Anthony seized the opportunity of her absorption in the spectacle in front of her, and he watched Caroline.
She was admiring the acrobat with her hands loosely clasped and her lips parted, and the expression on her face was not performed wonder. It was the real variety; he knew the difference by now. It was the kind that arrived before she could arrange it into anything more composed. Her eyes tracked every movement above her with the absorbed attention of someone who had stepped entirely free of the world in which she was theDuke of Grayston’s sister with a Season to complete and a future being quietly arranged around her.
In this moment, she was simply herself.
She is beautiful.
The plain, inalterable fact of it arrived without ceremony, and he dealt with it as he had dealt with the book. Noted, filed, set aside.
The performance concluded, and Caroline turned to say something, only to find him already watching her, and Anthony did not want to look away from her gaze.
“Well,” she said after a short beat.
“Well,” he echoed, his lips curving up at the sight of the slight pink dusting her cheeks.
She looked away first. “We should…move on,” she said and turned around.
And Anthony found himself wondering if he would be able to forget about Lady Caroline and move on when the time came.
Chapter Sixteen
He navigated them out through a quieter passage between the tents, following the lantern-lit corridor between canvas walls until they reached a smaller arrangement at the field’s far edge.
This tent was darker, marked by a single hanging lamp at its entrance. Just outside, a woman sat on a low stool behind an embroidered banner which read: Tristy’s reading, watching their approach with the dispassionate patience of someone who had assessed a great many strangers and found few of them worthy of remark.
She was perhaps sixty, dark-eyed, and spoke in an unhurried manner. “Two?” she said, looking at them both.
“One,” Anthony said, as Caroline said, “Two.”
The woman’s mouth curved fractionally. “Come,” she said, and held the flap open.
The inside was warm and close, smelling of cedar and lamp oil and something faintly herbal. In the center of the room stood a small table with three chairs, a cloth, a wooden bowl of stones, and a deck of worn cards.
The woman settled across from them with the ease of long practice and indicated the chairs with a gesture that was neither invitation nor instruction. Anthony sat because refusing would have required more conversation than it was worth.
The woman looked at Caroline first.
“You carry a list,” she said. “Not a written one. A list of things you have been told you are not suited to want.”
Caroline did not waver, but something shifted fractionally behind her eyes.
“You have been patient with it for a long time,” the woman continued, not looking up from the cards she had laid. “But you are not, by nature, a patient person. You are someone who has made patience into a skill, which is not the same thing.”
“You are looking for something before the door closes,” she said, and raised her eyes. “And you are running out of time. You already know this.”
The accuracy of it settled in the space between them. Anthony looked at the canvas wall, as though giving her privacy in his own little way.
The woman turned to him then. She looked at him for longer than she had looked at Caroline, with the flat attention of someone reading a language she was proficient in but required a moment to translate.
“You.” Three cards lay unhurried. “You have carried something heavy for a very long time. Not grief. Older than grief.”
He maintained his expression with the ease of long practice.
“You were told, very early, that you were not enough,” she said. “And you have spent every year since trying to make those who said it wrong.” A pause in which the lamp held steady, and the distant roar of the circus reached them as a low, muffled tide. “But they cannot be made wrong now. They are not here to see it. And still, you go on trying.”
Anthony rose instinctively, pushing the chair back in the cramped tent. He had not meant to listen so intently to the woman’s words, and yet, they had reached him. She had said things just now that no one could know, unless they were amongst his closest acquaintances.
“Thank you,” he said to no one specifically, and pushed through the canvas into the cold night air. He stood there panting and aiming to catch his breath.