He blinked, as though he had not expected that admission.
“I know what you were trying to protect me from,” she said. “I know what it cost you, with Uncle Timothy. I am not ungrateful.” She set her glass on the nearby surface and turned to face him more directly. “I only want you to understand that I am not you, and that what I need to be safe is not the same as what you needed.”
Lewis was quiet for a long moment. Across the room, Lord Powell laughed at something, a broad, easy sound that drifted over the other noise with the pleasantness of a man who found the world largely agreeable. Lewis tracked it for a second, then looked back at her.
“Esther says I hear you, but I don’t listen,” he said.
Caroline’s mouth curved slightly. “Esther is right.”
He made a sound that might, in another man, have been a laugh. “She usually is.” He glanced at her, briefly, and the expression on his face wasunmanaged, the one that was not performing the function of Duke or brother or master of the house. “I will try,” he said. “To listen.”
It was not a full reconciliation, or the sort of thing one wrote about in books, but it was an attempt, and it was genuine, and she found, unexpectedly, that it was enough.
“Thank you,” she said, and they stood together in the companionable silence that had characterized the better hours of their childhood, before their uncle had entered the picture.
Lord Powell, apparently sensing a natural pause, crossed back toward them with his claret and a mild, enquiring expression.
Caroline smiled at him. He was, as she had said,perfect: perfectly safe, perfectly decent, and perfectly content. He asked her about the spring weather as though it were a topic that required careful exploration, and she answered him in kind. Caroline then discovered within four minutes of conversation that his deepest ambition was to improve the south pasture on his Wiltshire estate and to produce two sons before he was forty.
“Do you have particular interests, Lady Caroline?” he asked, with the pleasant curiosity of a man who expected the answer to be embroidery or watercolor and had already decided to be politely appreciative of whichever it was.
“I paint,” she said. “And I read Latin.”
“Oh,” said Lord Powell.
She waited.
“Well,” he said, with a diplomatic smile that contained no appreciable interest in either pursuit, “how industrious.”
She smiled back at him, and he soon returned to the pasture.
After he excused himself some minutes later to greet an acquaintance, Lewis gave her a long look that contained, shesuspected, the awareness that his candidate had not landed precisely as hoped. She said nothing. She did not need to.
Instead, she found Laura near the beverage table, slightly apart from a cluster of ladies who were discussing the cut of the new Parisian sleeves with the focused attention of scholars presenting a theory.
“Well?” Laura said.
“He is very interested in his south pasture,” Caroline said.
Laura said, “Ah,” which contained everything.
They moved together, by the quiet, practiced drift of two people who had learned to maneuver around rooms, until they had achieved a window alcove with a degree of privacy. Outside, the rain had begun to fall in earnest, and the lamps on the street wavered.
“How are you?” Laura asked. “Actually.”
It was the question Laura always asked. Not how are you in the polite, small-talk way, the one requiring fine, thank you, or very well, and yourself, but the other one, the one requiring a real accounting.
“The list is done,” Caroline said. “You know that.”
“I know the list is done,” Laura said. “I asked how you are.”
Caroline considered the rain on the glass. “I am entirely well,” she said, and heard herself say it, and felt, beneath the steadiness of the words, the particular dull ache of something she had made the decision not to examine.
Laura’s expression was patient and entirely unconvinced.
“I am going to marry someone,” Caroline said. “I have always known that. Lord Powell, or Lord Ashby, or whoever Lewis presents next. I always knew this was how it would end.” She paused. “The list is done. There is no reason for it to continue.”
“You mean there is no reason for you to continue accompanying the Duke of Wynford about London in the dark.”