All three were equally dangerous.
“Your Grace?”
Miss Hartley again—more gently, but with a hint of strain. He realised he had drifted once more into silence.
“My apologies,” he said. “I find myself unusually fatigued this evening. The day’s exertions, you understand.”
“Of course.” Her smile did not quite reach her eyes. “Perhaps tomorrow you will be more yourself.”
I do not know who that is,he thought, but he did not say it.
He smiled instead. He conversed. He performed.
Dinner continued. The young ladies sparkled, the mamas manoeuvred, and the elegant machinery of society turned on, heedless of his weariness.
When the gentlemen at last withdrew for port, he excused himself at the earliest moment that would not give offence.
The library called to him. And he answered.
***
She was not there.
Sebastian stood among the books, surrounded by knowledge and silence, and acknowledged the disappointment he had been attempting to ignore.
Of course she was not there. It was late; she would have duties, or she would be confined to her small room on the upper floor, or—most sensibly—she would have chosen to stay away after their encounter that morning.
I am often here in the mornings, he had said.Should you happen to return a book...
An invitation, veiled in courtesy and deniability. He had known it even as he spoke. She had known it too; he had seen the calculation in her eyes.
She had neither accepted nor refused.
He crossed to the section where he had found her that morning, examining the shelves as though they might reveal some trace of her presence. The book she had borrowed was gone, of course. The space it had occupied gaped like a missing tooth.
He selected a volume at random and settled into a chair by the cold hearth. He would read. He would distract himself. He would not think about grey dresses and dark hair and a voice that said his name like it meant something.
He read the same paragraph four times without understanding and closed the book.
What ailed him? He had met hundreds of women—thousands, perhaps—beautiful, accomplished, eminently suitable. None had remained in his thoughts like this; none had unsettled his composure, or made him feel absurdly young and unguarded.
Because they did not see you,whispered a voice he disliked.They saw the title. The fortune. The influence. She saw you.
But what, precisely, had she seen? A man confessing weariness to a stranger. A duke admitting that the role he played chafed. Seldom an attractive portrait.
And yet she had not recoiled. Had not offered false comfort or empty reassurance. She had looked at him with those watchful eyes and said,We both know our roles. It would be wiser to perform them.
She understood. That was it. She understood performance—understood the discipline of presenting a life one did not entirelyinhabit. She lived that discipline daily, for stakes far higher than his own.
His performance was tiring. Hers was survival.
And still, that morning, she had remained. Had acceptedfellow scholarsas a fiction under which they might briefly meet as equals. A pretext—dangerous, fragile—but a space in which the world’s expectations loosened for a moment.
Would she return? Would she speak to him as she spoke to those books—directly, thoughtfully, without artifice?
Had he any right to hope so?
No. None. She had no freedom; he had no excuse. The distance between them was fixed, and any attempt to cross it would wound her, not him.
