“Thank you,” Mary said without turning from the window. “For Lady Thornton. For all of it.”
“You do not need to thank me for protecting my family.”
“I am thanking you anyway.”
She did not look at him for the rest of the ride. Evander did not look away from her. The carriage rocked through the Mayfair streets, and the silence held, and the distance between the opposite seats might as well have been the English Channel.
When they arrived at Blackholm House, Mary took the stairs without pausing. Her door closed. Evander stood in the entrance hall and listened to the latch click, and the sound was small and final, and he turned and walked to his study and closed his owndoor, and the house held them both in their separate rooms, and the walls stood, and the evening settled, and nothing was resolved.
CHAPTER 32
“Your Grace, the left cuff is unbuttoned.”
James stood beside the dressing table, bleary-eyed and suppressing a yawn. It was half past four in the morning, and the footman had answered Evander’s bell with the resigned obedience of a servant who had been roused before dawn three times this week and had stopped expecting an explanation.
Evander looked down. James was right. The left cuff hung open, and the right one was buttoned to the wrong hole. He had been dressing himself since he was twelve years old, and he could not manage a shirt cuff.
“Thank you, James. That will be all.”
“Shall I send for coffee, Your Grace?”
“No. Go back to bed.”
James bowed and retreated, closing the door with the careful quiet of a man who understood that four-thirty in the morning was not a time for questions. Evander fixed his cuffs, tied his cravat by feel rather than by the mirror, and sat on the edge of his bed.
Nearly a fortnight. Twelve days since Mary stood in this room and told him she could not accept his offer. Twelve days since she pushed him away because he could not give her his heart. Twelve nights of lying awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling, listening for her footsteps in the corridor and hearing nothing, because Mary had stopped walking past his door.
She had stopped walking past his door. The absence registered as a sound louder than any footstep.
Each morning, he descended to the dining room and found her plate already cleared, her teacup rinsed, her chair pushed in. She had taken to eating at six, before the rest of the household stirred, and by the time Evander arrived, the only evidence of her presence was the faint warmth on the coffeepot and the lavender scent that lingered in the air.
He had tried, once, to beat her there. He arrived at a quarter to six and sat with his coffee and waited. At ten past six, Harding appeared with a note on a tray.
I had breakfast in the nursery this morning. M.
The single letter. The same careful handwriting. The politeness of a woman who had drawn a line and would not cross it.
Evander had drunk his coffee alone and stared at the note and understood, with perfect clarity, that the distance he had cultivated for seven weeks had reversed direction. He was no longer the one retreating. Mary was.
And it was unbearable.
He passed her in the corridor outside the library that afternoon. She carried a stack of Charlotte’s correspondence and walked with her eyes forward, and when she saw him, she adjusted her path to the far wall without breaking stride.
“Good afternoon,” she said. Polite. Steady. A voice designed to carry no warmth and leave no opening.
“Good afternoon.” Evander flattened himself against the opposite wall to let her pass. Their shoulders cleared each other by six inches, and the air between them was charged, and he opened his mouth to say something, anything, and she was past him before the words arrived.
He stood in the corridor and watched her walk away, and pressed his hand against the wall where the plaster still held the warmth of her passing.
That evening, he heard her singing to Tommy through the nursery door. A melody he recognized from the early weeks, the one she had told him that her mother had sung to them as children. Her voice carried through the wood, low and steady, and Evander stood in the dark corridor and listened, and the longing in his chest expanded until his ribs ached.
He could knock. He could open the door and walk in and sit in the rocking chair beside her and tell her everything Richard and Lucrezia and Quentin and the whole stubborn, beating world had been trying to make him say for weeks.
He raised his fist to knock. He lowered it. He walked to his room, closed the door, and sat in the dark and hated himself with a thoroughness his father would have admired.
“You look like death.”
Richard handed Evander a glass of whisky as he entered Quentin’s drawing room. The fire was roaring, the lamps were bright, and the atmosphere was the exact opposite of Evander’s state of mind.
