The clock on the mantel marked the quarter hour. Somewhere in the house, a door closed. From Lewis’s study, directly above them, came the familiar creak of the chair as he shifted at his desk.
He was still awake.
Esther heard it too; Caroline saw the small movement of acknowledgment in her expression, the slight lift and setting of the shoulders that communicated she was aware of him, as she always was, in the way of a woman for whom another person had become a frequency she carried in her chest.
For one moment, looking at her sister-in-law, Caroline felt the particular, clean loneliness of standing outside a door she did not know how to open — not because it was locked, but because she did not yet have the language for the knock.
She picked up her pen and looked at the letter.
She thought about a man who had said, in the cold and the dark, with all his usual armor suddenly and briefly absent.
You are lucky to have a brother to fight with.
And then he’d retreated to a reserved and silent man before she could find out what he had meant.
Above them, the chair in Lewis’s study creaked again, and then came the sound of footsteps crossing the floor…and then they stopped, directly above where Caroline sat. It was as though he had crossed the room and then thought better of wherever he had been going.
The footsteps did not resume.
Chapter Fifteen
VISIT A FORTUNE TELLER
The parcel arrived on a Tuesday morning.
It was not a large parcel, nor did it bear any ribbon, calling card, or ornament of any kind. It was simply brown paper and plain twine, delivered to Wynford House by a boy who gave his name as nobody’s concern and vanished before the footman could press for clarification.
Anthony turned it over in his hands once, but there was nothing on the outside save his name.
So, he broke the twine, and the parcel unwrapped to reveal a book:Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, first edition. Its spine had been carefully treated, and the pages were cleanly cut.
Anthony knew, immediately, who had sent it.
He had mentioned it in passing at the Royal Institution, not even to her directly. She had been beside him while the lecturer chalked the board, and he had said, half to himself, that Herschel’s framework on observation was the only sensible method he’d encountered for separating useful knowledge from decorative noise.
He had said it and had not thought of it again, but it was now apparent that she had remembered.
There was a slip of paper tucked inside the front cover.
You mentioned this. I thought you might like your own copy. How will you thank me for treating you with the money I won? — C.
He held the book in both hands, even as his heart trembled inside his ribcage in a manner he was not confident enough to examine just yet.
Women had given him things before, many times, and with varying degrees of subtlety: cufflinks, snuffboxes, miniatures in ivory frames. Things were offered with the graceful calculation of a transaction in which sentiment was the currency and expectation the return.
This was not that.
He put the book in the bottom drawer of his writing desk, beneath the household correspondence and the stack of agricultural reports from his estate manager.
He closed the drawer decisively, filing it away, placing both hands flat on the desk surface for a moment, and then went to his morning appointments without looking at the drawer again.
The Hartley reception fell on a Thursday. Anthony arrived on time, which was a professional habit rather than a social one: a man who arrived late to things communicated that his schedule was the primary object of interest in any room.
Anthony had spent too many years repairing the impression left by his father’s disastrous final seasons to take for granted the goodwill of those who had since extended it.
Lord Hartley found him near the window at half past noon, with the directness of a man who had been waiting for the appropriate moment and decided it had arrived.
“Wynford.” He extended a hand with the settled ease of someone who had been in rooms like this one long enough to have stopped performing anything he did not feel. “Your man Graves sent the revised figures for the drainage scheme. The committee reviewed them Tuesday last.”