“A considerable margin,” Cecily repeated. “Duke, it grazed the wire. I heard it.”
“You heard the wind.”
“I heard the wire.”
“There is no wire.”
“There is wire enough.”
William stood slightly to the left of this exchange with his mallet resting against his shoulder and watched his wife argue with a duke about a game of Pall Mall with the focused conviction of someone for whom the outcome of this particular hoop was a matter of genuine moral consequence.
She had her hand on her hip. Her hair had come slightly loose on the right side—she hadn’t noticed, or had noticed and didn’t care, and he was finding he could not look away from it. Her cheeks were high with color from the cool air and the argument, and she was looking at Edward with the expression she had used on William across the breakfast table, which he now recognized as the expression she wore when she had already decided she was right and was simply waiting for the other party to catch up.
Beatrice was standing near the garden wall, eating an apple she had produced from somewhere, watching the proceedings with the serenity of a woman who had made a deliberate decision to be uninvolved.
The game continued with intensity, and William soon discovered that Cecily was good. Not politely good, not lucky-good, but genuinely, technically good. She read the ground before she played, adjusted her stance with quick, practical attention, and hit the ball cleanly, even though Edward was a worthy opponent.
She was also completely incapable of concealing her feelings about the score.
“Yes,” she said when her ball cleared the fifth hoop cleanly. The word came out with a quiet, emphatic satisfaction that she appeared entirely unaware of.
“Well played,” William praised.
She looked up at him. There was a sparkle in her eyes—uncomplicated and unguarded, the expression of someone who had forgotten to manage their expression because they were too busy being pleased—and it lasted approximately two seconds before she recovered herself.
“Thank you,” she said with composure.
Beatrice, near the wall, had given up all pretense of not being entertained and was simply watching them with her arms folded and her apple finished and the expression of a woman getting everything she had hoped for out of an afternoon.
Edward took the lead at the seventh hoop by means of a shot which Cecily described as lucky, and which he described as skilled, and which William privately thought was lucky but had no intention of saying so.
“That,” Cecily said, staring at the ball’s final position with the focused displeasure of a military strategist reviewing an unexpected defeat, “was the wrong outcome.”
“It was the correct outcome,” Edward countered. “It was simply not the outcomeyouwanted.”
“In this context, those are the same thing.”
“They are emphatically not the same thing.”
“Duke,” Cecily said, turning to him with the patient precision of someone about to make a very simple point to someone who should understand it, “you have won enough things in your life. You are a duke. You own property in four counties. You have a beautiful family, an excellent cook, and a dog named Horatio–”
“That’s our dog.” Eloise beamed.
“–and I think,” Cecily continued without pause, “that the generous thing, the truly gracious thing, given the disparity in our life circumstances, would be to allow me this one hoop.”
Silence followed.
Edward looked at his wife. Beatrice bit the inside of her cheek.
“No,” he said.
“Fine,” Cecily huffed, and took her shot with a violence of intention that sent the ball considerably farther than necessary and rolled it into the hedge at the garden’s edge.
William retrieved it without comment.
“Thank you,” she muttered, taking it from his hand with clipped courtesy.
“Of course,” he said.
