“I was simply enjoying the view of the ceiling,” she said wryly. “And I do intend to rest, but it is hard to pin Malcolm at the best of times, and he was willing just now. I had to fetch my measuring tape.”
“Malcolm’s resistant?” Elias said with some surprise. “He seems to me a fellow who enjoys expanding his wardrobe.”
“Oh, he is,” she said with a titter, “as the debonair gambler and banking man. Not as the Marvelous Human Abacus.”
“Ah,” said Elias, feeling a little slapped by how that resonated. “That does make sense.”
“Bah,” said Monica. “One ought to be grateful for discovery. If Willa hadn’t found me, I’d still be scrubbing stained particulars next to my mother’s lean-to. Now she has her own laundry and I’ve seen the Continent. What’s to complain about?”
He pressed his lips together, his cheeks warming at his own many, many complaints, and resolved not to complain himself through the next hour of pinning and prodding and pinching as he and Malcolm Lennox shared sympathetic glances between themselves, propped like mannequins in front of a set of dusty, old mirrors that Monica had not yet had time to wipe down.
Afterward, he did rather wish he could take a nap.
Instead, he found himself standing at the foot of the foyer stairs as the sun began to sink lower in the late-afternoon sky, his hand brushing the dusty banisters as he gazed up toward themaster suite, pondering whether or not he should go have a peek into his future without Harriet in tow.
He knew that he should not. He had already decided not to do it.
But that didn’t change how it likely looked to her when she found him there.
“Have you gone up?” she asked softly, startling him so much, he might have broken off part of the stair railing, the way he spun around.
She had changed, he saw, after hersiesta. Her wealth of brassy, red-blonde hair was piled up on her head now, pinned into order, and she was wearing a diaphanous orange gown that glowed like an ember opposite the lowering sun.
It hit him right between the ribs, the way she glowed there, as though nothing at all were amiss. His eyes followed her fingers as she twisted a strand of her brassy hair over her knuckles, pulling her lip between her teeth as she gazed up the stairs. She looked just as worried as she had back in the parlor.
Oddly, knowing she was capable of anything other than total confidence and bizarre trains of thought was somehow reassuring to him.
He shook his head, following her gaze up the banister. “No,” he bit off. “I only considered it. Hadn’t quite worked up the nerve.”
She nodded, running her thumbnail against the pads of her fingertips as her eyes tilted up to the darkened hall above. “If we are going to go up today,” she said, “we ought to do it right now, before it gets any darker. What do you think, Elias?”
He swallowed, considering it. “Do you think it will get any less ominous tomorrow?”
She gave him a thin smile. “I do not.”
“Well, then…” He shrugged and jerked his head toward the stairs to indicate that they should climb them.
“So,” he said between footfalls on the creaking wood, “do you picture a serpent every time you say my name?”
Her lips gave a delicate twist, her eyes down watching her slippered feet take one step at a time. “Not a literal snake, no,” she said, shaking her head. “It is more the shape of the word as it escapes into the air. I do not find you snake-like, Elias.”
“No?” He reached the landing and fished the heavy, silver key out of his pocket, taking a deep breath as they turned to walk toward the master suite doors. “What do you find me like? Not three, either. Not candy and chimes.”
“Definitely not candy and chimes,” she agreed, still wearing that little look of amusement. “Nothing so fleeting or fluffy. I hear thunder sometimes. I taste salt. I smell the bonfire from the summer’s end festival, from that day that you pushed me into the water, right before the rain started. I didn’t know that was what it was. I didn’t realize it was a memory until last night. Barren fields. I do remember now. And I am sorry.”
“Youare sorry?” he repeated, stopping dead in his tracks. “Why areyousorry?”
She grimaced, drawing that lip back between the clamp of her teeth. “It was… I was… silly. I was a silly child, and I said something unkind, even if I didn’t mean to. It doesn’t make it less unkind just because it was unintentional. I understand that now.”
He paused, frowning. “I never thought you were being cruel,” he said, guilt pricking up in his veins. “Just… relentless.”
“‘Relentless,’” she repeated, as though she didn’t know the meaning of the word. Though, of course, she did. “I’ve never been described as such, to my knowledge.Tenacious, perhaps.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” he said with a sigh, rubbing his hand over his face. “You were just quite a lot as a girl and I got overwhelmed on that day. I am sorry too.”
“Oh,” she said, blinking at him in clear surprise. “Well, if we are both sorry, then I suppose the only sensible thing to do is agree on mutual forgiveness.”
He blinked. And then he laughed. “Sensible,” he said, watching her through the half-shadows of the hallway. “Is that what you are now? Instead of relentless?”
