Cecily nodded. “That is an excellent observation.”
Isadora looked faintly startled. Not by the subject, but by the directness of the approval. She recovered quickly, but Cecily had seen it.
“I want to read romances,” Letitia announced with energy. “Proper ones. With heroines who do things and heroes who are—you know…” She gestured with her hands. “Heroic. And not interminably sensible.”
“There is considerable overlap between heroic and sensible, if the author is doing their job,” Cecily opined.
“There isn’t in the good ones,” Letitia said, with absolute conviction.
“No, I–” Isadora began.
“And I want to ride the lower fields,” Letitia continued, gathering speed now that she had started. “The whole lower field, not just the paddock. Mrs. Eldridge says the paddock is sufficient, but the paddock is the size of a very large carpet, and a very large carpet is not–”
“Letitia.” William set down his coffee cup. The sound was not loud—it barely carried—but it was final.
Letitia stopped as though a door had closed. He looked at her. His expression was not unkind—that was the thing Cecily was already learning to watch for, the thing that made himcomplicated. There was no cruelty in it. Only a certainty so complete it had never thought to question itself.
“Too many novels fill a young lady’s head with expectations that the world is not arranged to meet. The disappointment that follows is not the world’s fault.” He looked at Isadora as well, briefly, including her in the observation without accusing her. “And riding without defined boundaries invites accidents. The lower fields are uneven past the second gate. You know this.”
“I know the paddock better than I know my own shoes,” Letitia said, with the careful dignity of making a last argument rather than a first one.
“Then you will continue to know it well.”
Letitia fell silent. Not happily—her expression communicated the full inventory of her feelings on the matter with considerable eloquence—but with the resignation of someone who had been here before and knew the terrain.
Cecily looked at her plate for a moment.
She is not afraid of him.Neither of them is. But they are afraid of his disappointment, which is a different and more complicated country to live in.
She looked up.
“Books,” she spoke up, addressing no one in particular, “teach discernment as much as they teach dreaming. I would argue they teach it more, when they are well chosen, because they offer the reader the experience of a hundred different lives and the judgment to navigate one’s own.” She picked up her teacup. “A girl who has read widely is harder to deceive and better equipped to understand the people she will encounter. That seems rather useful.”
“It seems romantic,” William remarked.
“It seems practical,” Cecily countered. “The two are not as opposed as you seem to believe.”
He looked at her with the expression she was beginning to recognize—the one that was not quite challenge and not quite interest, but occupied the territory between them.
“And riding the lower fields?”
“Confidence in the saddle is not built through restrictions. It is built through graduated experience and the opportunity to test one’s own judgment in conditions that are not entirely controlled.” She set her teacup down. “A rider who has only ever ridden in a paddock does not know how she will respond to uneven ground. That seems like a more significant safety concern than the lower fields themselves.”
“Fear of accidents prevents them.”
“Fear of accidents,” she said, “produces exactly the kind of tense, hesitant riding most likely to cause one.” She met his gaze. “Discipline keeps a household ordered, Duke. I do not dispute that. But discipline alone—without trust in the person being governed, without kindness in the governing—does not produce capable, confident young women. It produces young women who are very good at waiting to be told what to do.” A pause. “And at hiding what they actually think.”
The room went very still. It was a different kind of stillness from the ones that had preceded it.
Across the table, Isadora had put down her toast. Letitia was looking at her plate with the focused attention of someone who was not looking at two people across the table.
William looked at Cecily. She looked back.
The distance between them was perhaps four feet. At that moment, it felt considerably less—the compressed distance between two people who had said something real to each other and had not yet decided what came next. His expression was not angry. It was not dismissive. It was a careful, contained expression.
She did not look away. Neither did he.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked through several seconds in which neither of them moved. Then William set his napkin on the table.
