He did look up then, and there was something almost cautious in his eyes, as if he wasn’t entirely certain she would accept. “I’m suggesting the possibility of one.”
Cressida considered this.
Theodore Yeats, the Duke of Ashmere, who guarded his solitude as though it were an estate boundary, was proposing they spend the morning together. Voluntarily. Over breakfast.
“I would like that,” she said.
He nodded, as though this were nothing of consequence, and returned to his toast.
The gardens at Ashmere were extraordinary in May. The formal parterre near the castle gave way to a longer walk along the south-facing wall, where the roses had begun to bloom. Pale peach and cream and one deep crimson climber that had been there, the gardener once told her, for fifty years. Beyond that was a kitchen garden, and past the kitchen garden was an orchard where the last of the blossoms clung to the apple trees in ragged white clusters.
They had been walking for a quarter of an hour, and Theodore had already identified three separate points where the drainage required attention and had opined, at some length, on the failure of his head gardener to adequately trim the yew hedges last autumn.
“You’re cataloguing grievances,” Cressida observed.
“I’m assessing the estate.”
She glanced around at the immaculate parterre, the neatly graveled paths, the rose walk stretching ahead in full, fragrant bloom. Then she looked back at him. “Did you bring me out here as an excuse to show me all the work I am apparently meant to be supervising? How very romantic of you, Duke.”
Theodore stopped walking.
It was only for a half-second, and his expression did not precisely change. But something shifted at the corner of his mouth, a brief internal battle between dignity and the thing that was threatening to become a smile.
Dignity made a creditable effort. It lost.
“The drainage in the east quadrant,” he said with great composure, “is entirely your responsibility as the lady of the castle.”
“I see. And the yew hedges?”
“Also yours.”
“The kitchen garden?”
“Unquestionably.”
“Then I shall add them to my existing list,” Cressida said pleasantly, “which currently reads: redecorate the blue sitting room, write to the housekeeper in London, and now, apparently, personally redirect an entire drainage system. One does wonder when I might find time to eat breakfast.”
“You were staring at your egg for three minutes,” he pointed out. “I suspect the mornings have some availability.”
She laughed, and he turned to look at her with that same expression she had caught at the breakfast table, that same unguarded warmth he hadn’t yet learned to conceal quickly enough, before he looked ahead again and resumed walking as though nothing had happened.
His mouth curved. It was not the controlled, minimal movement she had catalogued over weeks of careful observation. It was a genuine smile, briefly and completely present, before he reined it in. Cressida felt it like a small triumph.
“What do you read?” she asked, more to extend the moment than out of curiosity, though her curiosity was genuine enough.
“History, primarily. Agriculture, when the need arises.” He paused. “Greek, when I want to remind myself that human folly is not a modern invention.”
She laughed. “Is that meant to be comforting?”
“I find it clarifying. Whatever particular catastrophe the present day has produced, some Greek general managed worse, and his biographer described it with more rhetorical flourish than it deserved.” He glanced at her. “And you? I know you read. The library here has been visited more frequently since your arrival than in the past decade.”
“How do you know that?”
“The cataloguing system I imposed involves a discreet notation on each volume. The disarrangement of the Ws is considerable.”
Cressida felt heat touch her cheeks, which she judged deeply unfair. She had not been covert about her use of the library; she had simply not expected him to track it.
“I was working through your poetry section. It needed reorganizing.”
