When it was time to walk, he offered his arm at the gate of the box, and she took it, and Helena fell in behind them at a considered distance.
“Your estate is in Shropshire, you said,” Annabelle offered, as they joined the promenade.
“It is. We have been improving the southern pasture for three years.” He sounded genuinely pleased about this. “I find I think about drainage a great deal more than I expected to at this stage of my life.”
“Most men of your acquaintance probably don’t think about it at all.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Which may be the worse situation.”
At the far end of the path where it curved toward the supper boxes, he stopped to read the placard for the evening’s fireworks program. She stood beside him and read it with him, and he asked which of the listed displays she was most curious about, and she answered him, and he agreed with her choice, and she had the faint, ungrateful thought that agreement was not the same thing as argument. That there was a species of conversation she had grown quietly accustomed to: pointed, unresolved, circling back on itself in ways that required her attention past the end of a sentence, and that this was not it.
She noted this and chose not to examine it further, because examining it had a destination she was not prepared to arrive at beside a supper box at Vauxhall with a viscount at her elbow.
She looked at the lanterns strung through the elms above the path and said nothing about any of this. She ate her supper. She watched the fireworks. The evening concluded in every respect as pleasantly as it had begun.
Lord Chesham called the next morning at half past eleven.
Annabelle was in the parlor with a book open in her lap when the footman announced him. She set it aside and rose with rather more composure than the occasion required. Lord Chesham came in carrying a small nosegay of white asters, which he gave to her with a brief bow.
“I hope this is not an inconvenient hour,” he said.
“Not at all.” She set the flowers on the side table.
Helena was on the settee with her embroidery, looking at neither of them with the fixed attention of someone looking at both.
He was wearing a blue coat today, which suited him better than the grey of last evening.
“What have you been reading this season?” he asked.
“Montaigne,” she said. “The essays. Cotton’s translation, mostly, though I return to the French when I can manage it.”
He leaned forward slightly. “I confess I haven’t read him.”
“Most people haven’t.”
“What does he write about?”
“Himself, chiefly.” She paused. “How little a man knows of his own thinking while he is inside it. He turns a subject over andover until it becomes something else entirely.” She looked at him. “It is either very useful or very alarming, depending on the day.”
“And which is it today?”
“Today I found it useful,” she said. “Yesterday I found it alarming.”
He smiled at that. “I should very much like to read him,” he said. “On your account of it.”
She was about to answer when Newton appeared in the doorway. He conducted a brief assessment of the room, decided Lord Chesham was the more interesting development, and walked directly to his chair.
Chesham looked down at him. Newton looked up at him. Lord Chesham extended one finger toward the cat’s nose. Newton considered this, found it insufficient, and went to sit under the window instead.
“An aloof cat,” Lord Chesham said, withdrawing his hand without embarrassment.
“He belongs to my sister-in-law,” Annabelle said. “He is staying with me for the season and has strong opinions about the arrangement.”
“Has he formed an opinion about me?”
“He sat down,” Annabelle said. “That is generally a neutral verdict.”
Lord Chesham laughed, and she found herself laughing with him.
