She was gone before Cressida could decide whether to be amused or heartened by that.
A moment later, Lady Seymore’s voice carried up the staircase, greeting the footman with the brisk warmth of a woman who had long since decided ceremony was an inefficiency she could not afford.
Cressida stood and moved to the window. Below, the afternoon light lay long across the gravel, and the grounds stretched pale gold and unhurried in the May warmth, entirely indifferent to the fact that this morning had begun so well and ended so badly.
She had been mulling it over for hours. The servants’ voices through the open window, and the words that had carried with such unfortunate clarity through the warm air.
About the damned scandal sheets. She was certain that was the reason Theodore had gone rigid at her side before leaving her standing alone in the rose walk.
What troubled her was not the servants’ gossip; she had long since accepted that her marriage had come about undercircumstances the household would discuss, that whispers were an inevitable feature of her new life and not one she could do anything to prevent.
What troubled her was Theodore’s response—a withdrawal so swift and total that it had the quality of a door slamming shut on a room he had not intended to open.
The ease of the morning, his dry wit, the genuine smile she had worked to earn, the warmth threading through every ordinary exchange—all of it had been erased by a handful of words overheard through an open window. As though he had been waiting for the confirmation that it was all too good to be trusted.
She understood what the scandal sheets represented to him. Not the indiscretion itself, but the betrayal implied by it—the idea that someone with access to his household had decided their own interests mattered more than any obligation to him.
She had no proof of this, only the accumulated intelligence of weeks: the way trust with him was not a disposition but a concession, offered in increments and revocable without warning.
What she could not resolve was this: he had held her in a darkened corridor at Lady Seymore’s ball and told her that she drove him mad, that his control crumbled with her. He had said she was his. And yet the servants’ casual mention of the gossip sheets had been sufficient to return him within a heartbeat to the man who passed her in corridors as though she were a stranger.
The words overheard this morning had not triggered his suspicion. They had only sharpened it. It had been there all along, she realized. Banked and waiting, as patient and reliable as a cold hearth.
She did not yet know how to reach the part of him that persisted in doubting her. She only knew that she intended to.
Below, the front door opened.
Lady Seymore swept into the sitting room in a gown of plum silk, her silver-streaked hair arranged with the settled authority of a woman who had stopped consulting fashion some years ago and was now simply right.
She kissed Cressida on both cheeks, held her at arm’s length, and subjected her to a frank and unhurried assessment.
“You look as though you’ve been thinking very hard about something you can’t resolve.” She released her and settled into the chair nearest the fire with an ease that suggested she had decided, somewhere on the drive over, to make herself entirely at home. “I blame my nephew.”
“I’m perfectly well, My Lady.”
Lady Seymore accepted that with the equanimity of a woman who had heard a great many reassurances and found them uniformly unconvincing.
“Now, about the other evening. The pair of you left with all the subtlety of conspirators fleeing the scene. I have spent two days constructing theories.”
“It was a lovely ball.” Cressida sat opposite her. “You were most gracious.”
“Don’t be diplomatic. It doesn’t suit you.” Lady Seymore tilted her head. “Theodore is here? He hasn’t barricaded himself in the study and declared himself unavailable to all human congress?”
“He has been…” Cressida considered her words. “Present.”
“That is the most guardedly encouraging thing anyone has said to me all week.” Lady Seymore’s mouth curved. “Come, then. Let us have dinner, and see if we can’t coax him out of himself for an evening.”
They sat down to dinner at eight, Cressida at one end of the long mahogany table, Theodore at the other, and Lady Seymore between them with the casual precision of a woman who had decided exactly where she wished to be and had arranged matters accordingly.
The first quarter-hour was stiff enough to be architectural. Theodore spoke to his aunt with perfect correctness andno particular warmth. Lady Seymore responded at twice the volume and three times the animation, compensating cheerfully for whatever his composure withheld. Cressida said several things about the soup that were accurate, if not especially illuminating.
Then Lady Seymore set down her spoon and announced, to no one in particular, that she had recently discovered her late husband’s private library contained an entire shelf of novels behind his collected Parliamentary speeches—three volumes of precisely the sort he had publicly decried as a corrupting influence on the English mind.
“He had opinions,” she said, with great serenity. “He simply exercised them in private, which I consider more honest than people who pretend to have no opinions at all.”
“Are you referring to anyone specific?” Theodore asked.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Lady Seymore turned to Cressida. “Your color is better. The south light suits you.”
