“I will tell her.”
She had crossed to the door when she heard him turn back toward the counter and speak quietly to the shopkeeper. She did not look back.
Outside, he fell into step beside her. His arm was offered without comment, and she took it. She thought about a man who stood in a draper’s doorway and went very still over a length of blue silk, and what she felt in response was almost too much for the ordinary afternoon it was dressed in.
“Mr. Harker made the most extraordinary bow,” she said.
“He has always been excessive in that regard.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “His father before him. Four generations of the same mill.”
“Does the great-grandfather disapprove of you?”
“Unquestionably. He disapproves of the road I had resurfaced in 1819. The original rutted approach gave him a more dramatic appearance when receiving visitors on horseback.”
“A very reasonable objection.”
“I thought so.”
He had lifted her down from her mare at the mill—hands on her waist, a pause between lift and set-down that was neither brief nor explained—and she had looked at the middle of his cravat because looking at his face at that proximity had seemed inadvisable. He had set her down without commentary, as though the pause had not occurred, which had been the most wholly unconvincing thing he had ever attempted.
By the time they were back inside, the day had accumulated between them like warmth in stone:gradually, until it was simply present throughout.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to unfasten her boot, when he crossed the room and crouched before her.
“You will be at that until evening,” he said, and moved her hands aside.
“I am managing perfectly well.”
“You are managing it at the wrong angle.”
He worked the boot loose with some effort, the leather refusing to cooperate for a satisfying interval, and she felt laughter rising as it finally yielded. He sat back on his heels with an expression of moderate affront.
“A triumph,” she said gravely.
“Against considerable opposition.”
She laughed, and he looked up at her, close and entirely unguarded. The afternoon light crossed his face without his permission, and she thought,There. That.
He rose, and she reached for the pin at her collar. His hands found her waist, and the rest of it unfolded with the particular warmth of something that had become its own kind of ordinary: unhurried, punctuated by her dry observation about the structural inadequacy of dress pins as a category, and his voice low at her ear, saying he had no investment in the dress pin as an institution.
It was different from before, less discovery and more fluency, a conversation between two people who had learned one another’s language and were still finding new things in it.
Cressida traced the old scar along his ribs, and his mouth found the curve of her shoulder, and when she pressed her lips to his temple, she felt the low sound he made against her skin.
Later, the room settled into the quiet of late afternoons. He lay beside her, his arm behind his head. The lake threw its faint ripple across the plasterwork above them, and neither of them spoke.
She had almost drifted off when he said, “Mr. Webb speaks very highly of you.”
She opened one eye. “Does he?”
“He mentioned that the new Duchess had visited and had the good sense to listen.” He paused. “I did not know you had visited.”
“You were in London,” she reminded him.
He exhaled through his nose. “They know you.”
“A little.” She turned her head, but he was still watching the ceiling. “I went because I wanted to understand the place. The people. It seemed important to know it myself, rather than be introduced to it.” A pause. “The way you know it.”
His hand moved to hers against his ribs and covered it briefly before returning to his side. She did not remark on it, but she lay very still in the fading light and thought,We are building something here.Neither of us is alone in knowing it.
