She looked up from the canvas, briefly, and found him looking back with an expression she had seen rarely—the same look that was underneath the rest, that she had first seen behind a circus tent in the cold, talking about a man who had never found him sufficient. She looked at it now without flinching, because there was no one else in the room to observe either of them. And the canvas was between them, which made it somehow manageable.
“Tell me something true,” she said. “It’ll help with the painting.”
He considered this with the gravity she had learned to expect from him when something was actually being thought out.
“The estate was in shambles before I took it,” he said. “Twenty thousand in unmanaged debt and three properties that had not turned a profit in a decade. It took me four years to correct it. I’m not sure I’ve been forgiven by the people who expected me to be a better-dressed version of my father and found me instead concerned with drainage coefficients.”
She smiled, and the smile surprised her by arriving without announcement. “A drainage coefficient is not a trivial thing.”
“No. It is not.” The corner of his mouth moved, however. “Your turn.”
“I am terrified of becoming dull,” she said, without thinking. Then, with thinking: “Not dull as in stupid. Dull as in…as in a woman who used to read Latin in the library secretly but now knows which fork to use at the fourth course and has entirely forgotten why the first thing seemed important.” She added a stroke to the canvas and looked at it. “I am terrified that I will look at myself in the mirror one day and realize I cannot remember what I used to want. That I will have been made into something respectable and will not even notice the moment it happened.”
The room was quiet for a moment. The candle nearest the easel produced a small, steady light that moved slightly in a draught she could not feel.
“That will not happen to you,” Anthony said.
“You cannot know that.”
“I knowyou.” He said it simply, and she sucked in a breath. “I have watched you sneak into boxing matches, out-calculate three men at a loo table, and outsmart a dozen men educated in science. Whatever circumstances do to you, they will not make you forget to want things. That is not who you are.”
She held very still for a moment, brush in hand, the painting half-made in front of her.
“That,” she said at last, “is the most comprehensively incorrect and completely correct thing you’ve ever said.”
He laughed; a real one, the sound of a man who had been caught off-guard, and she found herself laughing too, without quite deciding to, and the room filled briefly with something warm and unguarded and entirely impractical.
Then she went back to her painting, and he kept his position. And they continued to talk; not about anything in particular, not about Lewis or Ashby or the Season or the particular arithmetic of eligible men; but about books and the nature of reliable evidence.
“And what new books have you had interest in lately?” He asked, careful not to move his hand.
“I’ve been considering what I ought to read next,” she said, her eyes focused on her painting. “Though I suspect my choice has already been decided for me.”
“By whom?” A hint of amusement touched his voice.
“Influence, perhaps,” she said, glancing at him. “Ever since our visit, I find myself thinking more of… observation.”
“Observation,” he repeated. “A thrilling subject. I can hardly imagine why the circulating libraries are not filled with it.”
She ignored that.
“I mean it seriously. The manner in which fortune tellers operate. I’d like to know how much is intuition, and how much is simply the careful study of another person.”
“And you intend to find the answer in a book?”
“I intend,” she lifted her gaze to him again, “to see whether anyone has thought to examine it with more rigor than idle speculation.”
He gave a quiet hum. “You will be disappointed. Most authors prefer their mysteries embellished rather than explained.”
She smiled, though she tried to hide it.
They talked the way she had found, over the preceding months, that she could only talk with him. Without the small, constant internal audit of whether she was saying the right thing in the right register for the right listener.
The candles burned lower, and slowly, the painting became something.
“I’m done,” Caroline said, putting down the brush she had been holding for the last ten minutes without using it, and looked at the painting.
The clock on the mantle read half past one.