She held his gaze for exactly the duration that was required to remain composed, and then she got into the carriage, grateful that none of his companions had noticed him gazing at her or the moment that passed between them. If so, she would be locked in an intervention all afternoon. In fact, her aunt and sister-in-law would no doubt involve Lewis in the matter, and with the way their relations have been strained for a while, Caroline definitely did not want to hear a lecture from him.
When the door latched and the carriage started moving, Caroline let herself relax.
Esther was telling Lady Hayward something about the card party, and Lady Hayward was responding in the measured tones of a woman with opinions on card parties. The city proceeded past the window in its usual indifferent progression.
Caroline looked at her gloved hands in her lap.
I am the only one who can make you sound like that.
She straightened her spine and turned toward the window. She watched the street move past and said nothing whatsoever. As the wheels rolled and the trio headed toward home, Caroline thought of the Duke and wondered if he was thinking of her, too.
Chapter Eleven
“Powell’s been asking afterheragain,” Lewis said, without preamble. He set his glass down and looked at it. “At Talton’s card party. Twice in one evening.”
Anthony said nothing. He twisted his own glass a quarter turn on the table and kept his eyes on the middle distance, which was currently occupied by the commonplace figure of a man losing steadily at dice and taking it with the philosophical resignation of someone who had been losing steadily for some time and had made his peace with the trajectory.
“He’s persistent,” Gideon offered.
“He is.” Lewis’s jaw worked briefly. “I am not yet certain whether that counts in his favor.”
The Bull and Sovereign was not a place Anthony would have chosen on his own account. It was too well-lit for a man who wanted to think without being observed doing it, and the claretwas adequate rather than good, which was the sort of distinction that became more meaningful the longer one sat with it.
But Lewis had suggested it, and Lewis had the particular look he occasionally wore when he needed company without wanting to say so plainly. Anthony had come because that was the nature of their friendship, and had now been sitting with his own thoughts for the better part of an hour while his friend talked around the subject he actually meant to raise.
Caroline.
She had been the subject, in various configurations, since they sat down. Anthony had arranged his face into the composed expression of a man with no particular stake in the outcome and had been maintaining it with a discipline he was finding increasingly taxing.
“Aldbury called on her on Tuesday,” Lewis continued. “She was gracious. Our aunt approved of the visit, which is something.” He paused. “But… Caroline said very little about it afterward.”
“Your sister says very little about most things,” Gideon said. “Strategically.”
Lewis looked at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means she is clever.” Gideon was entirely mild about it. “Cleverer than the conversation generally requires her to be, and she knows it, and she has worked out that saying her thoughtsrarely serves her.” He lifted his glass. “It is a quality I find rather admirable, if you want my honest opinion.”
“I did not ask for your honest opinion,” Lewis said. “I rarely do. Yet, it tends to arrive anyway.”
“That is because I provide a service, Lewis.Unpromptedcandor. Someone in your circle must.”
Lewis exhaled through his nose, which was as close as he ever came to laughing at something he had not intended to find amusing. He turned back to his glass, and his expression underwent the small shift that Anthony had learned, over the years of their friendship, to recognize: the one that stripped away the Duke and left the man underneath. The one that appeared only when Lewis was speaking about something he could not afford to get wrong.
“I want her settled before the end of the Season,” he said quietly. “Not because I want to be rid of her. I want—” He stopped. “She has more spirit than most of these men know what to do with. I want someone who won’t simply want to manage it…manage her.”
Anthony looked at his friend.
He had known Lewis long enough to understand this particular tone of his: the one that carried, beneath the controlling elder brother certainty, a genuine and somewhat helpless love.
Lewis had raised Caroline after their father’s death, had shielded her from their uncle’s cruelties, and had made himself into a wall between her and the world with the ferocious instinct of a man who knew what the world did to women left undefended.
His protectiveness was not cruelty; it was fear wearing the costume of authority, and it had simply never occurred to him to take the costume off.
Anthony knew something about that.
He also knew that Lewis’s definition of a ‘settled’ life and Caroline’s definition of a ‘tolerable existence’ were not converging on the same destination by any road he could currently identify.
He had not said so. He had been saying nothing of the kind for the better part of an hour, and he intended to continue.