“I am making one,” Eleanor returned, her tone bright. “If William’s kiss disappointed, someone else’s did not. And only one name comes to mind.” She did not pause. “Julien.”
The last was uttered with something rather akin to a crow of victory.
“You are enjoying my discomfiture in this matter far too much,” Caroline replied, though she could not quite summon true displeasure.
“Not your discomfiture, my dearest friend,” Eleanor corrected. “But I cannot deny being quite pleased that the two of you are now dancing with one another as opposed to around one another.” She leaned back slightly. “I have suspected for some time that my brother harbored strong feelings for you, and it was not so long ago that I began to suspect those feelings might be returned. It was evident in the way the two of you always seemed to possess an awareness of the other’s presence.”
Caroline looked down at her hands. “It was last night,” she said. “In the corridor. I could not sleep. And I suppose the same was true for him. It was not planned. It was more… a moment of impetuousness.”
“Well, that is even better,” Eleanor said at once. “If my staid, stoic, steady—and at times rather stodgy—brother was moved to impulsiveness, then I can only conclude that something truly remarkable has occurred.”
Caroline drew a breath, then forced herself onward. “I feel entirely out of my depth,” she admitted. “It is not merely the kiss. It is that I have no notion what comes after such a thing.”
Eleanor blinked.
“You have no notion?” she repeated. “Caroline, you were with William for six years.”
“And yet,” Caroline replied, more firmly, “we were never permitted the opportunity to behave improperly.”
Eleanor did not answer at once.
The immediate delight that had animated her expression moments before faltered, not entirely disappearing, but shifting into something more thoughtful, more measured, and Caroline felt a small, unexpected flicker of reassurance at the change.
Eleanor knew.Not in any vague or theoretical sense, but in ways that were far more specific and far less easily set aside. Marriage had seen to that with a thoroughness she had not entirely anticipated, and the understanding it had brought had been as surprising as it was compelling. What she knew now had not been learned through careful explanation or gradual instruction, but through experience, through moments that had unfolded with a warmth and intensity that had caught her entirely unawares and left her with a far greater appreciation for such matters than she had ever thought to possess. And that, she realized, was precisely the difficulty, because what she understood could not be easily separated from how she had come to understand it, being bound up as it was in sensation, in reaction, and in the quiet astonishment of discovering just how much more there was beyond what she had once assumed to be the full extent of such intimacy.
There had been nothing orderly about it, nothing that could be neatly arranged into explanation without stripping it of the very things that made it meaningful, and she found herself suddenly aware that what she knew best was not how to describe it, but how it felt. More to the point, she had no wish to shock Caroline, nor to frighten her, and the reality of it, delivered without care, might very well do both, which left her in the rather inconvenient position of possessing knowledge she could not easily share and being asked, quite directly, to do precisely that.
“Well,” she began at last, though the word carried more uncertainty than she might have wished, “it is not so very complicated. There are… natural progressions to such things. A kiss is not an end in itself, but rather a beginning, and from that beginning one is led, quite gradually, to further?—”
“To further what?” Caroline asked at once.
Eleanor faltered, the sentence trailing despite her intention to complete it. “Further intimacies,” she finished.
“That is not, I think, as illuminating as you intend it to be,” Caroline replied.
“No,” Eleanor admitted. “I rather suspect it is not.”
“And yet you persist in speaking as though I ought to understand it.”
“I persist because I do not know how else to explain it,” Eleanor returned. “A kiss does not remain merely a kiss. It deepens. It leads.”
“Leads to what?”
Eleanor let out a breath. “To closeness. To familiarity. To… a greater willingness to remain rather than withdraw.”
“That still sounds like the same thing said three different ways.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said, with a faint, rueful smile. “Because I am, quite evidently, failing to explain it properly.”
“You are explaining just enough to make me wish for more clarity.”
“And I am discovering that clarity, in this instance, does not lend itself particularly well to conversation,” Eleanor returned, with a small, unladylike huff. “This is absurd. I am explaining nothing at all.”
“Not nothing,” Caroline said. “Only not enough.”
“Which may be worse,” Eleanor replied, though there was humor in it still. She studied Caroline then, more carefully, taking in the earnestness of her expression, the uncertainty she was attempting—and failing—to conceal, and something in it tempered her amusement into something more thoughtful.
“I have suspected for some time,” she said then, more deliberately, “that my brother’s regard for you was not of the ordinary sort.”
