She sobered a little. “Yes. Less than a month. I’ll have freedom to make decisions like an actual adult.”
“And what will you do with it?” His tone was indifferent again, but at least he was asking questions and keeping the conversation going.
Cordelia realized she had been caught off guard because no one had ever asked her that. They all assumed the usual: she would find a quiet country house, perhaps sponsor a cousin’s season, maybe open a school for girls too plain for the marriage mart.
“I want a house,” she said slowly. “One with too many rooms. I don’t want any servants whispering in the halls. I want a housewhere I can make noise and spill ink and hang up all the awful paintings I love without someone telling me it clashes with the wallpaper.”
The Duke glanced at her sidelong.
“I want a studio,” she added. “I want to start something new every week and abandon half of it andnotfeel guilty about it. I want to live somewhere where I don’t have to prove that I’m useful in order to be wanted.”
The last words slipped out uninvited, and she bit her tongue. The silence that followed was different. He didn’t say anything although she would have given anything for him to have done so. She hated that she could not decipher him, that his quiet was a fortress she could never breach, no matter how open she made herself. She looked away and said nothing more.
By the time they reached the edge of the estate, the grand façade of Galleon Estate rising like some ancient, unyielding fortress out of the mist-dusted hills, Cordelia realized that she had forgotten to ask the most important question: why had he shown her the cottage and what it meant… if it meant anything at all.
But now, the moment for it had disappeared, lost in the wake of his silence and her babbling, like a letter dropped into a stream. Her steps slowed although her thoughts raced. Had he meant for that to happen?
Had his sudden, brooding quiet been designed to throw her off, to make her speak of herself instead? To see what she would dowith freedom? Whether she’d flee to the coast and waste away in poetry, or build something that mattered? Had he been…assessingher? The way one might a piece of land or a horse or a possible duchess?
Cordelia’s cheeks flamed. She was being ridiculous, surely.
And yet…
There had been a sharpness in his question, and she, like a fool, had answered honestly, as if she owed him her truths just because he walked beside her with the moonlight caught in his eyes.
The wind tugged lightly at her shawl. Distantly, a bell rang somewhere from the stable yard, and the muffled clatter of servants in the kitchens below stairs signaled the return to a household settling into its evening rhythm. She looked up at the manor and felt the ache return, quiet and familiar.
She didn’t want to leave.
It was the first time in years she had felt as though she belonged somewhere, and people wanted her there. She liked the cook’s daughters, who slipped her extra biscuits. And she was also liked by the Dowager Duchess, who in turn relished their conversations, even when Cordelia rambled. Now, there was also Isabelle, who had smiled at her like an equal, not a guest.
Everyone welcomed her… everyone but the Master of the house.
Chapter Twelve
Cordelia Brookes was not the sort of woman who took kindly to being dismissed… especially not quietly and especially not by a man who never said what he meant.
So, when three days prior, the Duke of Galleon had gently suggested that the Dowager’s companion might soon be missed in London, Cordelia had smiled, nodded graciously… and promptly set about making herself as difficult to remove as possible.
That was exactly why she now sat cross-legged on the floor of the east library, surrounded by teetering towers of books that resembled a battlefield after some deeply intellectual war.
She had flung open windows and tugged dustcloths from shelves with wild abandon. But that was not all. She had dispatched three volumes to be rebound in town with a note to the bookbinder she refused to show the Duke on the grounds thatit wasabsolutely not his concern, and anyway, isn’t surprise a necessary component of life?
In short, she had declared war on disorder with the full knowledge that Mason Abernathy would never dream of interrupting a lady halfway through a large project involving his prized books, if only because it would offend some dark, bibliophilic corner of his soul.
He wouldn’t throw her out while she was elbow-deep in Aristotle and naval charts. He had principles.
That was her hope, at least, and now, she had been at it for hours.
Her gown was smudged with dust at the hem. Her hair, pinned up too hastily, had begun to curl in damp black wisps around her temples. Her hands were ink-stained, and she looked altogether delightedly unfit for polite society. A stack of books wobbled beside her, threatening collapse.
Cordelia narrowed her eyes at it. “You stay right there, sir. You’re between me and the Ottoman Empire, and I refuse to be thwarted again.”
The tower, to its credit, remained upright.
She turned back to the open volume in her lap, which was a curious tome titledCartographic Principles and Global Proportions. Its spine was cracked, and its pages lined withmaps and diagrams in faded ink. She hadn’t meant to pause here.
This wasn’t part of the plan. This genre had simply been part of the “M” section.Maps. Minerals. Military Strategy.Those were books that were not novels or poetry; certainly not the kind of things ladies were expected to skim by candlelight with idle fingers and dramatic sighs.
