She closed her eyes and let him.
“The Duchess,” he said eventually, addressing the ceiling, “ought to make another visit to the village. The tenants will wish to see their Duchess again.”
“Naturally,” she agreed. “When would be convenient?”
“End of the week, if the weather holds. I will accompany you.” He said this as casually as he possibly could, as though it were an offer that carried no heart. But she knew otherwise.
“Then the end of the week it is.”
He rose, crossed to the washstand, and attended to himself with the economy of a man accustomed to solitude. Cressida was content to watch him from the bed. And then the thought crossed her mind, one that had nagged at her for the longest time, and she felt as though this was as good a time to ask about it.
“About… about the portrait in the gallery,” she said.
He stilled immediately.
“The one that is covered.” Her voice was mild. She refused to burden these words with any particular weight. “I have thought about it since. The staff will not speak of it.”
He turned. “Where did you hear about that?” His voice was low and careful. Wholly suspicious.
“I did not hear about it. I saw it myself. Months ago.” She held his gaze steadily. “I did not ask the staff… because I wanted you to tell me about it.”
He looked at her across the room, and the silence between them extended past the ordinary length of silences, past comfort andinto something more significant. She held his gaze and said nothing further.
The moment broke with a rap at the door, and it was clear he was grateful for the interruption because he soon left without another word. The door closed behind him.
Cressida lay in the morning light and looked at the ceiling—the faint ripple of reflected light from the lake was still moving, indifferent to what had just taken place beneath it.
Then she looked at the vase of flowers on the table, Mrs. Agnes’s addition, arranged with the precise care of a woman who had been waiting a considerable while to arrange it. Early roses, white and cream, the stems cut at a careful angle.
Someone had risen before dawn to cut them from the garden. Someone had carried them up two flights of stairs and placed them where the morning light would catch them first.
She thought about a portrait draped in cloth, and a man who had gone completely still at the sound of two syllables. She thought about his face in the moment before he turned away, about the shape of it, old and private and somehow heavy.
He would come back to it. She believed that with a certainty she could not entirely account for, and did not try to.
By now, she had become very good at waiting.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“You are going to fall behind,” Theodore warned, without looking at her.
Cressida’s mare had stopped to investigate a patch of verge with considerably more enthusiasm than the situation warranted.
Cressida clicked her tongue and drew the animal’s head up. “I assure you, I am not going to fall behind.” She brought the mare level with his grey and found him watching the road ahead with the expression of a man who had not been truly looking at the road. “There. You see?”
“Mm.”
They rode on through a morning of clear light and cool air. Theodore’s hands on the reins were loose and easy. She caught herself watching them and found she did not care about being caught staring.
The village appeared in stages: the church spire above a copse of oaks, the smoke from the mill, the lane widening into the high street. A woman with a basket looked up as they came in, and Theodore’s name was on her lips before they had fully drawn to a halt.
But her eyes went first to Cressida.
“Your Grace!” Mrs. Fletcher’s curtsy was quick and warm, her face alight. “What a lovely surprise. And you’ve brought His Grace at last.”
Cressida smiled with the ease of someone returning to familiar ground. “Mrs. Fletcher.”
“We’ve all been hoping you’d come again. The little ones have been asking after you since you read to them at the schoolroom.” Mrs. Fletcher’s attention shifted briefly to Theodore, properly deferential but with the settled confidence of a woman who had already formed her opinion of his wife and found it satisfactory. “Your Grace. We’re very glad to see you together.”
