“Yes, funerals are generally different from whateverthisis.” Gideon agreed pleasantly as he took a small sip of his drink. “I will not press you. I am merely observing, as your close friend, that you have the look of a man who has backed himself into a corner of his own construction and is now trying to punch his way through the wall.”
Ha, Anthony thought.
He had been right to suspect that Gideon suspected something. Now, the rogue had decided that he would amuse himself with his life.
“The wall,” Gideon added, “is not, in my experience, what requires hitting.”
“Gideon.” Now, Anthony did not restrain the warning from his voice.
“I’m done with giving advice and asking questions.” Gideon raised his glass in a small, precise salute. “I shall drink with you and ask you nothing further this evening. You have my word.”
Anthony narrowed his eyes at the other man, but Gideon just gave him a guileless grin.
And so, they drank.
Anthony’s mind wandered, even past the limits with which he’d sought to restrain it with the brandy and the boxing bout.
You are lucky to have a brother to fight with.
He had said it before he had considered what questions might follow, which was not the problem. He had always spoken freely; that was rather the point. He was not a man who weighed his words for fear of consequence, because he had never needed to, and he had never wished to censure his musings.
He had found, over the years, that the men who did were generally the ones who had something to conceal.
The problem was that the words had not been his in the usual sense. They had not been selected or deployed. They had simply arrived from somewhere below the part of him that knew how to manage a room, a woman, and a conversation. He had spoken and meant it before he had decided to mean it, which was a distinction that should have been impossible, and which he found, upon examination, deeply objectionable.
He was not in the habit of being outmaneuvered…least of all by himself. And it was not thatshedid anything, exactly—thatwas the particular irritation of it. She did not flatter or perform or arrange herself for his benefit, as he had come to regard as the natural order of an interaction with a young lady. She simplywascurious, and something in him responded to that with a directness that bypassed every mechanism he had constructed for exactly this eventuality.
Anthony understood desire; it was clean, transactional, and entirely manageable.
This… this wasnotthat. This was the inconvenient discovery that he meant things when she was present in a way that desire had never once required of him.
And he resented it thoroughly…even as he could not help but seek it out regardless.
The drawing room at Grayston House was very quiet that evening, in the specific way of a room that had been quiet for several days and had begun to accommodate itself to the condition.
Esther sat with her needlework near the fire, though the needle had not moved with any particular ambition for the past quarter hour. Across the room, Caroline was at the writing desk, which contained a half-finished letter to Laura, upon which she had not made material progress since supper. The fire spoke; the clockon the mantel spoke; the house around them settled into the sounds of late evening.
“The primrose silk came back from the modiste today,” Esther offered, in the pleasant, conversational lilt she had been deploying for the past four days. “She’s taken in the waist as you asked. I think it will be very becoming.”
“Thank you.” Caroline looked at her letter, and the silence resumed.
Esther set her needlework in her lap. “He is not angry with you,” she said, after a moment.
Caroline did not question the sudden subject and kept her attention on the letter. “He has a remarkable way of expressing himself. I wonder how you know Lewis is anything other than angry with me.”
“He is merely worried for you,” Esther said evenly. “And it comes out in him as an attempt to fix things by establishing their proper place.” Her voice was gentle, without judgment. “It is not a quality that is always easy to live alongside. I am aware of that.”
Caroline placed her pen down. She looked at the fire rather than at her sister-in-law because Esther’s face was kind, and kindness was, at present, somewhat difficult to meet directly. “He told me I would have to marry. That he would be the one to make the final decision because he knows what men are like.” She paused. “As though I were furniture. As though my preference in the matter were a charming irrelevance.”
“I know.” Esther’s voice was quiet. “I spoke to him about it.”
Caroline turned to look at her, and Esther’s expression was carefully composed. That did not bode well for the results of the conversation she’d had with her husband, then.
“And?” Caroline said.
“He is not easy to move when he has decided upon a matter. But he listened, which is, with Lewis, a step in the right direction. He genuinely loves you,” Esther continued. “But I sometimes think he does not understand that the protection can, itself, become the misfortune.”
Caroline said nothing. There was nothing, quite yet, that she was prepared to say.