Edmund went very still, as if afraid that moving would frighten her away.
“I do not know what to do with you,” Elise whispered.
His voice, when it came, sounded rough. “I do not know what to do with myself.”
A tiny, breathless sound escaped her—something that might have been laughter in a different life. Yet the truth in his voice did not feel like a demand. It felt like a plea he did not know how properly to voice.
Something in her, weary and stubborn and unaccountably alive, broke through its own caution. She rose on her toes and kissed him.
It was not a grand gesture. It was not theatrical. It was the desperate choice of warmth over judgement for a single, dangerous moment. Distantly she realized she was choosing herself over everything else in that moment.
Edmund’s hands lifted, and he drew her closer then—gently, reverently, as though she might shatter—and returned the kiss with a thoroughness that startled her. He did not take; he met her, as if he, too, had been holding himself too tightly for too long.
When they broke apart, Elise felt oddly alive in a manner most unfamiliar to her. Her breathing quickened in response to his nearness.
Briefly, Edmund rested his forehead against hers, and Elise felt safe for the first time in weeks. It was quite absurd.
“You must go,” she murmured, and now she meant it in both senses: he must go downstairs, to his men; and he must go to London, to that funeral that waited like a sentence.
“Yes,” he said, though he did not move at once, as if he could not bear to end the moment. “But I will return.”
“When you return,” she said quietly, “it will be not as Mr. Leigh, but as Edmund.” The sound of his name in her own mouth made her feel giddy in a way that was entirely improper.
“As Edmund,” he agreed.
A knock sounded at the door—a quick, discreet tap.
“Sir,” Sophie’s voice called softly, “they be asking for you below.”
Elise stepped back at once, renewing the familiar distance like a wall. It was easier to breathe with the wall in place.
Edmund looked at her, and Elise had the unsettling sense that he was trying to memorize her—as if he feared she would not be there when he returned.
“I will come back,” he said quietly.
Compelled by some hidden force, Elise abandoned the wall’s safety, ran to him and hugged him fiercely, giving him a swift kiss on the cheek before stepping back again.
Edmund left her then, closing the door gently behind him.
As his footsteps faded, Elise remained where she was for a long while, her hand still half-raised as if she had meant to call him back and had lost the courage to do so. The house, newly quiet, seemed to listen with her. Even the sea beyond the cliffs sounded subdued, as though it too had withdrawn its voice and was waiting.
She drew a careful breath and then another, schooling herself as she always had. Feeling, indulged without restraint, was a luxury she had long ago learned not to trust. It unsettled the mind, softened the judgement, and encouraged hope.
Hope had nearly undone her once before.
She moved at last, smoothing the front of her gown and tucking an escaped curl back into its place. The mirror above her washing-stand reflected a woman she barely recognized: her eyes too bright, the colour still high in her cheeks, her mouth faintly swollen. She looked—she thought with a touch of bitterness—like a girl who had been kissed and believed it meant something.
“Compose yourself,” she murmured aloud, the way she might do to one of the younger girls before a recital or examination. “You are not one of your silly girls. You know better.”
Edmund—no, Singleton now, and soon to be something else—had kissed her because danger compressed feeling into immediacy; because relief sought expression when bodies remembered they were alive. It was not, she told herself firmly, a promise. It could not be. He would be an earl, bound by duties she neither fully understood nor wished to entangle herself in. London would claim him again as surely as the sea claimed wreckage. He would return to a world of drawing rooms and expectation, of obligations inherited as ruthlessly as guilt.
Gentlemen returned to London and changed. She had heard of it often enough.
Elise turned from the mirror and went to the window, resting the tips of her fingers against the glass. Below, the grounds of Belair House lay quiet for the first time in days. The wall had been set to rights, the fallen limbs cleared away and the garden returned to something like order. Order was deceptive. It was merely the surface arrangement of things; beneath it, lives continued their unruly courses.
She could not allow her own to be dictated by the memory of one man’s presence, however compelling. There was work to be done. That, at least, she understood.
By noon she had sent word to the vicarage and to the half-dozen village families who had taken girls in during the emergency that they could return by that afternoon. The notes were brisk, reassuring and deliberately dull. Children need never know how closely danger brushed their skirts—it was enough that they were kept from it.
