The drawing room was warm after the garden, the fire crackling, and the tea set laid out. Edward and William came in behind them, and there were ten minutes of the comfortable, well-fed disorder of an afternoon concluding with coats retrieved, tea poured, and Edward making a remark about the Pall Mall score that Cecily refused to dignify with a response.
Then Edward said he had a letter to finish before the evening post, and William said he’d walk with him to discuss a matter they’d left unresolved at luncheon. Within a few minutes, it was only Cecily and Beatrice in the drawing room, the fire between them, the sounds of the house settling into the late afternoon echoing around them.
Beatrice poured Cecily more tea without asking.
Cecily accepted it without a sound.
They sat for a moment in the particular silence of two sisters who had been amid company all day and were relieved to be without it.
“How is it? Truly?” Beatrice asked, eventually.
Cecily looked at the fire. “How is what?”
“Cecily.”
She turned the cup in her hands. “It is what it is. We agreed on the terms. He is—he has been perfectly civil. The house is comfortable. His sisters are wonderful.” She paused. “It is an arrangement, and it functions as one.”
“Mm.”
“Don’t mm me. You are the one who asked.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You saidmm, which in your language is an entire paragraph.”
Beatrice set down her cup and looked at Cecily with the direct, unhurried look she’d had since childhood.
“He was watching you all afternoon,” she noted.
“He was watching the game.”
“He was watching you play the game. Not the same thing, and you know it.” Beatrice tilted her head slightly. “At the fifth hoop, when you were arguing with Edward about the ball, he was standing behind you, and you couldn’t see his face.Icould.”
“And?” Cecily prompted in the tone of someone who did not particularly want the answer.
“And men do not look at women that way out of a sense of duty.”
The fire shifted. Cecily looked at it.
“He probably looks at me,” she said carefully, “because I am his wife and I am present, and he is an observant man. That is all it is.”
“Cecily–”
“We agreed, Bea. Before the wedding, strictly, essentially—we agreed it was an arrangement. He said so himself. A few months of appearances, and then we lead separate lives.” She paused. “He has been consistent about that.”
“What people agree to and what people feel are not always the same thing.”
“In this case, they are.”
“I watched him at the eighth hoop,” Beatrice said, with the patient persistence of a woman who had decided where this conversation was going. “You were laughing at something Edward said and you’d forgotten to be careful, you were just laughing and he stopped mid-shot and looked at you. Just looked. And then he looked back at his mallet and smiled. It wasn’t the smile he uses in company.” She paused to let that sink in. “It was the other one. The one I suspect not many people see.”
Cecily said nothing. She was thinking about the garden, about the rolled sleeves and the quiet laugh. She was thinking about the library, the firelight, the warmth of him close in a small room, and his voice lower than usual, saying,You are more than welcome.
She was thinking about all the moments she had been collecting without meaning to, filing carefully in a part of herself.
“It doesn’t matter how he looks,” she insisted. “A look is not a feeling, and a feeling is not a choice. Even if he…it doesn’t matter. The arrangement is what it is. I am not going to–” She stopped.
“Going to what?” Beatrice asked gently.
