You don’t truly mean that,she thought to herself.
The morning was grey and mild, the kind of March morning that could not quite commit to winter or spring and had settled instead on a pleasant ambiguity. The elm trees along the path were beginning to show the faintest suggestion of green at theirextremities, and Hyde Park was sufficiently populated to make the walk respectable without being so crowded as to make conversation impossible.
“I am enjoying the air,” Caroline said, finally.
“You have walked past the same duck three times and have not noticed once that we are going in a circle.” Esther adjusted the brim of her bonnet against a gust that arrived from the direction of the water. “Which is rather more evidence than I require.”
Lady Hayward, walking on Caroline’s other side with an erect, unhurried posture, did not look up from where she was regarding a passing landau, as though cataloging the occupants for future social reference.
“She is thinking,” she said, in the same tone she deployed for observations that did not require debate. “One would hope.”
Caroline glanced at her aunt. “I am perfectly well.”
“You have said ‘perfectly well’ in three distinct registers this morning,” her aunt pointed out, “none of which have communicated anything approaching contentment. I recognize the phrase, because it is the one you use when you are deciding whether to say the thing you are actually turning over in your head.” She pivoted away from looking at the carriage and angled the full precision of her attention forward, toward the path ahead. “You may, of course, continue to decide. I am in no hurry.”
This was the specific variety of patience her aunt wielded with the expertise of a weapon she had spent decades perfecting: the patience that communicated, without words, that she already knew rather more than she intended to say, and that waiting cost her nothing. Caroline had been subjected to it for the better part of twenty-one years and had never yet found a satisfactory defense.
“I have simply been thinking about the Season,” she said.
“Mmm,” said her aunt.
“The primrose silk is very becoming,” Esther offered.
“Thank you.”
“Lord Ashby was quite attentive at the Hartley reception,” Esther continued, in the same pleasant, conversational tone she used when she was not discussing what she appeared to be discussing. “He asked after you specifically. Lewis mentioned he has an estate in Devonshire.”
“Lewis mentions all of them,” Caroline said. “He has a catalog.”
“He is trying,” Esther said mildly.
“He ismanaging,” Caroline said, and kept her eyes on the path.
She did not say it with heat; she had spent enough evenings examining the distinction to find out that the two impulses were not the same, even when they arrived in identical form.
Her brother’s management was built on affection and a complete, sincere belief that he knew what she needed, but that did not make it any less restrictive. It only made it considerably harder to oppose without feeling monstrous in the process, and that was why she and her brother were yet to see eye-to-eye, even until this morning.
Esther said nothing, which meant she had registered the distinction too.
They walked in companionable silence for a few paces, and Lady Hayward paused to observe a pair of children launching a small wooden boat at the water’s edge under the supervision of a harassed nurse. She watched with an expression that communicated simultaneous approval of the children and mild concern for the nurse’s structural integrity.
“There’s Lady Laura,” Esther said.
Caroline looked up. Laura was coming toward them along the path from the direction of the gate, slightly ahead of her own maid, in a blue wool pelisse that suited her considerably better than she appeared to realize. She was looking down at the path with the expression she wore when she was composing something mentally; it took her a moment to see them, and when she did, her face lifted into the particular, unguardedpleasure of someone who had hoped for a specific encounter and found it.
“Your Grace.” She fell into a small curtsy, which was warmly received by Esther. “Lady Hayward.” Another, more cautious curtsey, also warmly received, though Lady Hayward’s warmth tended to manifest as a single, precise nod that conveyed more than most people’s elaborate demonstrations. “Caroline.”
This was said with no ceremony at all, which Caroline found, as always, a relief.
“We were hoping to see you,” Caroline said, and meant it.
“Were you? I told my maid I wished to walk, and I could not have said why I wanted the park specifically, but here I am.” Laura fell into step beside Caroline naturally, the way she always did, as though their companionship were a simple matter of shared gravity. “Lady Hayward, how are you finding the weather?”
“Indeterminate,” Lady Hayward said. “As one expects from March.”
“Dear Esther,” Caroline said, “I believe Aunt Judith was saying earlier that she wished to view the plantings on the south walk.”
This was not precisely true, in the sense of being true at all, but Lady Hayward’s eyes moved to her with the brief, assessing acknowledgment of a woman who had conducted a great manystrategic withdrawals in her time and recognized the shape of one.