Page 58

Ronan looked at him for a long moment. Then he sighed, and shook his head, and picked up his mask.

“Your funeral,” he said. “Or mine.”

They fought on for another quarter hour, and the strokes were cleaner now. Gregory kept his mind on the blade. He did not think of her hands, or her laugh, or the way she had looked at him.

He was in love.

CHAPTER 22

“Forgive me,” said Ronan. “I had hoped to find you alone.”

Phillipa looked up from the blanket where Theodore sat in the middle of it in three layers of wool with his fists full of dead leaves.

She was surprised to see him, but welcomed him anyway. Perhaps he might have some news about her husband, who had not seen her in days.

“It is no worry,” she said, feeling herself growing nervous. Had he appeared with some news about Gregory?

She hated how her mind went to the worst possible scenario, thinking that something had gone wrong with him even though Ronan had given her no indication so far.

“What did you wish to tell me?” she asked, impatiently. In earnest, she couldn’t help herself.

Ronan drew a breath, “Phillipa, I will be plain, because I think you would prefer it. I am worried about Gregory.”

Something tightened in her chest. She kept her hands quite still on the blanket. “Are you?”

“He is not talking to me. I have known him for a good many years and I have never seen him like this. He is gone from the house at dawn, I am told, and does not come home until midnight. He has stopped eating. He came to fence this morning and he was, well, I shall say only that I am grateful for my mask.” He turned the leaf between his fingers. “I asked him what was wrong. He told me he was doing what he ought to have done years ago. And then he looked at me as though I had said something that pained him, and asked me to take up my foil.”

“Did he say what it was?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything at all?”

“He said...” Ronan hesitated, and glanced at her. “Very little. I thought that if anyone were to know what troubled him, it would be you. I hoped he might have said something to his wife.”

She heard herself laugh. Phillipa pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, and took it away again.

“Forgive me,” she said. “It is only that you have come to the wrong person, Your Grace. If anything, you see him a great deal more than I do.”

Ronan went quite still.

“I have not spoken to my husband in eight days,” she said. “I know he visits Theodore. Martha tells me. He comes in the small hours, when I am asleep, and stands over the cradle for a while, and goes away. Martha says that lately Theodore has taken to calling out to the door at that hour, a little sound like Ga. He cannot possibly mean anyone in particular. But I lie awake and listen for it. I know he eats nothing, as the butler lets me know, though he says it as though he were reading the weather. I know he is out of the house all day and half the night. But as to where, or why, or what it is that has made a man who once laughed at dinner into a shadow that walks up the stairs at one in the morning, I know nothing. I know less than you do. He tells me nothing at all.”

“Phillipa...”

“I do not say it to be tragic.” She drew a breath. “I am not a fool. I understand that he has had a very great loss, and that a man in grief may not be himself. I understand that we did not marry for love, and that I have no right to demand his heart. I only wish...” She stopped. The words she had been about to say had got tangled somewhere between her mind and her tongue, and she found, to her horror, that her eyes had filled. She blinked hard, once, twice, until the garden steadied.

“I only wish he would let me carry some of it,” she said, quietly. “He is so very tired. And he does not have to be alone.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Theodore had gone back to his leaves. A robin was going about its business in the hedge, and somewhere in the house a door closed, and the sound of it carried, small and clear, over the grass.

Ronan reached out, and very lightly, briefly, laid his hand on her arm.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I had no right to come to you like this. I thought you would know. I see now that he has been keeping you out as he has been keeping out the rest of us.”

“It is all right.”

“It is not.” His jaw set, and for a moment he looked rather like a man who had just made up his mind to something unwise. “But I shall tell you this. I have never in my life seen Gregory look at anyone the way he looks at you. Whatever this is, it is not a want of feeling. If anything, I think it is the reverse.”