Aurelia could not undeceive her. To do so would be cruel, and worse, dangerous.
“Our correspondence is quite proper,” Aurelia reminded her instead.
“Oh, I am sure it is dreadfully proper. That is what makes it so romantic. Improper people are never half so interesting as proper ones who are secretly attached.”
“Clara.”
“Well, I shall say no more. Only I think Lord Westbridge looks at you as if he had not expected to find you, and now that he has, he is not certain what he ought to do about it.”
Aurelia’s heart gave a foolish movement.
“You have been reading novels again.”
“Yes, and improving ones too, for they have taught me to observe.”
Aurelia smiled. “They appear to have taught you to imagine even more.”
“That is nearly the same thing when one is young.”
Aurelia could not help smiling, though she turned away to hide it. Clara, satisfied with the victory, returned to the superior question of ribbons, and the morning passed into those small occupations by which the female portion of society prepared itself for public inspection while pretending the matter held no great importance.
Over the next several weeks, Clara’s affection for Captain Harrow became a fact with which all observant persons were forced to reckon. It did not declare itself in any breach ofpropriety, for Clara had been too well taught for that, and Aurelia, whatever her private burdens, was not negligent in her guardianship.
Captain Harrow sought Clara’s hand for dances when he could do so without marked impropriety. He found reasons to stand near her at assemblies. He laughed at her remarks with a delight that did not flatter so much as reveal him.
Aurelia watched them from the edges of rooms. She had become practiced at the occupation. There were few positions in society more suited to observation than that of a woman no longer young enough to be pursued with eagerness, not old enough to be invisible, and too complicated in reputation to be comfortably embraced.
Sometimes, Owen stood beside her. On those evenings the shadows seemed less like exile and more like shelter. He did not always speak much, and she liked him perhaps most dangerously in those silences. There was no need to perform cheerfulness for him.
Once, while Clara and Captain Harrow moved past them in a country dance, Aurelia stepped back to avoid a gentleman who had turned too suddenly with his elbow raised. She might have collided with the pillar behind her, had Owen not reached out at once. His hand closed lightly around her wrist, steadying her for no more than a heartbeat.
It was nothing. It was less than nothing, just a perfectly ordinary act of courtesy, performed in a crowded room where accidental contact could hardly be avoided.
And yet, Aurelia felt it everywhere. His gloved fingers were warm through the thin fabric of her own glove, and the care with which he released her almost made the touch more unsettling than if he had held on. She looked up before she could prevent herself.
“Forgive me,” he said quietly.
“There is nothing to forgive,” she replied, which was true and therefore, no comfort at all.
At other times, he was absent, detained by obligations or inquiries he did not fully describe until later in his letters. Then Aurelia felt the absence more than she approved, but at the same time, she began quietly to seek out women who had known her mother.
At first, she did so with no very formed intention. There was a name overheard here, or a remembered connection there. She approached carefully, asking after health, daughters, weather, or the inconvenience of crowded assemblies. Only then, if she sensed no hostility, did she allow her mother’s name to enter the conversation.
The responses were not all kind. Some ladies grew cautious at once. One looked over her shoulder before answering, as though scandal might be revived merely by pronunciation. Another murmured something about unfortunate tempers and the danger of women involving themselves in gentlemen’s affairs. Aurelia received such remarks with surface indifference, though the old heat rose within her.
But there were others.
Lady Renwick, who had grown stout and nearly deaf, remembered Arabella Finch as “the prettiest creature at Almack’s one winter, though never vain with it.” Mrs. Selby, after a long silence, placed a gloved hand over Aurelia’s, while saying “Your mother was not mad, my dear. Whatever else was said, some of us knew that much.”
Some of us knew that much.
It was not vindication. It was not proof. It did not restore her father, nor heal her mother, nor undo the years abroad in which Arabella Finch had grown frailer beneath the weight of being disbelieved. But it was something. A small candle in a long dark passage.
***
Aurelia left Lady Renwick’s house with the peculiar sensation that the pavement beneath her feet had altered.
Nothing in the street had changed. The same neat row of houses stood in sober respectability beneath the pale afternoon sky. The same carriage waited by the curb, its horses stamping faintly in the chill. A servant stood ready to assist her. Yet Aurelia felt as though she had stepped out of one world and into another.
