“You called on her on a Tuesday,” Frost said, setting his cup down. His voice was calm, factual, the voice of a man delivering observations rather than accusations. “You danced her two waltzes, and you have not played the wager set’s game with anyone for a fortnight. You have not been to Aurelie’s since before the Marchmont. You arrived at my rooms this morning looking as if you have not slept, wearing yesterday’s coat, and you have been staring at my bookshelf for four minutes without reading a single spine.”
“I am capable of staring at bookshelves, Frost. It is not a diagnostic.”
“I am asking you a question, Ash. Not making an accusation.” Frost leaned forward. His eyes were steady, but it was not performance. This absence of performance in Frost’s face was the reason Ash had come here this morning instead of staying at Grosvenor Square, where the silence would have been the wrong kind. “Have you fallen in love with the girl?”
The question landed on the room and sat there. It was very different from the way questions usually sat in rooms where Ash was present, because usually questions were things he could deflect or redirect or charm his way around. This question was not deflectable, not redirectable and not charming; it was simply true in the way that Frost’s questions were always true.
Ash laughed. The laugh was not the real laugh; it was the one he had been using for eight years: the polished dismissive sound of a man who found the question amusing because the only alternative was to find them devastating.
Frost did not laugh with him. He sat in his chair and regarded Ash across the coffee pot, and the regard was patient and undeceived, because Frost had never been in love himself but had spent a lifetime watching other people stumble into it. He understood, clearly and without judgment, that some truths needed to be arrived at by the person they belonged to, not delivered by a friend over coffee. The silence that followed the laugh was not awkward. It was simply full, the way a room is full when two people are thinking the same thing and one of them is waiting for the other to say it.
Ash did not say it.
“You do not have to answer,” Frost said, picking up his cup again. “But you should know that the question is not going to go away. And you should also be aware that whatever you have told Devlin, he is not going to stop asking either, and Devlin’s version of the question will not be as kind as mine.”
Ash set his cup down, stood, walked to the window and looked out at Jermyn Street, which was bright and busy and full of people who were not in love with anyone and were therefore capable of walking in straight lines and purchasing their morning newspapers without incident.
“I do not have an answer for you, Frost.”
“Yes, you do. You are simply not ready to say it out loud.”
Ash left Frost’s lodgings without answering. He walked out onto Jermyn Street, turned south, and the morning light hit him full in the face; bright, warm and excessively cheerful for a man who had not slept and who was carrying a question he could not answer.
He walked the entire length of the street without his hat. He had left it at Frost’s, or possibly at Grosvenor Square, and the absence of it meant that the sun was on his face and the wind was in his hair. He looked, to any of the half-dozen acquaintances who passed him, like a man who had eithergone mad or fallen in love, both of which produced the same symptoms and neither of which responded well to treatment.
He thought about the conservatory. The orange trees, the lamplight, the taste of her mouth and her gasp when his hand found her breast and her fingers holding him through his breeches, steady, certain, not pulling away. He thought about Devlin asking for a report and the word surprised leaving his mouth before he could stop it, and how the word had told Devlin everything while meaning to tell him nothing. He thought about Frost’s question, sitting on the room like a stone dropped into still water, and the rings spreading outward from it, and the fact that he had not denied it.
He had not denied it. That was the thing. Frost had asked him if he had fallen in love with the girl and Ash had laughed, and neither of them had needed the right words after that.
The street was full of men going about their mornings, hatted and purposeful, men with appointments, obligations, investments and daughters to marry off. Ash walked among them with his head bare, no destination at all, and the aimlessness of it felt more honest than anything he had done in years. He was not performing. He was not calculating. He was walking down the street thinking about a woman who read French novels behind potted palms and who had held him in her hand without flinching. Then the silence of her departure had been louder than any speech, and he was still hearing it, and he suspected he would go on hearing it for a very long time.
