An icy hand caught her arm, though no one was at her side.
Isabella did not turn. A person looking straight at nothing drew trouble.
Help me…See me… The voice was thin, barely a sound at all.
Habit rose, well-worn as prayer. See nothing. Hear nothing. Never say it. Never show it.
She stepped round a costermonger’s barrow and almost collided with Mr. Caradoc. She stumbled back a step.
“Forgive me.” He set a palm to the side of the barrow to steady it and, with his other hand, steadied her. The touch was light, proper, but the heat of it struck through glove and nerve. He wore his dark coat buttoned high. Rain jeweled the brim of his hat.
“Mr. Caradoc,” she managed.
“Miss Barrett.” He released her slowly, as if attentive to the possibility she might sway. His thumb lifted last, a fraction late, leaving a ghost of warmth behind. “You’re in haste.”
“I have an interview,” she said, because that was true and safe to say. “At a—” She did not wish to name the shop in case she failed there too and had to walk past his knowledge of it later. “—a place that will be glad of me.”
The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, but not mockery either. “Any place would be.” His gaze dropped to the ink on her glove and away again, a quick flicker that felt too intimate by half.
She told herself to step past him. She did not. Instead, she looked away.
Across the street, in the shadow of a print-seller’s awning, a man stood where rain did not seem to fall on him. His cap was all wrong, too high on his head, and when a cart rolled through him, his edges trembled like heat above a lamp.
Mr. Caradoc’s gaze followed hers.
“Do you see someone you know?” he asked, and the question landed like a thrown stone breaking water.
Isabella’s gaze flashed to his. “No. I was only…thinking of the rain.”
He did not look back across the street. He looked at her. “Have you given any thought to my offer?” he said.
“To catalogue Harrowgate’s library,” she said, wrapping the words in cool paper. “I have.” She had spent too much thought there, like coins dropped in a well.
“And?”
“And I must make my own way, Mr. Caradoc.” She heard the stiffness in her voice and wished she did not mind being stiff. “I will not be beholden to a stranger because he was kind.”
He started as though the word pained him.
“I was not kind,” he said, very low. “I was—” His gaze cut downward and away, brief and private, before it returned. “—selfish.”
She could not decipher the meaning of that. She glanced away in confusion.
The man under the awning lifted his hand, rain stitching through his hat.
“Miss Barrett,” Mr. Caradoc said softly, his gaze following hers once more. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” she said too quickly, then stepped back, as if by changing the angle of her seeing she might change the world.
A cry lifted three doors down, a woman scolding a dog, and an omnibus huffed to a stop, horses blowing, leather creaking. The driver flicked his whip and the lash whispered over the air where the wraith on the far side of the street stood. Isabella’s throat closed. It was not the seeing that undid her. It was the wanting to acknowledge, to answer, to be useful to something that could no longer be helped.
Mr. Caradoc shifted half a pace, deliberately putting himself between her and the street, an easy motion that set his shoulder a little before hers so she would have to look through him to look beyond. The rain gathered and ran off the brim of his hat in one clear thread.
“I must go,” she said.
“Come.” He tipped his head toward the mouth of an alley—not a dark one, not a trap, only a passage running through to Red Lion Square. “It’s a quicker way if you’re bound east.”
She hesitated. Then she nodded, because she had walked that labyrinth of lanes a hundred times and knew the shortcut was real. He fell in beside her, not close, not too far, matching his stride to hers as if it were second nature, his limp slight. Now and then, his arm brushed hers, a small contact that made her pulse misbehave.
