Chapter 11
The house was quiet after Charles's departure.
Elizabeth stood by the tall window, arms folded, her gaze on the grey sky beyond the rooftops. Damon watched her from across the room, the crackle of the hearth the only sound between them.
"Thank you," she said at last, without turning. "For standing up for me. With Franklin."
"I did not spend the better part of two weeks nursing you back to health," he said, "so that a physician could walk through that door and undo it in a single sentence.
" He crossed to stand near her. "I got you well enough to walk back into that room at full strength.
I was not about to watch a man try to make you smaller the moment you did. "
She turned to look at him, and something in her expression eased. Then, despite herself, she smiled. "Stop teasing me."
"I am entirely serious," he said, and the wink that followed suggested he was at least half serious, which for Damon was a considerable proportion.
Her smile faded into something quieter. "I mean it. When I began working with my uncle, things were — difficult. Far worse than anything Dr. Franklin said today." She did not elaborate. She did not need to. "So thank you. Genuinely."
Damon was quiet for a moment.
"It was my pleasure," he said. "I do not make a habit of defending things I do not believe are worth defending.
" He leaned a shoulder against the window frame.
"My parents agreed on very little, as it happened.
But they agreed on this — that a person's worth ought to be acknowledged, wherever it is found, whatever the circumstances.
" A pause. "My father believed in merit.
He could not abide seeing a capable man overlooked because he lacked a title, or a capable woman dismissed because she was a woman.
It offended his sense of order. To him it was simply inefficient — a waste of something valuable. "
Elizabeth watched him, listening.
"My mother believed in dignity," he went on.
"Which is a different thing, though people confuse them.
She could not abide seeing anyone diminished.
Not a duke, not a scullery maid. She thought cruelty dressed up as manners was the worst kind, because it pretended to be civilized.
" He smiled faintly. "There was an evening — some function at the estate, a great many important people — when a guest spoke to one of the serving girls as though she were furniture.
Reduced her to nothing in front of the entire room.
My mother crossed the floor, took the girl gently by the arm, and spent the next quarter hour in conversation with her.
Publicly. Warmly. As though she were the most interesting person present.
" He paused. "My father, meanwhile, made certain the guest was never invited anywhere he had influence again.
Merit and dignity. They arrived at the same place by different roads. "
"They sound remarkable," Elizabeth said softly.
"They were. And whatever else they disagreed upon, they always stood for what they believed. Both of them. Every time." He looked at her. "I have tried to live by that. I do not always manage it. But I try."
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. Then, tilting her head slightly: "And what do you believe in?"
He smiled — slow, and knowing. "Who is fishing for compliments now?"
"I am not fishing for anything," she said, color rising.
"No?"
"No."
He held her gaze. "I believe," he said, "that I made both of them proud today. By defending you."
The words settled over the room quietly.
Elizabeth did not have an immediate answer to that. She looked at him, and he looked back, and neither of them moved, and the silence between them held the particular weight of a thing not yet spoken.
"You are not what they wrote about you," she said finally. Quietly. As though the observation had escaped before she had decided whether to make it. "In the papers. The man in those articles — the careless one, the scandalous one. That is not who is standing in this room."
Damon went still for a moment.
Then, recovering, he arranged his features into something wry. "I feel obliged to warn you — flattery has never once worked on me. A great many have tried."
"It is not mere flattery when it is true, " she said. ''Which is precisely why it—"
Her stomach growled. Loudly.
Damon's brow arched. He bit back a laugh.
Elizabeth closed her eyes and covered her face with both hands. "Good God."
"Well," he said, thoroughly delighted, "that is one way to conclude a sentence."
"Do not," she warned through her fingers.
"I said nothing at all." He was already rolling back his sleeve. "Though I feel obliged to warn you — my compliments cannot be purchased with a growling stomach. Assisting me with dinner, however, might improve your standing considerably."
She dropped her hands and lifted her chin, reassembling her composure with visible effort. "Then lead the way, Your Grace."
