
“I know.” Alistair’s gaze drifted to the doorway where Sophia had disappeared. “I am fortunate in a great many things I do not deserve.”
Arthur set the empty cup on the desk. “What happens now?”
“Now?” Alistair smiled, not the rakish smile, not the cynical smile, but something simpler and more exhausted and more honest than any expression Arthur had ever seen on his face.
“Now we try to build something. A life. A partnership. A future that is not dictated by the mistakes of dead men.” He looked at Arthur.
“You will stay, won’t you? For a while. I have a feeling we are going to need witnesses. ”
Arthur thought about his rooms in town, the neat stack of books on his nightstand, the quiet life he had built for himself in the spaces between other people’s dramas.
He thought about the essays in his coat pocket, the ones he had carried for weeks without quite knowing why.
He thought about Sophia Ainsworth’s smile, the real one, and the way Alistair had looked at her as though she were the only solid thing in a room full of illusions.
“Yes,” he said. “I think I will.”
The sunlight strengthened, spilling through the window and catching the dust motes floating in the air. Somewhere in the house, a door opened and closed. Footsteps on the stairs. The ordinary sounds of a household resuming its rhythm after a long and difficult night.
Arthur Finch stood in the study of a house that was not his, surrounded by the wreckage of a feud that had finally, after generations, begun to crumble, and he understood something he had not understood before.
He was not a marginal figure in someone else’s story. He was part of it. He had always been part of it. And the story was not over yet.