“No,” she said. “That is not all. You would not have that expression on your face if that were all.”
Caroline bristled. “What expression?”
“The one that looks like you are trying very hard to be practical about something that is not, in fact, a practical matter.” Laura’s voice was careful now; not probing, but cautious, in the way of a person navigating around something fragile.
The elm trees moved overhead, a rustle of not-quite-spring, and Caroline looked at the water and considered the considerable advantages of saying nothing whatsoever.
“It was the Duke of Wynford,” she whispered.
The silence this time was of an entirely different quality. For one, Laura stopped walking altogether. Caroline took three more steps before realizing she was proceeding alone, turned, and found Laura looking at her with an expression that combined the general effects of astonishment, alarm, dawning comprehension, and something that was unmistakably the precursor to a great many questions.
“The Duke of Wynford,” Laura whispered back, barely audible.
“Yes.”
“The Duke of Wynford.”
Now, Caroline clenched her teeth. “That is what I said.”
“Your brother’s best friend,thatDuke.”
“Laura.” Caroline walked back the three paces she had put between them. “I am aware of who he is.”
“I am aware that you are aware,” Laura said. “I am reciting the information in order to ensure that I have understood it, becauseit is—” She stopped. “How? When? Where?” She shook her head. “In what possible…?”
“At the circus,” Caroline said. “After we visited the fortune teller. We were in the dark, and we had been talking, and…”
She stopped there. This was the part that resisted clean narration; not the event itself, which was recoverable in its outlines, but everything that had preceded it.
The tent and what had been said in it. Anthony’s voice stripped of its register of irony, flat and accurate, speaking about his father and the title and the years of managing something the man whose opinion had shaped those years had not lived to see managed.
He had gazed at the canvas wall, and in the silence, she understood all he could not say. So, she spoke what they both knew to be true, as any other response felt pointless in the darkness and cold.
And then…
She did not, quite yet, have language for her emotions. She had approximately one hundred words for the physical event itself and approximately no adequate words for what it had been beyond that; beyond the obvious, overwhelming, rather embarrassingly comprehensive nature of the physical event.
She said none of this to Laura. She murmured instead, “We were talking, and he kissed me.”
Laura’s eyes had not simply changed size. They were, if anything, larger. “He just kissed you?”
“Effectively.”
“Was there…was there a build-up, you know, to…? Was there conversation? Was it sudden?”
“It was…” She stopped again. “Not especially sudden,” she admitted.
“Caroline.” Laura’s voice had gone very quiet in that way that said she knew her friend was holding back information. “What do you mean, not especially sudden?”
“I mean,” Caroline said carefully, “that there were preceding circumstances that one could, in retrospect, identify as…”
“How was it?” Laura asked, and the question landed with the directness of a woman who had set aside everything else she intended to say in favor of the thing she most urgently needed to know.
Caroline looked at the Serpentine. A coot moved across the surface of the water with the dignified, unconcerned pace of a bird who had no particular schedule and no pressing appointments.
“It was,” she said, “thorough.”
Laura made a sound that was not quite a word.