Chapter Ten
“Can you walk?”
“I have been walking for twenty-three years, Your Grace. I believe I can manage a meadow.”
The rain had stopped, and the dawn was coming in gold and pale gray through the cracks in the cottage shutters, and the world outside was washed and dripping and smelled of wet earth and the particular green freshness that arrived after a summer storm.
Imogen stood in the doorway of the cottage and stretched muscles that had spent the night on a stone floor wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket with a duke’s arm around her waist and her back against his chest. Her shift had dried against her body overnight, stiff in some places and soft in others, and her dress, which had been draped across the table near the fire, was damp and wrinkled but wearable.
She pulled it on over the shift and laced it badly, her fingers clumsy from cold and from the particular stiffness that came from sleeping on stone.
She did not ask for help with the lacing because asking for help would have required Ash to put his hands on her back, and his hands on her back at six in the morning in a cottage where they had spent the night was a complication neither of them needed.
He was already dressed, his shirt tucked into his breeches, his coat damp and creased and slung over his arm.
He looked gaunt in the morning light, the hollows under his eyes visible, but that made him look younger and older at the same time, as if the night in the cottage had stripped something away and left the man underneath closer to the surface.
They walked out into the meadow together.
The grass was silver with water, knee-high, soaking their boots and the hems of their clothes within the first ten steps.
He reached for her hand. Not the practiced reach of a duke offering his arm to a lady, not the deliberate touch of a man advancing a seduction.
A simple reach, his bare hand finding hers, their fingers lacing, palm against palm, and the contact was warm and steady.
It was the first time they had touched since the cottage, since his mouth at her breast and his hand at her thigh, but the touching now was different from all of that, quieter, smaller, more real.
They walked hand in hand across the wet meadow, but neither of them spoke, because speaking would have required them to decide what the night had meant, and they were not ready for that.
The silence was easier and more honest than any words would have been, and Imogen let the beauty of it sit alongside everything else she was carrying and did not try to sort it out.
The stile appeared at the edge of the meadow, the wooden crossing where the fence separated the meadow from the path that led back toward the house.
He stopped walking, and his hand tightened on hers.
The watch was lying in the wet grass beside the stile.
Half-hidden by a clump of meadow-rue, the gold casing dark with rain, the chain coiled loosely in the mud.
It had been there all night, and they had searched two hundred yards of meadow without finding it because neither of them had thought to look at the place where they had been closest.
He released her hand and knelt in the grass.
He picked the watch up slowly, carefully, turning it over in his fingers, checking the casing, the hinge, the chain.
The gold was cold and wet but undamaged, and when he pressed the hinge with his thumb the casing opened, and she caught a glimpse of something small and pale inside.
She stood beside him and watched him hold the watch but did not speak, because speaking would have been wrong.
Whatever was happening on his face was private, and the privacy of it deserved silence.
She had learned, in every moment she had spent with this man, that the most important thing she could give him was not words but the space to feel something without being required to explain it.
He stood, put the watch in his waistcoat pocket, buttoned the pocket and looked at her.
“Thank you,” he said. “For looking.”
“You would have found it eventually.”
“I would not have.” His voice was quiet, and the quietness carried a certainty she had not heard before.
“I would have torn the meadow apart and missed it, because I was looking in the wrong place, and I would have kept looking in the wrong place, because panic makes you do foolish things. I was very foolish last night, but you were very kind, and I want you to know that I know the difference.”
She did not know what to say to that. She held out her hand instead; he took it, and they walked the rest of the way to the house in silence, their fingers laced, the watch in his pocket, and the morning warming around them as the sun climbed above the treeline.
The path from the meadow ran along the edge of the woods and then through the formal gardens, past the rose beds that Cassie had explored the day before, the ornamental lake that Imogen had not yet seen and the long gravel sweep that led to the kitchen entrance.
The walk took twenty minutes, and in those twenty minutes Imogen was aware, with a precision that surprised her, of every place where their bodies connected and every place where they did not.
His hand was still around hers, and she could feel the roughness of his palm, the way his thumb occasionally brushed the back of her hand as they walked; an absent gesture, unconscious, something his thumb was doing because his thumb wanted to and not because he had told it to.
She thought about the cottage. Not the steam of it, but the other part, the quiet part: the father’s watch and the mother’s portrait and the knowledge that he had stopped, again, for the second time.
She was beginning to think she understood what it meant, though she was not yet ready to say it aloud, not even to herself.
He was trying to deserve her. That was what the stopping meant.
A man who was taking what he wanted would not stop.
A man who was performing desire would not stop.
A man who stopped, twice, at the moment when stopping was harder and continuing was easier, was a man who had decided that having mattered less than earning.
Earning her meant giving her something, and she suspected it was a truth she could feel pressing against the wall between them every time he pulled back.
She did not know what the truth was. She suspected, in the way that a woman who had read enough novels to recognize the shape of a secret suspected things, that it was something that would hurt. That was the reason he had not said it, and that was probably the reason he kept stopping.
They reached the house early in the morning.
The kitchen entrance was open, the scullery maid up and working, and the under-housekeeper, Mrs. Calvert, a solid gray-haired woman in a white cap who had been at Ravenhurst since Ash was a boy, was standing in the kitchen corridor with a tray of early tea when they came through the door, hand in hand, looking exactly like two people who had spent the night in a cottage and were trying to arrive home before anyone noticed.
Mrs. Calvert looked at their clothes and at their hands.
Her expression did not change, not because she did not have an opinion but because thirty years of managing the private lives of Hambridges had taught her that opinions were best kept in the same place as the household silver; locked away and polished in private.
She set the tray down, produced two fresh towels and a pot of hot water, and directed them to separate staircases without a word.
The absence of words was its own form of discretion, and the discretion was, Imogen suspected, the reason Mrs. Calvert had lasted thirty years.
Ash released her hand at the foot of the back stairs. The releasing was slow, his fingers sliding against hers as they separated, and the slide was the last touch of the night, the final point of contact between the cottage and the morning.
Imogen climbed the back stairs to the blue bedroom, closed the door, leaned against it, pressed her hands against her face and breathed.
She was falling in love with him. She could feel it happening; the slow, relentless accumulation of small things. Each small thing was a weight added to a scale that had been tipping since the potted palm and was now very nearly overbalanced, and the overbalancing was terrifying.
She bathed, changed and went downstairs for breakfast. The morning passed in the strange suspended animation of a country house gathering the day after a storm; everyone slightly displaced, the ground too wet for walking, the horses too restless for riding, the drawing room full of guests reading, playing cards and talking about nothing in particular.
Cassie was playing spillikins with Miss Drayton on the settee.
Aunt Margery had found a kindred spirit in the vicar’s wife and was deep in conversation about the relative merits of different kinds of lamp oil, a subject on which both women held strong and apparently irreconcilable opinions.
Imogen sat by the window and tried to read but with no success. The book was open in her lap, but the words were not connecting, because behind the words was the meadow, the cottage and behind the cottage was his mouth on her breast and his hand at her.