Inside the drawing room, she heard nothing for a moment, and then the low, measured sound of Esther’s voice, and then silence again.
The clock on the hall table read quarter to one.
She pushed off the wall and ran upstairs, and the house settled quietly around her with the particular indifference of walls that had contained a great many arguments and intended to outlast this one, too.
Her room was exactly as she had left it: the curtains drawn half-back, the desk by the window with its stack of books, the small fire burning low. She sat on the edge of the bed, looked at the fire, and did not move for a very long time.
He knows what men are.
She turned the words over, and they were not wrong; she understood that. But he was incorrect in the one particular, immovable way in which he had always been: in the absolute certainty that the shape of his love and the expression of her life were the same, and that his love was license enough to decide it for her.
A soft knock came at the door—not Lewis’s knock—and she knew it before it opened.
Esther put her head in and looked at her for a moment without speaking. After she closed the door behind her, she came to sit beside Caroline on the edge of the bed.
She did not say anything immediately. She did not reach for her hand or begin with something comforting and approximate. She simply sat with the steadiness of a woman who had learned that the most useful thing she could offer was often just the fact of her company.
Caroline looked at the fire. “You don’t have to do this.”
Caroline knew she’d come. Always the mediator.
“I know.” Her sister-in-law folded her hands in her lap. “I want to.”
Another silence, and this one was different; not the charged, pressurized silence of the drawing room below, but the quieter kind, with room in it to breathe.
After a long moment, Caroline rested her head against Esther’s shoulder, very briefly, and Esther did not remark on it.
Esther had stayed with her for half an hour and left. Caroline did not go down for supper that evening.
The following morning, she was already at her desk when she heard her brother pass her door on his way to his study.
His footsteps paused outside for a moment, as they always did. She held her pen without writing, waiting.
But the footsteps eventually moved on.
She returned to her page, carrying on with her letter to Laura, letting the painful silence drown her.
Chapter Eight
ATTEND A UNIVERSITY LECTURE
“You look,” the Duke of Wynford said without looking up from his document, “as though you’ve spent the afternoon swallowing vinegar.”
Caroline pulled the carriage door shut behind her and dropped onto the seat opposite him. “Good evening to you as well, Your Grace.”
“Was it the suitors?” He folded the document with the neat efficiency of someone filing it away entirely. “Or your brother? Or both, arranged in sequence, as some variety of endurance exercise?”
She did not know how he had learned of her recent ordeals, though she could make an educated guess. There were no secrets among theton, certainly none involving the marriage mart.
No. That was not what unsettled her. What unsettled her was that even he knew she and Lewis were at odds with one another.
Still, she said nothing. Because the honest answer was both. And admitting that would mean the afternoon had followed her—into this carriage, into this hour—and she refused to grant it that reach.
She had waited through the particular deepening of silence that fell over Grayston House around midnight like a lid settling on a box, listening to Lewis’s footsteps pass her door and not return. She had sat at her window and read the same page of the same book four times without retaining a syllable, the argument’s residue clinging.
She had managed her own buttons, taken her cloak from the hook, and slipped into the corridor with the practiced noiselessness of a woman who knew which floorboards creaked.
Third from the landing: always.