She closed the watch and gave it back to him.
“I am going to forgive you, Your Grace.” Her voice was steady. “I am going to forgive you because I have decided to, and because I know the difference between a man who has changed and a man who has performed change. I have not yet decided when. You will have to wait.”
He nodded but could not speak. He took her hand, the one that had touched his face, and kissed it, his lips against her knuckles, and the kiss was brief and careful.
He turned to leave.
“Ash,” she said.
He stopped at the door.
“Stay for dinner.”
He stayed for the evening. Aunt Margery went to bed at nine. Cassie followed at half past. Bethany, who had been reading in the morning room with the particular concentration of a woman who was not reading but was listening to the sounds of the house and tracking the movements of its occupants, closed her book at ten, kissed Imogen on the cheek at the library door, and said, very quietly, “I will be at my cousin’s house tonight. I will come back in the morning.” She left, the garden door latched behind her, and the house was quiet.
They were in the library again. The candles were burning low, and the Crébillon volumes were on the desk.
He was sitting in the chair, and she was standing by the desk. The silence between them was not empty but was not full either. The silence was waiting for one of them to cross it, and the crossing was going to change everything, and both of them knew it.
She crossed it.
She went to him and stood before his chair. She looked down at his face; she lifted her hand and touched the bandage at his temple, the small strip of linen Mrs. Patton had placed there. The touching was gentle, and the gentleness was deliberate by choice.
She undressed him slowly. His coat first, easing it off his shoulders, which were thinner, and she traced them with her fingers, mapping the changes, the shadow under his ribs, the hollow at his collarbone, the visible evidence of what the inn had cost him. His shirt. She unbuttoned it, slowly, one button at a time, and each button was a reckoning, and the reckoning was hers. His skin was warm beneath her hands. She could feel his ribs more clearly than she had in the bedroom, and the feeling of his ribs was an apology his body was making that his mouth could not, and she accepted it, silently.
She pulled him down. He came to her on the floor of the library, on a quilt she had laid there earlier, because she had known, when she sent the note to the inn, that dinner was not going to be the end of the evening, and the knowing had been a decision. The decision was hers, freely made, with full knowledge, with the wager spoken and the letters read and the truth between them bare, ugly and examined, but the examination had not destroyed her love. It had changed it. It made it harder, clearer and less innocent, a love that had passed through fire and had come out different, not unscarred but intact.
He wept. Quietly, into her shoulder, his face pressed against her neck, his body trembling against hers, and the weeping was not dramatic or loud. He was simply a man who had held everything inside for two weeks, finally allowing it to leave, and the leaving was messy but honest. She held him through it, her arms around his back, her hands against his shoulder blades, feeling his ribs expand and contract with each breath, holding him until the trembling slowed, the breathing steadied and his body settled against hers.
She held him until he was steady.
The intimacy that followed carried every chapter before it. Slower than the first time. Where the first time had been discovery, this was reckoning. Where the first time had been the beginning, this was the beginning made right. He touched her as if touching were a privilege he had lost and had been returned, carefully, gratefully, his hands on her body reverent and tentative and trembling slightly, but the trembling was not desire. It was fear. Fear that she would stop him. Fear that she would change her mind. Fear that the forgiveness she had offered was conditional and that the condition was something he could not meet. The fear made his hands gentle in placeswhere they had been confident before, and the gentleness was the change in him that she needed.
She was the one who guided him. She pulled his mouth to her breast, wrapped her legs around his hips, held his face in her hands and looked at him and said, quietly, “I am here. I have decided. You do not need to be afraid.”
He entered her slowly. The same slow press as the first time, the same careful attention, the same watching of her face, but somehow different because everything underneath it had changed.
He did not whisper this time. He did not say the words he had said in the bedroom, because those words belonged to the first time. Instead, he moved inside her in silence, and the silence was its own language, and that language saidI am sorry, I am here, and I will not leave.
She came apart beneath him with her hands in his hair and his name on her lips, and the coming-apart was different from the first time; it was quieter, deeper, a release that came from further inside her and that took longer to arrive but lasted longer when it did. The lasting was the forgiveness, the physical forgiveness, her body telling his body what her words had not yet specified.
He followed. He pressed his face into her neck and held himself above her until she was steady. Then lowered himself beside her, and they lay on the floor of the library in the dark, his head on her chest, and his hand on her ribs.
He slept. After eleven days without rest, his breathing evened out, and his body went still against hers, and his hand on her ribs relaxed. She held him and watched him sleep and listened to the quiet house and thought about forgiveness and about how forgiveness was not a single act but a practice, a thing you did again and again, every day, a choice you made eachmorning when you woke beside the person who had hurt you and decided, again, to stay.
She was going to stay. She had decided. The decision was hers, made with full knowledge. The decision was not innocent. It was not naive. It was the decision of a woman who had been broken and who had chosen, with her eyes open, her anger acknowledged and her grief examined, to rebuild, and the rebuilding was going to take time, but was going to be worth it.
Epilogue
One Year Later
“Acceptable,” Aunt Eugenie said, setting down her teacup with the decisive click of a woman who had been evaluating young men for forty years and who regarded the evaluation as a public service. “He is acceptable. The chin is weak, but the character is not, and character outlasts chins, as I have had to observe in this family more than once. You may keep him, Cordelia.”
Cassie, seated beside her young man at the far end of the luncheon table, blushed to the roots of her hair and gripped Mr. Harding’s hand beneath the tablecloth. Mr. Harding, who was a quiet solicitor’s son from Wiltshire with excellent manners and a complete absence of ambition to be anything other than kind, blushed with her but did not let go of her hand and did not look at the Dowager Duchess of Saintbury for longer than was strictly necessary.
Imogen watched from the head of the table, which was her table now, in her dining room, in her house, because Imogen Goodall was the Duchess of Ravenhurst and had been for ten months.
The betrothal luncheon had been Aunt Eugenie’s idea. A small gathering at Ravenhurst Park, family only, the announcement to be made over cold chicken and champagne and Aunt Eugenie’s opinion, which was the same thing as a benediction and considerably harder to obtain. Cassie had completed her second season under the Saintbury name, sponsored quietly, the sponsorship never traced to Ash, and the season had been everything the first season had not: successful, calm and uncontaminated by scandal. Somewhere in the middle of it, Cassie had met Mr. Harding at a lending library in Bath andhad fallen in love with him between the poetry shelves and the periodicals, and the falling had been mutual and gentle.
