Page 66

“Go,” she said. “Of course you must go.”

“I should like to come,” she added, as he turned. “If I can be useful.”

His first answer rose so promptly that he heard it before he spoke, the old answer, the one that kept everything he cared about behind a closed door. He made himself set it aside.

“Someone must inspect the walls,” he said. “I do not yet know whether they will stand. Let me see to that today. When the family is safe, I will take you to them, if they are willing. They will want to meet you, and you will be more use to them then than under a roof that may come down.”

She held his eyes, and he watched her decide that he meant it. “Very well. When they are safe. But I shall speak to Mrs. Bell about blankets now, and food. Collins, how many are there altogether?”

“Eight, Your Grace, with the parents.”

“Then eight of everything.” She was already walking. “And something for the boy’s head.”

Tristan watched her go up the path toward the house with the cobweb still on her sleeve. He turned and followed Collins at a run.

He did not get back until after ten.

The roof was worse than Collins had feared. Rain had been rotting the timbers longer than anyone knew; the beam above the children’s room had gone soft as cheese, and only luck had brought it down in the kitchen and not on six sleeping heads. By the time they had moved the family across the lane to Mrs. Hale’s sister, and Dr. Mercer had stitched the boy’s scalp and declared Mrs. Hale in no danger, and the carpenter had agreed to come back at first light with sound timber, full dark had fallen and the rain had returned. Tristan rode home soaked through and so tired he could barely feel the reins.

Whitmore met him in the hall with a towel and a branch of candles and the news that Her Grace had sent four baskets to the Hales before dinner, had dined alone, and gone up at nine.

“Is she asleep?”

“I could not say, Your Grace.” Whitmore addressed the ceiling. “James moved your things this afternoon, as you instructed. He has laid out a dry shirt in Her Grace’s dressing room.”

At the top of the stairs Tristan hesitated, out of five years’ habit, and turned toward his own door. Then he stopped, turned back, and went down the passage to hers.

She sat up in bed with a book open on her knee and a candle beside her, and when he came in, wet hair and muddy boots and all, she closed the book with one finger marking her place.

“The Hales?”

“Safe. All of them. The boy has four stitches and is proud of each one. Mrs. Hale’s sister has taken them in. The roof will be sound in a week.” He stood just inside the door, dripping on the carpet, suddenly uncertain. “Thank you for the baskets. Mrs. Hale wept over them.”

“I sent the blankets from the blue room. I hope you do not mind.”

“I do not mind.”

She studied him a moment longer. Then she put the book down. “You are soaked through. You will take a chill. James has put a shirt behind the screen. And there is hot water in the jug. I asked them to bring it up an hour ago, though I daresay it is only warm now.”

He went behind the screen. His fingers were stiff with cold, the wet cloth clung, and the buttons of his waistcoat defeated him twice. He heard the bed creak, and her bare feet on the floor, and then she was behind the screen with him, her hands on his waistcoat.

“Let me,” she said.

He stood still and let her. She undid the buttons one by one, frowning slightly in the candlelight, with the concentration she gave a difficult leaf. She slipped the waistcoat off him and laid it over the screen. She untied his cravat, sodden and gray with mud, and dropped it on the floor. Then she reached for the hem of his shirt, and hesitated, and lifted her eyes to his.

He could not have spoken, so he just nodded.

He bent to help her as she drew the wet shirt up and over his head, and then he stood before her bare to the waist in the candlelight while she looked at him.

She looked for a long time. Women had looked at him before, appraising, admiring, with the cool pleasure of a buyer at a horse sale. Nobody had ever looked at him like this, lips parted, eyes wide, a kind of wonder in her face, as if he were a plant she had read about all her life and never seen growing. She laid her hand flat against his chest, over his heart, as she had in the hall, and the warmth of her palm went straight through him.

“You are cold,” she whispered.

“Not now.”

She wet the cloth in the warm water and began, carefully, to wash the mud from his arms and his chest and the back of his neck. Her hands moved slowly. She did not speak. Her breath came short and quick against his skin, and every pass of the cloth tormented him, and he stood and bore it with his hands clenched at his sides and his eyes closed, until she reached the line of his breeches and stopped.

He opened his eyes. She held the cloth in her hand, her face scarlet.