He did not say anything else.
They stayed like that for a moment longer than was necessary. Then he crossed the studio floor and began to dress. She turned to look at the painting one last time, and she memorized it.
She memorized the room, the smell of linseed oil and beeswax, the sound of the house beyond the door.
She memorized tonight.
The house was silent when she slipped in through the garden door. She removed her half-boots at the bottom of the stairs, held her cloak over her arm, and moved up the first flight with the practiced care of someone who had learned, over the course of a season, precisely which boards creaked.
Lewis’s study was dark. The line of candlelight that had been there when she left was gone. She noted it and moved on.
She closed her bedroom door and stood in the dark for a moment. The room was familiar around her: the writing table, the curtained window, the particular geography of a life that was entirely hers and entirely not, simultaneously, because none of it existed outside a context she was not free to leave.
She did not take the list from the drawer. She did not need to. She could see it perfectly clearly without looking: six items in her own hand, and beside each one, the small, careful mark she had made when it was done. All six, now.
She went to the window and looked out at the garden.
The list was complete. She had made it because she had wanted a record that she had actually lived in the way she had read about and been denied, and wanted with the persistent desire of someone who had never been permitted to stop wanting things.She had wanted, at the end of this Season, to be able to say:I was here, and I was myself, and I chose this.
She pressed her palm flat against the cold glass.
She could not decide, standing there with paint still dried under her fingernails and the warmth of his hands still precise against her face, whether what she felt was the ending of something or the beginning of something else.
The garden did not answer her.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“He is everything you could want,” Lewis said, from beside her, in the tone he used when he had already decided something and was informing her of the fact. “He is steady, respectable. Good family, sound estate. He will make an excellent?—”
The very things he said about Ashby. But she did not think this was a good time to point that out to him.
“Brother,” Caroline said pleasantly, “I am standing directly next to him.”
Lord Powell had, mercifully, moved several paces away to accept a glass of claret from a passing footman, and so had not heard this. Lord Tobias Linfield, Earl of Powell, was precisely the sort of man one described as handsome in the way one described weather as agreeable: adequately, inoffensively, without feeling the need to remark further. He was perhaps thirty, with neatdark hair and the pleasant, unmarked quality of a man who had never had cause to look alarmed about anything.
“I am simply saying,” Lewis murmured, “that he is a serious candidate. He asked about you specifically.”
“He asked about my pin money specifically,” she said. “There is a distinction.” She watched the earl accept his claret and exchange a word with someone across the room, and felt, with the clear-eyed quality she had been developing all Season, precisely nothing.
That was not entirely fair, she amended. She felt a mild, humane interest in him, the kind one extended to a pleasant stranger at a dinner table. She simply could not imagine spending the rest of her life at that dinner table. But then, she had not been able to imagine any of them. It was beginning to seem less like a problem with the candidates and more like a problem with herself.
Lewis turned to her, slightly. The Cartwright reception had drawn the usual assembly: silks and powder and the low roar of fifty simultaneous conversations. They were standing near the windows, which gave the impression of being apart from it while remaining entirely visible. Caroline kept her expression pleasant and her spine straight. She had had many years of practice at both.
“I have not said you must accept him,” Lewis said. He sounded, she thought, slightly different tonight. Much less certain of the ground he was standing on. “I simply wished you to meet him.”
“I have met him.” She lifted her glass to her lips. “He is perfectly?—”
“Do not say perfectly well.”
She closed her mouth.
He looked at her for a moment, with the same expression from over the preceding weeks: a slight caution in it. She did not know exactly what Esther had said to him. She only knew that her brother was looking at her now as though he had recently been told something about the way he looked at things and had not yet worked out what to do with the information.
“Caroline.” He said her name with an effort that was not quite an apology and not quite an acknowledgment, but was composed, she thought, of the honest attempt at both. “I know I have been…I know that I have managed this Season as though I were the one who had to live in it.”
She was quiet for a moment. Outside the tall windows, the streetlamps cast pale circles on the wet cobblestones, and two sedan chairs moved past each other in the narrow road below.
“You have always done so because you thought it was right,” she said. “I know that.” She paused. “I have not always been entirely fair to you, either.”