He thought about the wager. The five thousand, the chestnut, the deadline at the end of June and the betting book at White’s where Devlin had presumably recorded the terms in his neat, careful hand. The thought of the betting book made him stop walking, physically stop, in the middle of the pavement outside Berry Brothers and a man in a tall hat was forced to step around him. The betting book. Her name in that book. MissImogen Goodall, written beside a sum of money and a horse, reduced to a line item in a ledger of men’s entertainments, and the thought of it was suddenly intolerable in a way it had not been intolerable six weeks ago. Because six weeks ago she had been a name on a page but now she was a woman who gasped when he touched her and who held him in the dark. He was beginning to understand, with the slow grinding inevitability of a conclusion he had been resisting since the morning room, that she was the only person he had met in eight years whose company did not feel like work.
He reached the end of the street and paused at the intersection, glancing left toward St. James’s and right toward the park, unable to choose. Neither way led anywhere he wished to go. The only place he longed for was a narrow street in Mayfair, where a woman was likely sitting in her morning room, reading, and not thinking of him at all.
Except that he knew she was thinking about him. She had held him in her hand, and her heartbeat had been hammering against his knuckles; a woman whose heart hammered did not stop thinking about the man who had caused it, not in twelve hours, not in a day, not in a week.
His body reminded him, unhelpfully, that it was also still thinking about her. The walk and the coffee at Frost’s had not dimmed it. Standing in the full glare of a London morning on the most public pavement in the city had not dimmed it. His member was not hard, not quite, but the memory of her hand was sitting on it like a claim.
He turned toward the park, walked without destination and even when the watch ticked in his pocket, he did not take it out.
He did not yet have words for what was happening to him. He had words for desire, because he had been desiring women for a decade and the vocabulary of desire was familiar and manageable and did not require examination. He had words forperformance, because performance had been his primary mode of engagement with the world since he was two and twenty and the vocabulary of performance was extensive and well-rehearsed. But what was happening to him now was neither desire nor performance. It was something that contained both and exceeded both but could not be managed by either. The only word Frost had offered, for it was a word Ash was not ready to say, and the not-saying was becoming, with every hour that passed, less a choice and more a delay.
***
He went home eventually, ate something, slept for three hours in the afternoon and dreamed of orange trees and her hand on him. He woke up hard, aching and furious with himself for dreaming and lay in bed staring at the canopy until the dream released him and the aching subsided to something manageable.
He wrote to his steward at Ravenhurst Park that evening and instructed him to prepare the east wing guest rooms for a gathering. The blue bedroom for Miss Goodall, the rose bedroom for Miss Cordelia Goodall, the yellow suite for Mrs. Margery Goodall and chambers for Miss Bethany Mercer. He wrote the names carefully, as if the careful writing were a form of attention the Goodalls deserved and had not previously received from anyone in his household. He wrote separate instructions for the rest of the guests and for the library, which was to be aired and stocked with fresh candles because the library was where Imogen would go. Imogen always went to libraries, and he wanted it to be ready for her. It was the most domestic thought he had ever had about any woman, and domestic thoughts were not part of the wager.
***
The Goodalls left for Ravenhurst Park at the end of the week. Having Imogen at his country estate had seemed like a strategic move, and not the act of a man who wanted her under his roof because the alternative was continuing to sleep alone in a house that was too large, too empty and too quiet.
He watched the Goodall carriage arrive from the window of his study on the first floor. The carriage was a hired one, not their own, because the Goodalls did not keep a carriage, and the fact that he had not thought to send his own to collect them struck him, belatedly, as an oversight that would have appalled Collins and that Imogen would probably have refused on principle. Cassie climbed out first, bright-eyed, delighted, an eighteen-year-old who had never been a guest at a ducal estate and who was looking at Ravenhurst Park as if it were a novel she intended to read from cover to cover. She turned a full circle on the gravel, taking in the facade, the gardens, the line of servants assembled near the front door, and her face was so openly happy that Ash found himself half-smiling from the window before he caught himself.
Aunt Margery followed, anxious, adjusting her bonnet, her eyes traveling up the front of the house as if she were counting the windows and calculating, probably correctly, how many servants were required to maintain a building of this size and how many years of her household budget each window represented. She clutched her reticule tighter as a footman approached to take her traveling case, and the clutching was a gesture Ash recognized, because it was a gesture his mother had never made and his father had never understood; the gesture of a woman for whom other people’s wealth was a landscape that could not be navigated without a map.
Imogen climbed out last. She was wearing a traveling dress he had not seen before, dark blue, simple, and she stood on the gravel for a moment before looking up at the house.
