“You might have been considerably less generous.”
“I might have.” She glanced up at him. “But I thought it would embarrass you when you came around to my point of view, if I had been petty about it in the interim.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “That is entirely self-serving.”
“Almost entirely,” she agreed. “Though I should like the small element of genuine charity acknowledged.”
The twitch almost became a smile. “I acknowledge it.”
She returned to her book. He returned to his.
The afternoon light streamed through the tall windows and lay across the floor in long bars, and Cressida thought: this ordinary, quiet afternoon. This man sitting in the chair across from her, reading with his hair disheveled and his boots still muddy, making unfounded accusations about the orientation of her book.
This.
She held the word privately.
“There is a second volume,” he said, with the idle authority of a man who knew this library as well as his own name, “on the second shelf from the left. Your naturalist.”
“How do you know which naturalist I am reading?”
“The spine is not illegible from this angle.”
She closed the volume. “You have been reading my book from across the room.”
“I have been noting the title.” A pause of considerable dignity. “There is a distinction.”
“There is absolutely no distinction.”
He rose, crossed to the second shelf, and pulled down the volume with the ease of a man who knew where everything lived. He placed it on the arm of her chair. Their eyes met at a proximity that was, she thought, entirely avoidable and clearly not avoided on either side.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
“The naturalist has considerable things to say about migratory patterns in the second volume.” He did not move. “In case that is of interest.”
“Given how absorbed I have been in the first,” she said, looking up at him, “I imagine it will be.”
He looked at her mouth in the way she had long since stopped pretending not to notice, and then returned to his chair and his book, and the fire continued its quiet work.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“You mentioned once,” Theodore said, not looking at her, “that your aunt kept no library.”
The carriage had been moving for nearly an hour. The last of Ashmere’s familiar country had given way to flatter ground, the hedgerows thinning, London’s grey beginning at the horizon.
Cressida looked at him. He was staring out the window, one hand resting on his knee.
“She kept no books at all,” she said. “She considered reading an indulgence that encouraged discontent in women of uncertain prospects.” A brief pause. “She was not entirely wrong, as it happened. I was considerably discontented.”
He turned his head and gave her the expression she had come to know best: the sharp attention reserved for things he found genuinely interesting.
“I memorized what I could from whatever she permitted in the house,” Cressida continued. “Agricultural almanacs, mainly. And a volume of sermons kept on the mantelpiece for decorative purposes that I do not believe she had ever opened.” She held his gaze for a moment. “I have since formed some fairly detailed opinions about crop rotation.”
The corner of his mouth twitched.
“What of you?” she asked, because this was how they had learned to do it. She offered something, he received it, she asked the same in return, and he answered. “Ashmere’s library is extensive. Were you always a reader, or was it circumstance?”
“My father did not encourage it. He thought it produced men who thought too much and acted too little. I read by firelight when the castle was quiet.”
