He inclined his head. “Forgive me. That was ill-timed.”
He expected her to accept the apology and say no more. Instead she answered, with a frankness that surprised him entirely, “No. It was only too well-timed.”
He did not trust himself to reply. There were moments when silence was not merely prudent but necessary. This was one of them.
The winter light had shifted while they spoke, shining across the gravel and the dark leaves of the holly. A thin breeze stirred the bare branches of the orchard, setting the smallest twigs in motion. Arch allowed his gaze to travel once more over the boundaries of the garden, marking angles, distances, the placement of neighbouring windows. If they were being observed—and he was nearly certain they were—then what had passed between them would already be noted.
Let it be noted.
Francesca seemed to arrive at a similar conclusion. He saw the change in her posture—the quiet settling of resolve, the acceptance of what must be done without further protest.
She drew a breath. “If we are to persuade anyone, we cannot stand apart like hostile diplomats. Offer me your arm again.”
He obeyed at once. The simple act—her hand returning to rest upon his sleeve—ought to have been unremarkable. It was not. It carried, for him at least, a significance wholly disproportionate to its outward form. He would not dwell upon it.
As they resumed their walk, she spoke again, her tone assured now, though not without its edge. “I must ask one question before I consent to anything. Did Colonel Renforth devise this scheme alone or is he in league with your mother?”
The question struck him so unexpectedly that he laughed—an unguarded sound, entirely unsuited to the gravity of the morning. He did not often laugh. He saw at once that the genuineness of it surprised her. “On my honour, only your uncle was consulted.”
“I consider that to be scarcely an improvement.”
“No,” he admitted, “perhaps not, but it is at least free of poetry.”
“And of flowers,” she said.
“And of terraces by moonlight,” he added.
She glanced at him then, properly this time, and for a moment the strain between them relaxed into something dangerously close to ease.
The feeling was dangerous because it was not part of the plan. It was also dangerous because it made the plan more difficult to remember. He reminded himself, with some force, that none of this—her nearness, her trust, her reluctant compliance—had been freely offered in the ordinary course of things. It had been compelled by circumstance, shaped by necessity, and justified by danger.
It was, in every meaningful sense, a fiction, and yet—he did not finish the thought.
If the deception held, it would protect her. If it failed—he could not think of the outcome.
At the terrace door she withdrew her hand, not abruptly, but with the natural reserve required once they returned to the sphere of windows and servants. He bowed.
“I shall call again later,” he said, keeping his tone low enough that the nearest footman, should one be within earshot, mighthear attentiveness but not instruction. “In the meantime, I beg you will not alter your plans without sending word.”
Her glance met his, bright still, but steadier than before. “You beg in a very commanding manner, Major Manners.”
The answer earned him the smallest softening about her mouth, though he saw, too, the effort behind it. She was brave; he had known that already. He had not quite understood, until this morning, how much her bravery cost her. It was one thing to consent to danger in the abstract, as part of a scheme one had helped devise, but quite another to discover that danger had turned and fixed its eye upon one’s own person. She bore that discovery with more composure than many men he had known. That thought followed him unpleasantly as she passed back into the house.
Sir Percival detained Arch only briefly in the library. The older man’s manner, though outwardly composed, carried a concern too real to be mistaken.
“Do you believe she understands the necessity?”
“I believe she understands it better than it pleases her,” Arch answered.
Sir Percival gave a short nod. “That is often the beginning of wisdom.”
On another day, Arch might have found some dry reply for that. He had none now.
“I shall send a trusted groom with any note she must dispatch,” Sir Percival continued. “No ordinary messenger will be employed.”
“That would be prudent.”
“And Archibald?—”
