“I’m well here.” She folded the cloth back over the pie. “Your mother and Louisa are happier together. Louisa thinks she’s guarding her.”
“She is,” he said, before he could make it gentle. He tried again. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For the way you looked at them last night,” he said. “As if they were the whole of the world.”
Her fingers smoothed the cloth one more time, then she lifted her eyes to his. “They were,” she said simply.
They rolled on. The rain softened for a few minutes, then returned with a force that made the hedges blur. A footman, soaked to the skin, clung to the perch behind like a stubborn limpet. Winston rapped the ceiling to have Hartley stop long enough to take the man inside the boot. They set off again.
He meant to keep his questions for Greystone. Oswald would meet them there.Debrett’slay in his memory like a judgment he was not sure he wanted to enforce. Yet the carriage, the rain, the unchosen quiet, these were a kind of room. He would not have another soon.
“You said before,” he began, not sure how to put it without turning it into an accusation, “that your father could be…difficult.”
She looked out at the hedge as if she could unspool the right words from the thin winter hawthorn. “He is not a man to cross,” she said at last. “He takes being alive as a kind of high office. We held to our places or we suffered for it.”
“And your mother?”
“She held to us,” Adeline said. “That was her place as she saw it. She made it so.” She glanced at him once and back to the window. “There were nights when I went out and hid in the grounds. I’d take my book and sit under the tree at the boundary wall, just there.” Her hand moved, marking space in the air. “I told myself I could see across the county if I kept very still. I learned to come back only when the lamps were extinguished.”
He felt something in his chest go tight and new. The picture was clear. A girl in a thin cloak under a tree, waiting for the temperature of a house to change. “And when you came back?”
“Sometimes there was only quiet.” She folded her hands, thumb across thumb. “Sometimes…” She shook her head and left the sentence where it was.
“You were alone,” he said.
“Not as alone as my mother,” she said without heat. “She did not show it. That was the trick she taught me. We make everyone comfortable, and then perhaps the thing with teeth will lie down.”
He wanted to reach for her hand but couldn’t spare his own from holding his position against the jostling of the road. His shoulder and hip came into contact with hers as they shifted. She slid on the seat; her body pressed against him, and then was torn away. Each contact brought a tightening of his breath. A race to his pulse. He settled for adjusting the leather strap at his shoulder. “He didn’t strike you?”
“No,” she said, with a flinty dryness that told him enough. “But the words were worse.”
There wasn’t much to say to that that didn’t sound like a speech men make when they are too late. Or when they are separated by the safe distance of time and space, able to speak platitudes that mean nothing. He let the wheels talk. When he spoke again, he kept the question easy on its feet.
“Did you ever come near marriage?” he asked.
“No,” she said at once, and then seemed to hear the shape of the word in the air. A small line showed at the edge of her mouth. “Not truly near,” she amended. “I… knew what it might be. I can’t say I stood with the thing in hand.”
He didn’t point out the contradiction. He only nodded. His mind filled the space with a memory of the drawing room at St. James’s, a hand-delivered letter, a face gone pale, and the way fear could make truth look like a trick of light.
“You always wanted children,” he said, recalling her voice in the carriage the night before, the way it had softened when she cradled Louisa’s foot on her knee.
“Yes.”
“Why do you speak as if…?” He trailed off, unwilling to put a date on a life that was alive in front of him.
“As if it’s too late?” she supplied, without being unkind. “Because I cannot see it happening.”
“You’re not an old woman.”
“I’m not a young one,” she said. “And I’ve made choices that close doors.”
He looked at her for a long breath. “Doors open,” he said.
A corner of her mouth warmed, then smoothed. “Sometimes they do.”
The road dipped and rose again. Fields opened to either side, water standing in flat mirrors where ditches had given up. Hartley had to take the next descent in a crooked path to avoid the worst of the wash. The carriage creaked. Something ahead shouted. Hartley hauled on the reins and the team came back under his hand in a rush of wheezing breath and flying foam.
