She looked up at him. He looked back at her. He was close enough to see the exact moment her indignation broke—a crack in it that became something helpless and then became, unmistakably, a laugh. She pressed her lips together against it. Failed. Turned away very quickly, under the pretence of lining up her next shot.
William looked at the middle distance and said nothing, but he felt the pull of something in his chest that had been there all afternoon and was becoming more difficult to ignore with every passing hour.
Cecily’s ball had taken a wide angle off a bump in the ground and come to rest in a position that was either just through the hoop or just short of it, depending on who was looking.
Then she turned back to Edward and said, “I’m taking the point,” and walked to the next hoop with settled finality.
“Is she always like this?” William asked him quietly.
Edward watched his sister-in-law line up her next shot with the focused intensity of a general. “At Pall Mall, yes.” He paused. “At most things, if we’re being honest.”
William watched her hit—clean, precise, satisfying—and mutteryesagain under her breath as though she couldn’t help it.
“Yes,” he murmured. “I’m beginning to understand that.”
“She was never like this in Society,” Edward elaborated, coming to stand beside him with his mallet slung over his shoulder. “In drawing rooms, she was perfectly pleasant. Asked the right questions, said the right things. You’d have thought her quite composed.”
“She is composed,” William said.
“She is composed,” Edward agreed. “When she remembers to be.” He nodded toward the far end of the course, where Cecily had now stood up, made a decision about the ground, and was positioning herself with settled concentration. “At home, she was always like this. Arguing about everything. Refusing to concede anything she didn’t believe was genuinely lost.” A pause. “Drove every suitor we ever entertained completely mad.”
“There were suitors.” It came out less like a question than William intended.
“There were always suitors,” Edward confirmed. “She refused them all.”
Down the course, Cecily hit the ball—clean and decisive—and said something under her breath that William was fairly certain was not ladylike and that the distance mercifully prevented him from hearing clearly. Then she looked up, caught the ball’s final position, and the expression that crossed her face was that of a person receiving news they had fully expected and were entirely pleased about.
She was smiling. Not the composed, careful smile he had seen her use in front of him. He watched it come and go, and felt something shift in his chest that he had been feeling with increasing frequency.
Beatrice pushed off the garden wall to stand on his other side, serene and unhurried.
“Six suitors in three Seasons,” she said pleasantly, as though continuing a conversation rather than beginning one. “Mama kept a list. She found it soothing, I think, to have it written down.”
“Six,” William echoed.
“That we knew about.” Beatrice watched her sister line up the next shot. “She turned down the first one without telling anyone for a week. We only found out because his mother mentioned it at a card party, and Mama came home and had to lie down.” A slight pause. “She’s always preferred books. It made the whole enterprise rather difficult. You cannot compete with a book. A book never says the wrong thing at dinner.”
“A book,” William said, watching Cecily crouch down to examine something near the hoop with the total, oblivious focus of a woman who had forgotten the game had other participants, “does not argue about every point.”
“She argues with books, too,” Beatrice revealed. “She writes in the margins.”
William thought of the library. Of Cecily in the chair by the fire, with her feet tucked beneath her and both hands over the cover of a very French novel pressed against her knee, and the color that had risen in her face, and the way she had looked at him while trying very hard to look at anything else.
“Books,” he said, allowing his voice to carry, “are formidable rivals. I’m beginning to understand the difficulty.”
He said it toward the course, not toward Beatrice, but he was aware of Beatrice’s expression shifting slightly, the way expressions shifted when something had been confirmed rather than discovered.
At the far end of the course, Cecily looked up.
She had not been looking at them—she had been entirely occupied with the mallet in her hands and the ground in front of her and some private assessment of the angle—but something made her look up at that precise moment. Her eyes found his with the direct, immediate accuracy they always had, as though looking at him were simply where they went when they were not being directed elsewhere.
He held her gaze.
And he watched it happen. Watched her hear the wordbooksand watch her mind go somewhere specific, watched the color rise in her face with the sudden completeness of something that could not be recalled once it had begun. It started at her cheekbones and moved, and she looked away almost immediately—down at her mallet, at the course, anywhere with intention—but not before he had seen all of it.
He looked back at the mallet in his hand.
“I see,” Beatrice said from beside him, in the tone of a woman who had seen more than he had intended.