The kitchen was small and warm, the last of the evening light coming grey through the north window. Damon had a page torn from a book propped against the flour crock — a recipe, copied in his own hand, that he had evidently been studying.
"I found this some days ago," he said, setting out onions, a knife, a knob of butter, a paper twist of what turned out to be saffron.
"A dish from the south of France. I have never attempted it.
I thought—" he glanced at her, "I thought we might attempt it together.
Since neither of us knows what we are doing, we begin as equals. "
"You are being generous to yourself," Elizabeth said, tying back her sleeves. "I know precisely what I am doing. It is you who are the unknown quantity."
"I burned a lamb stew so thoroughly it achieved a kind of permanence," he acknowledged. "I am aware of my limitations. Which is why I intend to defer to you at every point where deferring is wise, and to pretend I planned it that way."
She almost smiled.
He did not stand over her and direct. That was the thing she noticed first, though she could not have said she was noticing it.
He read the next line of the recipe aloud — soften the onions slowly, they must not color — and then he did not tell her to do it.
He set the pan between them, close enough that either could reach it, and began the onions himself, and when his knife-work proved slower and less certain than hers, he simply moved aside without comment and let her take over, and picked up the next task instead.
Not ceding ground grudgingly. Not performing humility.
Simply finding the place where he was useful and going to it.
"You are enjoying this far too much," she said, watching him measure saffron into warm water with the exaggerated care of a man handling something he did not understand.
"I am enjoying being competent at a small portion of something," he said.
"It is a novel sensation. In most rooms I am expected to be competent at everything, which is exhausting, and largely a performance.
Here I am permitted to be genuinely bad at the onions and merely adequate at the saffron, and no one's estimation of me collapses.
" He glanced at her. "It is rather freeing. "
She said nothing to that. But something in her chest shifted, because it was, she realized, the most honest thing he had said all evening, and he had said it while stirring water.
They found a rhythm without deciding to.
She stirred; he salted, tasting first, adjusting by degrees.
She reached for the butter and it was already in her hand — he had passed it before she asked, having seen the reach begin.
When she stepped left to reach the pan he stepped right to give her room, the two movements so cleanly matched that neither registered as accommodation.
They moved around one another in the small space without collision, without negotiation, like two people who had done this a hundred times, though they had done it perhaps twice.
"Here," he said, and reached behind her for the thyme on the shelf, his arm brushing the length of her back. She did not flinch. She glanced over her shoulder — close enough now to catch the clean citrus of his soap — and took the thyme from him.
"Thank you," she murmured.
Their eyes met, held a moment too long, and she turned back to the pan.
"The recipe says to add the stock a little at a time," he said, reading. "Patiently. Which I gather is not my strongest—"
"It is not."
"—so I shall add it, and you shall tell me when I am being impatient."
"You are being impatient now, and we have not begun."
"See," he said. "Invaluable."
She caught herself, then, doing something she did not immediately understand — some dry twist of phrase already halfway out of her mouth.
"Do try to contain your disappointment," she heard herself say, in exactly his cadence, the mock-grave understatement that was entirely his and not at all hers, "when it transpires that I was right. "
He looked at her.
For a moment neither of them said anything. She had heard it too — the borrowed rhythm, the deflection worn like a coat that was not hers. Something flickered across his face, pleased and quiet, and he had the grace, or the cunning, not to name it.
"I would not dream," he said, "of being disappointed by your being right. I have grown rather accustomed to it."
They ladled the stock. They waited. The kitchen filled with the smell of saffron and softened onion and something richer beneath, and the light went from grey to gone, and Damon lit a lamp without breaking the rhythm of the work.
When at last the sauce had thickened to something worth eating, she held out a spoon. He tasted it, and his eyebrows rose in genuine surprise.
"That is—" He tasted it again. "That is actually good."
"Of course it is," she said. "I supervised."
"You did. I concede the point without reservation." He set the spoon down. "You are markedly better at this than I am. It is not close."
"I know," she said serenely.