“Then you have not been watching.”
“I have been watching since April,” she said quietly. “And I disagree.”
He turned back to the window because there was nothing useful he could say to that. His hands were on the sill, and the glass was cold, and the street below showed him a lamp and a passing figure and the ordinary end of an ordinary London evening, and none of it was any help at all.
“You sat with James today,” she said, behind him. “In Lucien’s library. You answered every question he brought you about the ship book and the Trafalgar fleet and Nelson’s signal at the mast. You did not rush him. You did not end the conversation when it became uncomfortable. You sat, and you answered, and you stayed.” A pause. “That is not the behavior of a man incapable of fatherhood.”
He turned around.
“That,” he said, “is the behavior of a man who does not know how to walk away from a boy who has no one else.”
The fire behind him had gone low, and the room was cooling at the edges. Her hands were at her sides, and her jaw was set, and she stood in the dying firelight and looked at him with the straight regard that had disarmed him from the night she first walked through his door, and he looked back at her, and none of it helped.
“I believed,” she said, and her voice went quieter still, “that I could show you something. That if you saw me here, and saw that I was staying…that I wanted to stay—” She stopped. Her hands came together in front of her. “I thought that would be enough. That I could make you see I care for you. That caring was sufficient to…” She pressed her mouth shut briefly.
“Annabelle—”
“You don’t want to try.” She said it flatly, without much emotion. It sounded very much like the verbal equivalent of a door gently clicked shut. “Do you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s for the best.”
She looked at him for a long count. The line of her mouth changed: a compression, held, then gone.
“Fine,” she said. “Then we continue as we are. As…as carers for James. Since we can be nothing beyond that…I won’t pretend otherwise.” She uncrossed her arms and let them fall. “And I won’t ask again.”
She turned and crossed the room, her skirts brushing the corner of the desk as she passed, and pulled the door open without looking back. The latch caught behind her.
Dominic stood at the window for such a long time that he was not sure how much time had passed. He crossed to the door and opened it. The corridor lay dark past the lamp’s reach. He stood in the threshold and listened. No footstep. The house was entirely still.
He went up the stairs, stopping at her door. The landing was unlit, the quiet around it absolute. He raised his hand to the wood, knuckles an inch from the door.
Then it came: a single sound from inside, brief and low, cut off immediately. Dominic stood in the dark with his hand raised. But he did not knock.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Ihave been very patient,” Helena said. She was not sitting still. She had been circling the morning room since Annabelle arrived, her skirts making their own argument at every turn of the carpet. “I have said nothing for a very long time, because you are not the sort of woman who requires someone to pick apart her feelings for her, and I try not to insert myself where I am not asked. But I am asking myself now, and the answer I am getting is that I have been patient for too long.”
Annabelle sat in the chair by Helena’s window, her gloves still on, her bonnet in her lap. She had walked the two streets from Silverford House without a destination and arrived here, and Helena had taken one look at her face, and the embroidery had gone onto the side table, and the bell for tea had been rung with more velocity than it required.
“You don’t need to?—”
“Idoneed to.” Helena turned at the corner. “I was there the night of the garden. I was there the morning of the wedding. I have watched this since April, Annabelle—this man getting close and retreating, getting close and retreating, until I am half convinced he does it to see what you will do. And now, a week. A full week in the same house, andnothing? That is absolutely abhorrent.”
“He speaks at dinner when James is present,” Annabelle said. “He is not unkind.”
“I know he is not unkind.” Helena sat down abruptly. “I would find it considerably easier to despise him if he were. He is never unkind, and never quite present, and never quite gone, and somehow that arrangement never becomes simpler no matter how many months pass.” She looked at her hands. “What happened? Before the week began.”
Annabelle turned her gloves over in her lap. She had not planned to say any of it aloud, but Helena was looking at her with the expression she saved for serious things, and the morning room was private, and she was tired of carrying it alone.
“I asked him something,” she said. “About the future. About whether we might—” She stopped. “He has an answer he will not change. I understand the reasons for it, or I believe I do. What I do not understand is why the answer requires him to vacate every room I am in for the next week.”
Helena looked at her steadily. “Because he is afraid of what the conversation cost him,” she said. “He gave you an honestanswer, and honest answers leave him exposed, and exposure frightens him, so he removes himself. He has done this every time he has said something real to you.” She paused. “I am not making excuses for it. I am only naming what I see from where I am standing.”
“I know the pattern,” Annabelle said quietly. “I have been standing inside it.”
“Then you know it does not improve on its own.”
Annabelle looked at the window. The street below was quiet at this hour. A housemaid was crossing the square with a basket, quick-footed, her cap pressed forward against a small wind.
