“Esther,” Caroline said, keeping her voice carefully even.
“I am not asking you to tell me anything.” Esther’s voice was gentle, entirely without pressure. “I am merely saying what I see, which I think you already know.”
She picked up her needlework with the quiet, purposeful ease of someone making a practical statement: that the subject was placed, and the space to breathe around it was offered, and what happened next was entirely Caroline’s choosing.
“The primrose silk really is very beautiful. I think you will do very well on Thursday.”
Caroline looked at the garden.
The elm buds had left a faint greenish mark on the inside of her left palm where she had crushed them. She rubbed it with her thumb without thinking, the way one rubbed at something that would not quite come off.
For whatever reason, her mind drifted to a certain duke and that carriage ride home. The silence of it had been excruciating. And, the particular, unbearable quality of sitting across from a man who had just kissed her with the unhurried, concentrated attention of someone who intended to remember the experience, and was now looking at the dark outside the window with the flat, deliberate composure of a man who had decided to regard the thing he had done as an administrative event on a list had been discomfiting.
She thought about how she had said it was a good kiss, in the cold and the dark, because it was the truth and because the alternatives: pretending it had not moved her, pretending it had meant nothing…pretending that the warmth where his hand had been at her jaw was not, even now, three days later, a quality she could locate with great accuracy; had seemed simply beyond her, in that moment.
She had meant it to be the end of something, but now she was becoming increasingly unsure that it had been the end of anything at all.
“Thursday,” she said.
“Thursday,” Esther agreed, and her needlework began to move with the steady, gentle rhythm of a woman who had said everything she intended to say and was content to let it settle.
Outside, the first rain of the afternoon arrived against the windows, light and consistent, and the garden received it with the patience of something that had been waiting.
A knock at the door.
“Ma’am.” It was Perkins, the parlor footman, with the careful expression he wore when he was delivering information he did not have full confidence in the appropriate reception of. “There is a note, ma’am. Just arrived. For Lady Caroline.”
Caroline straightened. “From whom?”
“The messenger didn’t wait, ma’am.” He extended the small, folded note on the salver. “No card.”
Caroline took it. She was aware of Esther setting her needlework down, but pretending to appear as if she were not watching while Caroline turned the paper over in her hands. Perkins withdrew, and the door closed behind him.
She unfolded the note.
The handwriting was familiar to her now; she had seen it on every note that had arrived over the past two months, each one brief and direct.
There is a matter we should discuss. I will be at the park in the evening. Eleven o’clock, south gate. Come alone. — A.
Caroline read it twice, and then she folded the note.
“Is everything well?” Esther asked in the tone that meant she had already read Caroline’s face and found the answer, but was offering the question as courtesy.
“Perfectly well,” Caroline said, and heard, even as she said it, the lie lurking beneath her words.
She placed the note in her pocket and looked at the rain against the glass.
There is no problem. Anthony might wish to discuss anything. Estate business. A scheduling concern. Something to do with the remaining arrangements she had no good reason to expect, given that the list was nearly complete.
She told herself this with considerable discipline.
She thought about the note: the south gate, alone—yet none of it felt true in the part of her chest where uneasy news always landed first.
It felt like a door she had not put there, opening onto a room she had not finished deciding whether to enter.
She had never, in her experience, been good at leaving doors closed.
She was at the south gate at ten minutes to seven.