It was nothing, really. Both of them were just standing in the garden, neither of them leaving when there was no reason for them to stay. Nothing dramatic, nothing declared. But the kind of nothing that was not nothing at all. Feeling the weight of remaining in her spot, Cori started to move.
"Miss Corinna," he said, stopping her.
Cori met his gaze.
"We are nearly family," he said, "given the circumstances. Daniel and your sister. It seems somewhat too formal for you to continue calling me ‘Your Grace’." The duke paused. When he spoke again his voice was quieter. "That is, please call me James."
Cori’s throat suddenly went dry. She swallowed in response.
"James.”
It came out more quietly than she intended. Just his name, in the quiet of a cool Yorkshire morning in the walled garden with the blackbirds and the moors beyond.
Something moved in his face that she could not quite name. Then it was gone, just as quickly.
"Cori,” she told him. “My family calls me Cori.”
His lips slanted upward, almost into a smile. “Well, Cori, I will see you after breakfast."
"Yes, after breakfast," she agreed.
James nodded once and turned toward the gate. "By the way, Cori, there is something in your hair," he said, without looking back over his shoulder.
Something in her hair? Cori put her hand to her head and encountered, with only a touch of mortification, a cabbage moth.
Of all the…
Cori closed her eyes as though to block out the embarrassment of her current state of dishabille. "Thank you," she said, to his retreating back.
An instant later, Cori found herself alone in the Acklan kitchen garden in the grey Yorkshire dawn with dirt on her skirts, a scratch across her left hand, and sporting a cabbage moth like a hairpin. She released a sigh, wondering if this was better or worse than when he discovered her sitting on the floor in the middle of his corridor.
Margaret Hythe had always found the breakfast room the most informative room in any house.
Dinner was performance. Drawing rooms were negotiation. But breakfast, taken before anyone had quite assembled their defenses for the day, was where you learned things. The quality of a silence. The direction of a glance. Who sat where and without being told spoke volumes if one knew how to listen. And Margaret had always prided herself on knowing how to listen.
The breakfast room at Acklan told her a great deal that morning.
Linthorpe, at the head of the table, had been there when Margaret arrived, early enough that he must have been there for some time. He looked as though he’d already been outside that morning, and something in the set of his shoulders made him appear fractionally more at ease than he had the previous evening. In front of him, a note sat open beside his plate, which Margaret suspected was from his estate agent and had something to do with the north field. Linthorpe read it with the focused attention he brought to everything and then folded the slip of foolscap and set it aside.
When Corinna had arrived at the table approximately ten minutes later, Margaret noted that the girl had a small smudge - had she been gardening at dawn? - on her left cuff. With a bit of pink in her cheeks, she took a seat three places from Linthorpe, careful, it seemed, not to look at him when she sat down.
Then the room began to fill with guests and the burst of energy that came with them. First, Lucien and Mr. Atherton made their entrance, arguing good-naturedly about a thoroughbred who’d raced in the Goodwood Cup a sennight earlier. Viscount Hadleigh and his daughter Miss Atherton were not far behind them. Miss Atherton settled herself near Lucien, but not too near as to be remarked upon. The girl was playing the same game with Lucien that Corinna was playing with Linthorpe. While the duke seemed open to playing along, Lucien appeared oblivious to everything around him. Margaret was going to have to do something about him once she got Corinna settled. How she’d ended up with a hopeless grandson, she had no idea.
Hythe arrived not long after, his trusty gazette in hand. He sat at Margaret's left, read as he always did at breakfast, and offered the occasional commentary at the most inopportune times.
"My father was absolutely certain Cormorant would win," Archibald Atherton told Corinna, as though he was confiding a delicious on dit. "He told me so at least four times before we left for Goodwood. He said there was no question whatsoever. He said any fool could see it."
"Cormorant finished fourth," Lucien said, without looking up from his plate.
"Fourth," Mr. Atherton confirmed with a wink for Corinna.
"I maintain," said Viscount Hadleigh, from further down the table, as though he’d been waiting for this conversation and had prepared himself for it, "that the going was soft."
"The going," his son began pleasantly, "was exactly as soft as it was for the horse that won."
Corinna laughed.
"The boy has a point," Hythe said, from behind his gazette.
