Annabelle said it as they walked the perimeter of the ballroom, her arm looped through Elinor’s as though they had known each other for years rather than minutes. She spoke quickly, warmly, with the energy of a woman who had been starved for female company and intended to make up for it in one evening.
“I cannot tell you how happy I am that he is open to finding love again,” Annabelle continued. “After everything that happened, I feared he would close himself off for good.”
Elinor’s step faltered. “Again?”
Annabelle’s mouth closed. A flush crept up her neck, and she bit her lip in a way that reminded Elinor sharply of Lucien.
“He has not told you,” she said.
“Told me what?”
Annabelle squeezed her arm. “It is not my place. Truly, I should not have said anything. But perhaps it is best that he tells you himself, when he is ready.” Her expression was earnest, almost pleading. “Please do not think less of him for it. He has his reasons for guarding himself.”
Elinor nodded, but the wordagainlodged itself beneath her ribs and would not move.
What had happened to Lucien before her? Who had he loved, and what had that love cost him? Was that the thing she could feel behind his walls, the injury he covered with charm the way one covers a wound with a clean bandage?
She thought of the alcove. Ofyou are mine.Of the way he had kissed her as though he were trying to outrun something. Of the week of silence that followed.
He has done this before. He has opened his heart before, and someone broke it, and now he is terrified that I will do the same.
The realization did not make her less hurt. But it made the hurt make sense.
“Newton, what is it?”
It was well past midnight. Elinor lay in bed with the atlas open on her chest and her thoughts circling the same territory they had covered for hours: the garden alcove, the week of silence, Annabelle’s arrival and the way Lucien’s face had shuttered when his sister asked how many times he planned to do this,the careful way Lucien had kissed her knuckles in front of the ballroom as though re-staking a claim he had no right to make.
Newton had been curled at the foot of the bed, but he was sitting up now, his ears pricked, his body taut. He stared at the window.
Then Elinor heard it. A small, sharp sound against the glass. A pause. Another.
She set the atlas aside, crossed the dark room, and pulled the curtain back.
Lucien stood in the garden below, his arm drawn back, another pebble pinched between his fingers. The moonlight caught the angles of his face and the white of his shirtsleeves. He was not wearing a coat.
Elinor pressed her palm flat against the glass and stared down at him. She shook her head, mouthing the wordsare you mad?
He gestured for her to come down.
She shook her head again, pointing toward the front of the house, where her stepmother’s rooms faced the street.
Lucien did not move. He stood there in the moonlight with his pebble and his shirtsleeves and looked up at her window with an expression she could read even from this distance, because she had seen it once before, in a jasmine-covered alcove, right before he kissed her.
Elinor stepped away from the window. She put on a dress, a cloak, and her shoes, moving as quietly as she had learned to move on the nights she slipped out.
Newton watched her from the bed, his tail flicking once.
“Do not judge me,” she whispered.
Then she crept down the stairs and out into the night.
Chapter Eighteen
“Are you mad?” Elinor had him by the sleeve before he could speak.
She pulled him into the shadow of the garden wall, her eyes cutting upward to the darkened windows of Morland House. Her hair hung loose over one shoulder, and her cloak was fastened crookedly, as though she had dressed in the dark, which she had.
“You could ruin me,” she hissed. “If anyone sees you here, if my stepmother looks out of her window?—”