Chapter 16 #3
Something moved across his face at that — not quite a smile, but its architecture. The truth, over comfort. It was the one currency he had never stopped trading in, and she had just paid him in it.
"Then I will not ask for that promise," he said.
"I know better than to bargain for the digging — I fell in love with the digging.
And I will not ask you to warn me only when it suits you, because we have both seen what your judgment calls suitable.
" He came a step closer, and the levelness in his voice finally gave way to something underneath it.
"What I ask is this. Before you act — before the next letterhead, the next dark lane — you tell me what you intend.
Even when you know I will argue against it with everything I have. Especially then."
"And when you argue," she said carefully, "and I go regardless?"
"Then you go regardless — and I will know where you are, and what you are hunting, and whose door to break down if you are not home by dark.
" He held her gaze. "I am not asking for the power to stop you, Elizabeth.
I know precisely how much of that power exists, and it is none.
I am asking not to be the last person in London who learns what is happening to the woman I love.
Let me stand beside the risk while it is still a plan, instead of meeting it afterward as a wound. "
She looked at him for a long moment — at the shape of what he was offering, which was larger than the shape of what he was asking, and she understood that too.
"That," she said quietly, "I can promise.""
He crossed the room then, and took her hands, and neither of them said anything further, because the agreement was already complete, and words would only have made it smaller.
"I am proud of you," she said, drawing back just far enough to look at him properly.
He smiled — the real one, the one with nothing performed in it. "Thank you, my love."
He took her hand.
"Come. I want to give you something back."
"Back?" She raised a brow. "You stole something from me?"
"More that I found it," he said, "and neglected, for rather longer than I ought to have, to return it."
He led her upstairs, to the small room with the narrow bed and the table beside it, and there, in the last of the evening light, he showed her the hairpin resting where he had left it, catching the glow of the candle he had not yet bothered to light.
"You dropped it," he said, "the first night. I kept meaning to give it back. I found, somewhere along the way, that I did not particularly want to."
She picked it up, turning it over in her fingers — plain, ordinary, entirely unremarkable, and yet she held it as though it were something considerably finer.
"Keep it," he said. "You found it once, without meaning to. I think that makes it yours by rights. A lucky charm, if you require one — though I confess I have never believed much in luck, only in persistence, and you have that in greater supply than any charm could improve upon."
She looked up at him, and he kissed her again — slow, unhurried, the moonlight through the window laying pale across both of them — and for a moment neither of them needed to say anything further at all.
Later, she lay across the bed, her shoes discarded, her hair loosed from its remaining pins, and looked up at him with the particular expression that meant she wanted something and had already decided he would give it to her.
"Read to me," she said. "A story."
"As you command." He crossed to the small shelf, running his fingers along the spines until he found the one he wanted — a volume he had acquired some weeks before, from a bookseller who had promised him, with the confidence peculiar to booksellers, that it was precisely the sort of story he would enjoy.
"I have found, this time, something rather closer to ours.
Complicated. Difficult, in places. But it ends, as these things generally do, exactly where it ought to. "
He settled into the chair beside the bed and opened the book.
It told of a man believed lost at sea for years — a shipwreck, a presumed death, a return no one had thought to expect — who came home to find the world had continued entirely without him but he came back with a dangerous secret that could bring the whole society down to its knees.
But when he returned, he met a young woman of considerable passion and dangerously liberating opinions, the kind of woman his old life would never have permitted him to want.
Their path together was not a simple one.
It was complicated by ideals, and by hardship, and by a world that had very firm ideas about how the people should be treated.
But it ended, as Damon had promised, exactly where it ought to.
Elizabeth listened with her eyes half closed, her hand loosely curled around the hairpin even as sleep began to claim her, and if she noticed how closely the story's shape resembled their own, she said nothing of it, and let him read on regardless, his voice low and steady in the dark.