She turned then to him. Their eyes met. He felt that gaze everywhere in his body. The way she listened, the way she absorbed things. It was such a rare pleasure, he realized, with some surprise, to speak to her.
“Are you astonished to learn that I even have a heart?” she asked. Somewhat ironically.
But her voice cracked a little on that last word.
“I’ve always known you have a heart, Lillias,” he said gently. “But I’ll tell you something. Beyond doing what they’re supposed to do, which is bump along and send blood through our veins, hearts are an encumbrance.”
He looked away then, back toward the sky where the moon hung like a portal to another, shining world.
“What is her name?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said smoothly.
She waited.
His sense of fair play, and honor, told him that he would have to give her an answer. And yet it was another moment before he could speak.
“Amelia.” He said it quietly.
He hadn’t said her name aloud in so long that it felt like a new word he’d just learned.
“Amelia Woodley.”
The name hung there in the dark for an instant.
“Is she in America, this Amelia?”
He breathed in deeply and sighed it out. “She was, in fact, last seen boarding a ship from New York bound for Liverpool. Her father, an employer and now friend, has entrusted me with finding her and bringing her home.”
If she wanted more information, she was going to have to pull it from him.
“I gather her departure for English shores was unexpected and not sanctioned by her family?”
“You gathered correctly.”
“Well. Another disobedient woman, Mr. Cassidy. You seem to have a predilection for them.”
He didn’t take this little challenge up, primarily because he was beginning to worry that it was true.
“She can’t have gone alone.”
“According to the letter she left behind for her father, she departed with a family by the name of Clay who was visiting New York, and with whom the Woodleys had become friendly.”
“Was there a man involved?”
“I don’t think so. But I don’t know for certain.”
The spoon Lillias described: scrape, scrape, scrape. That’s what the thought of Amelia had done to him ever since.
Funny that at the moment he still could not quite recall her features distinctly. It was like peering through a scratched lens.
The first reel had begun. The ghostly strains of it reached them in the garden.
It seemed quite some time before either of them spoke again. The silence was oddly not uncomfortable. Both had laid down burdens. There was relief in that.
He realized she was studying him. He couldn’t quite interpret her expression.
“And... you love her?” She said it tentatively. Almost reluctantly.
