A knock at the door, and Mrs. Agnes entered, carrying a silver salver. “Forgive the interruption, Your Grace. A letter has arrived by express messenger, marked urgent.”
Theodore took it, and she quickly withdrew.
The handwriting was Lady Bardwell’s. Cressida recognized it at ten paces, the extravagant loops, the ink pressed too hard. Her pulse quickened.
Theodore broke the seal and read. His face gave away nothing, but his stillness took on a different quality: the management of a reaction he had not yet decided how to share. He lowered the letter.
“Your father has requested a visit.”
“When?” Cressida asked.
Theodore’s eyes did not leave her face. “Next week.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“As Aristotle so wisely observed,” Lord Bardwell announced, setting down his fork with the gravity of a man conferring a gift upon the table, “a man’s home is the measure of his character.”
“That was not Aristotle,” Theodore said.
Lord Bardwell blinked and adjusted his cravat. “Well, the meaning, at any rate?—”
“Quite.” Theodore reached for his wine.
Across the table, Cressida kept her eyes on her plate and pressed her lips together with great concentration.
The Bardwells had arrived that morning with three trunks, a lady’s maid, and the settled confidence of people who had married their daughter to a duke and intended the duke to appreciate the full weight of this arrangement.
Lord Bardwell had surveyed the castle’s proportions with the assessing eye of a man calculating acreage, already composing, the dinner party anecdote he would make of it.
Lady Bardwell had declared the journey from London “positively medieval” while simultaneously cataloguing every appointment in the entrance hall with sharp, acquisitive attention.
As for her siblings, Peter had arrived reading a pamphlet on Parliamentary reform. Mary had arrived at a dead run and flung herself at Cressida before the footman had finished announcing the party.
That reunion Theodore had watched from the top of the staircase—Cressida catching her sister and laughing into her hair, wholly unguarded, wholly herself—had left him unable to look away.
By the time dinner came around, he was acquainted with how dinners with the Bardwells proceeded.
“A man who will not read has no advantage over one who cannot,” Lord Bardwell announced apropos of very little as the fish course was served. “Seneca, I believe.”
Peter looked up from his plate. “That’s Burke, Father.”
“I beg your pardon?” Lord Bardwell huffed.
“Edmund Burke. The sentiment is Burke’s.” Peter reached for his wine calmly, confidently, precisely like a Cambridge man who considered correction a civic duty. “Seneca was rather more concerned with death.”
Lord Bardwell adjusted his cravat. “Translations vary considerably.”
“It wasn’t translated. Burke wrote in English.”
“Peter,” Cressida said gently.
“I’m simply?—”
“I know what you’re simply doing.”
Lady Bardwell set down her fork and turned to survey the north-facing windows with an expression of quiet suffering. “These windows let in a dreadful draught. I noticed it the moment we sat down. Is there nothing to be done?”
“I’ll speak to Mrs. Agnes in the morning,” Cressida said.
