Chapter 17 #2
“They are when the dinner was built to make you do neither.”
“Was it built for that?”
“It was built to teach the room what my mother had to teach it. The lesson is delivered. The room is now obliged to spend the next three weeks revising its opinions, which is the kind of work London does well in private and badly in public. We shall let it do its work.”
“You knew,” she said. “About the seating.”
“I knew.”
“And you did not move me up the table.”
“I did not. I considered it, and I considered what it would cost you to be visibly moved by your host in front of his mother, and I did not. I shall hear about that decision from you for some time. I am prepared to hear about it.”
She was quiet for a moment before she answered.
“It was the right choice. Tonight.”
“Thank you.”
He looked at her then. The green light from the glass had made his face younger than the dining room had let him be.
She could see in it the boy who had argued about military histories in a garden five years ago, and the soldier who had come back, and the man now standing in his mother’s conservatory plainly afraid to come any nearer than the yard he had set himself.
“Once,” he said, “you would have called this an adventure.”
“Once, you were Lord Cole and I was foolish enough to believe adventures ended kindly.”
“And now?”
“Now you are His Grace, and I am old enough to know that doors are noticed.”
He took one step, and did not take the second.
He stood close enough that she could have laid her hand against his sleeve without rising, and he did not reach for her, and she did not reach for him.
The two yards of green damp air between them was the most public yard of air she had ever stood in, because it was a yard she had wanted closed.
She looked at his mouth.
It lasted a moment only. She had spent four years not looking at this mouth, and six weeks looking at it carefully when she thought herself unobserved, and she did not have permission to look at it now.
She chose to regard it nonetheless. He saw, and his hand at his side moved once towards her and did not lift.His features settled into that same mask of iron self-control he had worn in the parish room, the church porch, and the bookshop, forcing an appearance of composure for her sake alone.
“Cole.”
She had not meant to say it. It had escaped her, the name without the title, the man without the rank, and she heard it land in the green room between them and could not have called it back if she had wanted to.
“I am here.”
“I know you are. That is the difficulty.”
“Melody.”
He said it quietly, and did not move closer. The name came out the way it had come out on the lane outside Carrow House the day he came home, the way she had refused to hear it then, and she heard it now, and the hearing was a thing she would have to walk back to the dining room carrying.
There was a small dry footstep behind them.
Cassandra stood in the conservatory doorway with her hand on the jamb.
She was lovely, and lit from behind by the candles in the corridor, and she had been there for some seconds, and her face was composed, and she had seen exactly enough to know what she was looking at, and was deciding, before she spoke, what she meant to do with it.
“Forgive me. I came to see whether Miss Carrow was unwell.”
“Miss Carrow is quite well, Lady Cassandra. The conservatory is restful.”
“Yes. They so often are.” She did not move from the doorway. “I shall tell your mother you are with her, Miss Carrow. I am sure she has been anxious.”
“You are very kind.”
“I try to be. It is a habit of mine that has not always been understood.”
She went, and her footstep faded along the corridor.
Cole did not look at the empty doorway, and Melody did not look at it either.
The conservatory air was suddenly cold, the small green warmth she had borrowed gone with the woman in white who had now taken it back to the drawing room and would set it down there in any shape she chose.
“I should go through,” Melody said.
“Yes.”
“She saw,” Melody said.
“She saw what was there to see. We shall not pretend she did not.”
“She will tell her mother. Her mother will tell the room.”
“Yes.”
“You do not seem worried,” she said.
“I am very worried. I am also accustomed to being told the cost of a thing the night I have already paid for it. I would rather pay for this one.” He let the sentence settle before he went on.
“But I should not have set the price, Miss Carrow. I am sorry the bill arrived here. It should have arrived in a quieter room.”
She rose from the window seat. The stone had been cold against her gown, and she had not noticed until now.
She put her hand on the back of a chair to steady herself for the walk back through the corridor and into the drawing room.
The small pressure of her own palm against the wood was the steady thing she could carry into the room with her, because nothing else in the room was going to be steady at all.
“Cole,” she said. “I am not yet sorry.”
“That is more than I had a right to ask for.”
She went out into the corridor, and the door of the conservatory closed behind her on the smell of the lemons.