He knew that the matter had been … somewhat adjusted. Loose ends needed to be tied, and when the official report was handed in, everyone seemed satisfied with it. Owen considered the matter closed. Now he found himself wondering, for the first time in earnest, whether it had been shaped into something like a lie.
He thought of the smooth certainty with which the whole thing had been carried past scrutiny. He thought of the men promoted, decorated, left standing. He thought, too, of names omitted. And of the Finches, exiled from society while the rest of them dined well and spoke of honor.
“What happened to them?” he asked quietly. “To your parents, I mean … after.”
Again, she hesitated. The piano stumbled through another phrase in the corner.
“My father is dead,” she revealed with anguish in her voice.
The simplicity of it, after all that lay beneath, struck him more sharply than a longer answer would have done.
“I am sorry.”
Aurelia gave a slight inclination of her head, accepting the words without encouraging them.
“My mother lives abroad,” she continued. “She does not care for England.”
He suspected that was a mercy in expression, and almost certainly deliberate.
“And you?”
Her eyes held his then, level and unreadable. “I care for it only when duty requires.”
The answer might almost have been light, if not for the bitterness so carefully kept beneath it.
Owen felt again that unwelcome sense of his own ignorance. He had moved through the consequences of that old affair as though they were contained neatly within military history. But they had not remained there. They had spread into drawing rooms, into households, into years. They had shaped this woman’s life in ways he was only beginning to glimpse.
He wanted to ask more.
He wanted to know what her father had found, what her mother had refused, what precisely had been done to crush them afterward. He wanted, too, to understand why her surname had stirred something in him before his mother’s explanation, as if some half-buried part of memory had known it mattered.
But Aurelia’s expression warned him not to mistake her willingness to speak at all for willingness to tell him everything. Owen glanced toward the window, where Harrow and Miss Blackmore were still deep in easy conversation, untouched by any of this. Strange, he thought, that the evening should hold both such simplicity and such complication under the same roof.
When he looked back, Aurelia was watching him in that intent, guarded way she had, as if measuring whether his discomfort arose from guilt, decency, or merely surprise. Owen could nothave said with confidence which of the three it was … perhaps all of them.
He did not know how long they stood in that small, uneasy pause, only that the room pressed in upon it at last. A servant moved past them with a tray. Their host struck a triumphant final chord and was rewarded with the sort of applause polite society reserved for mediocrity in command of a musical instrument.
“I think,” she said, “we have both made the evening heavier than our host intended.”
Owen seized the opening with gratitude. “Then perhaps we owe him the courtesy of becoming shallower.”
“Do you excel at shallowness, Lord Westbridge?”
“No,” he said. “But I may attempt it under guidance.”
That drew the faintest movement at the corner of her mouth.
“Very well. We shall speak of something harmless.”
“Does anything harmless remain?”
She glanced toward the walls of the drawing room, where several small framed paintings hung between mirrors and sconces. They were family portraits, a pastoral scene, an over-bright hunt, and one marine print so darkly varnished it was nearly impossible to make out what it had once represented.
“Art, perhaps,” she suggested.
Owen followed her gaze. “That depends very much upon the art.”
She looked at him then with the air of someone testing whether a promise was worth the making. “Very well. What do you like?”
