She had learned, over months, to distinguish his step from the footmen’s measured tread, and the quality of it now told her something had shifted. It was not the tight, controlled footfall of a man holding himself on a short lead, but something freer.
She did not look up when he came into the library. She knew he stood in the doorway a moment. She turned a page.
The chair opposite creaked as he settled into it. Then the small percussion of a book plucked off the side table. Then quiet.
She read a paragraph. He read whatever he had selected. The fire settled, and the May light held its thin, clear quality across the carpet, and there was no reason to say anything at all.
After some time, she looked up.
He was reading with the focus he brought to things he found worthy, his long legs stretched out before him, dark hair slightly disheveled from the cold. He had not changed out of his riding clothes. A pink hue lay along his cheekbones.
She thought about the conversation that had taken place that morning in her absence and felt a tenderness she had the sense to keep to herself.
She returned to her book, and he turned a page, his lips curving.
“Yours is upside down,” he noted, without looking up.
She looked down. It was not upside down. It was correctly oriented. She looked across at him, and the corner of his mouth quirked up ever wider, as if excited at the prospect of her taking the provocation.
“No,” she said, “it is not.”
“Are you certain?”
“I am reading it.”
“That,” he said, turning another page, “is not definitive evidence.”
She put her book down. “I have been reading since I was four years old.”
“A formative achievement.” He looked up then, his eyes dark and entirely amused. That expression, aimed at her across a library on a quiet morning, was something she was still not entirely accustomed to. “What is it?”
“A collection of correspondence. Letters between a naturalist and his colleagues.” She picked her book back up. “Very engaging.”
“Engaging enough that you failed to notice you had been reading the same page for approximately twenty minutes.”
She looked at him over the edge of the volume. He returned her gaze with the bland equanimity of a man making a wholly neutral observation.
“I was thinking,” she said.
“About the naturalist?”
“About various things.”
“Mm.” He returned to his own book.
A moment passed.
“It went,” he said, in the tone of a man taking up a thread from some considerable distance, “adequately.”
She did not ask what had happened. Telling her about it, even at that remove, must have cost him something. She would not strain him further by asking for more than he could give that day.
“I am glad,” she said, and meant it precisely as simply as she said it.
He looked at her. She felt the look without returning it, and let the moment stand without building architecture around it.
“She told me,” he added, after a moment, “that you argued on her behalf.”
“She is your family.” Cressida shrugged. “Her method was wrong. Her reasons were not.”
