Page 60
“I know.”
He glanced at her before taking a step back. “Very well. I shall not post a man.”
“Thank you.”
“I shall hate it a little.”
“Of course.” She almost smiled. Her fingers found the edge of the chair back, and she held on to it. “You will let me know… the moment you have something certain?”
“Yes. The moment I have it.”
She nodded. “I shall come as often as I can.” She had to look at the carpet to say the rest. “But please do not be cross with me if I cannot manage it in the first few days.”
“I understand.” His voice was gentle, and it made her throat ache. “My grandmother will understand too. I shall tell her myself.”
She nodded, because she did not trust herself to speak. If she stayed another minute in this room, with him standing so near, she would say something she could not take back.
“I should see to my things,” she said. “If I start now, I can be gone before supper.”
She let go of the chair and crossed the room, but he did not stop her. At the door she put her hand on the frame and told herself not to look back.
She looked back. He was standing exactly where she had left him, watching her with an expression she could not read.
She stepped into the corridor. The door stayed open behind her. She listened for his footsteps all the way to the stairs, and they never came.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“You have made a fool of me, Anthony.”
The study door had not so much as creaked. Anthony looked up from the ledger he had been staring at for the better part of an hour and found his grandmother standing just inside the room, in a gown the color of ripe plums and a hat with two yellow feathers that quivered whenever she moved her head.
A gray cat was draped over her left arm like a shawl, quite unconcerned. She was not smiling. His grandmother was always smiling, in one way or another, and the absence of it was so strange that for a moment he could not make sense of her words.
His pen had dried in his hand. A small blot had spread across the line he had been meaning to read.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me perfectly well.” Marian crossed the carpet slowly, and lowered herself into the chair across from his desk. “I have been carrying this about for three days. I wrote it down on a card so that I would not lose it before I reached the door, and I have now lost the card, but I have not lost the thought. It took me a while to put two and two together, but I believe I have finally got it.”
“Grandmother, I am quite busy today,” he said. “What are you talking about?”
“Leonora.” She said the name gently. “She is not your fiancée, is she?”
The room went very quiet. Somewhere in the house a clock struck the half hour, and Anthony heard the stroke.
“Of course she is. You were there when...”
“I was there. I declared it at the Camden ballroom.” Marian stroked the cat’s head with one finger. “Ever since you got so upset about it that night, I have been watching you ever since, my dear, and I am not so addled as everyone supposes. Not nearly.”
He opened his mouth and she raised a hand.
“A betrothed girl sleeps under her intended’s roof three nights in seven, and no one raises so much as an eyebrow. There is no chaperone but me, and I am a woman who talks to her cats. There has been no talk of banns. There has been no modiste, no guest list, no settlements. I asked you last week what you thought of a spring wedding and you asked me whether I wished for more tea.” Her voice did not rise. “I am an old woman, Anthony, and I forget where I put things. I do not forget that. A man who is about to be married does not ask for tea.”
He said nothing. There was nothing in his head to say.
“She is my companion, isn’t she? That is what she is. That is the whole of it.” Marian looked at him with searching eyes. “I began to wonder... what if that was the plan all along? What if my grandson found himself a girl to sit with his difficult grandmother, and then discovered that his difficult grandmother would accept her far more easily as family? You know very well what I have wanted for you. You have known it for years. I have said it at every Christmas dinner since you were twenty. What if you took the one thing I wanted most and used it to get what you needed?”
The cat blinked at him. Anthony found that he could not hold his grandmother’s eyes.
